Pinpointing Sheets for the Standard Cross- Cultural Sample: Complete Edition Douglas R. White Department of Anthropology, School of Social Sciences, 3151 Social Science Plaza, University of California, Irvine CA 92697;
[email protected] © 2006 (original files by White and Murdock completed in 1969) The original pinpointing sheets, 2/3rds prepared by Murdock and 1/3rd by White, are printed here in the same font as they were originally typescript, with only minor spelling corrections. Only the first 113 pinpointing sheets were published in 1988 (World Cultures 4#4). 1. INTRODUCTION Murdock and White, in a rapprochement between modern cross-cultural and statistical methods (Murdock) and more nuanced approaches of the Columbia historical school (White), published the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample in 1969 as the basis for a coded, collaborative, and cumulative comparative data base, extracted from ethnographic research on 186 societies, for use by scholars engaged in cross-cultural studies. White (1968) had shown that previous cross-cultural samples had so little overlap that it was fruitless to test hypotheses comparing variables from different studies. Murdock (1967, 1968) had classified the 1,267 societies in his Ethnographic Atlas into 200 distinctive world cultural provinces. From these they evaluated the literature and chose the best and preferably earliest described representatives for the SCCS. The idea behind the sample was to allow any and all theories that could be tested with comparative data to have a level and historically nuanced playing field on which to compete. The sample was designed to be sufficiently large to test multivariate hypotheses, sufficiently small to allow different investigators to code all the cases and so contribute to a cumulative database, and pinpointed to specific communities and times (White and Murdock 2006), for which bibliographic recommendations for ethnographic sources (White 1986) were classified by focus and pertinence.