Main trends of research in the social and human ... - unesdoc - Unesco

Cross-cultural, cross-societal and cross-national research 667
opment of social science theory. Instead, we propose to direct our attention to
one single, central set of issues in the development of a world-wide science of
Man and Society: the possibilities of translating ‘grand theory’ into empirically
workable typologies of ‘macro-settings’ for variations in human behaviour, and
the consequences of such typologies for decisions on the cultural and the geographical
range of comparisons at the level of communities, households and
individuals.
These issues cut across all the disciplines of the human and the social sciences:
they are of central importance in the disciplines devoted to the study of structures
of interaction among human beings. Much of the literature on comparative
anthropology focuses on the merits of alternative typologies and on the
possibilities of establishing regional ranges for cross-societal comparisons.59
The argument opposing anthropologists and economists over the analysis and
interpretation of data on production, manpower and barter in preliterate
societies bears on similar issues: how far is it meaningful to ‘stretch‘ models
developed at one end of the continuum to cover the twilight zones of partmonetized,
part-mobilized communities in developing countries ? Similar
controversies have arisen in the wake of the eager attempts of sociologists and
political scientists to introduce their techniques and styles of analysis into the
new nations of the ‘Third World’: anthropologists and other area specialists
have strenuously opposed such efforts to establish a data basis for comparisons
across societies differing so fundamentally in structure and in ethos. The
attacks against the universalist assumptions underlying Murdock’s statistical
correlations for samples of the world’s societies have their counterpart in the
criticisms levelled by anthropologists and historians against such attempts at
world-wide data archiving as Karl Deutsch’s, and at such universal models
of socio-cultural-political development as those sketched by Talcott Parsons
among sociologists and by Gabriel Almond, Lucian Pye and their partners
in the comparative politics movement.
The extremes in this controversy are easily stated: at the one pole of opposition,
all societies, past, present or future, constitute units of potential comparison
and ought eventually to be subjected to tests against unified models of
universal hypothetico-deductive explanation; at the other pole, all societies are
culturally and historically unique and defy understanding through comparisons
with others.
The Murdock school comes closest to the universalist extreme: they want
to make sure that all known variants get a chance to be represented in the
sample and see few if any direct barriers to meaningful comparisons across
the major regions of the world. To this school, the diffusion of cultural characteristics
and the sharing of historical experiences constitute so many disturbing
elements in the design of the sample of societies, and do not constitute
criteria for the limitation of comparisons. The protracted controversy over what
has come to be known as ‘Galton’s problem’ tells us a great deal about the
ways in which differences in intellectual styles affect the organization of comparative
research. The English anthropologist Edward Tylor presented the first
‘cross-cultural’ table of associated characteristics for a sample of societies in