Russel-Research-Method-in-Anthropology

The Foundations of Social Research 65
Rotton (1997) found that more crimes of violence are reported to police on
hot days than on cool days, but those crimes are, in fact, more likely to occur
during the cooler evening hours than during the hottest part of the day.
Many theories are developed to explain a purely local phenomenon and then
turn out to have wider applicability. Many observers have noticed, for example,
that when men from polygynous African societies move to cities, they
often give up polygyny (Clignet 1970; Jacoby 1995). This consistent covariation
is explained by the fact that men who move away from tribal territories
in search of wage labor must abandon their land, their houses, and the shared
labor of their kinsmen. Under those conditions, they simply cannot afford to
provide for more than one wife, much less the children that multiple wives
produce. The relation between urbanization and changes in marriage customs
is explained by antecedent and intervening variables.
If you read the literature across the social sciences, you’ll see references to
something called ‘‘contagion theory.’’ This one invokes a copycat mechanism
to explain why suicides are more likely to come in batches when one of them
is widely publicized in the press (Jamieson et al. 2003) and why more women
candidates stand for election in districts that already have women legislators
in office (Matland and Studlar 1996).
‘‘Relative deprivation theory’’ is based on the insight that people compare
themselves to specific peer groups, not to the world at large (Stouffer et al.
1949; Martin 1981). It explains why anthropology professors don’t feel all
that badly about engineering professors earning a lot of money, but hate it if
sociologists in their university get significantly higher salaries. ‘‘World systems
theory’’ proposes that the world’s economies and political bodies are part
of a single capitalist system that has a core and a periphery and that each
nation can be understood in some sense by examining its place in that system
(Wallerstein 1974, 2004).
All such theories start with one or two primitive axioms—things that are
simply defined and that you have to take at face value. The definition of cognitive
dissonance is an example: When people have inconsistent beliefs, or when
they perceive things in the real world to be out of whack with their ideas of
how things should be, they feel discomfort. This discomfort leads people to
strive naturally toward cognitive consonance.
Neither the fact of dissonance, nor the discomfort it produces, nor the need
for consonance are ever explained. They are primitive axioms. How people
deal with dissonance and how they try to achieve consonance are areas for
empirical research. As empirical research accumulates, the theory is tested
and refined. William Dressler, a medical anthropologist, developed his theory
of cultural consonance based on cognitive dissonance theory. Cultural consonance
is the degree to which people’s lives mirror a widely shared set of