Standard Cross- Cultural Sample

CULTURAL SAMPLE The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, or SCCS (Murdock and White 1969), is a cumulative and collaborative database of coded variables on maximally diverse and ethnographically best-described societies used by scholars in the social sciences. The champion of modern cross-cultural and statistical methods, George P. Murdock, in preparation for a standard sample, had classified the 1,267 societies in his coded Ethnographic Atlas into 200 distinctive world cultural provinces (Murdock 1962-1967, 1968). Douglas R. White (1968) had compiled a database of coded cross-cultural studies and done a concordance of previous samples (repeated by Ember 1992) that showed the fruitlessness of testing hypotheses that involved variables from different studies because there was little overlap between randomly drawn or ad hoc samples. White (1969), linked to the Columbia-Michigan historical-evolutionary successor to the Boasian school, had just completed the first comparative historical study to use Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas codes in a regional study. The dual-authored approach to the SCCS signified a rapprochement between the Yale school of evolutionary functionalism and the historical anthropological schools at Columbia, Michigan, and Berkeley. Their founding of the Cumulative Cross-Cultural Coding Center (CCCCC) for the SCCS at the University of Pittsburgh (1968-1973), like their 1969 authorship, was coequal, although they were born nearly fifty years apart. Both Murdock and White (1969) were advocates of multiple competing hypotheses (Chamberlain 1897). They designed the SCCS to be sufficiently large to test multivariate and competing hypotheses and sufficiently small to allow different investigators to code all the cases and so contribute to a cumulative database. Their evaluation of the literature on the 1,267 Ethnographic Atlas societies and other ethnographies led to their selection of the best and preferably earliest described representatives for 186 of Murdock's cultural provinces that were most independent of one another. Each society was pinpointed to specific dates and communities (White and Murdock 2006). Bibliographic recommendations for ethnographic sources (White 1986) were classified by focus and pertinence. The SCCS-the goal of which was to represent the cultural diversity of well-described human societiesranges from contemporary hunter-gatherers such as the Kung to historical cities (e.g., Babylon, 1750 BCE; Rome, 110 CE; the Khmer capital of Angkor, 1292; Erevan, 1880; Abomey 1890) to communities of industrial nations (e.g., an Irish village, 1932; a Russian commune, 1955). Construction of the SCCS reflected Murdock and White's concerns for sorting out alternative hypotheses. Correlations among variables in the SCCS cannot be taken as necessarily causal or functional relationships. As with similarities between the SCCS societies, they are affected by many factors, and the challenge is to separate out the different strands of influence, including measurement biases that may be studied by data quality controls (Naroll 1962; Whyte 1978b) . Correlations or similarities may be influenced by functional associations, diffusion or borrowing from one society to another, or shared characteristics passed along through common ancestry. It is only the assumption of parallel independent inventions that supports the interpretation of a correlation between traits as functional adhesions in cultural systems. Murdock (1956), Harold E. Driver (1956), White (1968, 1975), and many other social scientists have long recognized the complementarities of different processes and the problems of inferences from correlational tests. History and science are integrally connected in this respect (Lyman and O'Brien 2004). The interpretation of inter societal similar-