Readings in
World
Cultural Comparisons
Spring 2001 D.R.White, UC Irvine
contents of packet 1: research orientation
1. Variables Focus on relationships between variables http://worldcultures.org/~drwhite/courses/trina.htm Index of SCCS Codes http://worldcultures.org/~drwhite/courses/stdsvars.html Variables in SPSS (*.sav) files for analysis http://worldcultures.org/~drwhite/courses/stdsstud.html 2. Spatial Linkages White-Veit Atlas - Maps of Variables http://worldcultures.org/~drwhite/ethnoatlas/index.html see web page for individual maps! White and Murdock - Pinpointing http://worldcultures.org/~drwhite/courses/STDSAMPL.htm Maps of Societies --Murdock and White Maps of Civilizations --Wilkinson 3. Civilizational Linkages Definitions-Civilizations --Wilkinson 4. Processual Linkages Cross-Cultural Surveys Today --Burton and White Substantive Contributions --Ember and Levinson
The purpose of this packet is to get you tuned to thinking of cultures in terms of patterns of variables that are partly self-organizing but also reflective of and affected by larger patterns (human patterns, contemporary worlds, symbiotic and coevolutionary patterns). Packets of culture, thought of in this way, are not discrete; cultures are not units, they are local points of coherence or decoherence, intersecting patterns. So in this course we take samples of how such variables play out for a paticular human group at some pinpointed spatiotemporal locality, fully aware that the patterns of that locality embed and are embedded in patterns at other levels. The sample constitutes something of a time machine, not oriented to the future, but to the past. Many of the patterns we will see in the past will play themselves out, in amplified or dampened form, in those of the present and the future.
Hence you are not going to "compare" distinct units called "cultures." You are going to engage in research on cultural comparisons on a world scale, and learn research skills that will be invaluable in your lives and careers, adopting the perspectives of anthropologists perceiving cultural patterns within a dynamic compass, and one within which the observer is among the observed.