The Comparative Method in Anthropological Perspective

E. A. Hammel

Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 22, No. 2. (Apr., 1980), pp. 145-155.

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The Comparative Method in Anthropological Perspective E. A . H A M M E L

University o f Crrlifornia, Berkeley

INTRODUCTION

Comparison is an indispensable technique of analytic scholarship. No analytic statement about empirical observation can be made without at least one comparison providing the contrast that permits either inductive generalization or deductive proof. Comparison is used for these purposes in all disciplines, but not always in the same way, or for the same reasons. Anthropology came to comparison because comparison was thrust on it by the rediscovery of classical antiquity and the opening of Africa, Asia, and the New World to a previously more isolated Europe.' Indeed, anthropol- ogy was born as a response to the great cultural contrasts thus exposed. This philosophical child of comparison, however, pursued it in some very special ways. In the first place, the initial interests of anthropology lay in the reconstruction of an unknown human past, attempting to explain cultural variety through the reconstruction of events leading up to the present. In the second place, the comparisons drawn by anthropologists were usually extreme, prompted as they were by the shock value of new discoveries.

In this essay I attempt to lay out the major lessons learned from the anthropological experience. Although some attention must of course be given to the history of anthropology, I cannot pretend here to provide an adequate history, only to use some snippets from it.2 Further, I cannot review or catalog all the ways in which comparison has been used in anthropology.' I am particularly concerned with the use of comparison to reach inductive generalizations or to form deductive conclusions, not with the use of comparison merely to cite illustrative cases that exemplify but do

I am indebted to Donald Callaway, Elizabeth Colson, and John Rowe for their helpful comments on an earlier draft. They are not responsible for my remaining errors of fact or interpretation.' Elizabeth Colson inquires why the Crusades did not have a similar effect, and I have no answer.

See Lowie 1937, Harris 1968, and, on the comparative method particularly, Bock 1956. See Naroll and Cohen, 1973.

0010-4175/80/2109-0100$2.0001980 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

I45

not demonstrate generalizations. This last use of comparison is trivial, although misleading, and unfortunately common in anthropology, history, and other social sciences.

Although comparison had been used as a technique by earlier writers, The Comparative Method was born in 1889, in a paper by Edward Burnett Tylor delivered to the Royal Anthropological Institute. Tylor was attack- ing the capricious use of comparison to exemplify favorite ideas rather than to generalize to them or test them. He had as his model of excellence more developed sciences of his day, and his words have a familiar albeit hollow ring: For years past it has become evident that the great need of anthropology is that its methods should be strengthened and systematized. . . . Strict method has, however, as yet only been introduced over part of the anthropological field. There has st111 to be overcome a certain not unkindly hesitancy on the part of men engaged in the precise operations of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, to admit that the problems of anthropology are amenable to scientific treatment.

Tylor's attempt to construct a rigorous methodology was conditioned by his evolutionistic philosophy and the generally held notion that the best way to explain any phenomenon was to show how it came to be, that is, to discover its history. Tylor's method had four elements:

1. The identification of clusters of associated culture traits, which he called "adhesions" because they stuck together with such frequency. Adhe- sions were identified in as wide a range of societies as possible, classified, and counted. The co-occurrence of heavy male involvement but relative female absence in agriculture with the use of the heavy plow and draft animals is an example, as is the common association of maize, squash, and beans.

2. The explanation of the existence of such adhesions in functional terms, showing their reasonableness or logicality, in terms of presumably well understood general principles of human behavior. In discussing the avoid- ance of relatives by marriage in certain societies, e.g. the "mother-in-law tabu," according to which a son-in-law cannot speak to or be in the presence of his wife's mother, Tylor likens the tabu to the British device of "cutting" an acquaintance, concluding: "So like is the working of the human mind in all stages of civilization, that our own language conveys in a familiar idiom the same train of thought. . . ."

3. The identification of societies in which the adhesions do not hold, that is, the remnant exceptional cases, and the identification of some elements of an otherwise expectable adhesion as a "survival" from an earlier state. Thus, if two elements of culture are generally associated, any singly occur- ring element would be classified as a survival from an earlier pair, the other half of which had been lost.4

Why it was not classified as a precursor has always escaped me.

COMPARATIVE METHOD I N ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE 147

4. The arrangement of societies along a presumed course of historical development, seriating these according to the patterning of survivals, the exceptional cases being placed interstitially between the more regular ones that show the common adhesions and those showing no elements thereof.

By this method Tylor hoped, through rigorous statistical comparison of nineteenth-century cultures, to reconstruct the history of their antecedents. This is not the place to review the great intellectual battles between evolu- tionism and diffusionism, or to give a critique of methods of historical reconstruction. What I want to do here is examine the issues that lurked in Tylor's procedure, because they permeate all applications of comparison, particularly of The Comparative Method as used in anthropology.

The presiding officer of the session at which Tylor presented his paper was Francis Galton, a man skilled in research design. He observed that, since societies could acquire customs, and thus patterns of adhesion, by borrowing, the number of independent cases of adhesions might be rather less than appeared on first examination. Since the frequency of co-occur- rence of culture traits was crucial to establishment of regularity of associ- ation, some method of weighting ought to be employed. For example, ifthe association between heavy dependence on hunting by males and patrilocal residence (residence of a newly married couple with the husband's people) emerged only once in human history and then spread by diffusion to many other cultures, our interpretation of the adhesion would be different than if it had emerged independently in each of the societies currently demonstrat- ing it. Ever since Galton's remark, this issue has been known as "Galton's Problem," even though of course it was really Tylor's.

The meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1889 adumbrated all of the problems The Comparative Method was to encounter over the next 90 years. Many of the problems have been discussed in a number of places, including works by Hobhouse, Wheeler and Ginsberg (l915), Mur- dock (1949), Eggan (1954), Naroll (1973), Driver and Chaney (1973), Kobben (1973), and White (1973). Embedded in these reviews are four major conceptual problem areas:

1. The identification and classification of the cultural items to be com- pared.

2. The scope of the comparison in time and space or, more generally, in the degree of expected difference between the pairs of social units com- pared.

3. The aims of the comparison. Is the intent of the comparison the formulation of scientific "laws" of functional relationship, or is it the reconstruction of history from subsequent materials? Are the comparisons made for descriptive or analytic purposes? Is the style of argument induc- tive or deductive?

4. The design of the comparison. How much control can be exercised over exogenous variation? How much attention is paid to sampling and statistical reliability?

IDENTIFICATION A N D C'LASSIFICA'TION

Most of the early work in cultural comparison was done by examination of published sources, and their evaluation was not always uniform. In 1889, Galton noted that Tylor's use of his sources was superior to that of another comparativist, Herbert Spencer. Nevertheless, even Tylor did no important field work, no first-hand collecting of data. Neither did other early anthro- pologists. The fundamental criticism of The Comparative Method. di- rected against both evolutionists and diffusionists by Boas, Malinowski. and Radcliffe-Brown, was the unreliability of the basic data. Some early comparativists, like Hobhouse, Wheeler and Ginsberg, distinguished clearly between the first-hand observations of trained anthropologists and the travelogues that had been used indiscriminately by earlier scholars.

Two issues are involved here. One is the need to have first-hand observa- tions of high professional quality, and the other is that co~nparison allnost inevitably involves the use of data collected by others, since one field worker can observe only a. limited amount of material. A major theme in anthropological training since about 1920 has been participation in field work, preferably in an exotic culture--so much so that the year of field work for the doctoral dissertation has taken on the symbolic significance of an initiation rite. A second theme, pursued less vigorously, has been the achievement of comparable data sets from the work of different field investigators. If the range of generalization to be pursued is large, then comparativists must use the reports of others, and they have great difficulty in doing so if the data structures are dissimilar.

Standardized questionnaires appeared as early as the eighteenth century, used in the Russian expedition to Kamtschatka, and many others appeared in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The early ones were intended to guide untrained travelers in their data collection, while the later ones, as in the most recent British Notes and Qu~ries in Anthropology. were written for anthropologists with professional training. Team efforts, in which a number of workers followed closely specified procedures in different societies, emerged in Kroeber's culture element distribution surveys (Kroeber 1937,1939a, 1939b), Kluckhohn's cultural values project (Kluck- hohn and Strodtbeck 1961), the Whitings' studies of socialization (1963), Foster's research in public health (1951, 1953), and Nader and Todd's village law project (1978).5

It is not ordinarily possible for historians to gather data in parallel efrorts in the way anthropologists have, for the historians are limited by the

I am indebted to John Rowe for a number of these obsel.vations.

COMPARATIVE METHOD IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE 149

written sources already available. They cannot seek out more than is there, as an inquiring field worker can. Nevertheless, they can strive to create comparable data sets by searching out similar kinds of information. Com- parability then rests, as it also does with results of field work, on similarity of classificatory schemes. The most useful sources for comparison are those in which there has been as little prior classification as possible, so that comparativists are least bound by the categories of the primary source. Classifications are informed by theory (or at least by prejudice), and theories differ from one investigator to the next and even for the same investigator over time. A system of classification useful for one theory or one body of data may not be so useful for another, and a system of classification that would accommodate both is very likely to be less than optimal for either. A primary investigation that is a major analytical contribution in its own right but also provides good data for comparative purposes must at least permit recovery of the data in as unclassified a form as possible, even though it categorizes them for the purposes of its own analysis. The difficulties of classification are well illustrated in the anthro- pological debates over the classification of kinds of postmarital residence. Is the residence of a newly married couple patrilocal, matrilocal, avunculo- cal, virilocal, uxorilocal, duolocal, ambilocal . . .? Two well-qualified field workers can emerge from the effort of classification with quite different results, using virtually the same body of original information (Good- enough 1956; Fischer 1958). A useful example of classification in historical demography is the pictorial scheme of Hammel and Laslett (1974), which attempts to avoid forcing the data but provides a common framework for comparison of household structures.

A major facilitator of comparison is the public availability of basic notes and documents. Historians are of course very familiar with the importance of public access to archives or copies of archival materials. Anthropologists now frequently make their field notes publicly available. Some anthropo- logical sources are available in the Human Relations Area Files, specially abstracted and coded data sets built up over many years, and in the computerized data set known as the World Ethnographic Sample (1957). Although no control could be exercised over the way in which the original data were collected, much attention has been given to the reliability and consistency of coding. Nevertheless, careful users of such materials should check their results against the original monographic sources to avoid errors stemming from classificatory incompatibility. I know of no similar bodies of data in the discipline of history, although as quantitative history becomes more common, it is more likely that computerized data sets will be made publicly available. If these are constructed, it is extremely important that the data be entered in as "primitive" a form as possible, leaving recoding to each investigator, according to his own needs and choice.

THE SCOPE OF COMPARISON

Exciting general theories always seem to demand a substantial range of time and space in which to locate the social units. In anthropology one thinks of Kroeber's work on the "configurations of culture growth" (1944), which ranged from classical times to modern civilization, from the simplest people to the most complexly organized, and across all continents. Claude Levi-Strauss, in a number of papers and recent works (e.g., 1962, 1963, 1970), ranges as widely. In history, or at least in historical philosophy, one thinks of Toynbee (1935-1962), Moore (1966), Wallerstein (1974). Even the most wide-ranging among the latter, however, is more restrained than most anthropological comparativists. The excitement of anthropological theories, associated as it is with enormous temporal and spatial range, is inversely related to control over the sources of variation. So many factors are present in wide comparison that it may be impossible to ask carefully phrased questions. One would prefer to compare societies that differed in only a few respects, particularly in those ofmost interest to the investigator. Such comparisons must be done at closer range-similar nation-states in Europe, similar emerging countries in Africa, two villages in the same valley, the Hopi with the Zuni, and so on. The grandeur of the investiga- tor's intellectual sweep is much humbled by controlled observation, and it takes some thought to find an analytical target that lies well between the excitingly vacuous and the trivially precise. Fred Eggan, among anthropol- ogists, was one of the first to make the issue explicit (1954), but some others have also taken the cautious route of controlled comparison, for example, Radcliffe-Brown (l930), Nade1(1952), Gluckman (1945), etc.

THE AIMS OF COMPARISON

Early implementations of the comparative method used accepted ideas about human behavior and the function of institutions to make inferences about historical development. These inferences sometimes stressed inde- pendent evolution, a tradition still followed by Marxist scholars since it supports the inevitability of socioeconomic development, and some stressed diffusion. All of these, however, make strong assumptions about the psychic unity of mankind. The ethnocentrism of these assumptions came under strong attack, led by the emerging British social anthropology of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown in the 1920s and later.

In America, Boas and his students attacked the conjectural aspects of evolutionism but continued their own chronological reconstructions at less ambitious range. An early vigorous effort and outstanding failure was Kroeber's work on culture element distributions (1937). Spier (1921, 1922, 1925), Driver (1969), and more recently Jorgensen (1969) have pursued the comparative method in a more cautious way. Their results are more

classificatory than chronological; that is, they point to well-structured patterns, but the temporal implications of the patterns are not always clear. (Jorgenson's forthcoming work on western American Indians presses the temporal issues explicitly, however.)

It is probably fair to say that the comparative method has yielded few consistently held historical generalizations in anthropology. An outstand- ing exception is the recent work of Berlin and Kay (1969), in which comparison in the restricted domain of the lexicon of color categories suggests an historical progression from a two-color system ("light" and "dark") to a three-color system including a term for "red," and then later to a polychromatic system.

The most ambitious undertakings in recent times have put as much emphasis on functional as on historical interpretation. Murdock's Social Structure (1949), although strongly oriented toward historical reconstruc- tion, is extensively devoted to functional and psychological explanation. Ethnographic studies undertaken by the followers of Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, principally in Africa, have resulted in implicitly drawn quali- tative comparisons concerning particular areas of social structure. For example, there have been studies of African kinship and marriage systems, of African political systems, and particularly of "chiefless" societies. Most recently, Jack Goody has conducted extensive comparisons of kinship and inheritance systems in Africa and Eurasia (1976). The more carefully these studies are conducted, the narrower and more cautious the range of their comparison; and the more attention they pay to total social context, the less they resemble the older anthropological exercises in The Comparative Method, in which culture traits and institutions were often torn from their setting for the sake of "rigorous" comparison. Technically, the way earlier comparativists controlled for sources of exogenous variation was simply to ignore them. In the more recent work it is clear that comparisons at restricted range permit the isolation of individual traits and institutions precisely because narrowness of scope keeps context relatively constant.

Part of the rejection of The Comparative Method was a rejection of evolutionism, extreme diffusionism, and of any kind of conjectural history. Modern comparative studies, even in the British tradition (where the attack on historical reconstruction was strongest), are now less antipathetic to- ward historical issues. The modern forms of comparison are more balanced, not only in their methodology but also in their blending of functionalist and historical issues.

SAMPLING A N D DESIGN

Research design of course involves many of the areas already discussed- whether one or another theoretical scheme informs data collection and classification, what the scope of comparison is to be, whether the problem is

152 E . A . H A M M E L

one of inference from synchronic materials to a diachronic seriation or to a functionalist interpretation, or whether historical materials will be used directly. In classic exercises in The Method, where comparisons are of broad scope and there is an emphasis on counting cases for statistical inference, Galton's Problem still looms large. (For detailed review see Naroll 1973 and Driver and Chaney 1973.) Let us look at the nature of that problem again. Suppose we observe, loosely, that societies in which the residence of a newly-married couple is with the wife's relatives are most often those in which descent is traced in the female line, and that these are frequently horticultural societies. Suppose we also observe, equally loosely, that societies emphasizing big game hunting rather than horticulture are those in which postmarital residence is with the groom's relatives, and that these societies are characterized by descent reckoned in the male line. Since horticultural activities are frequently carried out by women, and big game hunting is exclusively a male pursuit, we might theorize that the need for cohesive work groups led horticultural societies to organize themselves around a female core and hunting societies around a male core. This hypothesis is in fact a classic one in social anthropology: that the nature of the productive labor force leads to particular kinds of residence patterns and these in turn to particular systems of descent that legitimize access to the means of production.

It is not difficult to select a sample of horticultural societies, and another of hunting societies in which these relationships are uniformly true. But an honest test of the hypothesis demands drawing a representative sample from the world's cultures, preferably randomly, so that cases that might disprove the hypothesis would have the same chance of entering the sample as those that confirm it. Even if the sampling is honest, it may be biased. If, for example, one were to select data on the basis of their quality, we could easily find excellent ethnographic materials on the southeastern United States and utilize information from the Choctaw, the Creek, the Alabama, the Chickasaw, and their neighbors. All of these peoples are matrilocal, matrilineal, and horticultural. But they all speak related languages and share to a considerable degree a common history. How many instances of the co-occurrence of matrilocality, matrilineality, and predominantly female horticulture do they constitute? Are they one instance, or can we use each village, or even each descent group, as a countable instance?

Suppose our interest is to demonstrate functional relationships, as in the example given. Although it may be true that the association of matrilocal- ity and female-centered food production is functionally important in any social unit in which it is found, down to the individual Choctaw household, the strength ofthe evidence brought to bear on the theory isvastly different when cases in support are historically independent. Each independent occurrence is a brand new confirmation of the hypothesis, since no occur-

rence in one case has any influence on the outcome in any other case. Suppose, on the other hand, our intent were to show historical relationship through common ancestry or diffusion. Here it would be important to exclude cases in which the association was strongly predictable on func- tional grounds, for then the similarities might occur independently of historical connection.

A number of solutions to the problem originally raised by Galton have been offered:

1 . Exclude all but one society from each culture area. This permits each culture area to be represented only once in the sample, thus sampling culture areas. This helps us to find historically independent cases, but it is very sensitive to the definition of culture areas, none of which are com- pletely independent of one another or several others over sufficiently long spans of time.

2. Establish a geographical transect in an arbitrary way and see whether trait associations tend to be continuous or discontinuous. Since diffusional similarities tend to be contiguous, contiguity along an arbitrary transect suggests diffusion and historical connection, while discontinuous occur- rences suggest independent development for functional reasons.

3. Examine the geographical extent of cases confirming and cases discon- firming the functional association of the culture traits. If the traits diffused without respect to functional association, then the cases disconfirining the functional hypothesis should be as widely spread as those confirming it. If the functional relation is strong, however, only the confirmatory clusters should be widely spread, regardless of whether they spread through diffu- sion or through independent development.

The lessons anthropology has learned over almost a century of explicit attention to conlparison are few but important. They are first that defini- tion of the problem and consistency of observation and classification are paramount. Reliable comparisons cannot be made between data sets that are not governed by similar theoretical intent, techniques of collection, and types of classification. Further, there is a trade-off between grand scope and grand theory, on the one hand, and more modest design and credibility on the other. Finally, even if all else bodes well for an investigation, failure to exercise care in sampling the evidence will make interpretable results difficult of attainment. Our colleagues in the social and historical sciences who contemplate the use of conscious cornparison should reflect on the lessons presented to the anthropologists, not all of whom have heeded them. The Comparative Method is no easy route around the need for careful observation and evaluation. No amount of technology or numeri- cal computation can solve the basic problems of scholarship.

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