Boas argued that anthropologists should make historical comparisons within well-defined regional contexts. A century later, we have many improvements in the statistical methodologies for comparative research, yet most of our regional constructs remain without a valid empirical basis. We present a new method for developing and testing regions. The method takes into account older anthropological concerns with relationships between culture history and the environment, embodied in the culture-area concept, as well as contemporary concerns with historical linkages of societies into world systems. We develop nine new regions based on social structural data and test them using data on 35 I societies. We compare the new regions with Murdock's regional constructs and find that our regional classification is a strong improvement over Murdock's. In so doiig we obtain evidence for the cross-cultural importance of gender and descent systems, for the importance of constraint relationships upon sociocultural systems, for the historical importance of two precapitalist world systems, and for strikingly different geographical alignments of cultural systems in the Old World and the Americas.

The issue of cultural universals versus linguistic relativity is currently one of the most intensely debated topics in sociocultural anthropology. Emotion terms have long served as a contested area and we provide a brief review. The primary aim of the paper is to introduce methods that facilitate the objective analysis of empirical findings on the extent to which semantic structure is shared among different languages. The main finding of this paper is that Chinese-, English-, and Japanesespeaking subjects assign basically similar meanings to 15 common emotion terms. The differences among the three languages are genuine and statistically significant but small. One of the particularly impressive aspects of the present findings is the extent to which they are consistent with previous research traditions that posit cultural and semantic universals. Differences also exist in the performance of Chinese and Japanese bilingual subjects when performing tasks in English compared to performing the same tasks in their native language, [emotions, inter-cultural and intra-cultural variability, cultural universals, linguistic relativity, Chinese, Japanese] The prevailing doctrine of American linguists and anthropologists has, in this century, been that of extreme linguistic relativity. Briefly, the doctrine of extreme linguistic relativity holds that each language performs the coding of experience into sound in a unique manner. Hence, each language is semantically arbitrary relative to every other language. According to this view, the search for semantic universals is fruitless in principle. Kay (1969)1991:1-2]

Culture consists of shared cognitive representations in the minds of individuals. This paper investigates the extent to which English speakers share the "same" semantic structure of English

This paper describes a variety of statistical methods for obtaining precise quantitative estimates of the similarities and differences in the structures of semantic domains in different languages. The methods include comparing mean correlations within and between groups, principal components analysis of interspeaker correlations, and analysis of variance of speaker by question data. Methods for graphical displays of the results are also presented. The methods give convergent results that are mutually supportive and equivalent under suitable interpretation. The methods are illustrated on the semantic domain of emotion terms in a comparison of the semantic structures of native English and native Japanese speaking subjects. We suggest that, in comparative studies concerning the extent to which semantic structures are universally shared or culture-specific, both similarities and differences should be measured and compared rather than placing total emphasis on one or the other polar position.

A small but important aspect of culture consists of shared cognitive representations of semantic structures that reside as localized functional units in the minds of individuals. In this article we discuss the cognitive and biological foundations for a model of culture as shared cognitive representations and summarize empirical evidence for predictions derived from the model. The structure of semantic domains such as the names of colors, animals, or kinship terms is defined as the arrangement of the terms relative to each other in a spatial model. In this space, items that are judged as more similar are placed closer to each other than items judged as less similar. Measuring the extent to which "pictures" or cognitive representations in the mind of one person correspond to those in the mind of another, research on various semantic domains has demonstrated that typical members of a culture have similar "pictures" in their minds.