"A measurement whose accuracy is completely unknown has no use whatever" [Wilson (107, p. 232)]. "A serious obstacle in the use of replications for increasing accuracy is the tendency to get closely agreeing repetitions for irrelevant reasons" [Wilson (107, p. 253)]. "My people don't lie to me" (Anonymous Anthropologist).

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.

An Algebraic Account of the American Kinship Terminology by Dwight W. Read ALTHOUGH THE STUDY OF KINSHIP SYSTEMS has been a major focus for anthropological research since at least the time of Morgan, a completely satisfactory means for defining, characterizing, and analyzing the internal logic that structures a kinship terminology has remained elusive. Morgan's (1871) preliminary distinction of descriptive versus classificatory systems, Kroeber's (1909) seminal paper developing the concept of alternative dimensions along which culturally determined distinctions are said to be realized, and Rivers's (1900) "genealogical method" all still form basic approaches to the study of kinship terminology structure, even though none of these or their subsequent schools of thought has led to a completely sufficient analysis of structure as a form generatable by the logic of a few basic principles (cf. Radcliffe-Brown 1941; Lkvi-Strauss 196934, 493). Componential analysis, the logical consequent to Kroeber's work, has only partially succeeded in laying bare elementary rules, operations, and equations from which a terminology structure may be deduced. While it has provided a method both for presenting and comparing different kinship terminologies in a common idiom and for delineating aspects of the structure of kinship terminologies, exemplars of the componential-analysis method based on the American kinship ter

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