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.
HIS paper will consider the relationship between the occupational T role of the middle-class male and his aims and concerns in the socialization of his children. The approach is deliberately one-sided. We will deal almost entirely with fathers, and scarcely at all with mothers, and we will high-light other aspects of the socialization process a t the expense of such matters as feeding practices, toilet training and sexual training.' There is no intention of denying the worth of approaches other than that exemplified here. We wish only to stress what seem to be neglected, though obvious and common-sense aspects of the question of socialization.
APPROACHES TO THE QUESTION OF SOCIALIZATIONWe will define socialization for the purpose at hand as the process of inculcating in individuals the skills, traits and value attitudes associated with the performance of present or anticipatedThere are a number of ways of stating problems concerning socialization. One approach is to ask what are the eJects of certain types of socialization experience. Considerable strides have been made along these lines, in analyzing, for example, the effects of "basic disciplines" such as weaning, toilet training and sexual
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