Cross-Cultural Ratings of Subsistence Activities and Sex Division of Labor: Retrospects and Prospects1

Abstract

Although much has been written concerning the legitimacy and the feasibility of the cross-cultural method as a research tool (brief summations of this literature are available in Textor [1967] and Harris [1968]), the assumption will here be made that the method is both valuable and perfectible. However, any cross-cultural research can only be as meaningful as the ratings it uses. I will therefore attempt to evaluate such ratings by examining those dealing with subjects of my own research interest -subsistence activities and the sex division of labor. These two areas were first rated cross-culturally in the pioneer work of Hobhouse, Wheeler, and Ginsberg (1915), but it was not until the publication of Murdock's &dquo;World Ethnographic Sample&dquo; ( 1957 ) that such ratings inspired a large body of cross-cultural * Judith K. Brown (Ed.D., Harvard Graduate School of Education), is presently an assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. During the past two years she was an associate scholar at the Radcliffe Institute, where she was engaged in research concerning the subsistence activities of women. Her thesis was a cross-cultural study of initiation rites for girls.