Focused Ethnographic Bibliography: Standard Cross-Cultural Sample

This bibliography consists, for each society in the Standard Sample, of (1) the sources cited by each of the major studies that contributed extensive sets of coded ethnographic variables; (2) any new sources that have been published or become available or known to the author since the original "pinpointing" sheets were prepared; and (3) citations to all of the above sources that are contained, as of 1988, in the Human Relations Area Files (1976, updated 1985, 1988).

Publication of the bibliography of ethnographic sources for the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (Murdock and White 1969) marks a new phase in the development of professional access to the crosscultural data base. This phase builds on George Peter Murdock's lifelong work of assessing the quality of ethnographic descriptions, coding the ethnographic variables for his extensive EthnographicAtlas (Murdock 1967), and classifying these societies in terms of cultural similarities. From 1967 to 1969, he and I assessed several thousand candidate societies, in order to pick the best-described societies in each of 186 world cultural provinces and to choose the earliest date of high-quality description for each, so as to construct a representative world sample of high-quality ethnographies for comparative analysis. Each society was pinpointed to a particular community or locale, in addition to a focal date, to which the description applied. In the Human Relations Area Files ( H RAF), the full text passages pertaining to a particular society may describe more than one locality and more than one focal date, which can allow the researcher to make intracultural and historical comparisons. In contrast, the codings for a particular society in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample all pertain to a particular space and time. Many reserchers have had access to either (a) the &dquo;pinpointing&dquo; sheets that we prepared for our 1969 article, which guided the coders for seven years of National Science Foundation funding of the Cross-Cultural Cumulative Coding Center (CCCCC) at the University of Pittsburgh, or (b) the shorter sample bibliographies that were published with each successive set of ethnographic codes (Murdock and White 1969, Murdock  Twenty years later, the successful fruits of this strategy are apparent. While this is not the place to review the extensive findings of crosscultural research, over two-thirds of the hundreds of cross-cultural studies since 1969 (see Barry 1980 for a partial listing) have used the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS). Scores of authors made contributions of anywhere from one to one hundred coded variables for this sample. The coded data from the bulk of these studies were assembled over the last decade by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, in a form suitable for electronic manipulation. In 1985, an electronic journal, World Cultures, was inaugurated as a means for disseminating cross-cultural coded data, bibliographies, codebooks, and related research materials (White 1985a). The current bibliography of ethnographic sources for the Standard Sample is now available in electronic form in the World Cultures journal, where it can be employed by researchers for a variety of purposes. Some of the new sources contained in this bibliography were located in 1979 by a bibliographer under the direction of Alice Schlegel. The remainder were found by the author. Table 1 contains a list of the 186 societies in the Standard Sample showing: (1) the SCCS number; (2) the societal name; (3) the pinpointed date; and (4) the pinpointed focus; as well as the Ethnographic Atlas, or EA (5) sequential number and (6) regional identity code; and the HRAF (7) file code (Murdock 1983, i.e., his Outline of World Cultures, or OWC); and (8) an indication of file quality (a=good, b=useful, and c=inadequate). The societies are listed by order of appearance in the Standard Sample. This list may be useful in organizing a coding project and in identifying sources in H RAF. The quality of H RAF sources for this sample, as of 1988, and using the standards of Murdock and White (1969: 28), are as follows: (a) Satisfactory (89), containing a good selection of the source materials, including all the major sources. (b) Useful (26), including the major sources but an incomplete selection of other important ones, and thus adjudged adequate for most crosscultural research but requiring supplementary library research on particular topics.
(c) Inadequate (21 ), lacking at least one of the major sources or several important ones, and thus to be used in cross-cultural research only with caution and preferably with supplementary library research.
A comparison of the 1969 and 1988 H RAF quality codes indicates the extent to which the New Haven files have been upgraded: Use of the HRAF ethnographic archive with the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample is discussed in Ember and Ember (1988).
The bibliography that follows is presented in the same order as that in which the societies are listed in Table 1. Each set of bibliographic entries for a society is headed by (1 ) SCCS#, the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample number (Murdock and White 1969); (2) HRAF#, the Human Relations Area Files (1976) number; (3) EA#, the sequential Ethnographic Atlas number and regional EA identity code (Murdock 1967); (4) the societal name; (5) the pinpointed focus; and, on the second line (6) G: the geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) of the pinpointed group and (7) T: the pinpointed time.
Groups of bibliographic entries are ordered under one of the six main numbered headings and two subheadings (1 a and 3a) that were part of the initial design of the bibliography for the sample (Murdock and White, 1968White, , 1969; White and Murdock 1988): 1. Principal Authority(ies) -pertaining to the pinpointed group and time. 1 a. Essential Secondary Sources-containing information or conclusions not easily obtained by a reading of the primary sources.
2. Other Dependable Primary Sources-pertaining to different dates and/or to adjacent groups representing the same ethnic and local cultures.
3. Auxiliary PrimarySources-pertaining to other similar groups of the same culture or to the general region to which the focal group belongs. 3a. Auxiliary Sources on the Larger Society-pertaining to essential sources on the relationship of local level groups such as the pinpointed focus to the larger society. 4. Useful Secondary Sources-summaries, reviews, or analyses of the culture in question, based on readings of the principal authorities and others. These are asterisked (*) when they are of similar utility for coding as the principal authorities. 5. Other Sources-regional histories, bibliographies, etc. 6. Sources to Be Avoided-pertaining to the general ethnic group in question, but containing known inaccuracies, marked differences from the focal group, etc. A string of seven numbers, dashes, zeros, or new source ( & d q u o ; or blank) indicators appears to the left of each bibliographic item. The numbers indicate the rank order of use of the ethnographic sources, for a given society, for each of seven major sets of coded variables (see Appendix for references). These seven numbers thus indicate a rough rankingnot an absolute scale-of the quality of each source for each of seven topics: 1 ' (Barry et al 1976) 5. Political Organization (Tuden and Marshall 1972) 6. Division of Labor (Murdock and Provost 1973) 7. Illness Beliefs (Murdock, Wilson, and Frederick 1978) Each of these seven major studies reported its own evaluation of the usefulness of the sources for particular ethnographic topics. A principal authority, for example, may have a string of ones, twos, or threes, e.g., 1111111, 1122111, 3101122, indicating that it was often the first, second, or third most useful source in coding the respective topic listed above. Zeros indicate that a given source was available and consulted, but not used in the coding of the given topic A string of zeros (0000000) indicates that the reference was not used by CCCCC coders, but was used in some other coding of the society. A string of dashes (-------) indicates references that may be useful to other coding projects, although they were consulted and not used by CCCCC  Any source in the bibliography can be referred to by the name of the society and a numeral (for the HRAF sources) or letter (for other sources). This provides a convenient means of referring to sources in a compact form in publishing new codes (e.g., White 1988), and page references may also be given. Future codes may utilize this convention to provide source and page numbers keyed to each individual code. This will permit the electronic data base being distributed through the World Cultures electronic journal to index specific coded information on each society back to the published sources from which the information was extracted.
The bibliographic entries give: (1) Author(s), last names and initial(s); (2) date(s) of publication and relevant editions [in brackets]; (3) titles of books, chapters in books, or articles, without subtitles; (4) journal titles for articles; (5) book titles for articles or chapters, and the editors thereof; (6) places of publication (or universities, in the cases of dissertations). While abbreviated (e.g., in comparison to HRAF bibliographic format), these entries give sufficient information for a researcher to locate each source and its publisher. For sources compiled by Murdock and White (1969), parenthetical comments on the sources and dates of fieldwork from the pinpointing sheets (Murdock and White 1968) are provided where available.
In view of the publication of so many new ethnographic sources in the decades since this sample was prepared and pinpointed, a question naturally arises concerning the best earliest description in each cultural province. Are the original sampling choices still the best early-described focal units in their respective provinces? For example, the Nyae Nyae focus among the ! King Bushmen, based on extensive work by the Marshall family, beginning in the 1950s, has now been surpassed in depth of coverage in many areas bythework, begun in the 1960s, of the Kalahari Research Group on the neighboring Dobe ! Kung. The coverage of one unit, however, is often complementary to that of the other, and in coding either one, it is useful to examine both sets of materials. I n this case, rather than replace one with the other for cross-cultural sampling purposes, the optimal scientific strategy is to code both separately one after the other, note the similarities and differences, make whatever inferences from one to the other as are strictly justified, contribute both to the cumulative data bank, and choose one for sampling purposes. Questions of sample redesign will be taken up in a separate article.

Electronic Dissemination
The electronic journal World Cultures distributes the cross-cultural data base, including over a thousand coded variables for Murdock and White's (1969) Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (see Appendix). A number of cross-cultural researchers are now analyzing coded crosscultural data at microcomputer workstations (White 1985b). The codes are read by programs that provide means for statistical and distributional analysis, mathematical modeling, and hypothesis testing (White 1985c). Codebooks in electronic form (White and Burton 9 researchers publish their source and page references for each of their codes on a sample of societies, it will be possible to move electronically: (1) from coded information to the text from which it was extracted, and (2) from ethnographic text to codes extracted from the text.
It is just a matter of time-the technology being now available-before researchers with a microcomputer workstation can move back and forth between coded cross-cultural data on a particular society and the descriptive ethnographic text in electronic form. At this point, the electronic materials published in World Cultures (including coded data and this bibliography) will be linked through HRAF to their ethnographic text files.
The step of linking coded comparative data, through an indexed source bibliography such as provided here, back to the original text, is much needed both for comparative studies and for anthropology generally. One of the greatest current weaknesses of the cross-cultural data base is the fact that the researchers who constructed the coded variables largely ignored the measurement of reliability and assessment of the validity of codes and coding categories. Code-to-text linkage via indexed bibliography will greatly facilitate studies of reliability and validity and will aid in reconceptualizing and recategorizing coded ethnographic variables or in developing new and improved measures of sociocultural phenomena.
For the anthropologist, researcher, or student who is interested in one or a particular set of societies, the text-to-code linkage provides a means of studying how particular ethnographic materials (texts, descriptions) have been interpreted in a comparative framework.
Such use of these materials may help to identify key unsolved problems of ethnographic and ethnological analysis.

Conclusion
The bibliography provided here is useful in a number of contexts. First, it will facilitate further scholarly research by comparativists using the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample and will provide convenient shorthand references for ethnographic sources when publishing codes. We would hope that such shorthand referencing will encourage crosscultural authors to publish page references for each of their codes (e.g., White 1988). We also hope that ethnographers and regional specialists will send updated bibliographic references to the author, so that this bibliography itself may be kept up to date. Second, the fact that this bibliography is keyed to specific field sites, &dquo;pinpointed&dquo; both in time and space, makes it an ideal instructional reference tool for classes focusing on the study of particular societies, on cross-cultural studies, by the numbers in the eight columns to the left of each entry in the ethnographic bibliography. Studies 8-10 are indicated by +, any -in column eight. 1 Paris. (Fieldwork 1934(Fieldwork -1936.) 0000000 b) Dugast, 1. 1955         -e) Thien-An, T. 1974