ABSTRACT: The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample contains the best-described society in each of 186 cultural provinces of the world, chosen so that cultural independence of each unit in terms of historical origin and cultural diffusion could be considered maximal with respect to the others societies in the sample. Often the time period chosen is that of the earliest high quality ethnographic description. Hence the SCCS is primarily a sample of preindustrial societies.
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ETHNOLOGY vol. 39 no. 4, Fall 2000, pp. 335-348.
In 1889, Galton argued that often traits diffuse across cultures and therefore we could never really know if culturalt raits arose independentlya s adaptiver esponseso r were a result of diffusion. With numerous hypothetical and actual examples we show that, statistically,t here are no mechanicalf ixes to this problem.W e conclude by asserting that each cross-cultural research question should find its own solution to Galton's problem and that, in fact, this is not a problem at all, but rather an asset which can be used to trace historical networks. (Galton's problem, cultural units, community, language, megacultural regions, Standard Cross-Cultural Sample)
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