An anthropologist surveys 15 societies in West Africa and finds they all practice similar initiation rituals. She concludes that initiation rituals are functionally necessary for social cohesion. A colleague raises 'Galton's problem.' What is the objection?
AFifteen cases are too small a sample for any statistical inference about cultural patterns
BFunctional explanations are inherently circular and cannot be tested cross-culturally
CThe 15 societies may have borrowed the rituals from one another through historical contact, so they don't count as 15 independent cases — they may be one observation repeated
DInitiation rituals vary too widely in form for any comparison to be meaningful
Galton's problem, identified in 1889, points out that geographically proximate or historically connected societies often share cultural features through diffusion — borrowing — rather than independent development. If the 15 societies inherited their initiation rituals from a common ancestor, they provide one data point, not fifteen. For a causal hypothesis to be tested, the cases must be genuinely independent — each society must have developed the feature separately, under the same proposed causal conditions. Modern comparative anthropology addresses this with regional controls and diffusion analysis.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
What is the primary intellectual contribution of comparative cross-cultural analysis that single-society ethnography cannot provide?
AIt produces richer, more detailed accounts of how specific cultural practices are experienced by insiders
BIt identifies which culture has solved universal human problems most effectively
CIt moves from particular description to general explanation by testing hypotheses across independently varying societies — separating local contingency from broader human patterns
DIt allows anthropologists to avoid the problem of researcher bias that afflicts participant observation
Ethnography gives depth — an insider account of one community. But depth in a single case cannot answer causal or distributional questions: Is this practice universal? What explains its presence here? Comparative analysis provides leverage by varying cases systematically. If pastoralist societies consistently develop stricter property norms than forager societies across multiple independent regions, that pattern supports a hypothesis about mobile wealth and norm formation in a way no single ethnography can.
Question 3 True / False
Galton's problem refers to the tendency for anthropologists to unconsciously impose their own cultural values and assumptions when interpreting the practices of another society.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Galton's problem is a statistical/methodological issue about the independence of cases, not about researcher bias. It holds that societies which share a cultural feature through historical diffusion (borrowing) cannot be treated as independent pieces of evidence for a causal hypothesis. Researcher ethnocentrism is a related concern in anthropology, but it has a different name and is addressed through reflexivity and self-awareness in fieldwork — not through sampling strategies.
Question 4 True / False
The existence of cultural universals — practices found in virtually all known human societies — is itself a finding that requires explanation, suggesting deep functional, biological, or structural constraints on cultural variation.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
Cultural universals (the incest taboo, some marriage institution, grief rituals, language) are not trivially obvious — the question is why, across the enormous diversity of human cultural solutions, certain features appear everywhere. Their universality supports hypotheses about deep functional requirements of social life (coordination, reproduction, knowledge transmission) or biological constraints. Comparative analysis is what establishes a feature as universal in the first place — you can only claim universality after systematic cross-cultural comparison.
Question 5 Short Answer
Why can't observations from ten neighboring societies that all practice bride-wealth be used as ten independent pieces of evidence for the hypothesis that cattle herding causes bride-wealth?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: Because of Galton's problem: neighboring societies often share cultural features through historical diffusion — they borrowed bride-wealth from one another — rather than each independently developing it in response to cattle herding. If they share the practice through contact, they count as one observation, not ten. Independent evidence requires societies that developed bride-wealth separately, without historical connection, so each represents a fresh test of whether cattle herding produces bride-wealth under independent conditions.
Galton's problem is the central methodological challenge of the comparative method. It doesn't make comparison impossible — it requires that researchers control for diffusion, whether through selecting geographically dispersed societies, using formal network analysis to identify independent cultural lineages, or applying regional controls. The HRAF database and stratified sampling approaches were designed precisely to maximize case independence. The problem matters because causal inference from comparative data depends entirely on the independence of the cases used.