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Cross-cultural comparison is the systematic method of comparing cultural practices, institutions, and beliefs across multiple societies to identify patterns, test hypotheses, and distinguish universal from culturally variable features of human life. The Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) database, created at Yale, systematically codes ethnographic data from hundreds of societies to enable statistical cross-cultural research. The method must navigate the Galton Problem (apparent independent occurrences may reflect historical diffusion) and the challenge that ethnographic data vary in quality and comparability. Despite these challenges, comparative research has generated important findings on the relationship between subsistence strategies, kinship forms, and political organization.
Use a simplified version of the HRAF or a textbook cross-cultural dataset to test a simple hypothesis (e.g., does patrilineal descent correlate with patrilocal residence?). Reflect on what the correlation does and does not prove.
Cultural relativism — your foundational prerequisite — insists that practices must be understood in their own context, not ranked on a universal scale of progress. Cross-cultural comparison might seem to violate this principle, since comparison implies a common scale. But the critical move is distinguishing *ranking* from *comparing*. You can ask "do patrilineal societies tend to have patrilocal residence?" without asking "which kinship system is better?" Comparison tests hypotheses about patterns; ranking imposes a hierarchy of value. Competent cross-cultural researchers hold both commitments simultaneously.
The comparative method treats societies as data points and cultural practices as variables. Drawing on your statistics background — sampling methods, measures of spread, correlations — you can see the logic: if you sample 200 societies and find that societies with extensive warfare tend to have male-dominant kinship systems, you've identified a pattern that demands explanation. The Human Relations Area Files (HRAF), the world's largest coded ethnographic database, was created specifically to enable this kind of systematic comparison. Hundreds of societies are coded on thousands of variables from economic organization to kinship rules to ritual practices, enabling researchers to run the equivalent of cross-cultural regressions.
But unlike a clean experiment, the ethnographic record introduces serious complications. The most famous is Galton's Problem: when many societies share a practice, are those independent observations or did most borrow it from one original? If 30 societies in a contiguous region all practice the same ritual, that might be 30 independent tests of a hypothesis — or it might be one case of diffusion counting as 30. Failing to control for cultural area and historical contact inflates apparent patterns. Your ethnography prerequisite also matters here: fieldworkers have different levels of access, ask different questions, and write up different observations. Two ethnographers describing "marriage" in two different societies may not be coding the same phenomenon. Language-and-culture issues compound this — words rarely translate cleanly across conceptual systems.
Despite these challenges, comparative research has produced important findings. Cultural universals — practices found in all or nearly all societies — include incest taboos, some form of marriage, mourning rituals, and prohibitions on murder of in-group members. Cultural variables — practices that differ widely across societies — include the specific form of descent reckoning, residential patterns after marriage, and the structure of ritual authority. The theoretical significance is precise: universals need evolutionary, cognitive, or functional explanations (something about human biology or universal social needs produces them); variables need historical, ecological, or institutional explanations (something about the specific circumstances of particular societies produces them). Cross-cultural comparison is the method that generates this distinction systematically, rather than leaving it to intuition.
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