On Ethnic Unit Classification [and Comments and Reply]

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Abstract

This paper discusses the general concept of the basic culture-bearing unit and proposes a new definition-the cultunit. This proposal is a response to the need for units of cross-cultural surveys to be comparable and to be rigorously defined if these studies are to be validated statistically. Such anthropologists as Schapera, Berndt, Whiting, Evans-Pritchard, Reichard, Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes, Ember, Murdock, Nadel, Leach and Driver have given much thought to the problem of defining basic culture-bearing units. From their writings, we can see at least six possible criteria for defining societal units: (1) language (which nearly everyone thinks is important), (2) political organization, (3) territorial contiguity, (4) distribution of particuar traits being studied, (5) ecological adjustment, and (6) local community structure. The cultunit concept uses the first three of these: a cultunit is defined as a group of people who are domestic speakers of mutually intelligible dialects and who also belong to the same state or contiguous contact group. Four types of cultunits can be distinguished: the Hopi type, a contiguous linguistic group who belong to no state; the Flathead type, a state whose members all speak a single language; the Aztec type, domestic speakers of the lingua franca of a linguistically diverse state. Three periods of time of any of these four types can also be usefully distinguished: palaeoethnographic periods, aboriginal periods, and colonial periods. Although the cultunit has some theoretical justification, it is offered as an arbitrary definition whose justification is its convenience in cross-cultural surveys. Through its use, sampling biases from inconsistent sampling units can be statistically controlled, and the importance of diversity of societal type can be statistically assessed.

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