Why Exceptions? The Logic of Cross-Cultural Analysis [and Comments and Reply]

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Abstract

This paper discusses the factors causing exceptions to rules in the social sciences in general and in social anthropology in particular. Exceptions may occur through defective classification by ethnologists. For example, the ethnologist may define the phenomena under consideration poorly. The importance of using operational definitions must therefore be stressed. He may class phenomena in the same category without making sure that their frequency of occurrence and intensity in the societies to be compared are about equal. He may class the phenomena on an all-or-none basis, whereas a more realistic model would be a continuum or a series of continua. This last is the main cause of exceptions due to defective classification. Data supplied by ethnographers may cause exceptions for a number of reasons. The informants' model may be different from the "real" social structure; so also may be the ethnographer's model, influenced as it is by his personality, by the "school" in which he has been educated, and by the culture from which he comes. Other factors causing exceptions are: multicausality; parallel causality; equivalents; intervening variables; diffusion (external contacts); cultural and social lag; coincidence; and personality. These factors are heuristic ones; logically they are not all independent of one another. Most anthropological rules have exceptions not of one type but of a combination of several or all of them. Given the great number of factors causing exceptions, it is surprising that valid regularities are found in anthropology at all. The fact that we are able to formulate them in spite of the imperfection of our data and theories strongly argues for their intrinsic value. We shall never achieve rules without exceptions, not even if we should have perfect data and perfect anthropologists. Many exceptions, however, may be eliminated either by proving them to be spurious or by including them in the rule. By so doing we will make our "laws" more complex and subtle than at present, much to the profit of anthropology as a science.

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