Cross-Cultural Research

The significance of the son's insufficient contact with his father during infancy in regard to circumcision and segregation at puberty was examined. It was found that among polygynous societies in which each co-wife lives in a separate quarter with her children, where they have limited contact with their father, males are significantly more likely to be circumcised or segregated. The arrangement of separate quarters for co-wives appears to be a key factor in explaining a long postpartum sexual taboo, circumcision, and segregation. It is not the long postpartum sexual taboo but the separa tion of each co-wife that is instrumental in bringing about circumcision and sepreeation.

Murdock and White (1969) have argued that in cross-cultural hypothesis tests where the variables measured are not focused (pinpointed in space and time to a single local community), we cannot assume functional relation ships between those variables. Since most of the published cross-cultural studies do not report focusing, Murdock and White cast doubt on the find ings of a few hundred studies. I argue that focusing should be used to increase data quality, but that a lack of focus only increases the amount of random measurement error, which tends to lower correlations. Therefore, if focusing is not applied and a significant correlation is found, it means that the actual association is probably even higher than the one found. This was tested by coding two variables, once with and once without a temporal focus. Both correlations were statistically significant, but the time- focused correlation was 23 percent higher. The test was then repeated on a second sample, drawn from a different universe, and similar results were found. In this instance, the time-focused correlation was 13 percent higher.

Using two kinds of asymptotic growth functions, the logistic and the Gompertz curves, the author argues that growth in the absolute numbers of Classic Maya temple centers in the lowlands was probably a process with built-in self-limitations. The logic of the two mathematical functions and the argument from the data provide a growth model embodying a simultaneous acceleration of growth and resistance to growth. After a statistical fitting of Sylvanus G. Morley's site data (drawn from The Ancient Maya, 1946), the model is compared against growth-limiting processes posited by the participants in a recent symposium on the collapse of Classic Maya civilization (Gordon R. Willey and Demitri B. Shimkin, "The Collapse of Classical Maya Civilization in the Southern Lowland: A Sym posium Summary Statement," Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 27: 1-18, 1971).