5 80 American Anthropologist [70, 19681 do well to look afield
for ideas, perhaps in the areas of social and political gaming and
game theory. Comparative Politicril Sjstenis: Studies in the
Politics of Pre-Industrial Societies. RONALD COHEN and JOHN
MIDDLETON, eds. (Ameri- can Museum Sourcebooks in Anthropology.)
Garden City, New York: The Natural His- tory Press (published for
the American Mu- seum of Natural History), 1967. xiv, 512 pp.,
bibliography, 4 figures, index, 3 maps (1 fron- tispiece). $6.95
(cloth), $2.50 (paper).
Reviewed by GEORGE PARK Pitzer College
Here are collected sixteen articles and four pieces extracted
from longer works; all but one of the twenty are strongly
anthropological in flavor. I found that only one of the articles,
by relying explicitly on familiarity with an earlier paper, missed
being self-contained, and the in- stance was minor-the selections
otherwise (with the major exception noted below) are characterized
by the virtue of wholeness. Not more than six deserve to be called
cross-cul- tural studies, and none are of the random-sam- pling
sort. About six are profoundly concerned with change, most of them
adopting a long view. The book is, therefore, mainly a presenta-
tion of the topic its title suggests. It should be exceedingly
useful to anthropologists, since it does some of their search-work
for them and does it well, but the greatest potential of the book
is certainly revelation, which it has to offer many an advanced
student of political sys- tems outside anthropology. Taken
together, the twenty pieces comprise a whole with balance and
richness-withal, a pleasing representation of the way
anthropologists have been handling political studies. The median
date of original publication is 1958-1959.
There is one editorial blunder worthy of re- mark; it is a
subtle and understandable one, but it is likely to result in a
slight increase in the worlds supply of mistaken contempt. A
chapter of Mary Shepardsons Navajo Ways in Govern- m v ~ t is
reprinted-so far, so good. The subject is the tribes traditional
authority system; on the surface, it would not be hard to justify
that choice from among the several chaptcrs that may have seemed
appropriate. Rut as it hap- pens, that chapter is an integral part
of a book concerned with a plurality of ways, of which the most
traditional is by no means the star; and the reader who does not
take this chapter as a foil to the two that (in the original) fol-
lowed it will surely mistake what is said. Miss Shepardson was not
doing Weberian word- dances for their own sake, but had a point:
the
distinction traditionallrational-legal was just what she wanted
as an aid to discussing a mod- ern situation of role-conflict and
strain affecting the process of institutionalization of a new po-
litical system. The anal cal scheme of Miss
representation in this anthology; but what we get has, in
itself, very little value. The extended citations from Weber seem
misplaced; the data available are clearly not sufficient to justify
in- clusion of the piece for its descriptive value; references to
earlier chapters remain cryptic; and worst of all in a collection
of readings upon which many students will form first and last
impressions, it sounds very much as though Miss Shepardson has not
read her Lowie. Our students, on the other hand, will in an earlier
selection have seen Lowie at his best; and when they have done with
the book they will know a great deal more about the forms and
contexts of political action than a person of Webers generation
could possible have known.
What is the state of political anthropology? If we can treat
this collection as a representa- tive document, the discipline is
in good health. In thirty years, we have probably not tran- scended
the analytical perceptiveness that Nadel could show in 1935; but we
have a good deal to say, and some are still able to say it very
well.
Cross-Cultural Approaches: Readings in Com- parative Research.
CLELLAN S . FORD, ed. New Haven: H[uman] R[elations] A[rea] F[iles]
Press, 1967. (Distributed in the U.S. by Tap- linger Publishing
Company, Inc., New York.) x, 365 pp., chapter bibliographies,
contnbu- tors, 1 diagram, 1 figure, 2 illustrations, 9 maps,
chapter notes, 88 tables. $6.50 (cloth), $4.50 (paper).
Shepardsons book is sop c sticated and deserves
Reviewed by ROBERT M. MARSH Bron*u University
It is increasingly clear that cross-societal comparative
analysis is gaining ground relative to case studies and single
society studies. It is also evident that the HRAF cross-cultural
method, which once bore almost the entire bur- den of systematic
comparative research, is now but one of several approaches to
comparative analysis. The HRAF approach is distinguished by its
system of ethnographic data storage and retrieval, by the
statistical testing of relation- ships among elements of culture,
using samples of (mainly simpler) societies from all parts of the
world, and by a theoretical eclecticism that, if all its adherents
are considered together, in- cludes learning theory, psychoanalytic
theory, functionalist theory, and other behaviorist
