ABSTRACT
Since the first comparative studies in anthropology that were not only comprehensive (in the old tradition of Tylor and Frazer) but that also followed a systematic comparative method,2 anthropology has gone through a long and heated debate over the uses and limitations of crosscultural comparison. I do not intend to raise here, once again, all the well-known arguments.3 My treatment would be biased anyway by the fact that my own academic training4 all but turned me into the kind of comparativist who, even when he is studying a single society, is not happy with his explanations of structure and process therein, unless he has tested these out cross-culturally, with a representative sample of the world’s societies, and preferably with the use of some inferential statistics.
