ABSTRACT
Cultural typology is a broad subject for anthropology. It covers nothing less than our whole way of bringing data on society and culture to order and manageability for the widest variety of purposes. It involves the grounds for being able to speak about the diverse and numerous ways in which sociocultural systems are alike or different from one another. Value theory is useful more for contrasting cultures — for specifying the ways in which each culture is a unique thing despite the traits it shares with other cultures. Value theory also generally carries the premise that stability and not change is fundamental to a working cultural system, and this makes it hard to use it to build a typology useful in speaking of evolutionary change. Apparently one requires for the diagnostic features of typology, formal, generalized and fairly abstract statements of order and relationship which are the elements of the structure of sociocultural systems.
