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WHY CROSS‐CULTURAL RESEARCH? *
Author(s) -
Rohner Ronald P.
Publication year - 1977
Publication title -
annals of the new york academy of sciences
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.712
H-Index - 248
eISSN - 1749-6632
pISSN - 0077-8923
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1977.tb29335.x
Subject(s) - annals , citation , anthropology , center (category theory) , sociology , library science , history , classics , computer science , chemistry , crystallography
Cross-cultural research has b o t h humanistic and scientific interest. Historically, the greatest contribution of cross-cultural research has been squarely on t h e boundary between the humanistic and t h e scientific, in helping to edit and extend man’s image of t h e nature o f “human nature.” Especially within anthropology, this has been a major if of ten unintended contribution since the days of Franz Boas after t he tu rn of the century. Boas and his s tudents devoted great effort to combating such uninformed, ethnocentric generalizations abou t the nature of human nature as: “children are more imaginative than adults.” The noted anthropologist Herskovits describes anthropology’s refutation of these generalities: