Friday, 16 July 2021

The ethnographic atlas isn't 'tabulated nonsense'

I've seen a number of papers over the years that have made use of data from George Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas (see here for a gated summary, or here for the data), often as an instrument for some other variable (as one example, see here). The Atlas summarises ethnographic data from over 1200 pre-industrial societies, including a variety of characteristics such as political organisation, social organisation, norms, and agricultural practices. A search on Google Scholar reveals that it has been cited over 6700 times, so it is widely used.

Given widespread use of the Ethnographic Atlas , I was very interested when I saw the title of this new article by Duman Bahrami-Rad, Anke Becker, and Joseph Henrich (all Harvard University), published in the journal Economics Letters (ungated earlier version here): "Tabulated nonsense? Testing the validity of the Ethnographic Atlas". It turns out that I didn't need to worry too much, and nor should researchers using data from the Ethnographic Atlas. Bahrami-Rad et al. compare data from the Ethnographic Atlas with comparable variables from more recent Demographic and Health Surveys for the same ethnic groups. They find:

...positive associations between the historical information reported by ethnographers and the contemporary information reported by a large number of individuals. Importantly, the associations between historical ethnicity-level measures and contemporary self-reported data do not only hold for dimensions that would have been easy to observe for an ethnographer, such as how much a society relies on agriculture, or whether marriages are polygynous. Rather, they also hold for dimensions that are more concealed, such as how long couples abstain after birth, or whether people prefer sons.

Clearly, no cause for concern. The title of the paper is clickbait (the quote "tabulated nonsense" is attributed to the British anthropologist Sir Edmund Leach), and clearly effective, since it got me to read the paper.

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