Tabulated nonsense? Testing the validity of the Ethnographic Atlas

Duman Bahrami-Rad (), Anke Becker and Joseph Henrich

Economics Letters, 2021, vol. 204, issue C

Abstract: The Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock, 1967), an anthropological database, is widely used across the social sciences. The Atlas is a quantified and discretely categorized collection of information gleaned from ethnographies covering more than 1200 pre-industrial societies. While being popular in many fields, it has been subject to skepticism within cultural anthropology. We assess the Atlas’s validity by comparing it with representative data from descendants of the portrayed societies. We document positive associations between the historical measures collected by ethnographers and self-reported data from 790,000 individuals across 43 countries.

Keywords: Ethnographic Atlas; Validation; Culture (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N01 N30 Z10 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:204:y:2021:i:c:s0165176521001579

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2021.109880

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