This newsletter
is in courier font and full page format to conform to the e-mail format
being sent to SCCR members with e-mail addresses.The scope of our journal Cross-Cultural Research has expanded. We now publish any studies that deal systematically with cross- cultural issues pertaining to the constants and variables of human behavior. This means that we are receptive to submissions from all the sciences dealing with humans on a global level (not just anthropology), including psychology, sociology, political sciences, economics, human ecology, and evolutionary biology. We are not interested in publishing studies that merely establish differences between cultures. Rather we prefer to publish studies that narrow down the explanatory possibilities by statistically linking the dependent variable(s) to possibly causal predictor(s).
In the few years since Sage Periodicals Press took over as publisher of the journal, subscriptions have more than doubled. It is encouraging that most of the new subscribers, in this age of declining library fortunes, are libraries in this and other countries. As editor of the journal, I am pleased that our efforts are reaching an expanding audience.
The National Science Foundation, in a grant to the Human Relations Area Files, will support the fifth of six Summer Institutes in Comparative Anthropological Research. The next Institute will be held at the Claremont Colleges, Claremont, California (July 2 - August 12, 1997). The directors and principal instructors will be Carol R. Ember, Michael L. Burton, and Robert L. Munroe. Twelve participants will be accepted for the three-week intensive course in the design and execution of systematic comparisons.
Instruction will cover regional and worldwide comparisons, using primary and secondary data, and include lectures, discussion, and hands-on experience with coding, computerized data, and state-of-the art statistical methods. A large part of the training is developing individual projects based on each participant's interests. Tuition as well as room and board (on campus) will be provided to the invited participants. Preference will be given to applicants with a Ph.D. in anthropology who are interested in comparative anthropological research (but have had little or no training in it) and who teach or would like to teach research methods to graduates or undergraduates in the United States. For further information and instructions on how to apply, please contact:
Dr. Carol R. Ember, Executive Director
Human Relations Area Files
755 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Telephone: (203) 764-9401
FAX:(203) 764-9404
e-mail: embercm@minerva.cis.yale.edu
Deadline for applications: March 15, 1997
The participants in last summer's institute held at the Claremont Colleges were: Salah Bassiouni, Eric Canin, Lewellyn Hendrix, John R. Johnson, Kathryn Kamp, Ann Metcalf, Sarah Soh, Margaret Swain, Lynn Thomas, Sita Venkateswar, and Stanley R. Witkowski
This newsletter
is in courier font and full page format to conform to the e-mail format
being sent to SCCR members with e-mail addresses.
I have had little or no response to the following items in the spring newsletter: a) inquiries about women; b) mailing lists of potential SCCR members; c) questions concerning scheduling and locations of meetings. d) response to discussions or sessions on cloistering & chaperoning or definitions of cleanliness and purity Douglas Caulkins has had no response to discussion or session on history of technology.
If members will send me information about recently published books, I will include it in future newsletters.
Desperately seeking Logos: If anyone can construct a good design for
the e-mail logos, please send it to me. I copied the stylized map used from
1976 to 1993, but the results were not satisfactory.
Lewellyn Hendrix. 1996. Illegitimacy and Social Structures: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Nonmarital Birth. Westport, CT: Bergin and Garvey, an Imprint of Greenwood Publishers.
Until the last few decades, theorists such as Frederick Engels, Bronislaw
Malinowski, Kingsley Davis and William Goode treated illegitimacy as the
basis of marriage around the world. More recently feminists and sociobiologists
and others have made illegitimacy a tangential part of their theories. To
test these theories, Hendrix uses original data codes on sanctions for nonmarital
birth for 122 societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. Illegitimacy
is not universally condemned, as early functionalists claimed. Some societies
handle illegitimacy in a relaxed way, while others use restitutive or repressive
sanctions. The work tests various theoretical ideas about structural factors
involved in the regulation of illegitimacy, including subsistence technology
and population factors, social hierarchy and complexity, marital residence,
descent, sexual inequality, extended family structure, affection for children,
and father-involvement with infants and children. While there is a tendency
for sanctions to be more repressive with greater hierarchy and centralization,
other factors such as sexual inequality and father-involvement interact
with these in interesting ways to affect illegitimacy sanctions. The last
chapter applies the findings to the current issue of teen pregnancy in the
U.S., noting that most proposals for dealing with the problem come from
a narrow band in the middle of the cross-cultural spectrum of variation,
and suggesting that the U.S. is moving from a repressive treatment of illegitimacy
toward a restitutive treatment. This shift is linked in part to basic features
and changes in the sociocultural system, and partly to women's involvement
this century in dealing with the problem of illegitimacy.
Fifth European Congress of Psychology
Dublin, Ireland, July 6th-11th
for information contact:
Secretariat, Fifth European Congress of Psychology
96 Haddington Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, Ireland
TEL: 351 1 6685442, FAX: 353-1 6685226, e-mail: psi@iol.ie
or
Congress Organizers, A Touch of Ireland Conferences Ltd.
96 Haddington Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, Ireland
TEL: 353 1 6680888, FAX: 353 1 6685226, e-mail: atoi@iol.ie
International Council of Psychologists (ICP)
55 th Annual Convention
Graz Congress Center Austria, July 14 - 18 1997
For information contact:
Roswith Roth PhD
University of Graz, Dept of Clinical Psychology
Universitatplatz 1/III, A-8010 Graz, Aistria
TEL: + 43-316-380-5127, FAX: +43-316-380-9808, e-mail:
roth@balu.kfunigraz.ac.at
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