Abstract
A NUMBER of attempts have been made from time to time to introduce statistical methods of analysis in the study of ethnographical facts, but certain obvious difficulties, more especially the artificial abstraction and the divorce of so complex a.n entity as an ethnographical fact from its cultural context, as a rule have militated against extended and continued application of these methods. Anthropologists, therefore, have watched with considerable interest the work of the Culture Element Survey of Native North-West America of the University of California, of which Prof. A. L. Kroeber is director. This survey was initiated as a result of an attempt to apply statistical methods of analysis to the recorded ethnographical data concerning the Indians of California by S. Klimek, who went to the University in 1933 as a Rockefeller Fellow.
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Statistical Methods and Ethnographical Observations. Nature 145, 300–301 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/145300d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/145300d0