World Cultures is an electronic peer-reviewed

academic journal An academic journal or scholarly journal is a periodical publication in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as permanent and transparent forums for the presentation, scrutiny, and ...

cross-cultural studies Cross-cultural studies, sometimes called holocultural studies or comparative studies, is a specialization in anthropology and sister sciences such as sociology, psychology, economics, political science that uses field data from many societies th ...

. It was founded in 1985 by

Douglas R. White Douglas R. White (1942 – 22 August 2021) was an American complexity researcher, social anthropologist, sociologist, and social network researcher at the University of California, Irvine. Biography Douglas White was born in Minneapolis in 194 ...

, editor in chief until 1990, followed by Greg Truex 1991, J. Patrick Gray (1992-2014), and Greg Truex (2015-16).

William Divale William Tulio Divale was a professor of anthropology at York College, City University of New York in Jamaica, New York, USA. He died in 2020 at the age of 78. Divale was a past chairman of the Social Sciences Department. He received his PhD degree ...

was the publisher until 2008, when the journal moved from print and CD-ROM format to online format. It is hosted as an

eScholarship The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management a ...

journal that publishes cross-cultural research articles and computerized codebooks and datasets. These include the

Standard Cross-Cultural Sample The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) is a sample of 186 cultures used by scholars engaged in cross-cultural studies. Origin Cross-cultural research entails a particular statistical problem, known as Galton's problem: tests of functional rela ...

, Western North American Indians, an Atlas of Archaeology, the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock, 1967), and

Lewis Binford Lewis Roberts Binford (November 21, 1931 – April 11, 2011) was an American archaeologist known for his influential work in archaeological theory, ethnoarchaeology and the Paleolithic period. He is widely considered among the most influ ...

's Constructing Frames of Reference: An Analytical Method for Archaeological Theory Building Using Ethnographic and Environmental Data Sets (2001) and numerous other topics. Numerous software programs for cross-cultural analysis have also been published.

Background

Part of the purpose of the journal is to provide codebooks and data that are in the public domain for scientific use, at minimal cost of distribution, both to support scientific work and instructional use. New as well as legacy issues of the journal are at the free on-line site of the

California Digital Library The California Digital Library (CDL) was founded by the University of California in 1997. Under the leadership of then UC President Richard C. Atkinson, the CDL's original mission was to forge a better system for scholarly information management a ...

. The largest of the databases supported by the journal to date are the contributed multiauthored coded data for the

, now numbering over 2,000 coded variables on 186 societies by over 90 different contributing authors.

References

External links

Early website
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Early website

''World Cultures''
at

About ''World Cultures''
{{authority control Cross-cultural studies Cultural journals Publications established in 1985 English-language journals