Cultural Complexity:The Concept and Its Measurement

Garry Chick
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Cultural complexity is one of the most commonly used variables in cross-

cultural research. It has often been used as a measure of cultural evolution and
has been shown to correlate with numerous other variables. At least eight
measures of cultural complexity have been constructed since the late 1940s.
The purpose of this article is to examine three of them, those proposed by
Carneiro, Murdock and Provost, and Naroll. Particular attention will be
devoted to the validity of these measures. Factor analysis and reliability
analysis indicate that Murdock and Provost’s index, designed for use with the
Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, although reliable, has two dimensions rather
than one and may lack content and construct validity. A case is made for the
use of the logarithm of the size of the largest settlement in a society as a
measure of cultural complexity, as suggested by Naroll.
Cultural complexity is frequently mentioned in anthropological and
archeological studies, but it is rarely operationally defined in

Author’s Note: An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual
meeting of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research, Pittsburgh, PA, February
14-18, 1996. 1 wish to express my deepest appreciation to Joe Jorgensen who
commented on an earlier version of the article. Please address correspondence
regarding this article to Garry Chick, Department of Leisure Studies,
University of Illinois, 104 Huff Hall, 1206 South Fourth Street, Champaign,
IL 61820; e-mail: gchick@uiuc.edu.
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them. Instead, its meaning is usually assumed. It is also customarily
assumed that complexity is the natural and typical result of
cultural evolution, a legacy of the 19th-century notion that evolution,
in general, and cultural evolution, in particular, is progressive.
However, the use of a commonsense definition of cultural
complexity in formal research and the nature of some of the implicit
assumptions that underlie the construct may lead to problems. The
purpose of this article is to examine several of the ways in which
cultural complexity has been defined, either explicitly or implicitly,
and measured in an effort to clarify the construct and further its
use in comparative research. I will be concerned with two primary
questions as well as several subordinate questions that derive from
those two. First, are operationalizations of cultural complexity
derived from particular, and explicit, definitions of culture? Second,
are operationalizations of cultural complexity based on notions
of complexity beyond intuitive or &dquo;dictionary&dquo; definitions?
These are issues of validity. I will direct my attention, to some
extent, at the scales developed by Naroll (1956) and Carneiro
(1962, 1970), but I will focus especially on that of Murdock and
Provost (1973) inasmuch as it is based on the Standard Cross-
Cultural Sample (SCCS; Murdock and White, 1969), currently the
most widely used sample in cross-cultural comparative research
(White, 1988). With respect to Murdock and Provost’s scale, I will
also address the issue of reliability.

THE CONCEPT OF CULTURAL COMPLEXITY

Thought about cultural complexity has a substantial history,

most of it tied to cultural evolution (for excellent accounts of the
development of thinking about cultural evolution see, e.g., Harris,
1968; Sanderson, 1990). Many 19th-century evolutionists, such as
E. B. Tylor, believed that humanity progressed through the familiar
stages of savagery, barbarism, and civilization and, more important,
that all people shared the capacity to progress. Observed
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cultural differences were of degree rather than kind. Lewis Henry
Morgan elaborated the nature of cultural evolution and the characteristics
of societies at the various stages of evolution. In Ancient
Society, which had the appropriate subtitle, Researches in the Lines
of Humczn Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization,
Morgan (1877) proposed that human societies, prior to
civilization, progressed and could be classified largely on the basis
of means of subsistence and material technology. His stages and
their diagnostic characteristics are as follows:

I. Lower Status of Savagery, from the Infancy of the Human Race to the
commencement of the next period.
II. Middle Status of Savagery, from the acquisition of a fish subsistence and
a knowledge of the use of fire, to etc.
III. Upper Status of Savagery, from the Invention of the Bow and Arrow, to
etc.
IV. Lower Status of Barbarism, from the Invention of the Art of Pottery, to
etc.
V. Middle Status of Barbarism, from the Domestication of animals on the
Eastern hemisphere, and in the Western from the cultivation of maize and
plants by Irrigation with the use of adobe-brick and stone, to etc.
VI. Upper Status of Barbarism, from the Invention of the process of Smelting
Iron Ore, with the use of iron tools, to etc.
VII. VII. Status of Civilization, from the Invention of the Phonetic Alphabet,
with the use of writing, to the present time. (Morgan, 1877, p. 12)

Marx was impressed with Morgan’s scheme because of his

emphasis on subsistence and the technology that supported subsistence.
Thus, economic production and the means of production
provided a base on which the rest of society rested, a view congenial
to Marx and Engels and to historical materialism.’ Another social
evolutionist, Herbert Spencer (1857-1972), believed that differentiation,
or increased complexity, was the goal of social development:
This law of organic progress is the law of all progress. Whether it be
in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its
surface, in the development of Society, of Government, of Manufactures,
of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same
evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations,
holds throughout. (p. 40)
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Although there is disagreement about the degrees to which
classical evolutionists-including Tylor, Morgan, and Spencer were
developmentalists (see, e.g., Sanderson, 1990), it seems to be
the case that, for them, cultural evolution involved increasing
complexity through the elaboration and/or the accretion of features.
Not surprisingly, the more features possessed by societies
that were like those of which the theorists were members, the more
evolved they were thought to be.
Nineteenth-century cultural evolutionism, and the notion of
cultural complexity with it, was run out of the anthropological
community in the early 20th century and was held at bay until its
utility became too obvious to ignore. When consideration of cultural
evolution again became respectable in the 1940s and 1950s in
America-principally under the leadership of Leslie White, Julian
Steward, and Elman Service~perationalization of cultural complexity
as a construct was not far behind.’ Raoul Naroll (1956)
developed one of the earliest of these and called it &dquo;A Preliminary
Index of Social Development.&dquo; Three factors comprised Naroll’s
Index of Cultural Complexity: (a) the size of the largest settlement
of the society; (b) the number of craft specialties in the society; and
(c) organizational ramification, the number of control officials or
groups (such as police).
Soon after Naroll’s work was published, Freeman and Winch
(1957) published an article in which they proposed a Guttman
Scale of social complexity derived from 11 of Redfield’s folk-urban
continuum variables, including settlement pattern, integration,
tool complexity, trade, written language, craft specialization, religious
specialists, medical specialists, government specialization,
money economy, and subsistence. Cameiro (1962) also used
Guttman scaling to measure cultural evolution through the presence
or absence of a large number (initially 358, later 618; see
Carneiro, 1970) of culture traits.3 Carneiro (1962) defended the use
of only scalable traits rather than a random sample of culture
traits. He cited the examples of head deformation, clans, and
cannibalism
whose presence at a certain point in culture history indicates greater
cultural complexity than their absence. But they are also traits that
appear to be relatively short-lived, tending to be abandoned or
replaced by societies at some later stage of evolution. Consequently
we can argue that among more advanced societies the absence of

head deformation, clans, and cannibalism betokens a higher culture

level than their presence. (Carneiro, 1962, p. 162)
This is a claim that gives pause. It seems suspect to eliminate
traits that do not support one’s point while retaining those that do,
but a random sampling of traits would likely not perform well in a
Guttman Scale (Carneiro, 1962). Carneiro (1962) indicated that
&dquo;this procedure may at first strike one as illegitimate, since it
amounts to eliminating unfavorable cases and retaining only favorable
or potentially favorable ones. But it is perfectly valid given
our stated aims and objectives&dquo; (pp. 161-162). Carneiro is almost
surely correct that some traits mark an intermediate level of social
complexity but neither simpler nor more complex levels. The
problem is that Guttman scaling, as he used it, requires the
assumption of an unilinear sequence, disallowing traits that come
and go in the middle of the pattern. Hence, he sought traits that
would scale, indicating it was not his purpose to determine whether
or not a random sample of traits would do so (Carneiro, 1962,
p. 161).
Even if the logical problem of selecting only traits that scale
versus a random sample of traits is set aside, a major difficulty
with Carneiro’s use of Guttman scaling to determine cultural
complexity is the coding of the sheer number of traits whose
presence or absence must be determined. When Carneiro (1962,
p. 167) used 358 traits to rank four societies, he found that the
Marquesans had 106, the Molima had 58, the Kuikuru had 21, and
the Mbuti had 3; a result that he felt indicated not only the correct
order in terms of cultural complexity for these societies but also
the magnitude of their differences. If this is true, then the more
traits, the merrier the analysis. One could well assume that a
larger number of traits would provide even more accurate measures
of the differences between particular societies. However,
Carneiro never indicated the optimum number of traits. Moreover,
as Carneiro (1967, p. 235) noted, his scalograms only account for
the presence or absence of traits, not for their frequencies. It may
be for these reasons that Carneiro abandoned Guttman scaling in
his later research (e.g., Carneiro, 1987) on cultural complexity, and
the technique is not used in the study of cultural complexity today.
Carneiro’s work, nonetheless, stimulated Murdock and Provost
(1973) to develop a scale of cultural complexity for the SCCS that
had been assembled at the University of Pittsburgh only a few