(B) The library option. Cross-cultural comparison has been a powerful tool for a

(B) The library option. Cross-cultural comparison has been a powerful tool for anthropologists interested in hunter-gatherer behavior and cultural systems. This assignment asks you to examine some cultural practice and compare its causes and manifestations across a range of different hunter-gatherer cases. If you choose this assignment, please follow the instructions below:
1. Choose some cultural practice or technology to examine cross-culturally. Try to pick something specific, discrete, and easy to describe. Successful topics in the past have included things like cooking technology/practices, water container technology, and fire-starting technology. Vague topics don’t work well. Unsuccessful topics in the past have included things like “hunting,” “marriage,” and “religion.”
2. Select 10 hunter-gatherer societies with which to make comparisons concerning the subject of your paper. You must choose at least one hunter-gatherer society from North America, South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia. Try to avoid choosing neighboring societies and try to maximize variability across different environmental zones.
3. Record information about the cultural practice or technology that you are researching. Do so in as much detail as you can manage but don’t go overboard.
4. Record information about other variables that might potentially influence the practice/technology that you are researching. You must record information about environmental context and population density. In addition, record information about other variables that you think might be important. Again, don’t go overboard.
5. Summarize your comparisons in a table comparing all of the variables about which you collected information… and think about it for a while.
6. Develop some potential explanations for the variation that you have observed. What variables seem to influence the practice/technology you are examining?
Once you have completed these steps, write a short paper (<10 pages, double-spaced, Times-New Roman font) describing your cross-cultural comparisons, your findings, and your potential explanations. Be sure to cite all of the sources for your information. I highly recommend using the electronic Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF) as a resource in researching your subject societies. You can access this resource electronically through the Tulane University library website:http://libproxy.tulane.edu:2048/login?url=http://e... In addition, the wiki from Lewis Binford’s book, Constructing Frames of Reference, provides lots of basic information about environmental context, population density, etc., for a large sample of hunter-gatherers. You can find that here: http://ajohnson.sites.truman.edu/data-and- program/