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Multiple imputation (MI) has become the preferred method for dealing with missing data in survey research. MI involves three steps: creating m multiply imputed complete datasets; estimating models on each of the m datasets using any standard statistica…

In an information society, where overload has become a problem, might anthropology’s comparative method find a new lease of life? This Lecture sets out to test the hunch that it might. A field ever more densely populated with information is that of org…

Two kinds of formal models need to be distinguished: data models derived from patterned observations and theory models derived from theories about processes that produce the patterned observations. These correspond to the difference between the phenom…

Formalization is typically associated by both supporters and detractors of formal methods with an emphasis on form over content or meaning. However well founded, this association fails to capture why we employ (or not) formal descriptions of what we ar…

Marriage payments: a fundamental reconsiderationAbstract This paper is a constructive critique of the well-known book by Jack Goody and Stanley Tambiah (1973), Bridewealth and Dowry. Given the general acceptance of Goody’s framework in contemporary stu…

Introduction to the Special Issue on “Formalization as a tool for empirical research: what it buys us and what it doesn’t.”

Models of theoretically generated relations among analytic entities have formal properties which enable them to accurately represent some desired relationships, but not necessarily all imaginable relationships. One important part of the modeling task i…

In this article, I present an analysis of the results of a memory task (free listing) about social relationships administered to Tongans of Polynesia. Contrary to claims by Weller and Romney (1988) and Ross (2004), the free listing activity did not yie…

Experimental economics and bounded rationality are very different from one another, but both claim to offer a more general and more empirical type of economic theory. Experimental economists, in addition, claim that their game-theoretic analyses provid…

From Darwin’s time in biology and even before Darwin in linguistics, the tree diagram has been the primary formal depiction of descent. The underlying logic of the dendrogram depends on a branching process: units fission, then diversify through time. T…

I am concerned with the distinction between data processing, modeling and actual theory formation, with the generating of empirically interpretable additional theorems, and in particular how formalization, far from abstracting away from data, makes one…

Galton’s Problem is one of identifying functional relationships in a set of observations where the observations may be related through borrowing or descent. The problem has long been recognized in the fields of anthropology and cross-cultural research,…

Tatau, tatau pé, katoa tatau ‘the same, just the same, all the same,’ is the phrase most Tongan villagers used when asked if any person within the village groups they had just mentioned was mahu’inga taha ‘most important.’ Such forceful insistence on e…