Introduction: Units for describing and analyzing culture and society

Cross-cultural research currently has a refugee status in anthropology, I e xplain why this is so by briefly tracing the history of cross-cultural rese arch from the time of Tylor to the present. The main problem for ethnologis ts has been to define and develop adequate and equivalent cultural units fo r cross-cultural comparison. I argue that this is also a problem for ethnog raphers. I conclude with a brief review of the articles in this edition, ea ch of which takes a different approach to addressing the cultural units pro blem. (Cultural units, ethnology, ethnography, met:hod, nomothetic theories ).