Cultural Variation in Amari, Papua New Guinea

An area of continuing debate in anthropology is that of the conceptual distinction between culture and observable behavior. This paper accepts the distinction between culture as an ideational system and behavior and an attempt is made to show how the ideational system may be elaborated. Using a data collection technique developed by Dawson and his colleagues, the culture of a rural population in Papua New Guinea is analyzedfor differences between and within village samples. Hierarchies of cultural elements, arrived at by Warfield's structural modeling procedures, indicate how cultural systems change unevenly and at different rates