The three sections of this article illustrate why cross-cultural research has not worked for some key social science questions and has worked for others.  The three sections involve interpretation of causality from correlations, causality not based on correlations, and maps pertinent to understanding aspects of male-female and husband-wife equalities and inequalities.

The use of computers in the analysis of fieldwork, texts, and socioculturally embedded systems is examined in relation to advances in problems of cultural anthropology, including synthesis of trait with textual and network analysis within a more general conception of cultures as distributed systems. Keywords: ethnography, cognitive testing, representation and inference generators, hypertext and text analysis, hypermedia, spatial autocorrelation, scaling, consensus analysis, modular and didactic programs. © 1988, Sage Publications. All rights reserved.