The Cultural Index as a Predictor of Culturally-Determined Behaviours in Multicultural Societies.

This paper introduces the Cultural Index (CI), which is composed of grounded indices for measuring cultural identity and predicting culturally-determined behaviors. These behaviors often are associated with ethnicity, which researchers have used as a predictor of culturally-defined behaviors. This use posits that ethnicity defines culture. However, this is not so in multicultural societies where ethnic groups influence each other's culturally-determined behaviors by sometimes borrowing more effective behaviors and sometimes marking their separate identity by emphasizing differential behaviors. This paper describes the CI and how to calculate it. It is supported by ethnographic data from a 4-year long comparative study of native Fijians and Indo-Fijians. Gives illustrative examples of CI use. Contains a 10-item bibliography. (Author/BT)