The reasonability of the construction of classificatory rankings of societies and related theoretical implications are considered in this paper. I argue that existing classificatory rankings are based on the essentialist views and represent societies as homogenous entities whereas they ignore intra-societal variety. Moreover, the quantitative methodology and methods which underlie those rankings are based on the etic approach and use concepts and indicators which are constructed in the west and don’t reflect indigenous socio-cultural dynamics. Besides, existing rankings simply equalize particular aspects to the whole societal development. For example, gross domestic product is equalized to the level of societal development; however, it actually can’t fully reflect even the situation in the economic field. Though it can be still reasonable to use such impersonal indicators as gross domestic product or longevity which are based entirely on impersonal data and are free from subjective interpretations, for the exploration of general tendencies in particular fields, however, we should restrain ourselves from invalid generalizations. Krys et al. proposed to elaborate culturally sensitive approach, however, still remained in frame of the etic approach, whereas I argue that the only way for the comprehensive and deeper assessment of the level of societal development is to construct a fully emic and indigenous approach that implies the usage of only locally constructed concepts during the definition of indicators. Those indigenous concepts most probably won’t be translatable to other languages that make the aim of the creation of a unified scale theoretically impossible; however, this is the only way for getting valid results at least concerning particular societies with current methodological apparatus. The solution to this issue requires further theoretical development and methodological innovations.

中文翻译：

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考虑社会分类的做法——迈向本土化的一步

本文考虑了社会分类排名构建的合理性及相关理论意义。我认为现有的分类排名基于本质主义观点，将社会表示为同质实体，而忽略了社会内部的多样性。此外，作为这些排名基础的定量方法和方法是基于 etic 方法和使用在西方构建的概念和指标，并不反映本土社会文化动态。此外，现有的排名只是简单地将特定方面与整个社会发展相提并论。例如，国内生产总值与社会发展水平相等；然而，它实际上甚至不能完全反映经济领域的情况。虽然使用国内生产总值、寿命等完全基于客观数据、没有主观解释的客观指标仍然是合理的，但对于特定领域的普遍趋势的探索，我们应该避免无效的概括。 . 克里斯等人。然而，提议详细阐述文化敏感方法的方法仍然停留在 etic 方法的框架内，而我认为，对社会发展水平进行全面和深入评估的唯一方法是构建一个完全 emic 和本土方法，这意味着使用在指标定义期间仅本地构建的概念。那些本土概念很可能无法翻译成其他语言，这使得在理论上不可能建立统一规模的目标；然而，这是获得有效结果的唯一途径，至少对于具有当前方法学装置的特定社会而言。这个问题的解决需要进一步的理论发展和方法创新。