THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY OF ACCULTURATION FOR ANTHROPOLOGY

Abstract

N outstanding development in anthropology during recent years has A been the growing interest in the study of peoples whose modes of life are undergoing, or have undergone, extensive change as a result of ascer-tainable historic contacts with alien cultures. Acculturation, the term cur-rent in this country for such studies, has been defined as comprehending those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups.' This definition restricts acculturation to those aspects of cultural change that have resulted from first-hand contact between peoples. I t plainly does not differentiate contacts between historic and non-literate folk from those between two primitive peoples. Nor does it touch upon the motivations behind studies of these cultures, though no discussion of the importance of acculturation in the furtherance of the aims of anthropological research would be realistic in its treatment unless it took into account that here the issue is joined between scientific and " applied " anthropology. To assess the significance of acculturation studies, the historical back-ground of anthropological theory out of which they have arisen must first be sketched. When, a t the turn of the century, the explanations offered by the evolutionary school became patently untenable, a more inductive mode of studying culture was developed, based on field investigation of primitive life. But though it was believed that from the resulting data valid general-izations about the processes of cultural dynamics might be made manifest, the great bodies of carefully controlled field reports were mainly used to make reconstructions of historic contacts between peoples-that is, in attempts to recover the processes of non-recorded history. In this country, such reconstructions were generally limited to restricted areas where a high degree of probability existed that the assumed contacts had actually taken place. In Europe, however, where history tended to become a fetish, logical deductions derived from the plotting of sweeping world-wide dis-tributions of traits considered with all but complete disregard for their cultural contexts attained wide currency. The weakness of all such studies, as came very clearly to be understood in this country at least, was that in R. Redfield, R. Linton, and M.