Culture Contact and Social Change

Abstract

nOCIOLOGISTS and social anthropologists now know much >.more than they used to about processes of social and cultural bJchange. They are not so much concerned as an earlier generation was with problems of the diffusion of 'culture traits', nor are they much given to hypothesizing about the possibility of some kind of social evolution, independent of external influence. It is now a little plainer that modifications in a people's social institutions and values through time are not to be understood in terms of any simple, 'blanket' principle, but rather that a multiplicity of processes is involved, often contemporaneously.l This awareness is largely due to the considerable body of data which numerous detailed field studies of technologically less advanced peoples have provided during the past thirty years or so. Even studies not explicitly concerned with change have contributed to ollr understanding, for nowadays (save in exceptiGnal circumstances) not even the most traditionally-minded field worker can suppose himself to be dealing with a static social system, maintained in organismic equilibrium by a set of smoothly interacting social institutions. At least since Malinowski's analysis of culture change (published posthumously in I945) and Gluckman's criticism of it,2 the notion of institutional functionalism has been supplemented by the idea of dysfunction, and the field worker must augment traditional structural analysis by some consideration of the manifold expressions of social conflict and strain. The sheer extent and complexity of available ethnographnic information constitute a major problem for present-day students of social change. For, broadly considered, social change is not just one social field among others; it is all social fields, considered in their temporal, dynamic aspect. It is no more possible to study 'social change' in general than it is to study 'society' in general; what is given us for analysis (if we are sociologists or social anthropologists) are specific social institutions, and what we have to do is to study the modifications of these through time, in the context of their relationships with other co-existing institutions. It is open to some doubt whether such a study will reveal any general laws, or even 'trends', of social change (at least above a very