The Culture-Historical Configurations of the American Peoples [and Comments and and Reviews and Reply

Abstract

Distinct processes of ethnic formation have operated to create the extra-European peoples of the modern world, and their identification and classification is a preliminary step toward an understanding of their differing ways of life and problems of modernization and development. Examination shows that four great culture-historical configurations can be recognized: the Witness Peoples, the New Peoples, the Transplanted Peoples, and the Emergent Peoples. The first three categories are represented in the Americas (the fourth includes the new nations of Africa and Asia, which have grown to nationhood from the tribal level or from colonial trading posts). Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador represent the Witness Peoples, formed predominantly from highly civilized aboriginal components that felt the impact of European expansion. Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, the Antilles, some parts of Central America and the southern United States, Chile, and Paraguay belong to the New Peoples, which have arisen from conjunction, deculturation, and fusion of African, European, and aboriginal ethnic matrices. The United States, Canada, Uruguay, and Argentina constitute the Transplanted Peoples, formed largely of European immigrants who re-established their former way of life almost intact in the regions they settled. An examination of the racial and cultural composition of each of these configurations, their process of formation and maturation, and their relationships to European centers of mercantile expansion and industrial civilization brings out their unique features: it also permits analysis of the sources of potential conflict between them in achieving national goals and makes possible some predictions of their relative viability with the passage of time.