had had several years of active research experience gathering firsthand field materials on one tribe; and a detailed comparison of the similarities and differences in the sequence of cultural change in six Indian groups provided some degree of methodological control. The participants and their respective subjects of study were: Edward H. Spicer of the University of Arizona (chairman), Yaqui of Arizona and Mexico; Helen Codere of Vassar College, Kwakiutl of the Northwest Coast; Edward Dozier of Northwestern University, Rio Grande Pueblos of New Mexico; David French of Reed College, Wasco of Oregon; Evon Z. Vogt of Harvard University, Navaho of New Mexico and Arizona; and Edward M. Bruner of Yale University, Mandan of North Dakota. s Aboriginally these six Indian groups were all nonliterate folk cultures. Today they find themselves in a roughly comparable situation: they are enclaved minorities surrounded by a more powerful alien culture, their administration has been in the hands of an external bureaucracy, and they are subject to characteristic American attitudes toward dark-skinned peoples. We believed this comparability would enable us to control some of the significant variables so that our comparisons might yield general propositions. During the first week of the seminar we established a rough scheme of analysis; in the second week we had no formal meetings but prepared our case materials; in the third, fourth, and fifth weeks we presented our data to the group, allowing two to three days, or about fifteen hours of lecture and discussion, for each case; and during the sixth and seventh weeks we revised our categories and evaluated the results. PROBLEMS AND SCOPE OF THE SEMINAR Two general problems will be discussed briefly here to give some indication of the scope of the seminar. The first concerns the balance between the nature of the Indian culture and the contact conditions as sources of explanation of cultural change. We know, for example, that the early Spaniards in Mexico were more interested in changing native religion than technology, while the French fur traders of the northern Plains had little interest in religion but did introduce vast changes in the native economy. As a direct result of the aspirations of the first contacting agents the Indians of Mexico underwent ceremonial change with technological stability, and the Plains Indians the reverse. However, the Spanish missionaries and the French fur traders had more success among some cultures than others, which suggests that factors inherent in the Indian cultures themselves are 8 Ronald Kurtz, graduate student in anthropology at the University of New Mexico, served as recorder for the seminar.
also significant in determining persistence and change. Both intrinsic characteristics of the native culture and the conditions of contact must be considered in attempt-a ing to explain differential culture change. • Some previous studies of acculturation of American . Indians have tended to view the Indian culture as if it existed in isolation, independent of the larger community which surrounds it; other such studies have presented the contacting culture as if it consisted entirely of outside agents impinging upon the native society. That we attempted to describe the two cultures in contact as one larger system emerges from our outline for the organization of the data. The material for each case was divided into historical periods, beginning with the earliest documentary evidence and in some cases with archaeological findings. In most cases there were four or five periods, established on the basis of culturally significant time, that is, important from the viewpoint of the Indian culture. For the recent period our data were from our own field studies, but for the earlier periods we used all the available historical sources. The project involved an exhaustive study of documents, reports of missionaries, fur traders' diaries, and government agents' records. In this perspective we have dealt with a chapter of American history. For each historical period we described what we termed the "contact community," covering the follow_ ing features: (I) Community organization-all the significant social groups in contact as perceived by the Indian people; the demography and settlement pattern of these groups. (2) External social relationships-strategy of each group toward the others; intergroup attitudes; network of intercultural roles; situational context for roles. (3) Internal social organization-economic, kinship, political, and ceremonial organization; social stratification; life cycle. (4) Other aspects of culture-supernatural and nonsupernatural knowledge; art; recreation; language; orientations; values. Following the description of the contact community in each historical period, we analyzed cultural change and persistence in terms of the processes of integration. This brings us to the second general problem to be discussed in this report: that analyses of change limited to identification and descriptions of the new elements that have been accepted and those that have been rejected are not sufficient. For example, Yaqui and Rio Grande Pueblo ceremonialism include both native and Catholic elements. An enumeration of the Catholic aspects woul be quite similar for both groups; yet there are vast di ferences in the integration of ceremonial items. In brief, the Yaqui have a fusional integration, in which native 2