Culture Contact on the Fringe of Civilization

Opening ParagraphIt is natural that the urgent need for systematic study of culture contact should first and most forcibly be felt with regard to areas where the process of ‘civilization’ or modernization is already comparatively far advanced, whether it be in the form of detribalization in urban and industrial districts or of the adaptation of the tribal system among an important and powerful people like the Baganda. In the first place, those areas present the most pressing practical problems and exhibit the most acute symptoms of social, economic, and political strain. In the second place, as a corollary of their accessibility to exotic influences, they are the areas most easily accessible to observers trained and untrained, and their troubles often force themselves on the attention of the civilized world. They have, however, certain disadvantages from the point of view of the student of culture contact, in that, as Miss Mair has shown, the opportunity to study the stages in their development has gone for ever. By careful investigation a useful and reliable, if incomplete, picture can be drawn of the working of the social order just before the torrent of modern civilization broke in upon it, and the comparison between past and present which such a reconstruction makes possible provides us with knowledge which is both necessary for the explanation of existing phenomena and also of the greatest practical value. But just as one cannot tell by looking at the finished product whether a pot has been fashioned from the lump or by the coil method, so, in the absence of proper observation at the time, we cannot reconstruct a picture of the intermediate stages in the creation of the present situation, or ever know the details of the processes whereby native society adjusted itself to some innovations and was dislocated by others.