CARLETON S. COON 
hardening arteries. The things that we learn first imprint them- 
selves the most firmly and have the most to do with our emo- 
tional life. These are family, territory, and status. They 
cannot be easily unlearned, and as the roots of cultural change 
lie in technology, these other things lag behind and move more 
slowly, accommodating their pace to that of the life of the 
individual. 
The rate of change in any social system can be accelerated 
by two means, or by a combination of both. One is the 
diffusion of new techniques from one cultural centre to other 
peoples, and the second is the over-rapid growth of technology 
towards the climax of a cumulative cycle, such as we live in 
today. The first is a commonplace of history, the second 
unique in our own age. 
When a peripheral culture area is swamped by the intro- 
duction of new techniques, a number of things can happen. 
A very primitive food-gathering people may be driven into 
barren wastes, if any are available, as in the case of the sur- 
viving South African Bushmen. If there is no escape they 
succumb to a combination of diseases from which they have 
no immunity and a neuroendocrinological dysfunction, like 
that found in animals subjected to crowding. Crowding affects 
reproduction rates as well as the will to live in a new, incompre- 
hensible, whirling social order, in which old values are dis- 
carded and the wisdom of the ancients turned into prattle. To 
these disorders may be added nutritional shock by the replace- 
ment of habitual wild foods by flour, sugar, tea, tobacco, and 
alcohol. For people subjected to such invasions of privacy and 
indignities by modern, civilized intruders, there is little hope 
of genetic survival except by peripheral absorption into the 
lower fringes of the invading population. 
Peoples with a less vulnerable food supply, such as fish and 
garden products, who see vast shiploads of new kinds of food 
and of machinery landed ashore for the use of invaders, may 
pass into the dream world of a cargo cult in which their leaders 
tell them to destroy all their own cultural paraphernalia while 
awaiting the arrival of imaginary shiploads of foods and goods. 
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