10 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BaU. 188 



study its internal interaction in terms of the role of the trader, and 

 with special attention to his own motivations. 



This structural analysis of culture contact in terms of interaction 

 within a single discrete social system involved no new departure in 

 anthropological theory. Shortly before I began refining my own 

 problem, the report of the Social Science Research Council Summer 

 Seminar on Acculturation (1954, p. 980) had appeared, carrying 

 the statement that — 



The patterns of conjunctive relations may be conceptualized as intercultural role 

 networks that not only establish the framework of contact but also provide the 

 channels through which the content of one cultural system must be communi- 

 cated and transmitted to another. 



A number of earlier works were cited in which this type of analysis 

 had been employed: those of Fortes (1936), Ekvall (1939), Gluck- 

 man (1940), Mandelbaum (1941), and Honigmann (1952). 

 The same report went on to say : 



Cultures do not meet, but people who are their carriers do. As carriers of 

 traditions such contacting individuals never know their entire cultures and 

 never convey all they know of them to one another. That part of their cul- 

 tural inventory which they do transmit is conditioned primarily by their reasons 

 for making the contact, that is, by the cultural concomitants of the role that they 

 assume in dealing with an alien group. [Summer Seminar on Acculturation, 

 1954, pp. 980-981.1 



Here were expressed many of the underlying assumptions upon which 

 I proposed to base my own study. Essentially the same view had 

 been taken by Eadcliffe-Brown (1940) and Malinowski (1945, pp. 1-4- 

 18) a decade earlier. 



The structural analysis of culture contact amounts essentially to the 

 study of a cross-cultural social system (or "contact community") 

 according to the principles of social analysis developed in particular 

 by Talcott Parsons (cf. especially 1949, pp. 3-16; 1951, pp. 3-23) 

 and a few other students of social structure (e.g., Merton, 1949; 

 Levy, 1952). Although formulated in recent years by sociologists, 

 this "actor-situation" approach (cf. Levy, 1952, p. 18) is built to a 

 considerable extent upon foundations laid by Durkheim (1897) and 

 later by Linton (especially 1936). It is expressed in the statement 

 of Parsons (1951, p. 5) that — 



a social system consists in a plurality of individual actors interacting with each 

 other in a situation which has at least a physical or environmental aspect, 

 actors who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the "optimization of grati- 

 fication" and whose relation to their situations, including each other, is defined 

 and mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared symbols. 



In the analysis of culture contact at Shonto I have found all of these 

 formulations useful and suggestive in their way. I did not find, how- 

 ever, that in and of themselves they furnished satisfactory models 



