Culture Creation and Social Reconstruction: The Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Intergroup Contact

Abstract

This study considers culture and social structure as, respectively, an epistemic system of graduated abstractness for defining and classifying experience, and the possible and legitimate means for coping with experience. It presents two paradigms which inquire into the nature of cultural and social structural change and stability that result when two groups come into contact. Variations in the qualitative characteristics of contact are seen as producing change or maintaining given socio-cultural systems. The variables considered in the first paradigm are the degrees of cultural similarity and oppression; the second paradigm considers the degrees of social structural compatibility and coercion. Processes of stability and persistence in culture and social structure are traced to different configurations of the characteristics of intergroup contact.