tie-in with learning theory. Here I must
remind the reader that learning theory likewise
relates to culture. Culture may set the
scenes not only for homeostasis and the
reduction of stress, but for its induction. A
simplistic organismic theory almost suggests
if we disregard cultural stress systems that
the organism is choosing its environment, or
at the opposite pole is somewhat passively
reflecting it. At the same time Dr. Peterfreund
is certainly correct when he notes (p.
226) that infantile traces and their repression,
as a simple paradigm, must be
replaced by a broader “life-cycle concept ,”
but that is precisely what every well-trained
cultural anthropologist already knows. The
simple paradigm involves Dr. Peterfreund in
some contradictions which he recognizes and
calls “Some Complications” (p. 239) where
the mother’s influence plus infantile experience
reappears. What he is accomplishing,
really, is the same warnings uttered by
psychiatric phenomenologists like Binswanger
who urged psychiatrists, as we might
urge anthropologists, to enter more deeply
into the actual lives of actual people which
the author on page 315 calls “the necessity
for entering the patient’s inner world of
experience in order to know what is going
on.” All of this argues for a more sentient
participant-observation technique by psychiatrists
which is exactly what the cultural
anthropologist also desires in his fieldwork.
The book is recommended as stimulating, if
these caveats are observed.
References Cited
Freud, S.
1922 Psycho-Analysis. Standard Edition
18:235-254. London: Hogarth Press,
1955.
Grene, M., Ed.
1969 Toward a Unity of Knowledge.
Psychological Issues, Monograph 22.
New York: International Universities
Press.
Medawar, P. B.
1969 The Molecular Shadow. New York
Review of Books, October 23, pp.
21-24.
Opler, M. K.
1967 Cultural Induction of Stress. In
Psychological Stress. M. H. Appley and
R. Trumbull, Eds. New York:
Apple t o n -Century-Crofts. pp, 209-240.
Communication of Innovations: A CrossCultural
Approach. EVERETT M.
ROGERS and F. FLOYD SHOEMAKER.
London & Toronto: Collier-Macmillan
(The Free Press, New York), 1971. xix +
476 pp., figures, tables, 2 appendices
(bibliography), 2 indexes. $9.95 (cloth).
[Second ed. ]
Reviewed by ROY WAGNER
Northwestern University
This sizable volume is actually the much
expanded and augmented second edition of
a work which first appeared in 1962. Since
then a great deal of additional data has been
gathered, much of it from outside the
United States, and in addition the authors
have elaborated upon the role of “communication”
(i.e., the transference of information)
in the diffusion of innovations.
Although the authors are concerned with
the “cross-cultural” aspects of communication
and diffusion, and have made repeated
references to anthropological theory, the
latter are in most cases confined to authoritative
quotations from the early functionalists
and diffusionists. In reviewing this
book for the American Anthropologist, I
shall limit my commentary to its implications
for the problem of developing a viable
theory of cultural change. Beyond this, I can
only point to the facts that the book is
massively documented, exhaustively annotated,
and obviously a definitive work in the
area of its professed methodological concern.
The theoretical and methodological bent
of the book can be seen as a direct translation
into analytical concept and jargon of
the “instrumentive” orientation of American
“progress” ideology. The idioms of agent,
function, and effect are employed throughout
(which probably explains the prevalence
of “vintage” quotations from RadcliffeBrown
and others). Even the diagrams distill
an aura of “directedness” and purpose; the
favored communicative symbols are arrows,
and I have counted in the neighborhood of
150 arrows scattered among the various
figures. If this flurry of explanatory archery
has anything to suggest, it is a view of
culture as a lethargic mass, stung into reaction
by the incessant pinpricks of innovation.
1376 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [74,1972]
Innovation itself is problematic herebut
more than this, it is seen as essentially
random and inexplicable. As is typical in a
rationalist approach, that which is not
specifically comprehensible as rational
procedure is denied and banished beyond
the limits of the “system.” Like the diffusionists
and functionalists, in other words,
the authors view innovation as accidental,
and therefore external to culture, which
emerges as a metaphor of “order.” Hence
this study is addressed to the diffusion and
communication of innovations, that is, the
way in which culture, as rational order,
apprehends, distributes, and deals with the
blind fate of “change.”
It is at this point that the idiom of
“purpose” makes its theoretical entrance,
for purpose involves the controlled acceptance
of innovations f