Presumably all societies could categorized in the "traditional or " modern "continuum. be in the categories, or found to be "strung out," so to speak, somewhere on versus between these two polar points. Such dichotomous thinking traditional modern, as compared with the reality that most societies are complex, overlapping mixtures of both-would dominate much of the subsequent thinking and writ- ing about developing nations. Moreover, the march from traditional to modern was presumably universal, inevitable, and one-way, it also followed the example of the already-developed and modern nations, the United States and Western Europe. In this way, some of the best-known anthropological writings on devel- opment came to closely parallel the writings of developmentalist economists such as Rostow