The author traces the conceptualizations of culture contact that emerged in American anthropology in the early 20th century and became the focus of ample investigative initiatives in the decades before and after World War II only to vanish into blue air by the early 1960s, leaving barely a fingerprint in the textbooks of the 21st century. Based on the published reports from research seminars on acculturation in the 1930s and 50s, the author exposes the modes of conceptualizing culture contact and change in the hey-day of these studies and considers the problems they posed to the scholars involved in their pursuit.

            At the outset the importance of fieldwork and of maintaining a historical perspective had been stressed as a basis for understanding cross-cultural contexts and their dynamics. Yet, emphasis gradually shifted to synchronic functional studies, resulting in a ‘theoretical lag’, as some leading scholars saw it. A major impetus to research had been an awareness that ‘White’ supremacy world-wide was coming to an end. Hence there was a demand for policies and techniques for managing relations to the peoples of former colonies that would be more efficient - and less dangerous to its users - than those based on the exercise of power. From the perspective of this agenda, acculturations studies were hardly successful. They did not deliver insights easily convertible into policy solutions for Federal Indian administration or foreign development programs.

            Comparative research allowed the formulations of preliminary typologies from which specialized vocabulary developed. The generalizations that emerged had to do with types of contact conditions rather than types of culture, but scholars hesitated to follow up on this point. They disagreed over the definition of culture as an autonomous system ascribed to by a majority while dissidents felt that the idea of seeing culture as an entity independent of the human beings was counterproductive to analysis of the processes of cross-cultural contact and change they were dealing with. The ambitious grand scale acculturation research plan gradually withered and never arrived at a hypothesis or a paradigm sufficiently clear-cut to inspire continuing investigation. A few scholars had begun to realize that unequal power relations were a primary defining characteristic of contact situations and trajectories, but few scholars chose to pursue this issue at the time. Eventually the acculturation paradigm was abandoned as scholars moved into other areas of anthropological research.