The discussion which these rival theories provoked has led students to closer studies of the effects of racial contacts and to a more penetrating analysis of the cultural process.
The contacts of races have invariably led to racial intermixture, and the mixed breed, as in the case of the mulatto, the result of the white-Negro cross, has tended to create a distinct cultural as well as a racial type. E. B. Reuter's volume on The Mulatto is the first serious attempt to study the mixed blood as a cultural type and define his rôle in the conflict of races and cultures.
Historical cases of the assimilation of one group by another are frequent. Kaindl's investigations of the German settlements in the Carpathian lands are particularly instructive. The story of the manner in which the early German settlers in Cracow, Galicia, were Polonized mainly under the influence of the Polish nobility, is all the more interesting when it is contrasted with the German colonists in the Siebenbürgen, which have remained strongholds of the German language and culture in the midst of a population of Roumanian peasants for nearly eight hundred years. Still more interesting are the recent attempts of the Prussians to Germanize the former province of Posen, now reunited to Poland. Prussia's policy of colonization of German peasants in Posen failed for several reasons, but it failed finally because the German peasant, finding himself isolated in the midst of a Polish community, either gave up the land the government had acquired for him and returned to his native German province, or identified himself with the Polish community and was thus lost to the cause of German nationalism. The whole interesting history of that episode is related in Bernard's Die Polenfrage, which is at the same time an account of the organization of an autonomous Polish community within the limits of a German state.
The competition and survival of languages affords interesting material for the study of cultural contacts and the conditions that determine assimilation. Investigations of the racial origins of European peoples have discovered a great number of curious cultural anomalies. There are peoples like the Spreewälder who inhabit a little cultural island of about 240 miles square in the Province of Brandenburg, Prussia. Surviving remnants of a Slavic people, they still preserve their language and their tribal costumes, and, although but thirty thousand in number and surrounded by Germans, maintain a lively literary movement all their own. On the other hand, the most vigorous and powerful of the Germanic nationalities, the Prussian, bears the name of a conquered Slavic people whose language, "Old Prussian," not spoken since the seventeenth century, is preserved only in a few printed books, including a catechism and German-Prussian vocabulary, which the German philologists have rescued from oblivion.
2. The Conflict and Fusion of Cultures
The contacts and transmission of cultures have been investigated in different regions of social life under different titles. The ethnologists have investigated the process among primitive peoples under the title acculturation. Among historical peoples, on the other hand, acculturation has been called assimilation. The aim of missions has been, on the whole, to bring the world under the domination of a single moral order; but in seeking to accomplish this task they have contributed greatly to the fusion and cross-fertilization of racial and national cultures.
The problem of origin is the first and often the most perplexing problem which the study of primitive cultures presents.[248] Was a given cultural trait, i.e., a weapon, a tool, or a myth, borrowed or invented? For example, there are several independent centers of origin and propagation of the bow and arrow. Writing approached or reached perfection in at least five different, widely separated regions. Other problems of acculturation which have been studied include the following: the degree and order of transmissibility of different cultural traits; the persistence or the immunity against change of different traits; the modification of cultural traits in the process of transmission; the character of social contacts between cultural groups; the distance that divides cultural levels; and the rôle of prestige in stimulating imitation and copying.
The development of a world-commerce, the era of European colonization and imperial expansion in America, Asia, and Africa and Australia, the forward drive of occidental science and the Western system of large-scale competitive industry have created racial contacts, cultural changes, conflicts, and fusions of unprecedented and unforeseen extent, intensity, and immediateness. The crash of a fallen social order in Russia reverberates throughout the world; reports of the capitalization of new enterprises indicate that India is copying the economic organization of Europe; the feminist movement has invaded Japan; representatives of close to fifty nations of the earth meet in conclave in the assembly of the League of Nations.
So complete has been in recent years the interpenetration of peoples and cultures that nations are now seeking to preserve their existence not alone from assault from without by force of arms, but they are equally concerned to protect themselves from the more insidious attacks of propaganda from within. Under these circumstances the ancient liberties of speech and press are being scrutinized and questioned. Particularly is this true when this freedom of speech and press is exercised by alien peoples, who criticize our institutions in a foreign tongue and claim the right to reform native institutions before they have become citizens and even before they are able to use the native language.