Frank G. Speck

Cultural Persistence versus Local Adaptation: Frank G. Speck's Catawba Indians

Cultural persistence, or continuity, is a recurrent theme in anthropological studies of acculturation. Until recently many anthropologists assumed that native peoples undergoing acculturation occasionally preserved isolated fragments of their cultural traditions as reefs of stability in an otherwise overwhelming flood of Westernization. It appeared that some institutions could be encapsulated and made immune to alteration. In some cases, this view proceeded from the peculiar perspective of a field worker: he was most intent on finding continuity, on discovering the contemporary modifications of aboriginal institutions, and in searching for persistence he tended to place weak emphasis on the more important fact of adoption of Western cultural characteristics. At other times, especially in studies of American Indian acculturation, the ethnographer appears to have overlooked local variations of AngloAmerican cultural patterns. Both of these marks of earlier American anthropology appear in the reports of Frank G. Speck, who may be taken as an example of the more capable ethnographers of the American Indian. From field work conducted among the Catawba Indians of South Carolina in 1963, I have come to question some of Specks