“Process”

All these mechanisms of change have been, or will be, noted (though in rather different order); but special attention should be accorded the one that may be the most important, yet the least amenable to direct observation: the deep structural changes experienced by a society and culture as a community evolves upward from a relatively primitive set of conditions toward an ever more complex civilized existence. The vast question of the degree to which the evolutionary paths of developing societies are followed in blind obedience to fundamental historical laws or, on the contrary, are coincidental in nature or the result of contacts among different societies, is one of the most difficult and controversial facing the cultural anthropologist . . .