A Model for the Analysis of Cross-Cultural Action Programs

As consultants in action agencies, anthropologists, (and other behavioral scientists) face the problem of analyzing and making recommendations in situations where representatives of one culture or subculture are attempting to bring about changes in members of another cultural system. Unfortunately, traditional approaches to culture change and acculturation are vaguest at exactly the points where the action researcher needs to make a clearer conceptual distinction between 1) the analysis of underlying cultural conditions and trends and 2) the analysis of programs and strategies designed to alter these conditions. That is, we have tended to stay at the level of broad social and cultural variables and to analyze change in terms of fairly large structural units, thus contributing much to point (1) but little to point (2). And even at this level, despite numerous attempts to develop a more inclusive acculturation theory, there continue to be more studies of "receiving" cultures per se than of relationships between the two or more cultural systems involved in any contact situation. Such studies are valuable and necessary in understanding the nature of culture change, but they tend to neglect the detailed analysis of interaction between persons in cross-cultural settings, especially the manipulative actions and interventions of change agents which are so crucial to any scientific planning for guided change. In short, as a number of recent studies suggest, we need a general frame-work which facilitates analysis both of cultural systems as such and of the actions of change agents in an inter-cultural network of roles—some concepts of changing to supplement current concepts of change. The following model, developed for a study of relationships between health services and personnel, on one hand, and local citizens and their healthways, on the other, is offered as one possible solution to the problem of visualizing cross-cultural interpersonal relationships within broader social and cultural dimensions

Acculturation · Action (physics) · Cultural analysis · Cultural system · Epistemology · Neglect · Political science · Psychological intervention · Public relations · Social science · Sociology · Community Health and Development · Evaluation and Performance Assessment · Psychology · Social Psychology