Eidos and Change

It is no longer open to question that a people may undergo even profound change and nevertheless retain their culture in its essential configuration and have a clear sense of their cultural and social identity. The difficult question is how this comes about: how cultural structures are carried by the total communication system so that, incorporating or overriding change, the processes by which members of older and younger generations organize their image of the world in which they live together are congruent. In this paper I demonstrate that in a society in which a direct approach to this problem is not feasible, primarily because the premises that shape and inform cultural structures are not within articulate awareness, an indirect approach through the use of a nonverbal technique-in this case, performance on the Lowenfeld Mosaic Test-can give insight into cognitive processes that account for cultural continuity. As background I characterize the kind of change that has taken place in the ongoing life of the Iatmul people of the autonomous village of Tambanum in the East Sepik District of Papua New