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Historic Contact: Indian People and Colonists in Today's Northeastern United States in the Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. Robert S. Grumet. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. 514 pp.

Paradigmatic processes in culture change are defined, in the sense of Thomas Kuhn, as the consequence of long‐continued deliberate effort by numbers of persons to innovate within a recognized technical, artistic, or intellectual tradition (or "school" or "discipline"). The evolving paradigm will often, after a certain point of development, attract exploitation; there will then occur various functionally entailed social‐cultural consequences; and ultimately efforts will be made to rationalize the change in religious, ethical, and philosophical terms.

As an alternative to traditional semantic analysis using class‐product logic ("Componential analysis"), it is proposed that the possibilities of analysis in terms of relative products be explored in appropriate lexical‐taxonomic domains, particularly kinship. In such analyses the order of components is intrinsic to meaning. The process is illustrated by an analysis of American kinship terminology.