Community Development in the Neoteric Community.

The article presents information on the community development in the neoteric community. A basic principal of community development has been that change must be accomplished through a modification of the existing culture. Implicit in the assertion that successful change programs must be based on existing culture is the assumption that all major social norms are deeply ingrained in tradition. Groups that have experienced very rapid change inevitably will lose much of their traditional heritage. Such a condition could develop where the basic means of subsistence have been suddenly and rather completely disrupted. Nancie Gonzalez has recently proposed using the term neoteric to refer to societies whose cultural roots are very shallow. She describes the neoteric society as the societies which are neither primitive nor peasant, in which traditions are absent or very shallow, and which may be said to have risen only recently in time. Primitive societies are the ones in which the producers control the means of production, including their own labor, and exchange their own labor and its products for the cultural defined equivalent goods and services of others.