Chapter 15

Processes of Change

Why Do Cultures Change?

• Much change is unforeseen, unplanned, and undirected.

• Changes in existing values and behavior may also come about due to contact with other peoples who introduce new ideas or tools.

• This may even involve the massive imposition of foreign ideas and practices through conquest of one group by another.

How Do Cultures Change?

• The mechanisms of culture change include innovation, diffusion, cultural loss, and acculturation.

• Innovation is the discovery of something that is then accepted by fellow members in a society.

• Diffusion is borrowing something from another group.

• Cultural loss is the abandonment of an existing practice or trait, with or without replacement.

• Acculturation is a massive change that comes about due to contact with a more powerful, group.

What Is Modernization?

• Modernization refers to a process of change by which traditional, nonindustrial societies acquire characteristics of technologically complex societies.

• Accelerated modernization interconnecting all parts of the world is known as globalization.

Causes of Cultural Change

• Accidents, including the unexpected outcome of existing events.

• People’s deliberate attempt to solve some perceived problem.

• Change may be forced upon one group in the course of especially intense contact between two societies.

Mechanisms of Cultural Change

• Innovation• Diffusion• Cultural loss• Acculturation

Innovation

• The ultimate source of change: some new practice, tool, or principle.

• Other individuals adopt the innovation, and it becomes socially shared.

• Primary innovations are chance discoveries of new principles.

• Secondary innovations are improvements made by applying known principles.

Acceptance of Innovation

• Depends partly on its perceived superiority to the method or object it replaces.

• Also connected with the prestige of the innovator and recipient groups.

Innovation

• A Hopi Indian woman firing pottery vessels. The earliest discovery that firing clay vessels makes them more durable took place in Asia, probably when clay-lined basins next to cooking fires were accidentally fired. Later, a similar innovation took place in the Americas.

Cultural Innovations

• Once one’s reflexes become adjusted to doing something one way, it becomes difficult to do it differently.

• Thus, when a North American visits one of the world’s many left-side drive countries (about sixty) such as Great Britain (or vice versa), learning to drive on the “wrong” side of the road is difficult.

Diffusion

• The spread of certain ideas, customs, or practices from one culture to another.

Diffusion of Tobacco

• Having spread from the tropics of the western hemisphere to much of the rest of North and South America, it spread rapidly to the rest of the world after Italian explorer Christopher Columbus first crossed the Atlantic in 1492.

Cultural Loss

• Abandonment of an existing practice or trait. • Example:

– In ancient times wagons were used in northern Africa and southwestern Asia, but wheeled vehicles disappeared from Morocco to Afghanistan about 1,500 years ago.

– They were replaced by camels due to their endurance, longevity, ability to ford rivers and traverse rough ground.

– While a wagon required a man for every two animals, one person manage six camels.

International Refugees

Repressive Change

• People don’t always have the liberty to make their own choices and changes are forced upon them by some other group, in the course of conquest and colonialism.– Acculturation– Ethnocide – Genocide

Repressive Change

• Acculturation– Culture changes that people are forced to make

as a consequence of intensive, firsthand contact between societies.

• Ethnocide– Violent eradication of an ethnic group’s cultural

identity; occurs when a dominant society sets out to destroy another society’s cultural heritage.

Repressive Change

• Genocide– Extermination of one people by another, in the

name of “progress,” either as a deliberate act or as the accidental outcome of activities carried out by people with little regard for their impact on others.

Genocide

• Two examples of attempted genocide in the 20th century: Hitler’s Germany against Jews and Gypsies in the 1930s and the 1940s; and Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda, as in this 1994 massacre.

Tradition

• In a modernizing society, old cultural practices, which may oppose new forces of differentiation and integration.

Syncretism

• The creative blending of indigenous and foreign beliefs and practices into new cultural forms.

Syncretism

• When British missionaries pressed Trobriand Islanders to celebrate their yam harvests with a game of cricket rather than traditional “wild” dances, Trobrianders transformed the staid British sport into an event that featured sexual chants and dances between innings.

Revitalization Movements

• Bolivia’s newly elected President Evo Morales was inaugurated at the archaeological site of Tiwanaku.

• Morales officially launched an indigenous cultural revitalization movement.

• Mostly poverty-stricken, Bolivian Indians have seen their ancestral traditions repressed, marginalized, or ridiculed during the past five centuries.

Rebellion and Revolution

• Rebellion – Organized armed resistance to an established

government or authority in power.

• Revolution– Sudden and radical change in a society or

culture. In the political arena, it refers to the forced overthrow of an old government and establishment of a completely new one.

Conditions for Rebellion and Revolution

1. Loss of prestige of established authority.

2. Threat to recent economic improvement.

3. Indecisiveness of government.

4. Loss of support of the intellectual class.

4. A leader or group of leaders with enough charisma or popular appeal to mobilize the population against the establishment.

Armed Conflict

Women’s Labor in China

• In China, women’s labor has become critical to economic expansion.

• Much of this labor is controlled by male heads of families, who act as agents of the state in allocating labor.

Modernization

• The process of cultural and socioeconomic change, whereby developing societies acquire some of the characteristics of Western industrialized societies.

Subprocesses of Modernization

1. Technological development

2. Agricultural development

3. Industrialization

4. Urbanization

Saami Reindeer Herders

• In the 1960s, Saami reindeer herders in Scandinavia’s Arctic tundra adopted snowmobiles, convinced they would make herding easier and economically more advantageous. Here, a young Saami man stands beside his tent and snowmobile, searching for his reindeer with binoculars.