Processes of Change

1
Chapter 15

• Processes of Change

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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.

3
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.

4
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.

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Causes of Cultural Change

• Accidents, including the unexpected outcome of
  existing events.
• Peoples deliberate attempt to solve some
  perceived problem.
• Change may be forced upon one group in the course
  of especially intense contact between two
  societies.

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Mechanisms of Cultural Change

• Innovation
• Diffusion
• Cultural loss
• Acculturation

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Cultural Innovations

• Once ones reflexes become adjusted to doing
  something one way, it becomes difficult to do it
  differently.
• Thus, when a North American visits one of the
  worlds 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.

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Diffusion

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

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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.

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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.

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International Refugees
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Repressive Change

• People dont 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

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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 groups cultural
  identity occurs when a dominant society sets out
  to destroy another societys cultural heritage.

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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.

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Genocide

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

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Tradition

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

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Syncretism

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

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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.

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Revitalization Movements

• Bolivias 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.

23
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.

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Conditions for Rebellion and Revolution

• Loss of prestige of established authority.
• Threat to recent economic improvement.
• Indecisiveness of government.
• Loss of support of the intellectual class.
• A leader or group of leaders with enough charisma
  or popular appeal to mobilize the population
  against the establishment.

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Armed Conflict
26
Womens Labor in China

• In China, womens 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.

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Modernization

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

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Subprocesses of Modernization

1. Technological development
2. Agricultural development
3. Industrialization
4. Urbanization

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Saami Reindeer Herders

• In the 1960s, Saami reindeer herders in
  Scandinavias 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.