The Process of Social and Cultural Change
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What Processes bring about cultural change?
Leslie White?s ?cultural materialist? theory (1971) states that there
are 3 sub-systems:
1) Technological- material culture used to exploit environment (most
important)
2) Sociological- interactive behaviour of individuals
3) Ideological- non- material
He said that the technological sub-system conditioned the other two, so that the development of a culture depends on technological advances and the amount of energy harnessed per head. ?Technology is the hero of our piece?- White.
Anthropologists in general distinguish between internal change (change coming from within a society) and external change (change coming from outside).
Change
At first anthropological fieldworkers could observe small-scale societies
in relative isolation. That is, changes had come from within. No longer
are any totally isolated.
Reasons for internal change-
1) Changing conditions in natural surroundings (e.g. drought, earthquakes
(short-term) or global warming (long term).
2) Population growth leading to a) territorial expansion
b) agricultural intensification
3) Inventions which are accepted. The ?Great Man Theory? is the idea
that a single forceful individual can cause major change in a society.
A climate of openness to new ideas greatly affects a cultural change.
Reasons for external change-
1) Cultural Diffusion. Diffusionism is the idea that culture change
can be explained by intercultural culture.
Direct diffusion is the diffusion of an idea or custom from one culture
to another without passing through an intermediary culture (e.g.
Christian Mission work)
Indirect diffusion is the diffusion of an idea or custom from one culture
to another after passing through an intermediary culture
People may adapt a diffused idea, e.g. syncretism of reggae music.
Syncretism- The blending of two or more cultural traditions into a
single new one.
Examples: Reggae music, which combines elements of both Western and
African music to produce an entirely new musical category.
Also, in Zimbabwe, there is a syncretic religion which combines Christianity
with traditional beliefs.
Beneficial vs destructive diffusion
Beneficial- the introduction of computers into Intuit Eskimo Culture
in the 1980s.
The Inuit of Canada?s Northwest territories whose lives retain elements
of their recent gathering-and-hunting past, readily incorporate new ideas
they consider helpful into their lives. In the mid-1980s, their regional
council, made up of representatives from 14 isolated Inuit communities,
decided to use computers to store information on the game that hunters
brought home to their remote hamlets. If one hamlet found itself with plenty
of caribou meat but few seal, it could easily locate a hamlet with an excess
of seal, and trade one kind of meat for the other. Both the hardware and
software had to be user-friendly, since many Inuit had little formal education
and not all of them spoke English. The Apple Macintosh, which uses images
rather than words to execute commands, and a software program made up of
lines and circles of the Inuit alphabet was written. Ultimately, even the
remotest Inuit villages will be able to communicate easily with one another
and the outside world.
Destructive- the putting in of a water pump in a village well in rural
India in 1987.
A solar-powered water pump, installed on a village well, freed local
women from the time-consuming task of drawing water by hand, but the women
found they were spending much less time chatting with one another around
the well. The easily availability of water attracted unwanted wanderers
from outside the village, moreover, local boys whose job it had been to
draw water from the well, had nothing to do and soon turned to petty crime.
Meanwhile, the gap between the rich and poor widened: the rich, who owned
land, used the pump for irrigation, but the poor had no land to irrigate.
The new pump was definitely a mixed blessing. Eventually, women of the
village intentionally broke it so they could once more gather around the
well that had been the centre of their social lives.
1) decimation (e.g. by disease, ethnocide, genocide)
2) Armed resistance
3) Colonialism and its changes in social order
4) Syncretism (open or hidden)
5) Enslavement
6) Harking back to the past
7) Milinarium movements (e.g. cargo cults)
8) Adaptation
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by: Admin
Total views: 256
Word Count: 727
Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2006 Time: 12:00 AM
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