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