Processes of Change

1
Processes of Change

• Chapter 15

2
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 (below).

Spanish conquest of the Inca
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. Syncretism is a form of Diffusion.
• Cultural loss is the abandonment of an existing
  practice or trait, with or without replacement.
• 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. Subcategories
  include Acculturation, Ethnocide, Genocide

4
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 (i.e. the wheel).
• Secondary innovations are improvements made by
  applying known principles (i.e. the Iphone).

5
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.

6
Innovation

• The earliest discovery that firing clay vessels
  makes them more durable took place in Africa/Asia
  as in these Badarian pottery examples from
  pre-dynastic Egypt (Above), probably when
  clay-lined basins next to cooking fires were
  accidentally fired. Later, a similar innovation
  took place in the Americas.

7
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.