Culture Change: How Meaning Drives History

It is the conundrum of culture that it strives for EQUILIBRIUM, and yet as a living system of individuals joined together through core values, beliefs, ideas, practices and products it is ALWAYS CHANGING.

So, how do cultures change? Two Ways:

• Diffusion (borrowing or transmission of a trait from one culture to another). 
• can be through direct or indirect interaction

Factors upon which diffusion is contingent (in this order)

• Need for change (desire or necessity for a product or practice in that culture)
• Availability for change (raw materials and know-how or the ability to acquire the product or practice through trade)
• Does not violate the WORLDVIEW of that culture

• Independent Invention
• primary innovation (chance discovery)
• secondary innovation (build on chance discovery)

• Acculturation (Forcible change-secondary learning of culture)
• Change which is "forced" upon an individual or culture. Takes place in the liefetimeof an individual.
• Results in the following if it persists:
• blending of cultural traits -SYNCRETISM
• Cultural attrition (decay)
• Cultural death (actual - genocide, or virtual- culture is lost)
• Revitalization Movements
• Nativistic
• Nonnativistic

One cannot predict accurately the rate or direction of change but there are factors that affect both of these features:

• degree of cultural difference
• intensity/frequency of contact
• relative status (power) of those in contact
• reciprocal versus nonreciprocal contact
• nature of contact (hostile or friendly)

 DIRECTED CHANGE: Modernization (Westernization/Development)
the process of cultural and social-economic change whereby developing societies acquire some of the characteristics of  Western industrialized societies.

• STRUCTURAL DIFFERENTIATION: 
• the division of single, holistic, traditional roles into specialized roles
• can lead to fragmentation in a society
• develop INTEGRATIVE MECHANISMS in order to counter fragmentation
• trade unions
• beaurocracies
• legal codes
• commin interest associations
• ACCULTURATION
• ASSIMILATION
• ETHNICITY (secondary affiliation that remains when a group has been assimilated)
• can be expressed in a number of ways
• always a VOLUNTARY association (you have an ethnicity because you choose to express it)
• food, traditions, naming, religious affiliation, common interest, etc.

Syncretic Religion in Brazil

Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans (arts)

Cricket The Trobriand Way