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Challenge and Change: How Does Culture Change?
All cultures change through time. No culture is static. However, most cultures are basically conservative in that they tend to resist change. Some resist more than others by enacting laws for the preservation and protection of traditional cultural patterns while putting up barriers to alien ideas and things. For example, the French government has forbidden the commercial use of English words for which there are French equivalencies. This is a reaction particularly to the widespread use and popularity of terms such as "sandwich" and "computer" among young people. More recently, Starbucks has found it very difficult to become established in France despite the fact that it is becoming successful elsewhere in Europe. In contrast, some cultures are extremely open to some kinds of change. Over the last two decades, the Peoples Republic of China has been rapidly adopting western technology and culture in everyday life. This can be seen in their wide acceptance of everything from cell phones to American television shows and fast food. McDonald's has already established 560 of their restaurants in China and soon will be adding 100 more. KFC fried chicken franchises have been even more popular. There are 1000 KFC outlets throughout the country with more than 100 in Beijing alone. Taco Bell, A & W, and Pizza Hut are not far behind. In 2003, the Chinese government made the decision to require all children in their country, beginning with the 3rd grade of elementary school, to learn English. This will very likely accelerate westernization.
China is far from being unique in experiencing a revolutionary rate of change. It is now abundantly clear that we are in an accelerating culture change period all around the world regardless of whether we try to resist it or not. It is driven by the expansion of international commerce and especially mass media. Ultimately, what is driving it is our massive human population explosion. The number of people in the world now doubles in less than half a century.
What Actually Changes When Cultures Change?
21st century jack based on principlesof physics known to the ancient Greeks
When analyzing the transformation of a culture, it is clear that different understandings are gained depending on the focus. Anthropology began its study of this phenomenon, during the late 19th century, largely from the perspective of trying to understand how manufactured things, such as tools, are invented and modified in design over time. It became apparent that there rarely are entirely new inventions. Most often, only the function, form, or principle is new, but not all three. For instance, our modern jack, used for lifting up the side of a car, is usually based on the principles of the lever and/or the screw. Those principles were well known to the ancient Greeks more than 2,000 years ago.
By the 1940's, anthropologists began to realize that ideas, tools, and other artifacts generally are not invented or changed in isolation. They are the product of particular cultural settings. Cultures are organic wholes consisting of interdependent components. Inventions often occur in response to other cultural changes.
Likewise, inventions potentially can affect all cultural institutions. Beginning in the 1950's, for instance, televisions in American homes affected how and when members of families interacted with each other. Less time was available for direct conversation. The size of houses in more affluent areas of the U.S. are now usually 2-3 times larger than they were in the 1950's. As a consequence, family members often have their own rooms and become even more isolated from each other.
Parents with few childrencan give more personal
attention to each of them
Similarly, the introduction of new, effective birth control measures, mostly beginning in the early 1960's, allowed people to easily limit the number of children they had and to space their births. This affected the relationships of children with their parents and siblings. When there are fewer children, parents can give more attention to each one. Likewise, more money per child is available for clothes, entertainment, gifts, and education. Potentially, there is also more money and leisure time for parents when there are fewer children in their family.
North American fatherin a non-traditional role:
caring for his child while
his wife works elsewhere
The interrelated nature of cultural institutions can also be seen in the effects of changing roles for American women since the mid-20th century. As they have increasingly moved into the work force outside of the home, it has given them financial independence and has altered traditional roles within the family. Men are less essential as bread winners and less accepted as patriarchs. They have begun to take on more child rearing and other domestic household responsibilities previously defined as "women's work." Divorce has become an economically viable alternative for women in unhappy marriages. There also has been a marked decrease in the frequency of mother-child interaction. American children have increasingly been raised by non-family members in child care centers and schools.
Culture and the naturalenvironment are interrelated
in complex ways
By the early 1960's, it was evident to some anthropologists that cultures do not exist in isolation. When cultures change, they can have major impacts on the environment. Similarly, when the environment changes, there are likely to be impacts on culture. For example, global warming at the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, very likely was a major contributing factor leading to the invention of agriculture. This technological innovation allowed for such immense increases in human populations that we began to rapidly alter the environment by depleting resources. In the vicinity of ancient cities, forests often were cut down for construction materials and fuel and wild animals were hunted to near extinction for food.
Since 1985, the average number of people living together in a household has been dropping in the 76 richest nations due to increased affluence and other social changes. Extended and joint family households are less popular. Divorce rates have gone up usually resulting in the establishment of new households by one or both former marriage partners. There also are larger numbers of unmarried adults who establish their own households. For a quarter century there has been a demand for housing that is significantly over what would be expected from the population growth in these nations. As a result, the need for lumber and other construction materials has caused a dramatic increase in the exploitation of forests. This in turn makes it increasingly more difficult to maintain global biological diversity.
The interrelationship between culture and environment also can be seen in our depletion of energy resources and forced adoption of new energy sources. As wood became relatively scarce by the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, it was replaced by coal to fuel factories and heat homes. In turn, coal began to be replaced by oil and natural gas during the early 20th century. The increasing costs associated with petroleum products have now caused it to begin to be replaced by nuclear, solar, and other energy sources.
Human economies change as necessity forces us to alter our relationship with the environment. As our economies change, the rest of culture changes in response. We are now facing potential major global cultural changes over the next century as a result of the greenhouse effect that is presumably being caused or aggravated by the accelerated burning of fossil fuels and forest products. The result likely will be progressive global warming, shifting climates, and flooded coastal regions. Entire island nations in the Pacific and Indian Oceans may disappear below the sea. Actually, this process of people changing the global climate may have begun much earlier than the beginning of the Industrial Revolution as it has been commonly thought. William Ruddiman of the University of Virginia has evidence indicating that the rise of global temperatures began about 8,000 years ago with the early spread of agriculture. He suggests that the massive clearance of forests in Europe and Asia for farming beginning at that time released huge amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In his estimation, this was enough warming to put off an impending ice age.
It is now clear that culture change is very complex. It has far ranging causes and effects. In order to understand all of the manifestations of change, we must take a holistic approach to studying cultures and the environments in which they exist. In other words, we must assume that human existence can be understood only as a multifaceted whole. Only then can we hope to understand the phenomena of culture change.
Processes of Change
All cultures are inherently predisposed to change and, at the same time, to resist change. There are dynamic processes operating that encourage the acceptance of new ideas and things while there are others that encourage changeless stability. It is likely that social and psychological chaos would result if there were not the conservative forces resisting change.
There are three general sources of influence or pressure that are responsible for both change and resistance to it:
1. / forces at work within a society2. / contact between societies
3. / changes in the natural environment
Within a society, processes leading to change include invention and culture loss. Inventions may be either technological or ideological. The latter includes such things as the invention of algebra and calculus or the creation of a representative parliament as a replacement for rule by royal decree. Technological inventions include new tools, energy sources, and transportation methods as well as more frivolous and ephemeral things such as style of dress and bodily adornment.
Culture loss is an inevitable result of old cultural patterns being replaced by new ones. For instance, not many Americans today know how to care for a horse. A century ago, this was common knowledge, except in a few large urban centers. Since then, vehicles with internal combustion engines have replaced horses as our primary means of transportation and horse care knowledge lost its importance. As a result, children are rarely taught these skills. Instead, they are trained in the use of the new technologies of automobiles, televisions, stereos, cellular phones, computers, and iPods.
Within a society, processes that result in the resistance to change include habit and the integration of culture traits. Older people, in particular, are often reticent to replace their comfortable, long familiar cultural patterns. Habitual behavior provides emotional security in a threatening world of change. Religion also often provides strong moral justification and support for maintaining traditional ways. In the early 21st century, this is especially true of nations mostly guided by Islamic Law, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
21st century professionalwoman working in a job
not open to women in her
grandmother's generation
The fact that cultural institutions are integrated and often interdependent is a major source of resistance to change. For instance, in the second half of the 20th century, the rapidly changing roles of North American and European women were resisted by many men because it inevitably resulted in changes to their roles as well. Male and female roles do not exist independent of each other. This sort of integration of cultural traits inevitably slows down and modifies cultural changes. Needless to say, it is a source of frustration for both those who want to change and those who do not.
The processes leading to change that occur as a result of contact between societies are
1. / diffusion2. / acculturation
3. / transculturation
Diffusion is the movement of things and ideas from one culture to another. When diffusion occurs, the form of a trait may move from one society to another but not its original cultural meaning. For instance, when McDonald's first brought their American style hamburgers to Moscow and Beijing, they were accepted as luxury foods for special occasions because they were relatively expensive and exotic. In America, of course, they have a very different meaning--they are ordinary every day fast food items.
Acculturation is what happens to an entire culture when alien traits diffuse in on a large scale and substantially replace traditional cultural patterns. After several centuries of relentless pressure from European Americans to adopt their ways, Native American cultures have been largely acculturated. As a result, the vast majority of American Indians now speak English instead of their ancestral language, wear European style clothes, go to school to learn about the world from a European perspective, and see themselves as being a part of the broader American society. As Native American societies continue to acculturate, most are experiencing a corresponding loss of their traditional cultures despite efforts of preservationists in their communities.
Sequoyah(ca. 1767-1843)
While acculturation is what happens to an entire culture when alien traits overwhelm it, transculturation is what happens to an individual when he or she moves to another society and adopts its culture. Immigrants who successfully learn the language and accept as their own the cultural patterns of their adopted country have transculturated. In contrast, people who live as socially isolated expatriates in a foreign land for years without desiring or expecting to become assimilated participants in the host culture are not transculturating.
There is one last process leading to change that occurs as an invention within a society as a result of an idea that diffuses from another. This is stimulus diffusion --a genuine invention that is sparked by an idea from another culture. An example of this occurred about 1821 when a Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah saw English writing which stimulated him to create a unique writing system for his own people. Part of his syllable based system is illustrated below. Note that some letters are similar to English while others are not. To see the entire Cherokee syllabary, click here.
16 of the 77 Cherokeealphabetical characters
It is also likely that ancient Egyptians around 3050 B.C. invented their hieroglyphic writing system after learning about the cuneiform writing system invented by Sumerians in what is today Southern Iraq.
There are processes operating in the contact between cultures as well that result in resistance to change. These are due to "us versus them" competitive feelings and perceptions. Ethnocentrism also leads people to reject alien ideas and things as being unnatural and even immoral. These ingroup-outgroup dynamics commonly result in resistance to acculturation and assimilation.
Summation
In order to better grasp the relationship between all of the different mechanisms of change operating within and between societies, it is useful to see them again in summary:
We now understand that this holistic approach to understanding culture change must also include consideration of changes in the environment in which a society exists. For instance, environmental degradation of fresh water supplies, arable land, and energy sources historically have resulted in the creation of new inventions, migrations, and even war to acquire essential resources.
NOTE: Human activities globally now move ten times as much earth and rock as all natural processes. One of the side effects of this is soil erosion that is causing the progressive loss of farmlands at the same time that the human need for them is growing. Driving this has been our rapidly increasing human population. Research done by Bruce Wilkinson of the University of Michigan has shown that this human-caused erosion began to exceed nature's ability to repair it nearly 1,000 years ago (Wilkinson Geology 28, 843-846, [2000]).