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 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. 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 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.