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MECHANISMS OF CULTURAL CHANGE

Why and how do culture change? Thru-

A- Diffusion

• Diffusion - borrowing of traits between cultures.
• Such exchange of information and products has gone on throughout human history because cultures have never been truly isolated.
• Diffusion is direct when 2 cultures trade with, intermarry among, or wage war on one another.
• Diffusion is forced when 1 culture subjugates another and imposes its customs on the dominated group.
• Diffusion is indirect when items or traits move from group A to group C via group B without any first hand contact between A and C.

B- Acculturation

• Acculturation -exchange of cultural features that results when groups have continuous firsthand contact.
• With acculturation, parts of the culture change, but each group remains distinct.
• One example of acculturation is a PIDGIN, a mixed language that develops to ease communication between members of different cultures in contact. This usually hapens in situations of trade and colonialism.
• PIDGIN English is a simplified form of English. It blends English grammar with the grammar of a native language, like PIDGIN ENGLISH used for commerce in Chinese ports.

C- Independent Invention

• This is the process by which humans innovate, creatively finding solutions to problems.
• Example is the independent invention of agriculture in the Middle East and Mexico which led to social, political, and legal changes, including notions of property and distinctions in wealth, class, and power.

National Culture - embodies the beliefs, learned behavior patterns, values, and institutions shared by citizens of the same nation.

International Culture - extends beyond and across national boundaries.

Ethnocentrism - the tendency to view one's own culture as superior and to apply one's own cultural values in judging the behavior and beliefs of people raised in other cultures.

Cultural relativism- the viewpoint that behavior in one culture should not be judged by the standards of another culture.

Human rights refers to the "basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled." Examples of rights and freedoms which are often thought of as human rights include civil and political rights, such as the right to life and liberty, freedom of expression, and equality before the law; and social, cultural and economic rights, including the right to participate in culture, the right to food, the right to work, the right to hold religious beliefs without persecution, and the right to education.
“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.”
—Article 1 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

Four United Nations documents descrbe nearly all the human rights that have been internationally recognized. Those documents are the UN Charter; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

• Alongside the human rights movement has arisen an awareness of the need to preserve cultural rights.
• Cultural rights are vested not in individuals but in groups, such as religious and ethnic minorities and indigenous societies.
• Cultural rights include a group's ability to preserve its culture, to raise children in the ways of its forebears, to continue its language.
• Indigenous INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS (IPR) - attempts to conserve our society's cultural base - core beliefs, knowledge and practices.
• Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce.
• Intellectual property is divided into two categories:
• Industrial property, which includes inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs, and geographic indications of source; and
• Copyright, which includes literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and architectural designs. Rights related to copyright include those of performing artists in their performances, producers of phonograms in their recordings, and those of broadcasters in their radio and television programs.

Characteristics of Culture

CULTURE IS LEARNED

• Children absorb any cultural tradition
• It’s human capacity to learn
• Other animals learn by experience
• Social animals learn from other members of their group, such as hunting strategies of wolves
• Social learning is important among monkeys and apes.
• Our own cultural learning depends on man’s developed human capacity to use symbols, signs that have no necessary or natural connection to the things they stand for or signify.
• culture is non-instinctive, we are not genetically programmed to learn a particular one.
• North American children informally learning the culture of their parents.
• Every human generation potentially can discover new things and invent better technologies.
• The new cultural skills and knowledge are added onto what was learned in previous generations. As a result, culture is cumulative.

Clifford Geertz (1973), an anthropologist – defines culture as IDEAS based on cultural learning and symbols.

• Cultures are sets of “control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions, what computer engineers call PROGRAMS for the governing of behavior.
• Programs are absorbed by people through ENCULTURATION.
• Internalization of learned behavior –Conscious or unconscious learning and interaction (observation or awareness – know which is wrong or right.
• North Americans acquire their culture’s notions about how far apart people should stand when they talk not by being directly told to maintain a certain distance. Latinos stand closer together than North Americans do.
• Taught directly (like parents telling their children to say “thank you” when someone gives them something or does them a favor.

CULTURE IS SHARED

• Culture is an attribute not of individual per se but of individuals as members of groups.
• Culture is transmitted in society.
• We learn our culture thru the interaction with many other people, talking, observing, listening to them.
• Shared beliefs, values, memories, and expectations link people who grow up in the same culture.
• Enculturation unifies people by providing us with common experiences.
• Today’s parents were yesterday’s children.
• Parents grew up in a place and absorbed certain values and beliefs transmitted over the generations.
• People become agents of enculturation of their children.
• Although culture constantly changes, certain fundamental beliefs, values, worldviews, and child-rearing practices stay or endure.
• Not finishing a meal or eating everything on plate- reminds us of starving children in the 3rd world.

CULTURE IS AN ADAPTIVE MECHANISM

• The first humans evolved in tropical and subtropical regions of Africa about 2.5 million years ago.
• Since then, we have successfully occupied all of the major geographic regions of the world, but our bodies have remained essentially those of warm climate animals.
• We cannot survive outside of the warmer regions of our planet without our cultural knowledge and technology.
• What made it possible for our ancestors to begin living in temperate and ultimately subarctic regions of the northern hemisphere after half a million years ago was the invention of efficient hunting skills, fire use, and, ultimately, clothing, warm housing, agriculture, and commerce.
• Culture has been a highly successful adaptive mechanism for our species. It has given us a major selective advantage in the competition for survival with other life forms.
• Culture has allowed the global human population to grow from less than 10 million people shortly after the end of the last ice age to more than 6.5 billion people today, a mere 10,000 years later.
• Culture has made us the most dangerous and the most destructive large animal on our planet. It is ironic that despite the power that culture has given us, we are totally dependent on it for survival. We need our cultural skills to stay alive.

CULTURE IS SYMBOLIC

• A symbol is something verbal or nonverbal, within a particular language or culture, that comes to stand for something else.
• Anthropologist Leslie White defined culture as ....dependent upon symbolling....Culture consists of tools, implements, utensils, clothing, ornaments, customs, institutions, beliefs, rituals, games, works of art, language, etc.
• Language is one of the distinctive possessions of Homo sapiens. No other animal has developed anything approaching the complexity of language, with its multitude of symbols.
• Symbols are often linguistic, like arches for food chains, flags for various countries, and holy water as a potent symbol for Roman Catholicism.
• Our nearest relatives - chimpanzees and gorillas - have rudimentary cultural abilities.
• However, no other animal has elaborated cultural abilities - to learn, communicate;and to store, process, and use information - to the extent that Homo has.

CULTURE AND NATURE

• Culture takes the natural biological urges we share with other animals and teaches us how to express them in particular ways.
• People have to eat, but culture teaches what, when and how.
• In many cultures people have their main meal at noon, but most North American prefer a large dinner. English people eat fish for breakfast, but North Americans prefer hot cakes and cold cereals. Midwesterners dine at five or sic, Spaniards at ten.
• Cultural habits, perceptions, and inventions mold "human nature" into many forms.
• People have to eliminate wastes from their bodies. But some culture teach people to defecate standing, while others tell them to do it sitting down.
• Frenchmen are not embarrassed to urinate in public. Peasant women in the Andean highlands squat in the streets and urinate, getting all the privacy they need from their massive skirts (true to old Filipina women).
• All these habits are parts of cultural traditions that have converted natural acts into cultural customs.

CULTURE IS ALL-ENCOMPASSING

• Culture includes much more than refinement, good taste, sophistication, education, and appreciation of the fine arts.
• Not only college graduates are "cultured".
• Culture encompasses features that are sometimes regarded as trivial or not worthy of serious study, such as those of "popular" culture.
• To understand contemporary North American culture, we must consider TV, fast food restaurants, sports and games.
• As a cultural manifestation, a rock star may be as interesting as a symphony conductor (or vice versa); a comic book may be as significant as a book-award winner.

CULTURE IS INTEGRATED

• Cultures are not haphazard collections of customs and beliefs.
• Cultures are integrated, patterned systems. If one part of the system changes, other parts change as well. For example, early 70's most Filipina women prefered to stay home to take care of the family. Most of today's college women, by contrast, expect to get paying jobs when they graduate.
• Repercussions of this includes change in attitudes and behavior.
• Late marriage, "living together", separation/divorce have become more common.
• Work competes with marriage and family responsibilities and reduces the time available to invest in child care.
• Cultures are integrated not simply by their dominant economic activities and related social patterns but also by sets of values, ideas, symbols, and judgments.
• A set of characteristics CORE VALUES integrates each culture and helps distinguish it from others.

PEOPLE USE CULTURE ACTIVELY

• Although cultural rules tell us what to do and how to do it, people don't always do what the rules say they should do.
• People use their culture actively and creatively, rather than blindly following its dictates.
• We are not passive beings who are doomed to follow our cultural traditions, like programmed robots.
• Instead, people can learn, interpret, and manipulate the same rule in different ways.
• Also, culture is contested. That is, different groups in society often struggle with one another over whose ideas, values, and beliefs will prevail.
• Even common symbols may have radically different meanings to different people and groups in the same culture.
• Golden arches may cause one person to salivate while another plots a vegetarian protest.
• Even if they agree about what should andf shouldn't be done, people don't always do as their culture directs or as other people expect.
• Many rules are violated, some very often (example, automobile speed limits)
• Ideal culture consists of what people say they should do and of what they say they do.
• Real culture refers to their actual behavior as observed by the anthropologist.

CULTURE CAN BE ADAPTIVE AND MALADAPTIVE

• Humans have both biological and cultural ways of coping with environmental stresses.
• Besides our biological menas of adaptation, we also use "cultural adaptive kit," which contain customary activities and tools that aid us.
• Sometimes, adaptive behavior that offers short-term benefits to particular groups or individuals may harm the environment and threaten the group's long-term survival.
• Economic growth may benefit some people while it depletes resources needed for society at large or future generations.
• Thus, cultural traits, patterns, and inventions can also be maladaptive, threatening the group's continued existence.
• Air cons help us deal with heat, as fires and furnaces protect us against the cold.
• Automobiles permit us to make a living by getting us from home to workplace.
• But the by-products of these "beneficial" technology often create new problem. Chemical emissions increase air pollution, deplete the ozone layer, and contribute to global warming.

CULTURE AND SOCIETY

The word culture has many different meanings. For some it refers to an appreciation of good literature, music, art, and food. For a biologist, it is likely to be a colony of bacteria or other microorganisms growing in a nutrient medium in a laboratory Petri dish. However, for anthropologists and other behavioral scientists, culture is the full range of learned human behavior patterns.

The term was first used in this way by the pioneer English Anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his book, Primitive Culture, published in 1871. Tylor said that culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Of course, it is not limited to men. Women possess and create it as well. Since Tylor's time, the concept of culture has become the central focus of anthropology.

Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon. It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds. Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of culture. They are not culture in themselves. For this reason, archaeologists can not dig up culture directly in their excavations. The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns--they are things that were made and used through cultural knowledge and skills.

There are very likely three layers or levels of culture that are part of your learned behavior patterns and perceptions. Most obviously is the body of cultural traditions that distinguish your specific society. When people speak of Italian, Samoan, or Japanese culture, they are referring to the shared language, traditions, and beliefs that set each of these peoples apart from others. In most cases, those who share your culture do so because they acquired it as they were raised by parents and other family members who have it.

The second layer of culture that may be part of your identity is a subculture . In complex, diverse societies in which people have come from many different parts of the world, they often retain much of their original cultural traditions. As a result, they are likely to be part of an identifiable subculture in their new society. The shared cultural traits of subcultures set them apart from the rest of their society. Examples of easily identifiable subcultures in the United States include ethnic groups such as Vietnamese Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans. Members of each of these subcultures share a common identity, food tradition, dialect or language, and other cultural traits that come from their common ancestral background and experience. As the cultural differences between members of a subculture and the dominant national culture blur and eventually disappear, the subculture ceases to exist except as a group of people who claim a common ancestry. That is generally the case with German Americans and Irish Americans in the United States today. Most of them identify themselves as Americans first. They also see themselves as being part of the cultural mainstream of the nation.

These Cuban American women in Miami, Florida have a shared subculture identity that is reinforced through their language, food, and other traditions.

The third layer of culture consists of cultural universals. These are learned behavior patterns that are shared by all of humanity collectively. No matter where people live in the world, they share these universal traits. Examples of such "human cultural" traits include:

1. communicating with a verbal language consisting of a limited set of sounds and grammatical rules for constructing sentences
2. using age and gender to classify people (e.g., teenager, senior citizen, woman, man)
3. classifying people based on marriage and descent relationships and having kinship terms to refer tothem (e.g., wife, mother, uncle, cousin)
4. raising children in some sort of family setting
5. having a sexual division of labor (e.g., men's work versus women's work)
6. having a concept of privacy
7. having rules to regulate sexual behavior
8. distinguishing between good and bad behavior
9. having some sort of body ornamentation
10. making jokes and playing games

While all cultures have these and possibly many other universal traits, different cultures have developed their own specific ways of carrying out or expressing them. For instance, people in deaf subcultures frequently use their hands to communicate with sign language instead of verbal language. However, sign languages have grammatical rules just as verbal ones do.

Culture and Society

Culture and society are not the same thing. While cultures are complexes of learned behavior patterns and perceptions, societies are groups of interacting organisms. People are not the only animals that have societies. Schools of fish, flocks of birds, and hives of bees are societies. In the case of humans, however, societies are groups of people who directly or indirectly interact with each other. People in human societies also generally perceive that their society is distinct from other societies in terms of shared traditions and expectations.

While human societies and cultures are not the same thing, they are inextricably connected because culture is created and transmitted to others in a society. Cultures are not the product of lone individuals. They are the continuously evolving products of people interacting with each other. Cultural patterns such as language and politics make no sense except in terms of the interaction of people. If you were the only human on earth, there would be no need for language or government.

Is Culture Limited to Humans?

Non-human culture? This orangutan mother is using a specially prepared stick to "fish out" food from a crevice. She learned this skill and is now teaching it to her child who is hanging on her shoulder and intently watching.

There is a difference of opinion in the behavioral sciences about whether or not we are the only animal that creates and uses culture. The answer to this question depends on how narrow culture is defined. If it is used broadly to refer to a complex of learned behavior patterns, then it is clear that we are not alone in creating and using culture. Many other animal species teach their young what they themselves learned in order to survive. This is especially true of the chimpanzees and other relatively intelligent apes and monkeys. Wild chimpanzee mothers typically teach their children about several hundred food and medicinal plants. Their children also have to learn about the dominance hierarchy and the social rules within their communities. As males become teenagers, they acquire hunting skills from adults. Females have to learn how to nurse and care for their babies. Chimpanzees even have to learn such basic skills as how to perform sexual intercourse. This knowledge is not hardwired into their brains at birth. They are all learned patterns of behavior just as they are for humans.