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Culture and

Culture Change

Contemporary Anthropology 110

Culture

 Most people rarely question their shared assumptions and
traits until they encounter others who have quite different
beliefs and customs.

 When people start to compare and contrast other cultures
with their own to learn how they are different, they are
beginning to think anthropologically.

 Culture can be understood as “the set of learned behaviors
and ideas (including beliefs, attitudes, values, and ideals) that
are characteristic of a particular society or other social group.”
the set of learned behaviors and ideas (including beliefs,
attitudes, values, and ideals) that are characteristic of a
particular society or other social group

Culture Change

 Culture change is not unusual; throughout history, humans
have replaced or altered customary behaviors and attitudes as
their needs changed.

 Culture change may be gradual or rapid.

 Within the last 600 years or so, the pace of change has
accelerated, largely because of contact between different
societies.

Answers the questions:

 How should we do things?

 How do we make sense of the world?

 What is right and wrong?

 Culture produces a degree of consistency in behavior
and thought among the people who live in a
particular society.

Culture Is:

Culture Is:

 A cognitive map

 Categories, plans, and rules people use to interpret
their world

 Norms (rules)

 Values – shared ideas about what is desirable and
not desirable

 A set of interrelated processes (not a thing)

Characteristics of Culture:

 Shared

 Learned

 Adaptive

 Patterned (although
imperfectly)

 Symbolic

 Cumulative

 Changing

Culture is:

 “A set of rules or standards that, when acted upon by the
members of a society, produces human behavior that falls
within the range of variation that the members find
successful.”

 There are as many definitions and understandings of the word
culture as there are theories to explain it.

Society

 A group of people
who occupy a
particular territory
and speak a common
language not
generally understood
by neighboring
peoples.

 They may or may not
correspond to
countries or nations

The terms society and culture are
not synonymous. Society refers to a

group of people; culture refers to the
learned and shared behaviors, ideas,

characteristics of those people.

Subculture

 Commonly shared customs of a
subgroup within a society

 Does not necessarily correspond to
an ethnic group

 In every society studied by
anthropologists—in the simplest as
well as the most complex—groups
do not all think and act the same.

Goth can be considered a
subculture in the U.S.

Food Systems are Culture

 Humans eat because they
must; but what and when
and how they eat are
learned and vary from
culture to culture.

 Some things North
Americans don’t eat that
other cultures do: horse,
dog, guinea pig, bugs,

Hindus, many of whom live in
India, are generally vegetarian but
are especially repelled by the idea
of eating beef, for they view the

cow as sacred.

Enculturation

 Children learn about the
traditions and behaviors of
their society through a
process called
ENCULTURATION.

 Humans have by far the
longest childhood of any
animal, reflecting our great
dependence on learned
behavior.

 For some
anthropologists, the
concept of culture should
not include the behaviors
or the products of
behavior.

 For Cognitive
Anthropologists, culture
refers to rules of
behavior, and therefore,
culture resides in
people’s heads

Cognitive Anthropologists

Culture as Constraint

 French sociologist Émile Durkheim
stressed that culture is something
outside us that exerts a strong
coercive power on us and constrains
our actions and beliefs.

 Cultural constraints are of two basic
types, direct and indirect.

 Although indirect forms of cultural
constraint are less obvious than
direct ones, they are usually no less
effective

 breaching experiment is an
experiment that seeks to
examine people’s reactions
to violations of commonly
accepted social rules or
norms.

 An example is social
psychologist Stanley
Milgram’s experiments,
such as the one in which a
young, seemingly able-
bodied researcher asked
people to give up their bus
seat.

Norms: Acceptable Behavior

Ethnocentrism

 The judgment of other cultures solely in terms of one’s own
culture

 Our own customs and ideas may appear bizarre or barbaric to
an observer from another society. We may think eating dogs is
disgusting because of our cultural norms, but in India, where
cows are sacred, our consumption of beef is considered
disgusting.

 Anthropologists try to suspend judgment and try to
understand how certain practice may function for a people

 Both ethnocentrism and its opposite, the glorification of other
cultures, hinder effective anthropological study.

Cultural Relativism

 Cultural relativism is defined as the attitude that a society’s customs and
ideas should be viewed within the context of that society’s problems and
opportunities

 A Theory that proposes that each culture has value and that there is not a
hierarchy of culture

 Culture can be explained in terms of itself

 The strong doctrine of cultural relativism includes being morally
relativistic—suspending all judgment about behaviors the anthropologist
believes to be wrong like slavery or torture.

 “A theory that asserts that there is no absolute truth, be it ethical, moral,
or cultural, and that there is no meaningful way to judge different cultures
because all judgments are ethnocentric” (Zechenter, 1997).

Ideals vs. Behaviors

 Anthropologists try to distinguish actual behavior from the
ideas about how people in particular situations ought to feel
and behave.

 Ideal cultural traits may differ from actual behavior because the
ideal is based on the way society used to be.

 We have the cultural ideal of monogamy, but some people
cheat on their partners. Also, some individuals openly practice
polyamory, or having multiple sexual partners although it is not
the ideal in U.S. culture.

Culture is Behavior

 Behavior: observed activities, or
material products of behavior

 Culture: that which is not directly
observed, but “abstract” values,
beliefs, techniques that people
hold and use to interpret
experience and generate behavior
related to everyday life, survival
and reproduction

Discoveries and Inventions

 Discoveries and inventions,
which may originate inside
or outside a society, are
ultimately the sources of all
culture change. They can be
ideas or objects.

 Innovation can be
unintentional (an
accumulation of small
changes) or intentional.

The first wheel wasn’t used for
transportation, but invented as a potter’s
wheel and was believed to have existed

around 3500 BC in Mesopotamia. The first
chariot appeared around 3200 BC in

Mesopotamia and was adopted by almost
every civilization.

Cultural Diffusion

Diffusion: the borrowing of one society
of a cultural trait belonging to another
society as a result of contact between
the two.

1) Direct contact (ex: use of paper)

2) Intermediate contact (ex: the
alphabet)

3) Stimulus diffusion (knowledge of a
trait of another culture stimulates the
invention of a local equivalent) The Cherokee syllabic writing system

was created by Sequoya and is a
classic example of stimulus diffusion

Forms of Culture Change

 Acculturation: The process of extensive borrowing of aspects
of culture in the context of superordinate-subordinate
relations between societies. It usually occurs as the result of
external pressure.

 Globalization: the massive flow of goods, people, information,
and capital across huge areas of the earth’s surface.

 Ethnogenesis: the creation of new cultures – usually occurs in
the aftermath of violent events

Revolution

 Revolution is usually the violent
replacement of a society’s rulers.

 Rebellions almost always occur in
state societies where there is a
distinct ruling elite

 As in many revolutions, those who
were urging revolution were
considered “radicals.” But, they can
become cultural heroes.

Sudanese Protests of 2019. Here
a young woman leads protesters
in a chant calling for revolution in

Khartoum, Sudan. Non-violent
protests have lead to the ousting
of the ruler of 30 years, Omar al

Bashir. (photo by Lana H. Haroun)

Revolution Cont.

Conditions that may give rise to rebellion
and revolution:

1. Loss of prestige of established
authority

2. Threat to recent economic
improvement

3. Indecisiveness of government

4. Loss of support of the intellectual
class

The Zapatista Rebel Movement
in Chiapas, Mexico is

comprised of primarily
indigenous people and women
participate in the leadership.

Globalization

 Globalization: the ongoing and substantial spread of goods,
people, information, and capital across wide expanses of the
earth’s surface.

 The process of globalization has resulted in the worldwide
spread of cultural features, particularly in the domain of
economics and international trade.

Features of Globalization

 Cultures have become more commercial, more urban, and
more international.

 People on the move: employment has become more
important, and kinship less important, as people travel to and
work in other countries and return just periodically to their
original homes.

 More cultural uniformity: people are increasingly sharing
behaviors and beliefs with people in other cultures.

 Increase in life expectancy, literacy, and the expansion of the
middle class.

effects of globalization.

Globalization

• Globalization is a process of interaction
and integration among the people,
companies, and governments of
different nations, a process driven by
international trade and investment and
aided by information technology.

• Anthropologists care about this process
has profound effects on the
environment, on culture, on political
systems, on economic development
and prosperity, and on human physical
well-being in societies around the
world.

 Maintain that because of free
trade, local and national
cultures are allowed to extend
beyond geographic and
political boundaries therefore
increases the variety of
products and cultures
available in all nations.

Proponents of Globalizaiton

Critics of Globalization

 Point to the rapid loss of local languages, art, and music as direct
consequence of globalization; local and national cultures have
been ‘crowded out’ by western popular culture as depicted in
music and movies.

 Globalization can lead to negative outcomes, such as increased
wealth inequality, the loss of indigenous culture and land, and
anthropogenic climate change.

Ethnogenesis: The Emergence of New Cultures

 Ethnogenesis is the creation of a new culture.

 It usually occurs in the aftermath of
traumatic events, such as depopulation,
relocation, enslavement, and genocide.

 The Maroons of Jamaica are descended from
people stolen from Africa who fought and
escaped from slavery and established free
communities in the mountainous interior of
Jamaica during the long era of slavery on the
island. They share culture and became
integrated with the Native Taino people.

Queen Nanny, a warrior
leader of the Winward
Maroons, is a national

hero in Jamaica.

Maroons of the Great

Dismal Swamp

 The Great Dismal Swamp
Maroons were freed and
escaped slaves who inhabited
the marshlands of the Great
Dismal Swamp in Virginia and
North Carolina.

 Although conditions were harsh,
research suggests that
thousands lived there between
about 1700 and the 1860s

A late 19th-century depiction of
fugitive slaves in the Great

Dismal Swamp

No Monoculture

 Worldwide diffusion of a culture trait does not mean that it is
incorporated in exactly the same way among societies, and the
spread of certain products and activities through globalization
does not mean that change happens in the same way
everywhere.

 Although we may be more culturally intelligible to one another,
this does not mean that there will be a single global culture in the
future. Local practices are usually maintained and integrated
with newer practices.