Processes of Change

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Globalization

Sustainability

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Earth Day

Why Do Cultures Change?

• Much change is unforeseen, unplanned, and undirected.

• Changes in existing values and behavior comes about due to contact with other peoples who introduce new ideas or tools.

• This can involve the massive imposition of foreign ideas and practices through conquest of one group by another.

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.

• Cultural loss is the abandonment of an existing practice or trait, with or without replacement.

• Acculturation is a massive change that comes about due to contact with a more powerful, group.

A McDonald’s in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Businesses as well as people can exemplify cultural diffusion.

Innovation

Cultural Loss

Acculturation

Diffusion• The spread of certain ideas, customs, or practices

from one culture to another.

MIGRATIONS AND CULTURAL DIFFUSION carried the Indo-European protolanguage from the homeland, which the authors place in the Transcaucasus (see Historical Armenia maps), and fragmented it into dialects. Some spread west to Anatolia and Greece, others southwest to Iran and India. Most Western languages stem from an Eastern branch that rounded the Caspian Sea. Contact with Semitic languages in Mesopotamia and with Kartvelian languages in the Caucasus led to the adoption of many foreign words.

Cultural Loss• Abandonment of an existing

practice or trait. Not always a progressive or regressive thing.

• Example: – In ancient times wagons were

used in northern Africa and southwestern Asia, but wheeled vehicles disappeared from Morocco to Afghanistan about 1,500 years ago.

– They were replaced by camels due to their endurance, longevity, ability to ford rivers and traverse rough ground.

– While a wagon required a man for every two animals, one person manage six camels.

Acculturation

Acculturation: the massive culture change that occurs in a society when it experiences intensive firsthand contact with a more powerful society.

Ray-Ban acculturation of a young Yanomami Indian in the Amazon Rainforest.

Aboriginal native with modern hat.

Repressive Change• Ethnocide

– Violent eradication of an ethnic group’s cultural identity; occurs when a dominant society sets out to destroy another society’s cultural heritage.

• Genocide– Extermination of one people by another, in the name of

“progress,” either as a deliberate act or as the accidental outcome of activities carried out by people with little regard for their impact on others.

• Two examples of attempted genocide in the 20th century:

• (1) Hitler’s Germany against Jews and Gypsies in the 1930s and the 1940s.

• (2) Hutus against Tutsis in Rwanda, as in this 1994 massacre.

Tradition & Synercretism• Tradition: In a modernizing society, old cultural practices, which

may oppose new forces of differentiation and integration.

• Syncretism: The creative blending of indigenous and foreign beliefs and practices into new cultural forms.

• When British missionaries pressed Trobriand Islanders to celebrate their yam harvests with a game of cricket rather than traditional “wild” dances, Trobrianders transformed the staid British sport into an event that featured sexual chants and dances between innings.

Rebellion and Revolution

• Rebellion – Organized armed

resistance to an established government or authority in power.

• Revolution– Sudden and radical

change in a society or culture. In the political arena, it refers to the forced overthrow of an old government and establishment of a completely new one.

• Bolivia’s President Evo Morales officially launched an indigenous cultural revitalization movement.

• Mostly poverty-stricken, Bolivian Indians have seen their ancestral traditions repressed, marginalized, or ridiculed during the past five centuries.

Modernization

Subprocesses of Modernization

1. Technological development

2. Agricultural development

3. Industrialization

4. Urbanization

• Modernization: The process of cultural and socioeconomic change, whereby developing societies acquire some of the characteristics of Western industrialized societies.

• In the 1960s, Saami reindeer herders in Scandinavia’s Arctic tundra adopted snowmobiles, convinced they would make herding easier and economically more advantageous. Here, a young Saami man stands beside his tent and snowmobile, searching for his reindeer with binoculars.

Multinational Corporations

Global Corporations

• Their power and wealth, often exceeding that of national governments, has increased dramatically through media expansion.

• Megacorporations have enormous influence on the ideas and behavior of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

• States and corporations compete for scarce natural resources, cheap labor, new commercial markets, and ever-larger profits in a political arena that spans the entire globe.

Overpopulation• In 1750, 1 billion people lived on earth.

• Over the next two centuries our numbers climbed to nearly 2.5 billion.

• Between 1950 and 2000 the world population soared above 6 billion.

• Today, India and China have more than 1 billion inhabitants each.

• Population projections suggest that global population will peak around 2050 at about 9.37 billion people.

Global pollution

• Air pollution is potentially one of the most dangerous human modifications in environmental systems.

• Pollutants such as various oxides of nitrogen or sulfur cause the development of acid precipitation, which damages soil, vegetation, and wildlife.

• Most atmospheric scientists believe that the greenhouse effect is being enhanced by increased carbon dioxide, methane, and other gases produced by industrial and agricultural activities.

Sustainabilitysustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs

http://depts.gpc.edu/~engage/sustainability.htmlSoutheastern Institute for Sustainability @ GPC

http://www.facebook.com/GPCSustainabilitySoutheastern Institute for Sustainability on Facebook

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SustainabilitySustainability at Wikipedia

Earth Day

Earth Day was first observed in San Francisco and other cities on March 21, 1970, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere.

About the same time a separate Earth Day was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in first held on April 22, 1970.

Silent Spring is a book written by Rachel Carson and published by Houghton Mifflin on September 27, 1962. The book is widely credited with helping launch the environmental movement.

• Write a 1 – 2 pages describing how you can help take care of the earth.

Quiz