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The subject of this chapter is probably the major focus of anthropology today: how and why cultures change. Three questions are presented here about culture change. 1) What is the source of a new trait? 2)Why are people motivated to adopt it? and 3) Is the new trait adaptive?
Change is affected in several ways. This chapter explores the mechanisms of discovery and invention, unconscious invention (accidental juxtaposition), intentional innovation, and who adopts inventions. Diffusion is also explored as a means of culture change. There are three patterns of diffusion: direct contact, intermediate contact, and stimulus. Direct contact refers to contact between two groups. An idea or invention is adopted by the neighboring group intermediate contact requires a third party such as a trader An idea or invention is carried from one group to another. Stimulus diffusion is quite different. Just the knowledge of an idea may stimulate a group to invent something similar. One last type of diffusion, acculturation, refers to the borrowing of cultural traits under external pressure. Cultural traits act much like biologically inherited traits. If they are adaptive or at least not maladaptive, they will stay an essential element of the society. In fact, adaptive traits should increase in frequency in a society through time while maladaptive traits should dwindle away. Of course, changes in the environment, both social and physical, can make formerly adaptive traits maladaptive and maladaptive traits adaptive. The final section of this chapter deals with the direction culture change has taken since A.D. 1500. Since then the expansion of Western societies has induced culture change, in some cases forcefully, upon nearly the rest of the world. Japan and China have also been responsible for stimulating culture change. One of the largest changes due to the expansion of Western societies is commercialization. Most societies had never used money nor grew crops for cash. As commercialization takes hold in a society the entire economic base is changed, along with an accompanying alteration in social, political, and even psychological elements of the society.
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