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Seeing Anthropology
Cultural Anthropology through Film
4th edition (abridged)
by Karl G. Heider
Chapter 13
Culture Change
Cultures change. All cultures change all the time. But different aspects of cultures change at different rates. And some
aspects of cultures can be remarkably stable over long periods of time. A culture is a complex mix of old and new. The
meal in the Dani boys' initiation ceremony is made up of wild foods that once were gathered but now are rarely if ever
eaten. Long medieval academic gowns and hoods, which were everyday wear in early European universities, can be
seen today in American colleges at graduation ceremonies, serving as a silent link to the past.
In the previous chapters, we often looked at cultures as still photographs that capture rich context at one moment in
time. We now shift to thinking of culture as a movie film or videotape that allows us to see change. We have discussed
the fact that past ethnographies have been written in the mode of the ethnographic present, that moment when the
ethnographer was doing fieldwork for a few months or a year or two, or some reconstructed time in the past before
change began. The fine analysis of action and interaction that this form permits is very valuable. Nevertheless, the model
of a culture as a sort of engine chugging along in a dynamic but essentially unvarying equilibrium has its limits. We need
another model, that of culture as constantly changing, always somewhat out of equilibrium, always adapting.
Some special terms have been used for this perspective that focuses on change. Studies of acculturation examine
cultural changes that resulted from extended, direct contact between two or more previously autonomous groups. These
types of studies were popular in the mid-20th century, often looking at the adjustments made by native North American
cultures to the overwhelming Anglo-American impact. Ethnohistory is another approach that combines written historical
records with oral history to achieve narration over time. More and more, cultural anthropologists are appreciating the
importance of gaining this sort of perspective—a lesson that has long been taught by both historians and archaeologists.
FORCES OF CHANGE
For years, anthropologists assumed that many of the apparently isolated cultures around the world remained fairly
stable, experiencing some change, but not as a result of contact with the outside world. The belief was that these
"isolated" societies did not trade with the outside world or come into direct contact with it until the forces of colonialism,
modernization, and globalization intruded on their worlds. Now, that assumption is being questioned. It seems more likely
that the cultures of the world were tied into regional systems of trade, and even global systems, long before
anthropologists thought they were. Now, of course, everyone agrees that there are no isolated cultures.
Change Due to Contact through Trade
The Ju/'hoansi, for example, had used iron tools and arrow points and pottery traded from Bantu neighbors for some
time before Ju/'hoansi became laborers on Bantu farms and the groups started to intermarry (Ju/'hoan women marrying
Bantu husbands), as they have done for decades now (Draper, 1992). Richard Lee points out, "Such trade is noted in
Ju/'hoansi oral histories in which desert products such as furs and ivory were exchanged for iron, (later) tobacco, and
possibly agricultural products" (Lee, 1993:20).
The large Dani population in the Grand Valley is based on intensive sweet potato horticulture, but the sweet potato is a
South American plant that was probably introduced in the last few hundred years. By the 20th century, all of the New
Guinea Highlands were populated, and these cultures were part of a vast trading network. It was quite unorganized, but it
connected people from one village to the next, from one valley to the next. By a series of these modest links, even the
most isolated settlements had somehow gotten cowries and other ocean shells that moved up from the coast to the most
remote mountain valley.
Diffusion refers to the spread of cultural items from one culture to another, often for great distances. When material
objects move from one culture to another, as the sweet potato spread from South America, reaching as far as the New
Guinea Highlands, or tobacco from the New World reached Europe, there may be little alteration, and things move fairly
intact. However, symbolic culture, such as language, beliefs, ritual, and games, often changes in the transmission
process. Extreme instances of this trend are called stimulus diffusion, in which the ideas from one culture have
triggered similar but drastically different versions in another culture. A classic case of stimulus diffusion is the alphabet
devised in 1821 by the Cherokee leader Sequoia. Although he could not read English, he understood the principle of
writing and had seen English letters. His alphabet used some letters from English (but with different sound values)
together with some new letters and served the Cherokee well. There were actually 86 characters, some standing for
single sounds and some for syllables.
The realm of play and sport offers other examples of cultural diffusion, in which cultures reshape games to conform to
cultural norms and patterns. We have seen what happened when, in the 19th century, Japan accepted the American
game of baseball, but on its own terms. The rules stayed the same, but the institutional structure of the ball clubs as well
as the strategy of play changed to reflect the greater Japanese cultural emphasis on groups in contrast to the American
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cultural emphasis on individualism. The film Trobriand Cricket reveals how the Trobriand Islanders reshaped the staid
British game of cricket to a more Trobriand form of competition.
Modernization is a term commonly used to label culture change, particularly when directing attention to (1) the way in
which that change is driven by forces of the global political economy and (2) the state of modernity, or how the newly
emerging forms more closely resemble Western forms ("Western" meaning the European Community, North America,
and perhaps Japan). In this sense, the term modernity is profoundly ethnocentric. It is also very broad, for it covers the
introduction of plastic buckets to the Trobriand Islanders, the establishment of free elections and liberal democracy in
Indonesia, the outlawing of female genital mutilation in parts of Africa, and the use of snowmobiles by Inuit and Lapps.
Modernization and modernity are not applied to all instances of culture change. Some sorts of culture change, which
do not meet the second requirement mentioned earlier, would not be considered modernization. Revitalization
movements—for example, the militant Islamic revolutions in Iran or the Taliban in Afghanistan—would usually be
considered retrograde, not modern.
Innovation: The Internal Dynamics of Change
There is so much interaction between cultures and so few really isolated cultures that purely internal change that is
unaffected by any outside influences—that is, innovation—is difficult to demonstrate. In theory, it should happen,
however. The old party game "Rumor" is a model. Someone whispers a sentence to someone else, who passes it on to
the next person. After a dozen such transfers, the message turns out to have been significantly altered without any
outside influence. It stands to reason that as cultural ideas are passed from parent to child, from older sibling to younger,
alterations happen. Also, factors such as boredom, human ingenuity, and children's desire to do things differently than
their parents did would seem likely to produce change over time in even the most isolated culture. The problem is, not
surprisingly, that we know little about any extremely isolated cultures. There seems to be good evidence that the Dani in
the area where I worked had given up cannibalism in the 1930s, at a time when they had no contact with outsiders. But
we can only speculate about the dynamics of that cultural change.
Change in Language
Working at a much more global and scientific level, some anthropological linguists have studied change in languages.
In the 1950s they suggested that all human languages alter their base vocabulary at the same rate over the centuries.
According to this assumption, they could measure the differences between the base vocabulary of two related languages
and determine the time when the two languages split apart. This approach, called glottochronology or lexicostatistics,
offers some particularly good examples of internally generated change that can be distinguished from the more obvious
loan words and other external borrowings.
The working assumption was that about 19% of the base vocabulary—the words for the most common things and
events—would be lost in the course of 1,000 years. More importantly, these words would be lost at random, without
reference to their importance. Thus, if the speakers of Language A split, with some moving away from the rest, the
language of each group would continue changing but in different ways. After 1,000 years, each language, A1 and A2,
would retain only about 81% of the words of the original language A. However, because they had been changing in
different directions, there would be even fewer shared words between Language A1 and Language A2. If each had only
81% of the original language, and if both had been changing at the same rate, then the percentage of words that both had
in common would be 81% of 81%, or 66%.
There is good evidence for a standard, internal change not only in the vocabularies of languages but also in sounds.
There seems to be a constant rate of sound change across languages (Labov, 1994:603).
DOING ANTHROPOLOGY
Nailing Down Language Change
To get a sense of how quickly language is changing, interview someone ten years older or ten years younger than
yourself. Try, with that person's help, to find as many words as possible that one of you—but not the other—uses, knows,
or has heard.
Revitalization Movements
A particularly dramatic sort of culture change, which has attracted much anthropological attention, has been labeled
revitalization movements by Anthony F. C. Wallace and defined as "any conscious, organized effort by members of a
society to construct a more satisfying culture" (1966:30).
Particular variations on the theme of revitalization have been called cargo cults (in which the emphasis is on material
goods that will magically appear), messianic movements (in which a leader is designated as a savior), millenarian
movements (in which a new era is anticipated in which the poor and disadvantaged will be saved), nativistic or
revivalistic movements (in which the traditions of the past are restored), and new religions. These movements often are
religious and often incorporate magical means. A frequent theme is a restoration of some real or imagined but certainly
more satisfactory cultural state of the past.
Wallace speculated that
all religions and religious productions, such as myths and rituals, come into existence as parts of the program or code of religious revitalization
movements. ... Such a line of thought leads to the view that religious belief and practice always originate in situations of social and cultural
stress and are, in fact, an effort on the part of the stress-laden to construct systems of dogma, myth, and ritual which are internally coherent as
well as true descriptions of a world system and which thus will serve as guides to efficient action. (Wallace, 1966:30)
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Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist party used similar thinking to gain power in Germany in the late 1920s and early
1930s, certainly a time of "increased personal stress" and "cultural distortion," to use Wallace's terms. The Nazis
deliberately espoused a return to an idealized Germanic cultural past, a basically medieval time when Germanic culture
was supposedly noble and the German race was pure. The attempts to purify German culture now seem slightly ludicrous,
but the Holocaust, which was central to Germany's attempt to recreate a pure Aryan race, still casts its shadow of horror.
TRANSNATIONALISM
Anthropology has long looked at the diffusion of objects, games, religions, or the like as they move from one culture to
another and as they, in their transits, are transformed. Recently, the phenomenon of transnationalism, as embodied in
transmigrants, has attracted much attention. "Transmigrants are immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and
constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more
than one nation-state" (Glick Schiller et al., 1995:48; see also Glick Schiller et al., 1992).
The pattern of immigrants who left their homes behind to seek a new life in another valley or continent is being
supplemented by a new pattern of cosmopolitan transnationals who retain their cultural ties to more than one homeland.
This picture is not a temporary situation that will go away by itself or that can be removed by turning up the heat under
some metaphorical national melting pot. In 1995, in the Dani compound where I lived for two years in the early 1960s, I
met two men whom I had known as boys. They told of being on a six-month dance tour of the United States, where they
shook hands with President George H. W. Bush. Now they are back in the old neighborhood, but surely they have taken
the first giant step toward transnationalism.
SEEING ANTHROPOLOGY
Trobriand Cricket: An Ingenious Response to Colonialism
Filmmaker and anthropologist: Jerry W Leach
Cultures are never totally consistent in the sense that all elements neatly mesh. But we can recognize a certain trend
toward cultural consistency in the acceptance or rejection of traits. In other words, change is not completely random;
the shape of a culture will have some effect on what is accepted or rejected or how borrowed traits are reshaped to match
the culture. In some cases, cultural borrowing is voluntary, and it is the borrowed trait that changes more than the culture
doing the borrowing. The complex interaction between an introduced trait and the local culture is well demonstrated in
Trobriand Cricket, in which we see how the Trobrianders chose to adapt the game of cricket to their culture and play it in
their way.
As the subtitle of the film proclaims, Trobriand Cricket is "An Ingenious Response to Colonialism." The British
introduced cricket to many of their colonies, and Jamaicans, Indians, and Pakistanis are among the world's best
cricketers today. In the Trobriand Islands, cricket escaped from its English mold. In the hands of the Trobrianders, it was
transformed dramatically to become an enterprise that reflects and supports Trobriand culture, not transplanted English
culture.
The short clip is taken from the very beginning of the film. In the opening shots, young men wearing little clothing, but
body paint, face paint, and feathers, play a game. An English audience recognizes it immediately as cricket, but as a most
exotic form of cricket. A short background sequence on English cricket emphasizes how it has changed over the years,
even in England. Next, a history of cricket in the Trobriands explains how missionaries introduced it in 1903 but the sport
was eventually taken over by the Trobrianders. They changed it into their own style, incorporating traditional Trobriand
elements of war, magic, erotic display and courtship, and ritual competitive feasting and gift exchange.
Setup Questions
1. Pay attention to the first shots. They are intended to shock an English audience. Why?
2. How much has English cricket itself changed over the years?
3. How does English cricket reflect English cultural values?
4. What effects do the team dances have?
5. What is the emotional tone of these events?
CHAPTER SUMMARY
 Cultures are always in flux, so it is necessary to describe and account for change even though it is difficult
to appreciate at any one particular moment.
 To some extent, change is the result of internal forces, the consequence of individual variation (because
cultures are never totally shared), and the outcome of adventurous and imaginative individuals.
 No culture is in complete equilibrium.
 Studies of languages, especially their lexicons, suggest a measurable and constant rate of change.
 No cultures are truly isolated, and much culture change results from interaction between cultures. Trade,
intermarriage, refugees, and war all facilitate the exchange of objects and ideas.
 Diffusion is the spread of cultural ideas and objects from one culture to another. Stimulus diffusion is the
term used to describe instances when one cultural trait inspires another culture to emulate it with more or
less accurate reproduction.
 The many forms of revitalization movements are attempts—often quite drastic—to create new cultures or
to restore old cultures, usually in response to major cultural stress.
 Transnationalism is the result of recent immigrations (usually to Europe or North America) by people who
still maintain close ties to their culture and country of origin. A whole new state of biculturalism is emerging.
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KEY TERMS
acculturation
cultural consistency
diffusion
ethnohistory
glottochronology
innovation
intellectual property
lexicostatistics
messianic movement
millenarian movement
modernity
modernization
nativistic movement
revitalization movement
revivalistic movement
stimulus diffusion
transnationalism
QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT
1. Many cultural movements (especially religiously oriented ones) that we casually call "conservative" or
"fundamentalist" are, in fact, radical agents of revitalization, or change. Is this a paradox?
2. Why is soccer the most popular game in the world, but cricket almost totally limited to the cultures of the
former British empire? What about baseball?
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