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Power, Religion,
Art and Cultural Change
Web version
Lolita Nikolova
Reference:
Haviland et al. 2005
(no illustrations)
Individual
Social personality/ Social actor
Household
Work
Associations
Political organizations
Leader/Head vs.
member
Famous vs. nonfamous
Talent vs. not develop
specific talent
Religious organizations
Cultural and other kinds of clubs and
organizations
Sport
Art
Science
etc.
Religion
 Organized belief in the supernatural.
 Fulfill numerous social and
psychological needs.
 No known group of people anywhere on
the face of the earth, at any time over
the past 100,000 years, have been
without religion.
Supernatural Beings
 Major deities (gods and goddesses)
 Ancestral spirits
 Other sorts of spirit beings
Animism
 A belief in spirit beings, other than ancestors,
who are believed to animate all of nature.
 These spirit beings are closer to humans than
gods and goddesses and are concerned with
human activities.
 Animism is typical of peoples who see
themselves as a part of nature rather than
superior to it.
How A Belief in Supernatural
Beings Is Perpetuated
 Through what are interpreted as
manifestations of power.
 Supernatural beings possess attributes
familiar to people.
 Myths serve to rationalize religious
beliefs and practices.
Shamans
 Skilled at contacting and manipulating
supernatural beings and powers through
altered states of consciousness.
 Provides a focal point of attention for society
and can help maintain social control.
 Benefits for the shaman are prestige, wealth,
and an outlet for artistic self-expression.
Rites of Passage
Arnold Van Gennep rites of passage into
the following:
 Rites of separation
 Rites of transition
 Rites of incorporation
Rites of Intensification
 Rituals to mark occasions of crisis in the
life of the group.
 Functions:
 Unite people.
 Allay fear of the crisis.
 Prompt collective action.
Functions of Witchcraft
 Effective way for people to explain away
personal misfortune without having to
shoulder any of the blame themselves.
 Provides an outlet for feelings of
hostility and frustration without
disturbing the norms of the larger group.
Functions of Religion
 Sanctions a wide range of conduct by
providing notions of right and wrong.
 Sets standards for acceptable behavior and
helps perpetuate an existing social order.
 Lifts burden of decision making from
individuals and places responsibility with god.
 Plays a role in maintaining social solidarity.
What Is Art?
 The creative use of the human
imagination to interpret, express, and
enjoy life.
 From the uniquely human ability to use
symbols to give shape and significance
to the physical world for more than just
a utilitarian purpose.
Verbal Arts
 Oral traditions denote a culture’s
unwritten stories, beliefs, and customs.
 Include narrative, drama, poetry,
incantations, proverbs, riddles, and
word games.
3 Categories of Narratives
 Myths - sacred narratives that explain
how the world came to be as it is.
 Legends - stories told as if true that
recount the exploits of heroes.
 Tales are fictional, secular, and
nonhistorical narratives that instruct as
they entertain.
Music
 Study of music in specific cultural
settings has developed into the
specialized field of ethnomusicology.
 Almost everywhere human music is
perceived in terms of a scale.
 Traditional European music is
measured into recurrent patterns of two,
three, and four beats.
Social Functions of Music
 Express a group’s concerns.
 Serves as a powerful way for a social or
ethnic group to assert a distinctive
identity.
 It may be used to advance political,
economic, and social agendas.
Pictorial Art
Three ways to approach the study of art:
1. Aesthetic approach focuses on how
things are depicted.
2. Narrative approach focuses on what
things are depicted.
3. Interpretive approach can reveal the
meaning of another people’s art.
Causes of Cultural Change
 Accidents, including the unexpected
outcome of existing events.
 People’s deliberate attempt to solve
some perceived problem.
 Change may be forced upon one group
in the course of especially intense
contact between two societies.
Mechanisms of Cultural
Change
 Innovation
 Diffusion
 Cultural loss
 Acculturation
Innovation
 The ultimate source of change: some new
practice, tool, or principle.
 Other individuals adopt the innovation, and it
becomes socially shared.
 Primary innovations are chance discoveries
of new principles.
 Secondary innovations are improvements
made by applying known principles.
Acceptance of Innovation
 Depends partly on its perceived
superiority to the method or object it
replaces.
 Also connected with the prestige of the
innovator and recipient groups.
Are Human Practices Always
Adaptive?
 In the U.S. it is not adaptive to
deplete groundwater in regions of
fast-growing populations.
Conditions for Rebellion and
Revolution
1. Loss of prestige of established
authority.
2. Threat to recent economic
improvement.
3. Indecisiveness of government.
Conditions for Rebellion and
Revolution
4. Loss of support of the intellectual
class.
5. A leader or group of leaders with
enough charisma or popular appeal to
mobilize the population against the
establishment.
Applied Anthropology
 Arose as anthropologists sought to
provide colonial administrators with
more understanding of native cultures.
 Later, anthropologists tried to help
indigenous people cope with outside
threats to their interests.
Process of Modernization
4 Subprocesses
 Technological development
 Agricultural development
 Industrialization
 Urbanization
Anthropologists Contribution to the
Study of the Future of Humanity
 Anthropologists see things in context.
 They have a long-term historical
perspective and recognize culture
bound biases.
 Anthropologists are concerned with the
tendency to treat traditional societies as
obsolete when they appear to stand in
the way of “development.”
Multiculturalism
 An policy of mutual respect and tolerance for
cultural differences.
 Ethnic tension, common in pluralistic
societies, sometimes turns violent, leading to
formal separation.
 To manage cultural diversity within such
societies, some countries have adopted
multiculturalism as an official public policy.
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.
Structural power
 The global forces that direct economic and
political institutions and shape public ideas
and values.
 Hard power is backed up by economic and
military force.
 Soft power is ideological persuasion.
 The world’s largest corporations are almost
all based in a small group of wealthy states,
which dominate international trade and
finance organizations.
Globalization and
Corporations
 Globalization provides megaprofits for large
corporations but wreaks havoc in traditional
cultures.
 Globalization is marketed as positive for
everyone, but the poor are becoming poorer
and the rich richer.
 Globalization engenders worldwide
resistance against superpower domination.

For this reason, the emerging world system is
unstable, vulnerable, and unpredictable.
Results of Globalization
 Worldwide and growing structural violence-
physical and/or psychological harm:

Repression
 cultural and environmental destruction
 Poverty
 hunger and obesity
 illness, and premature death
 Caused by exploitative and unjust social,
political, and economical systems.
A Sustainable Future
 Dramatic changes in cultural values and
motivations, as well as in social institutions
and the types of technologies we employ, are
required if humans are going to realize a
sustainable future.
 Shortsighted emphasis on consumerism and
individual self-interest needs to be
abandoned in favor of a more balanced social
and environmental ethic.
Pollution and Over Population
 A direct threat to humanity.
 Western societies have protected their
environment only when a crisis warranted.
 Many of the world’s developing countries
have policies for population growth that
conflict with other policies.
 Even with replacement reproduction, the
population would continue to grow for 50
years.
Questions
 What is religion?
 What are religion’s identifying features?
 What functions does religion serve?
 What is art?
 Why do anthropologists study art?
 What are the functions of the arts?
 Why do cultures change?
 How do cultures change?
 What is modernization?
Questions
 What can anthropologists tell us of the
future?
 What are today’s cultural trends?
 What problems must be solved for
humans to have a viable future?