Cultural Diffusion

3 Key excerpts on "Cultural Diffusion"

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  eBook - ePub

  Cultural Anthropology: 101

  • Jack David Eller(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Diffusion refers to the spread of cultural elements between societies and therefore across social boundaries. This presupposes contact between peoples and flow of ideas, practices, objects and individuals between groups. While this process has sometimes been seen as foreign, even destructive, to local culture, it is really nothing more than normal cultural transmission (learning and sharing) except translocally. Neither innovation nor diffusion typically entails the simple automatic acceptance of new cultural elements. Usually, a complex and unpredictable process follows, in which some members of the group may adopt the change, while others do not. Those who adopt it may still modify it to substitute familiar materials or to conform to local tastes and values or to find new uses, applications or meanings for it. When I was traveling in Japan years ago, I discovered Japanized pizza; it is only sensible that Japanese people, who do not have the Western taste for sausage and pepperoni, would top their pizzas with ingredients like seaweed and shrimp. At the same time, people might resist a cultural change—as Americans resist the metric system—because it is too difficult or costly or merely foreign. If culture contact is sustained over a long period of time, and if it is especially asymmetrical (that is, one society is more powerful than another), then acculturation may occur. Whenever contact occurs, culture flows in both directions, but the flow may be highly imbalanced, with one society accepting—voluntarily or involuntarily—more content than the other and being more profoundly changed. During the colonization of North America, European settlers certainly acquired bits of culture from the Native Americans, including knowledge of new plant species and many new words, especially place names like Mississippi and Dakota. Native cultures were more extensively, and often intentionally, changed by this encounter

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  eBook - ePub

  Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition

  • Everett M. Rogers(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Free Press

    (Publisher)

  Compared to other research traditions, anthropology has been more concerned with the transfer of technological innovations from one society to another (as compared to the diffusion of a new idea within a society or system). This emphasis on interCultural Diffusion is consistent with anthropologists’ interest in the concept of culture, their favorite intellectual tool. An early illustration of this type of investigation was Wissler’s (1914, 1923) study of the diffusion of horses from Spanish explorers to American Indian tribes in the West (see Chapter 5), and the spread of corn growing from the American Indians to European settlers. Contemporary studies of interCultural Diffusion evaluate development programs in which Western technologies have been introduced into the developing countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Unlike many development program officials, anthropologists note the importance of indigenous knowledge systems in whether or not technological innovations are accepted.

  In part owing to their early appearance on the diffusion research scene, anthropologists influenced the other diffusion research traditions, particularly early sociology and rural sociology. Other traditions have seldom used participant observation as their data-gathering methodology, but they have carried forward into quantitative research certain of the theoretical leads pioneered by anthropology diffusion scholars, such as the importance of perceived compatibility in explaining an innovation’s rate of adoption. Anthropology is one of the smaller diffusion research traditions today, representing about 4 percent of all diffusion publications (Table 2-1 ).

  Miracle Rice in Bali: The Goddess and the Computer*

  One may have an image of an anthropologist as wearing native dress and a pith helmet and speaking the local dialect fluently. University of Arizona anthropologist Steve Lansing indeed dresses in a traditional Balinese sarong and immerses himself completely in the exotic culture of Bali, the Indonesian island in the South Pacific. Lansing’s research in Bali provides understanding of how the indigenous knowledge system influenced the diffusion of technological innovations, a relationship that even Indonesian government officials did not see. Anthropologists’ in-depth comprehension comes from studying small systems over a lengthy period of time. Professor Lansing used computer techniques in his research on the introduction and consequences of miracle rice varieties in Bali. In order to understand why miracle rice failed in Bali, one must comprehend the religious meaning of the rice irrigation system.

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  eBook - ePub

  Globalization

  The Essentials

  • George Ritzer, Paul Dean(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 7 Global Culture and Cultural Flows

  1. Cultural Differentialism
     1. Civilizations
  2. Cultural Hybridization
     1. Muslim Girl Scouts
     2. Appadurai's “Landscapes”
  3. Cultural Convergence
     1. Cultural Imperialism
        1. Deterritorialization
     2. World Culture
     3. McDonaldization
        1. McDonaldization, Expansionism, and Globalization
        2. Beyond Fast Food
     4. The Globalization of Nothing
        1. Cricket: Local, Glocal, or Grobal?
  4. Chapter Summary

  Because much of it exists in the form of ideas, words, images, musical sounds, and so on, culture tends to flow comparatively easily throughout the world. In fact, that flow is becoming easier, because culture exists increasingly in digitized forms. Thus, the Internet permits global downloading and sharing of digitized cultural forms such as movies, videos, music, books, newspapers, photos, memes, and so on. Further, those who see themselves as part of the same culture can maintain contact with one another through email, social media, or via virtual face‐to‐face contact on Skype, Facetime, or other videochats. They can also remain immersed within the culture in which they exist and/or from which they come by, for example, reading online newspapers from home. While the global flow of digital culture is increasingly easy, the fact is that there are still barriers to it – especially, for many, a lack of access to the Internet, particularly in the South.

  While culture does flow comparatively easily across the globe, not all cultures and forms of culture flow with the same ease or at the same rate. For one thing, the cultures of the world's most powerful societies (most notably the United States) flow much more readily than those of relatively weak and marginal societies. Similarly, some types of culture (e.g. pop music) move quickly and easily around the globe, while others (e.g. innovative theories in the social sciences) move in slow motion and may never make it to many parts of the world.

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