3.6.1 Paradox 1: Culture Is Continuous, but It Changes

Cultural materials, practices, and ideas are handed down from older to younger members of a culture, giving some degree of continuity to culture over time. However, many factors can intervene in this process of cultural reproduction to subtly alter or dramatically change the elements and aggregates of culture. In some contexts, younger people either fail to precisely learn the culture of their elders or deliberately reject those cultural lessons. Through travel and trade, people learn about other ways of doing things, and they take these ideas back to their own cultures, trying them out to see how they might improve their own ways of life. Accidents and deliberate experimentation introduce new possibilities. People may simply get tired of doing things one way over and over and thrill at some refreshing style or craze.

We can identify four main mechanisms of cultural change. These four mechanisms overlap and interact as the history of a culture unfolds over time. Diffusion is the movement of an element of culture from one society to another, often through migration or trade. Friction occurs when two or more elements of culture come into conflict, resulting in alteration or replacement of those elements. Innovation is the slight alteration of an existing element of culture, such as a new style of dress or dance. Invention is the independent creation of a new element of culture, such as a new technology, religion, or political form.

In the examples at the beginning of this section, building techniques and ideals move along with human migration to new settings, where they must be altered to fit the materials and challenges of the new environment. In colonial and neocolonial contexts, dominant groups may introduce the techniques and ideals of their own homelands as “superior” even if they don’t work very well in the environments of colonial conquest.

Some cultural inventions are so successful that they transform the whole way of life of a people. Consider the information technologies that have reshaped American life since the 1970s, such as computers, the Internet, and cell phones. These tools have changed the ways Americans communicate, work, learn, shop, navigate, and entertain themselves. Diffusing through trade, these inventions have transformed cultures all over the world in diverse ways. In many societies, modes of interacting through communication technologies come into conflict with norms for interacting face-to-face, creating friction between the two realms. Where the movements, behavior, and social relationships of young women are tightly controlled, for instance, mobile phones allow women to secretly make new friends, explore new topics of conversation, and engage in behavior their elders might not sanction.

Sometimes the forces of innovation and invention catch on, and sometimes they don’t. In the 1970s, Ralph Hasty, a disc jockey from southwest Missouri, moved to Northern California, where he lived and worked for many years. There, he learned about a new technology for building houses in the form of geodesic domes, structures comprising intersecting polygons assembled from prefabricated kits. In late 1980s, he returned to live in southwest Missouri, bringing with him this enthusiasm for geodesic construction. He ordered a kit and built a geodesic dome house on a piece of rural land, intending to sell the house and use the profits to build more of these geodesic wonders. Well, things did not exactly go to plan. The locals apparently found the house far too weird to suit their notion of home. From the outside, the dome looked like some sort of futuristic greenhouse or zoo habitat. On the inside, conventional furniture did not fit in the oddly shaped rooms of the dome. Once finished, the geodesic home sat on the market for a number of months, and eventually, he had to sell it at a loss. It must be mentioned that Ralph Hasty, geodesic innovator, continued to live in a conventional rectangular house for the rest of his life.