Studies in Culture Contact

Studies in Culture Contact
Author: James G. Cusick
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2015-03-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0809334097

People have long been fascinated about times in human history when different cultures and societies first came into contact with each other, how they reacted to that contact, and why it sometimes occurred peacefully and at other times was violent or catastrophic. Studies in Culture Contact: Interaction, Culture Change, and Archaeology, edited by James G. Cusick,seeks to define the role of culture contact in human history, to identify issues in the study of culture contact in archaeology, and to provide a critical overview of the major theoretical approaches to the study of culture and contact. In this collection of essays, anthropologists and archaeologists working in Europe and the Americas consider three forms of culture contact—colonization, cultural entanglement, and symmetrical exchange. Part I provides a critical overview of theoretical approaches to the study of culture contact, offering assessments of older concepts in anthropology, such as acculturation, as well as more recently formed concepts, including world systems and center-periphery models of contact. Part II contains eleven case studies of specific contact situations and their relationships to the archaeological record, with times and places as varied as pre- and post-Hispanic Mexico, Iron Age France, Jamaican sugar plantations, European provinces in the Roman Empire, and the missions of Spanish Florida. Studies in Culture Contact provides an extensive review of the history of culture contact in anthropological studies and develops a broad framework for studying culture contact’s role, moving beyond a simple formulation of contact and change to a more complex understanding of the amalgam of change and continuity in contact situations.

Making Culture, Changing Society

Making Culture, Changing Society
Author: Tony Bennett
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2013-09-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1136596178

Making Culture, Changing Society proposes a challenging new account of the relations between culture and society focused on how particular forms of cultural knowledge and expertise work on, order and transform society. Examining these forms of culture’s action on the social as aspects of a historically distinctive ensemble of cultural institutions, it considers the diverse ways in which culture has been produced and mobilised as a resource for governing populations. These concerns are illustrated in detailed case studies of how anthropological conceptions of the relations between race and culture have shaped – and been shaped by – the relationships between museums, fieldwork and governmental programmes in early twentieth-century France and Australia. These are complemented by a closely argued account of the relations between aesthetics and governance that, in contrast to conventional approaches, interprets the historical emergence of the autonomy of the aesthetic as vastly expanding the range of art’s social uses. In pursuing these concerns, particular attention is given to the role that the cultural disciplines have played in making up and distributing the freedoms through which modern forms of liberal government operate. An examination of the place that has been accorded habit as a route into the regulation of conduct within liberal social, cultural and political thought brings these questions into sharp focus. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, museum and heritage studies, history, art history and cultural policy studies.

The Rise and Fall of Culture History

The Rise and Fall of Culture History
Author: R. Lee Lyman
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 278
Release: 2007-07-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0585304521

This volume presents an insightful critical analysis of the culture history approach to Americanist anthropology. Reasons for the acceptance and incorporation of important concepts, as well as the paradigm's strengths and weaknesses, are discussed in detail. The framework for this analysis is founded on the contrast between two metaphysics used by evolutionary biologists in discussing their own discipline: materialistic/populational thinking and essentialistic/typological thinking. Employing this framework, the authors show not only why the culture history paradigm lost favor in the 1960s, but also which of its aspects need to be retained if archaeology is ever to produce a viable theory of culture change.

Cultural Change in Modern World History

Cultural Change in Modern World History
Author: Peter N. Stearns
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2018-12-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350054321

In this innovative textbook, leading world historian Peter Stearns analyses key examples of culture change from around the world, highlighting what culture change involves and how it can be explained and assessed, both historically and in the contemporary world. Culture change is one of the most interesting and significant features of human society, but until now there has been no book for the classroom which looks explicitly at this phenomenon. Cultural Change in Modern World History covers different kinds and levels of culture change since 1500 – from colonial culture contact in British India to modernization in Meiji Japan and changing attitudes towards gay marriage in the past decade – considering how we should define culture change, how to deal with causation and how to evaluate continuities and consequences. Stearns addresses fundamental questions: why do groups of people change their beliefs and values, and what happens when they do? Conversely, why do some groups resist culture change, and how do some manage to combine novel and more traditional cultural components? Figuring out how better to understand why groups or societies change their minds – or refuse to do so – provides a crucial perspective on human behaviors and values. As the first book to explore this important question, Cultural Change in Modern World History is a ground-breaking text for students of world history, cultural history and anthropology.

Revitalizations and Mazeways

Revitalizations and Mazeways
Author: Anthony F. C. Wallace
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2003
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780803247925

"In sixteen landmark essays Anthony F. C. Wallace illuminates the interconnections between cognition and culture and the formative social conditions of the modern world. Probing the psychological reality (or realities) of culture, Wallace offers incisive analyses of the cognitive foundations of kinship terms and the ability of cultures, past and present, to process complexity. He also examines whether beavers have a culture and reveals how the mazeway of modern American culture equips and enables a routine drive to work. In the volume’s second section, Wallace interrogates the consequences of revolutionary changes in labor, technology, and society in the modern world. A series of essays details the multifaceted, pervasive impact of the Industrial Revolution on the coal-mining communities of Rockdale and Saint Clair, Pennsylvania. He also considers the implications of the disaster-prone coal-mining industry for risky technological enterprises today, such as nuclear power plants. An in-depth comparison between the administrative structures of a modern university and Iroquois-Seneca leadership rounds out this volume."--pub. description.

Ancient Society

Ancient Society
Author: Lewis Henry Morgan
Publisher:
Total Pages: 598
Release: 1909
Genre: Anthropology
ISBN:

Culture Change

Culture Change
Author: Felix Maxwell Keesing
Publisher:
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1953
Genre: Anthropology
ISBN:

The Rise of Anthropological Theory

The Rise of Anthropological Theory
Author: Marvin Harris
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 824
Release: 2001
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780759101333

The best known, most often cited history of anthropological theory is finally available in paperback! First published in 1968, Harris's book has been cited in over 1,000 works and is one of the key documents explaining cultural materialism, the theory associated with Harris's work. This updated edition included the complete 1968 text plus a new introduction by Maxine Margolis, which discusses the impact of the book and highlights some of the major trends in anthropological theory since its original publication. RAT, as it is affectionately known to three decades of graduate students, comprehensively traces the history of anthropology and anthropological theory, culminating in a strong argument for the use of a scientific, behaviorally-based, etic approach to the understanding of human culture known as cultural materialism. Despite its popularity and influence on anthropological thinking, RAT has never been available in paperback_until now. It is an essential volume for the library of all anthropologists, their graduate students, and other theorists in the social sciences.

The Acceleration of Cultural Change

The Acceleration of Cultural Change
Author: R. Alexander Bentley
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 176
Release: 2017-08-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0262036959

How culture evolves through algorithms rather than knowledge inherited from ancestors. From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals—the drive for “food and sex”—explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O'Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. Today, we are following social media bots as much as we are learning from our ancestors. We are radically changing the way culture evolves. Bentley and O'Brien describe how the transmission of culture has become vast and instantaneous across an Internet of people and devices, after millennia of local ancestral knowledge that evolved slowly. Long-evolved cultural knowledge is aggressively discounted by online algorithms, which prioritize popularity and recency. If children are learning more from Minecraft than from tradition, this is a profound shift in cultural evolution. Bentley and O'Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.