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SOCIAL CHANGE
Causes, effects, and . . .
Training Handout
Materialism sans Marx
William Ogburn saw three processes
of social change: innovation, discovery and diffusion.
He saw the main driver of social
change as the technology of a culture but, unlike Marx, did not see it
necessarily as a result of relations of production.
In our description of the six dimensions
of culture, we have put the technological dimension at the bottom as a
foundation.
New technology tends to be less threatening
as might be innovations or introductions in the other five
dimensions.
It is easier to introduce a transistor
radio to an isolated community than to introduce a new language, a new
belief system, a new way of distributing wealth, or new values.
That introduction of a transistor
radio, however, will have considerable repercussions in all six dimensions
of culture, thus social change.
Was agriculture invented or discovered?
Perhaps the most important discovery
or invention in the history of homo sapiens, was the process of controlling
food production, by the domestication of herd animals and planting of seeds
or shoots to reproduce food bearing plants.
Domestication of dogs took place
much earlier, and the dog became another tool for hunters, along with spears
and other hunting weapons.
Dogs perhaps started by hanging around
hunting camps, and a symbiosis developed to their mutual benefit.
The herding of cattle, including
cows sheep and goats, other animals in Asia and the Americas, was a big
jump.
This involved the protection of the
herd animals from predators, which humans could do with their
hunting tools.
Humans had binocular vision, perhaps
developed when their primate ancestors lived in trees, so were better at
judging distance, which cattle could not. This helped them to protect
cattle from predators. Cattle that associated with humans were more likely
to survive and reproduce.
Domestication also involved the controlling
of mating and reproduction, and therefore selective breeding, to emphasise
physical traits that the humans wanted among the cattle.
Perhaps men first domesticated herd animals, but the jury is
still out.
The planting of seeds and shoots
to control the timing and location of food bearing plants, and subsequent
elaboration, adding water and/or fertiliser, removing weeds, inventing
means of storage, all these contributed to mankind’s biggest revolution,
the agrarian surplus.
Was this invented or discovered?
Prior to plant domestication, many
plants reproduced by seeds, which were distributed by wind, water
and animals.
A berry would be eaten, its seeds
passed unchanged through the digestive system of the animal, then being
planted and fertilised in the same operation. Hunters were very observant
of the residual food in faeces (spoor) of animals they tracked.
It is likely that humans
observed this process and thought to control the planting.
This
was most likely done by women, who were already gathering plant products,
while the men were away hunting or herding animals.
There can be a fine
line between two of Ogburn’s processes, innovation and discovery.
When different communities contact
each other, they usually begin sharing or copying each other’s technology.
See
The Incest Taboo.
This is the basis of diffusion.
Sometimes a technique was jealously
guarded by one community, and that often stimulated much curiosity and
coveting in the other community, and its members would go to great lengths
to uncover that technique.
The result was that any innovation
or discovery, if useful, would be passed along from community to community,
thus diffusion.
Once a change in technology is introduced
in a community, then adaptations take place in all six cultural
dimensions
of that community.
Any change that falls behind in adapting
to the first change, in Ogburn’s terms, was
cultural
lag.
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