Cultural Change

Abstract

The concept of culture is inherently linked to the concept of change, as the human ability to create and maintain individual or shared identities depends on the ability to adapt to changing ecological and social environments. While it is generally accepted that triggers for cultural change are manifold and lead to very different developments, there is no consensus on the appraisal of cultural change. Since the eighteenth century, cultural change has been related to the idea of progress in Western thinking, resulting in the formulation of four logical positions towards the direction of cultural change: optimism (from good to better), secondary optimism (from bad to good), pessimism (from good to bad), or secondary pessimism (from bad to worse). From the 1960s, Cultural Studies have stressed cultural change as an opportunity to remove social and cultural deficits, whereas Culture and Development Theory questions the preponderance of Western thinking and encourages the introduction of indigenous, premodern, pluralistic, and participatory forms of culture into the global mainstream. In premodern East Asia, culture was seen as a force to change individuals and groups according to the prevalent Chinese model, which was, however, replaced by the Western model during the nineteenth century. While nowadays slogans such as “hybridization” or “McDonaldization” are used to describe the effects of cultural globalization, methodological and theoretical tools for the analysis of cultural change beneath the tip of the cultural “iceberg” are still lacking.