Cultural variation and mechanisms of culture change

HIV Prevention

Cultural Change

Typically, culture is defined as a unique way of life that is both shared and developed by a group of people that is passed down from generation to generation and provides a framework that organizes society. While there are differing cultural formations, and these formations depend on a number of complex elements, there are also several similarities that allow a greater "macro" human culture, and various levels of understanding between cultures that share a number of characteristics that make us human. Among these are language, regional differences and adaptions to the environment, religious or spiritual beliefs, and political systems. Indeed, not all cultural groups share all elements of culture; and in larger cultural groups there are also smaller, micro-groups. Individuals may be part of more than one cultural group, and may also separate themselves based on either cultural similarities as well as cultural differences (Ferraro, 2008). Indeed, a detailed understanding of cultural variation is necessary to understand cultural change.

Culture, in fact, is a learned set of values and behaviors that is communicated and passed down through parents, peers, the schools or learning environment, as well as other aspects of society that individuals interact regularly. It is reinforced with positive responses and discouraged with negative responses. Because of this pedagogy, it is possible for a person to communicate multiculturally, and even adapt to different cultures and cultural change. Taking a cultural bias for learning can be done through the psychological, sociological, anthropological, linguistically, political, economic, and historical points-of-view; each element of which then combines to form a synergistic whole (Gudykunst, ed., 2003).

One of the issues that helps us understand cultural change and development is to establish a basic difference between dominant and subdominant cultures. The uneven distribution of advantages, material possessions and rewards, opportunities and power within society, is all do to stratification of differences within a culture. Ethic stratification is a system of structured inequality that allows individuals to receive differing amounts of societal resources based on a particular ethnic difference. Thus, levels of power are determined according to cultural differences that have been subscribed and dominated based on ethnic (usually physical or religious) differences. Ranks within culture are central to our understanding of cultural variation because the describe the actual fundamental issues that often result in cultural change. Typically, this change occurs because the dominant group takes on the higher rank, with lower ranked groups taking a subordinate position -- resulting in ethnocentrism and eventually the desire of the subdominant group to overthrow, integrate into, or change the position and levels -- causing a deep chasm and eventually cultural change (Harrison and Kagan, eds., 2006).