Imagine a place in the mountains of West Virginia. And imagine another place in the same mountains, and that there is only one way to get from the one place to the other. You will need to travel on a number of different roads, so there are turns to be made, and the roads are twisty as they wind around the mountains. But still -- there is only one path from where you are from where you want to be. Since you only have one option, the path is complicated, but it is not complex.
Now imagine yourself at the Inner Harbor in Baltimore, and assume that you want to be in Towson. There are literally thousands of ways to get to Towson. In fact, you can start out in any direction and still get there. This surplus of options makes the path to Towson complex. Even if the particular route that you choose is simple, the collection of possible ways to get there is still complex.
If 1000 people tried to drive from the first place to the second in West Virginia, they would have to travel in a line. All of their paths taken together would be easy to describe. If 1000 people started at the Inner Harbor and headed for Towson, they would disperse according to whatever needs and desires were driving them. The totality of their combined paths would be much harder to describe.
Complexity arises in situations where there are many choices to be made, and it produces behaviors that are hard to predict and difficult to describe.
Psychology studies individual behavior. If a group of people are doing something, then from the point of view of psychology, the group's behavior must be described in terms of what the individuals thinking and doing.
Sociology studies group behavior. If an individual is doing something, then from the point of view of sociology, the person's behavior must be determined by social forces or goals.
Neither of these seems able to tell the entire story. But no one has been able to synthesize them into a theory that does.
The human brain is extremely complex. There are billions of nerve pathways, and we don't know how many different paths that nerve impulses can take. In addition there are chemical reactions, blood flow for nutrition, and other processes that affect how we think.
Perhaps strangely, individual human behavior is simpler than brain behavior. This is because people think more than they act. For example, suppose you are about to speak. Many thoughts may race through your mind, but in the end you have to choose one set of words and say them out loud. Whatever you say will be less complex that what you were thinking because it simplifies your thoughts into words.
Similarly, the relationships and communications within a group are more complex that the actions that the group takes. Democratic government is a good example of this. Whatever the people who make up the society might say to one another before a decision is made, the government action will be simpler than the discussion that preceded it.
Clearly "culture" is about human beings, but is it created by societies or by individuals?
Consider an example:
Millions of people spoke today on their cell phones. By and large their words have vanished - millions of individual connections have served their purposes and expired. On the other hand, the cell phones themselves still exist.
Each individual had something in mind when they made their phone calls. As far as I know, there is no social theory that can explain the timing and contents of their calls. A phone call is a psychological act.
The words the people said were not recorded and are lost forever. Mostly, they were not unusual or really worth even trying to save. But the relationships the words established and maintained do last, and it is these interactions that constitute social behavior. At the moment, the best we can do is to describe this statistically: a certain percentage of people use cell phones, they use them a certain percentage of the time, and so on. But clearly this is a social phenomenon.
The cell phones themselves are artifacts. They are the physical embodiment of this complex social behavior that we can't measure and can barely describe. And they beg a series of questions. Why were cell phones invented? Why are they suddenly everywhere? Are they important, or a passing fad? What is going on here?
Now ... which or what combination of these situations constitutes "culture"?
My own answer would be that the word "culture" is an intellectual simplification. It stands for something that we don't understand, namely, how all of the individuals, making their own choices, generate the common social patterns that are so easy to see. Something very, very complex is going on, and "culture" is the linguistic symbol we use to refer to it while we try to figure it out.
So, be careful - the word "culture" is loaded with connotations and means different things to different people in different contexts. It is a nexus of disagreement.
"Colonization" originally meant "the subjugation of one group of people by another group for the purpose of theft." It turned out, however, that colonization was generally followed by revolution, often involving war, with the result that the colonies were freed, one way or another, to pursue their own ends.
"Colonization" then came to mean "imposition of one group's cultural artifacts on another group." Thus, for example, the fact that many Indians speak English is taken to be an act of colonization ... rather than a side effect of "colonization" in the original sense. In the context of this usage, you can say that "Coca Cola is colonizing the world" -- the assertion being that Coke is conquering territory and driving out native species of drinks.
But this leads to a problem. What if they people involved prefer the newer artifact? As an example, consider the changes in clothing that followed the Feminist Movement of the 1960s. In 1950 dresses were the only acceptable clothing for women who appeared in public. After gender reconstruction, women were free to wear many different kinds of clothing (a weird exception being beach attire, where women may not go topless - a distinction that does not apply to men, who apparently have no "tops.") The basic male pattern -- shirt, pants, shoes -- was quickly adapted to women's tastes. A "suit" also appeared for business use (though women decided they did not want to wear the "tie").
On the one hand you can argue that men's clothing styles colonized women's styles, driving out dresses and skirts and bringing in pants and suits, but not ties. On the other hand you can argue that individual women had personal reasons for choosing to wear these clothes, and that their actions actually show a new independence. (Note that since the new rules gave women many more choices in clothing than they had previously, American society became more complex as a result.)
I tend to agree with the later view, and this means that to me "colonization" means "forcing people to do something that they don't want to do". This does not mean that colonization does not exist - when the Romans conquered Gaul, built roads and cities and imposed their own customs and language, they did it by force, which made it colonization. However, when the Romans adopted many elements of Greek culture and made them their own, the Greeks were not colonizing the Romans.
Thus, the nearly global acceptance of "American" dress -- t-shirt, jeans, athletic shoes -- has more to do with comfort, price and durability than it does with an "American cultural empire." But, by my definition, you can argue that the American presence in Iraq today is an attempt at colonization ... you can also argue that it is not - it all depends on what the people of Iraq actually want.
Recently, there has been a global surge in these cultural adoptions: American clothing, Jamaican music, Japanese sushi, Italian fashion. And, there are a number that really can't be tied to any nation or ethnic group: cell phones, email, small automobiles, digital cameras. Since we can't call them "colonization" any more, we need a new term.
This process does involve millions of individual interactions ... and it also involves advertising, film, television and other global media. It works on a global scale now, so I guess "transculturation" is as good a name as any ... though I'm most familiar with it as "cultural diffusion."
To a large extent this global cultural diffusion has been technological, and since the technologies were largely developed in Europe and the U.S., the changes were at first described as "Westernization." However, Japan, China and India have entered the picture in terms of technology, and in terms of easily transported artifacts (such as food and music, for example) there has been a flow in all directions.
However, while there appears to be a general "mixing" of cultural artifacts on a global scale, it seems to occur first by means of communications technologies, and secondly by interpersonal communication. Thus, areas of the globe that lack the technological infrastructures have not been much affected.
On the one hand, global cultural diffusion seems to provide people with more options: new foods, new clothing, new art forms, new ideas. This would suggest that the world is becoming more complex. On the other hand, some of what appear at first to be options turn out to be constraints. For example, if McDonald's comes to town, it would seem to offer an additional option. But if so many people eat at McDonald's that other food services go out of business, then options are reduced.
People seem to make material choices based on what they perceive to be their own good. So, for example, jeans have become a nearly universal item of apparel, not because of any advertising campaign or marketing strategy, but because people find them relatively inexpensive and useful.
We know much less about how people make intellectual and entertainment choices. For example, reggae, a music invented in Jamaica, quickly swept the globe, again, with little in the way of advertising or marketing. But we have no way of measuring the "utility" of music.
Cultural artifacts can combine in startling new ways. For example, except perhaps for "barbecue," there is no traditional "American" method of cooking. American cuisine borrows from many traditions and mixes and combines these to form many new cuisines. Some of these will survive, others will not. This sort of "Darwinian" view of cultural diffusion suggests that the upwelling of new cultural forms may never stop.
Which brings me to the final point. If people are making personal decisions to adopt new ideas, goods and procedures, then they are not being colonized, they are opting for what they see as a better way of life. It's possible that this way of life lets other, older, ways of life die out. But death is part of the pattern, too. Change is part of the human condition.
As a final example, consider WalMart, a company that sells retail goods. WalMart's strategy is fairly simple: they identify the most popular, fastest selling goods, and then, by buying from suppliers in great volume, they arrange to sell those goods at the lowest cost.
Retail sales operations that do not use this approach have to sell the most popular goods at a higher price because this helps cover the cost of their inventories, which include many less popular items. If shoppers buy most of their goods at WalMart and only go to other stores occasionally to buy specialty items, the other stores lose a lot of business. Some of them close, and some of them switch to only selling specialty items. In any case, their are fewer options and the culture gets simpler.
But - the WalMart phenomenon is happening at the same time Internet shopping is coming of age (and in fact WalMart's success is based on a networked inventory and purchasing system). The Internet favors specialty shops, and there are thousands of these online. Here are a few examples:
Sunreed Instruments offers you a wide variety of quality hand made bamboo flutes, shakuhachi, bamboo saxophones and clarinets, Native American flutes, didgeridoos, drums, and musical instruments of the world.
Northern Sun offers message-oriented T-shirts, bumper stickers, buttons, posters, etc. covering a wide variety of issues/topics.
King Arthur Flour sells flour, ingredients, tools and baking accessories.
AAA Light Bulbs sells bulbs, lamps, fluorescent lights, halogen bulbs to fill all your lighting needs from one great store.
So, if you step back and look at the bigger picture, while WalMart is consolidating the sale of needful items such as soap and toilet paper, the Internet is opening thousands of outlets for flutes and t-shirts. It's not at all clear whether the number of options is rising or falling.
Though it is clear that people who do not have Internet access are missing out. But in much of the world, Internet access is rapidly rising. This shift is part of what scholars seem to be calling the "Age of Information".
Did I mention cacti? This winter I was looking to buy some plants to put on a hot dry window sill that sits right above a radiator. One day I thought to myself, "you know, a cactus might work there", and with Google's help I found Old Man Cactus . I bought a Pachypodium namaquanam, which is now happily digesting sunlight and thinking about growing larger. [Sigh] ... life is good when you're a cactus and it's summertime. :-)
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1. Those of you who are well into Bellwether will see how this discussion relates to the book.
2. The odds that I would have written this or made it a part of a lecture in a regular course are small. I don't get to talk as much in an online course, but I find that what I say is tailored to the questions and comments that the students make. I think that this is a good thing ...