Cultural Change

Cultural change refers to the way a society's patterns of culture shift over time, and the push behind such change can come from inside a society or from outside it. Internally, something as ordinary as a new farming technique can raise agricultural output and, in turn, transform how an agrarian community eats and lives. Externally, events like conquest or colonisation can force deep, lasting changes on a society's practices and behaviour whether its members choose them or not. More specifically, sociologists point to three recurring sources of cultural change: shifts in the natural environment or ecology, contact with other cultures, and the gradual process of adaptation. Environmental change can be especially disruptive -- when forest-dwelling communities lose access to the forest they depend on, whether through legal restriction or the forest's outright destruction, the effect on their whole way of life can be devastating; this is exactly what has happened to many tribal communities in North East and central India as forest resources have shrunk. …