Q.Discuss two different approaches to studying cultural change.

Cultural change can be studied by asking where it comes from, or by asking how fast and how deeply it cuts. …

Cultural change can be studied through more than one lens, and two useful, distinct approaches are worth setting side by side. The first approach asks about the source of change -- where the pressure for a culture to shift actually comes from. Change can be internally generated, as when a new farming technique raises agricultural output and, over time, reshapes an agrarian community's food consumption and quality of life; or it can be externally imposed, as when conquest or colonisation forces deep changes on a society's practices and behaviour regardless of whether its members chose them. A closely related internal-source case worth naming on its own is ecological or environmental change: when forest-dwelling tribal communities in North East or central India lose access to the forests they depend on -- through legal restriction or the forest's outright destruction -- their whole way of life is forced to change as a largely unchosen consequence of that environmental shift.

The second approach instead asks about the pace and depth of change, distinguishing evolutionary change -- gradual shifts that accumulate slowly over long stretches of time -- from revolutionary change, which happens rapidly and overturns a culture's underlying values and meaning systems all at once. The French Revolution of 1789 is the standard example of revolutionary cultural change: within a short span it dismantled the old estate-based ranking system, abolished the monarchy, and installed liberty, equality and fraternity as the new organising values of French society, a transformation far too rapid and far-reaching to count as merely evolutionary. …