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TSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > Anthropology > Beneficial vs destructive diffusion

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Contents 1 Beneficial 2 Destructive 3 Impact of the west on small scale societies 4 Comments

Beneficial

The introduction of computers into Intuit Eskimo Culture in the 1980s.

The Inuit of Canada's Northwest territories whose lives retain elements of their recent gathering-and-hunting past, readily incorporate new ideas they consider helpful into their lives. In the mid-1980s, their regional council, made up of representatives from 14 isolated Inuit communities, decided to use computers to store information on the game that hunters brought home to their remote hamlets. If one hamlet found itself with plenty of caribou meat but few seal, it could easily locate a hamlet with an excess of seal, and trade one kind of meat for the other. Both the hardware and software had to be user-friendly, since many Inuit had little formal education and not all of them spoke English. The Apple Macintosh, which uses images rather than words to execute commands, and a software program made up of lines and circles of the Inuit alphabet was written. Ultimately, even the remotest Inuit villages will be able to communicate easily with one another and the outside world.

Destructive

The putting in of a water pump in a village well in rural India in 1987.

A solar-powered water pump, installed on a village well, freed local women from the time-consuming task of drawing water by hand, but the women found they were spending much less time chatting with one another around the well. The easily availability of water attracted unwanted wanderers from outside the village, moreover, local boys whose job it had been to draw water from the well, had nothing to do and soon turned to petty crime. Meanwhile, the gap between the rich and poor widened: the rich, who owned land, used the pump for irrigation, but the poor had no land to irrigate. The new pump was definitely a mixed blessing. Eventually, women of the village intentionally broke it so they could once more gather around the well that had been the centre of their social lives.

Impact of the west on small scale societies

Lead to:

1. decimation (e.g. by disease, ethnocide, genocide)
2. Armed resistance
3. Colonialism and its changes in social order
4. Syncretism (open or hidden)
5. Enslavement
6. Harking back to the past
7. Milinarium movements (e.g. cargo cults)
8. Adaptation

Comments