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 Organizing Cultural Diversity
Throughout time there has been an enormous cultural variety—differences in the worldview, family structure, styles of dress, etc.—in human societies all around the world.
Anthropologists and archaeologists are scientists who study people and the cultures they have created over time. These scientists create various organizational systems that help them examine human development and the vast complexity of culture diversity.
Organizing cultures by similarities or dissimilarities helps scientists better understand the relationships between different cultures. But it is important to note that not all groups fit perfectly into nice, neat categories.
Over time, scientists have come up with many different ways to organize culture:
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Early classification systems
One of the earliest classification models—now considered inaccurate and judgmental—ranked cultures according to whether they were “savages,” “barbarians,” or “civilized” a long a single evolutionary trajectory.
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Later classification systems
Later models classified cultures by how they utilized technology, what kind of economic system they employed, or how they were organized politically and socially. You may be familiar with ranking systems that label cultures as “Stone Age, Bronze Age, Copper Age, and Iron Age.” While these tools are still somewhat useful in identifying a society’s level of technological advancement, they do not acknowledge a culture’s social and political development.
Other models of classification attempted to incorporate socio-economic development by creating the categories of “bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states, and empires.” The inherent danger in this classification system is that people may perceive these categories to be progressive, implying that each represents a stage in improvement.
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Today’s organizational systems
Scientists today often use a combination of approaches. For example, The Ancient Americas is based loosely on a socio-political organizational strategy that acknowledges different ways of living such as hunting and gathering, farming, etc.
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The scientific goal is to recognize that societies do change or evolve, however, this type of evolution is not linear, ever-present, or preordained. Each category represents both positive and negative changes for people’s lives and does not represent a step towards a better way of living or an “ideal” lifestyle. Organizational categories simply represent different lifestyles and different ways of solving the same problems.
Continue to Cultural Evolution? >>
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