Frank C. Miller, “Cultural change as Decision-Making: A Tzotzil Example,” Ethnology 4, No. 1 (Jan. 1965), 53-65.

Notes

• 53 – University of Minnesota
• “The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize cultural change as a dynamic process, not simply as a succession of structural states. The first step in this procedure is to recognize the need to consider not only what changes take place but also how they come about. To understand how a chnage occurs we must first understand the ongoing processes by which a culture is maintained.”
• 53-54 – “The thesis proposed here is that such familiar processes of maintenance as leadership, decision-making, and social control may contribute to changes in the cultural system that they ordinarily serve to maintain. Therefore, the distinction between recurrent [maintenance] and directional [change] processes is not absolute, since the operation of recurrent processes may produce a new direction in a society. I shall present a simple decision-making model of change and use it to describe and interpret data from a Tzotzil village in Mexico.”
• 54 – “When culture changes, individuals and groups make choices among alternatives; they decide to adopt or reject innovations in culture or choose to follow one mode of behavior rather than another.”
• “The extent to which such choices are ultimately determined by cultural or material factors is an issue that is not empirically resoluble at the present time. I do not affirm freedom of choice; I maintain only that both affirmation and denial are metaphysical stances, neither of which can be proved by anthropology. Certainly it is possible to study the process of choice, and to assess the factors which influence its outcomes, without drawing any ultimate conclusions about determinism.”
  • Use to set up all the other later studies on choice
• “In sum, the view of change proposed here is that new items of culture are evaluated in a decision-making process which involves leadership directly or indirectly; and that the degree of adherence to the choices which are made depends on mechanisms of social control [ostensibly from either within or without the community in question].”
• 56 – “These groupings [core/fringe of both Native (still wear traditional costume) and Revuelto (have stopped wearing traditional costume)] are not recognized as such in Yalcuc, although people are well aware of the cultural differences. Yet social interaction follows lines of membership in categories; and, as I shall demonstrate later, the rate of cultural change varies widely by social category.”
  • So these four social categories are used to quarter the community, rather than using economic quartiles
• 61 – “The chief stimulus for change in the Indian cultures of the Highlands of Chiapas is the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (INI), the National Indian Institute of the Mexican government. The goal of the Instituto has been stated by Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, former President of the Republic: ‘We do not seek to maintain the Indian communities in a permanent state of assistance, but rather to give them the elements and the orientation necessary for bringing about, in the least possible time, their effect collaboration in the cultural, economic, and political life of Mexico.”
  • Don’t look too hard for a simple traditional model of colonialism in Mexico by a Northern power. Any foreign intervention is simply another layer atop the original colonization of the indigenous by Spanish, resulting in a mixed culture of indigenous and mestizo. Any attempt to see the United States as an explicit imperialistic entity in Mexico will fall short of the more common manifestation of colonization in the country — that of the indigenous and peasant mestizo population by the metropolitan, more Europeanized, higher classes.
• “The Centro in San Cristobal, established in 1951, was INI’s first co-ordinating center. It seeks to promote the integration of the Indian by raising the level of life through a program of innovation in agriculture, education, commerce, transportation, and health. Much cultural change in Yalcuc since 1951 has been in direct response to proposals made by the Instituto.”
  • Nearly transparent statement of an attempt to epistemically-colonize the indigenous population by integration through the deployment of a development regime.
• “In considering change I am interested not so much in what changes are adopted as in how decisions are made and how leadership and social control affect the process.”
  • Is this indicative of the fact that the author doesn’t intend the results of this study to be operationalized for development agents or diffusion programs?
• 65n1 – “The field work on which this paper is based was conducted in 1957-58 under a fellowship from the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Foundation, and the analysis of data was facilitated by a Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council. The work was part of the Mexican Cultural change Project sponsored by the Laboratory of Social Relations, Harvard University, supported by the National Institute of Mental Health.”
• “In Southern Mexico and Guatemala, persons of national as opposed to Indian culture are called Ladinos.”
• “Analysis of decision-making is especially useful in the study of directed acculturation, exemplified by the case study that will be examined later. Innovations are presented by external agencies, and decisions must be made. They may be made by an officially constituted political body, by a wide variety of social groups, or by individuals singly. The reaction to an innovation is determined in part by the nature of the unit making a decision about it.”