Part IV

CULTURE TRANSITION AND CHANGE

T he Atlantic World was a great mixer of cultures. People from four continents
met in a broad variety of settings and circumstances and exchanged a wide
range of cultural ideas and practices. In addition to the changes induced by inter-
action, many Atlantic people also moved from familiar home environments to
ones that were quite unfamiliar, and in the process were forced to make adapta-
tions that shaped a new worldview. Others – most Europeans, some Africans, and
many Native Americans – remained at home and accepted input from outsiders.
Cultural change is erratic in any case, arising from the inner workings of a
society as well as from interaction, all stimulated further by movement and envi-
ronmental change. We can divide cultural elements into a number of categories
as a means of understanding this change. There are some elements of culture
that are “hard” – that is, they are dificult to change, and typically break before
they are much altered. Language is the best example of a hard cultural element
that changes very slowly and is ill-suited for much cultural exchange. On the
other hand, there are elements of culture that are “soft,” which can change rap-
idly and are very open to absorbing new ideas and elements. Aesthetics, such
as art and music, are the most malleable and open cultural element. In between
these two extremes lies religion, worldview, and philosophy, which people are
often committed to for ideological reasons, but which are nevertheless subject
to change if it can be managed within the rules of the system.
While hardness or softness are important irst elements to consider in study-
ing cultural change in the Atlantic world, there are other considerations as
well. One of these is the degree to which population transfer occurs in such
a way as to preserve communities. For example, the controlled movement of
freeborn families, voluntarily transferring themselves from western England
to New England in the seventeenth century, was likely to preserve a great deal
of the existing culture, with change taking place mostly as a result of the new
environment, economic transformations following the movement, and the
interaction with Native Americans.
On the other hand, the transfer of millions of Africans to America during
the slave trade did very little to preserve community. Africans became slaves

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 314 Culture Transition and Change

through the disruption of war, rarely traveled as families, and were often set-
tled into environments where they were forced to live in close proximity with
people of quite different cultures. Furthermore, they were subject to a harsh
social regime that sometimes actively sought to modify their culture and other
times limited cultural activities by rules designed to prevent revolt or enhance
work performance. Clearly the two groups would have different cultural pro-
cesses and different degrees of inluence.
Of course, there were groups that did not move at all. Many indigenous
people of the Americas, even when conquered, remained ixed in their ancestral
communities, Europeans for the most part did not leave their home continent,
and a great many Africans received inluences from abroad while remaining at
home. For these people change took place in different ways within a community
that had all the possibilities of retaining its past, even though it was still, to a
greater or lesser degree, obliged or invited to adjust to new cultural elements.
Moreover, there is also a question of power, coercion, and culture change.
Scholars today have noted that many elements of culture are shaped by relations
between social classes, political power, and ethnic domination, where these ele-
ments play an important role. A good number of scholars have argued, as Arnold
Bauer has recently done in a carefully documented and presented study, that in
the conquest societies of Latin America, the Spanish sought to distance them-
selves from the indigenous peoples and thus resisted whatever temptation there
might be to eat their food, use their ceramics, dress in their manner, or share in
their artistic culture. Slaveholders in the Caribbean, Brazil, or North America are
likewise sometimes held to have been engaged in a program of deculturation, and
survival or continuation of African culture can be seen as an act of resistance. As
we have seen, there were many areas of cultural interaction – for example, in the
contact zones, where no such program of cultural maintenance or domination
was possible. Moreover, it is worth noting that in conquered areas, the Europeans
had to maintain long-standing alliances with many various indigenous people;
indeed, the signiicance of these alliances, as we shall see, was important even at
the end of the colonial period. Even in the slave colonies, especially ones like the
Caribbean regions, Europeans needed the cooperation of a signiicant number of
the slaves themselves to maintain their authority.
More signiicant still, any act of deculturation requires considerable effort
and expense, and while Europeans, particularly those of the higher elite, wished
to show their status in terms that would be recognized by their European peers,
their primary goal in their relations with the lower classes was to extract labor
and ensure security, to which deculturation was a casually considered and
inconsistently applied idea. The Spanish, for example, were anxious to use at
least some of their power in conquest to change the religion of the people
they conquered; masters at times wanted to alter the culture of the slaves they
owned. The element of forced cultural change must therefore join the more
benign internal mechanisms of change or the type of changes that took place
with people exchanging ideas and items through their encounter.

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