CHAPTER 12 - Of Change, Conflict, and Resistance

Abstract

Analysts who deal with the practice of change and persons who are directly engaged in trying to bring it about tend to make use of naive and simplistic theories. It is true that social science theories do not produce unified and agreed-upon statements about change that other analysts or persons in neighboring disciplines can pick up like a bag of tricks. To get the theory, one has to work over the materials and establish logically linked principles that appear to have some empirical verification. The practical men, trying to induce social change in the field, find resistances where, according to their analysis, the advantages of change should have been so obvious as to be automatic in producing results. But they are not and they do not. Current theories of social change are also based on a reaction against two other major influences in anthropology, namely, functionalism and structuralism. Here the reaction is not so much one of disagreement but of asking questions that cannot be put easily within the functionalist or structuralist framework, although both may be adapted and brought together to be homologous with social change theory.