Het cultuurpatroon als analytisch instrument bij de studie van veranderingsprocessen

Samenvatting

A study of the use of the term 'cultural pattern' in explaining phenomena of soc change with special reference to the Netherlands. The term was popularized by R. Benedict; it has been used by several Dutch students of soc change, esp by B. Bergsma in his Op weg naar een nieuw cutuurpatroon (Towards a New Cultural Pattern, Assen, 1963), a study of social change in the Frisian village of Dantumadeel. Bergsma uses the term to explain social change in Dantumadeel through the replacement of one cultural pattern by another; also to apply G. Gurvitch's theory of social cadres and quantitative methods. Cultural pattern is thus used as a substitute for personality structures. A subsidiary hyp is that there exist 2 cultural patterns (traditionalist and modernist) which are incompatible and unblendable. It is concluded that cultural change should rather be viewed not as a command imposed from above through a new pattern but by an interaction between patterns in which the initiative of the people undergoing change plays a leading part. I. Langnas.