Social diversity – do we need to understand?

Culture theory is the division of anthropology, semiotics, and other related social science disciplines (e.g., sociology) that seeks to define the heuristic concept of culture in operational and/or scientific terms.

According to many theories that have gained wide acceptance among anthropologists, culture exhibits the way that humans interpret their biology and their environment. According to this point of view, culture becomes such an integral part of human existence that it is the human environment, and most cultural change can be attributed to human adaptation. Moreover, given that culture is seen as the primary adaptive mechanism of humans and takes place much faster than human biological evolution, cultural change can be viewed as culture adapting to itself.

The above mentioned statement scares me a bit when I started observing and comparing the past/present Maldivian culture and evolution of the social behavior.

Without any dispute we can agree to the difference between the past and the present generation. The diversity is enormous when you check the educational margin, exploration margin, adaption margin, etc. As for this reason, elderly people started to recognize their inconvenient or not understandable culture that they are repeating in daily life. Some try to fix those and apply the new culture into their culture and behavior. But would this be possible?

If this means that the Maldivian bio-culture (our forefather’s culture) is adapting to a new-culture. If there is a change, do we have any control over this change and have anyone conducted any research how the Maldivians are adapting to this new-culture to find out if it is good or bad?

Since 1980, The Ministry of Planning and National Development, Statistics Section issues The Statistical Yearbook of Maldives with the objective of providing comprehensive statistical information of various aspects of the economy and social conditions on the Maldives. However, this information is general but not specific enough. Still this information can be implemented to kick start a constructive in-depth research.

My suggestion: in the future, researches should be carried out to find the scope of this cultural change. Yet, we do not have Universities like other developed counties who normally do all the targeted research; we could divide tasks in to different categories. Small projects which do not need any budget (or a minimum budget) could be conducted by students under a specific subject/module integrated in the educational system. We also need NGO’s to start conducting research for the future in specific topics. All of these results should be later add-on with public access to the Statistics Section of The Ministry of Planning and National Development.

This article is an idea only aimed for the better future of The Maldivians. So please be free to criticize and comment your suggestion.
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~ by behindtheshadow on March 6, 2009.