ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that cultural development could be described in terms of flows of innovations, operating patterns, and levels of sociocultural integration defining broad capacities for production and elaboration. It advances the thought that major dynamic forces influencing the direction and intensity of cultural development included ecological requirements, kinship, religion, militarism and status rivalry. The chapter expresses in the form of economic competition. One body of relevant information is that concerning the history of Russian peasant societies. The internal developments within the villages can be divided into two groups, ecological adaptations and free innovations. The development of peasant religion shows an intimate yet complex relationship to urban antecedents. In particular, the highly organized religious congregations of late Kievan and Muscovy cities were driven by State oppression to take refuge in the Cossack steppes and the north Russian forests in the seventeenth century, and have persisted as Old Believer communities to the present day.
