ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the processes by which competition-induced structural change in the national economy and growth in the numbers of powerful women in Antigua and Barbados replaced a culture of domestic violence with a culture of domestic affection. Cultures thus evolve from an interaction between innovations and an evolved means for choosing one option over another. Religious cultures thus make powerful means for achieving specific ends. Some cultures work better than others. Cultures, to judge from the last 300,000 years of human history, constitute resource management designs that, with varying success, provide for collective action to address specific sustainability problems. The power of cultures to direct the course of human affairs comes into being as an emergent property of their collective agreement. An individual innovation exerts cultural power when and to the extent that it becomes part of a collective agreement and, so, part of the environment that we ignore at our peril.
