For example Lynch cites Hawkins and states:

...that prior cultural values predominate in setting the course of subsequent cultural exchange.

And Urban states that new forms of culture:

...assimilates earlier manifestations of culture into itself.

Now I brought this up as a question surrounding teaching as a comment on Derek's post, but here I want to try to understand, much like Mike in his post how this works. How does culture move and progress if it is always at least tainted by the previous incarnation of culture?

Something that is helping me think about this is Raymond Williams' idea of Dominant, Residual, and Emergent. According to Williams, at any given moment in the process of culture, there is a dominant culture, a culture emerging, and one that has past but still leaves its residual marks on the current forms of culture. To me, this helps me understand the ways in which Lynch and Urban are dealing with how culture moves, and how we can strive for new cultures while still invoking cultural norms that are more familiar.

I suppose this post can be filed under "scholarship of duh," but this connection has helped me better understand how one might use these models for resistance to dominant waves of culture. (I know, always with the activist angle here.) If activist movements want to change the world, as they are often wont to do, there needs to be some consideration of the dominant and residual in their rhetoric. In other words, it is difficult to have a full rejection of a culture stick (not counting wars and genocides and other atrocities that "seem" to lead to full rejection of the beliefs that enacted them), so perhaps it is the omega that we should all be aiming for. The culture that takes into account the dominant and residual, but still finds a way to make emergence happen.