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Diffusionism

While social evolutionary theory attempted to explain difference among peoples throughout the world, diffusionism focused on their similarities. Diffusionism is the idea that cultural phenomena (traits, inventions, ideas, objects, whole cultures), rather than arising independently through invention, spread from one society to another through forms of contact. Although some cultural evolutionists, like Lewis Henry Morgan, did allow for diffusion to occur in their theories of social change, generally they emphasized a cultures bounded psychic unity and with it the notion that invention was brought about internally and independently within particular societies. Diffusionism raised much initial resistance; as such a theory demanded a re-conceptualization of difference based on race categories. However, developments in such fields as Paleoanthropology were turning up more conclusive evidence that pointed to a shared history of people's across the world. Diffusionist theories took various shapes across different national anthropologies.

In Germany, Friedrich Ratzel, Leo Frobenius, Fritz Graebner and Father Pater Wilhelm Schmidt were putting forward and extending their concept of "Kulturkreise" (culture circles). These "kulturkreise" were primeval culture complexes that underwent modification as they diffused across the world. This concept postulated separate cultural archetypes and attempted to identify large cultural patterns in world history.

In Britain, William H Rivers and Alfred Cort Haddon were stressing the roles of migration and social contact in the process of change, particularly based on Darwinian principles of adaptation. G. Elliot Smith, W.J. Perry, and Rivers himself proposed a more extreme diffusionist theory, termed "heliocentric" diffusionism. This theory claimed that all cultures originated from the cultural center of Egypt. The influential movement toward British functionalism, in large part, came about in opposition to this British diffusionism. Functionalists found the debate between invention and diffusion to be mute. From their perspective the origin of cultural traits was not the interesting subject matter, but rather, of interest were the very different functions or roles these traits played in different societies.

In American Anthropology, the British debates and German influences were blended into the paradigm that is now often referred to as "Historical Particularism". Franz Boas, trained in Germany as a geographer, highlighted the contingent nature of diffusion and focused on the selective principles of assimilation of objects and ideas that he believed revealed something core about the ethos of the culture being influenced. He had many critical things to say about German and British diffusionist theories. His approach influenced the development of another type of diffusionist theory termed the "culture area" approach. This concept was first termed by Otis T. Mason and refined by such anthropologists as G. Holmes, Clark Wissler and A.L. Kroeber, particularly in the study of Native Americans. Famous examples of these culture areas (or culture complexes) are the East African cattle complex (Herskovitz 1926) and the horse complex among Plain Indians (Wissler 1923).

While its difficult across these varied diffusionist notions to agree on some defining characteristic of culture, contrary to evolutionist thought, culture for diffusionists was no longer thought of as isolated and stable. Rather contact and hybridity was a characteristic of most cultures. Diffusionist scholars paid more attention to history and the broader regional configurations and relationship in understanding/identifying a group's "culture." There was no assumption of a uniform pattern of socio-cultural development. It is clear, however, that culture itself was still defined by similar "traits" as those discussed in the social evolutionary framework.

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