The American, Lewis Henry Morgan, demonstrated that social change involved both independent invention and diffusion. Discrete elements become interrelated as time passes ( Hatch 1973:57-58). He viewed culture as consisting of countless loose threads, most of foreign origin, but which were woven together to fit into their new cultural context. He believed that the cultural inventory of a people was basically the cumulative result of diffusion. Boas used these key concepts to explain culture and interpret the meaning of culture. He sought to understand culture traits in terms of two historical processes, diffusion and modification. Boas emphasized that culture traits should not be viewed casually, but in terms of a relatively unique historical process that proceeds from the first introduction of a trait until its origin becomes obscure.
He felt this was especially true in societies where there were similar combinations of traits ( Boas 1938:211). The school of cultural geography combined idealism, environmentalism, and social structural explanations, which made the process of diffusion more feasible than the process of innovation (Hugill 1996:344).įranz Boas (1938) argued that although the independent invention of a culture trait can occur at the same time within widely separated societies where there is limited control over individual members, allowing them freedom to create a unique style, a link such as genetic relationship is still suspected.
It generally avoided the trap of the Eurocentric notion of the few hearths or one hearth origination of most cultural traits. This set the foundation for the idea that many inventions occurred independently of each other and that diffusion had relatively little effect on cultural development (Hugill 1996:343).ĭuring the 1920’s the school of cultural geography at the University of California, Berkeley purposely separated innovation from diffusion and argued that innovation was relatively rare and that the process of diffusion was quite common. According to social evolutionists, innovation in a culture, was considered to be continuous or at least triggered by variables that are relatively exogenous. Some Social Evolutionists, on the other hand, proposed that the “psychic unity of mankind” meant that since all human beings share the same psychological traits, they are all equally likely to innovate (see Social Evolutionism in this site for more on the psychic unity of mankind). The most extreme view was that there were a very limited number of locations, possibly only one, from which the most important culture traits diffused to the rest of the world. Two schools of thought emerged in response to these questions. Among the major questions about this issue was whether human culture had evolved in a manner analogous to biological evolution or whether culture spread from innovation centers by means of processes of diffusion (Hugill 1996:343). Studying these very diverse cultures stimulated an interest in discerning how humans progressed from primeval conditions to “superior” states (Kuklick 1996:161). By that time scholars had begun to study not only advanced cultures, but also the cultures of nonliterate people (Beals and Hoijer 1959:664). A more expanded definition depicts diffusion as the process by which discrete culture traits are transferred from one society to another, through migration, trade, war, or other contact ( Winthrop 1991:82).ĭiffusionist research originated in the middle of the nineteenth century as a means of understanding the nature of the distribution of human cultural traits across the world. Versions of diffusionist thought included the conviction that all cultures originated from one culture center ( heliocentric diffusion) the more reasonable view that cultures originated from a limited number of culture centers ( culture circles) and finally the notion that each society is influenced by others but that the process of diffusion is both contingent and arbitrary ( Winthrop 1991:83-84).ĭiffusion may be simply defined as the spread of a cultural item from its place of origin to other places (Titiev 1959:446).
Diffusionism as an anthropological school of thought, was an attempt to understand the distribution of culture in terms of the origin of culture traits and their spread from one society to another.