Diffusionism Introduction
Diffusionism as an anthropological school of thought, was an attempt to understand the distribution of culture in terms of the origin of cultural traits and their spread from one society to another. 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 .
Diffusion may be simply defined as the spread of a cultural item from its place of origin to other places (Titiev 1959:446) through migration, trade, war, or other contact .
Diffusionist 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. By that time scholars had begun to study not only advanced cultures, but also the cultures of nonliterate people . Studying these very diverse cultures stimulated an interest in discerning how humans progressed from primeval conditions to “superior” states (Kuklick 1996:161). 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). Two schools of thought emerged in response to these questions. 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. 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). According to social evolutionists, innovation in a culture, was considered to be continuous or at least triggered by variables that are relatively exogenous. 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).
During 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. It generally avoided the trap of the Eurocentric notion of the few hearths or one hearth origination of most cultural traits. 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).
Thus , Diffusionism theory interpreted the growth of culture in terms of “cultural similarities”, “mutual contact”, “cultural cradle”, “culture area”, “kulturkreise” (culture circle). Diffusionists negated the principle of Unilinear Evolution and studied geographical distribution and migration of cultural traits, and reflected that cultures are patch work of traits interwoven with numerous histories and origins. According to diffusionists, various culture complexes develop at various times in different parts of the world and later on diffuse to other parts of the world mainly due to migration. They thus, opined that culture has grown in course of history not because of evolution, but because of transmission of culture due to migration and mutual contact.