CENTERS, CLIMAXES, AND THE LAW OF DIFFUSION
Clark Wissler was a student of Franz Boas. Dissatisfied with earlier writers as evolutionists, who had treated American Indian populations , as if they formed one uniform and undifferentiated whole. He was of opinion that steps should be taken to indicate and locate the varieties of modes of life and to classify their social grouping according to their dominant traits and geographical location.
Wissler like was opinion that cultures of no two groups of people were identical. The customs of those who live close to one anther tend to have greater similarities than do the customs of those groups who live farther apart. It follows that the groups who live close together opportunity to barrow from each other than those who are at distance. That’s why when cultures viewed objectively, they are seen to form clusters so to speak efficiently homogeneous that the regions in which they occur can be delimited on the area in which similar cultures are found call a culture area. It was coined by Oils T Mason.
Wissler says that the natives of new world could be grouped according to cultural traits, this would give us food areas, textile areas, ceramic areas etc.. if however , we take all traits in to simultaneous considerations and shift our point of view to social or tribal units, we are able to form a definite group. this will give us culture areas or a classification of social groups their cultural traits.
Thus, culture area for American historicists of diffusionists was a classificatory device, not in itself is a very useful historical concept, but a necessary element in the reconstruction of past. It was referred to groups of geographical contiguous tribes the contrast with each other groups. The similarity of culture in part of presumably the result of their communication with each other; so that boundary enclosed a geographical area over which fairly intensive diffusion had taken place. it was thus bounded system to study historical development, usually the environment was relatively uniform throughout the area . this meant that one important variable accounting for intercultural differences was held more or less constant.
Clark Wissler proposed Culture -Area to explain similarities in same geography and his biggest contribution was the age-area hypothesis. In an age where radio carbon dating was yet to appear on the scene, it was difficult to ascertain the real age of the artifacts. Clark at such a juncture came up with the age area hypothesis that assumed that culture traits tended to spread from the centre towards the periphery of any culture area. This was also known as the ‘law of diffusion’. Further he defined A culture area was defined as a geographical/cultural region whose population and groups share important common identifiable cultural traits, such as language, tools and material culture, kinship, social organization, and cultural history. Therefore, groups sharing similar traits in a geographical region would be classed in a single culture area
Wissler’s ( 1917) attempt to base his culture areas on “food areas,” as follows:
| Food Areas | Culture Areas |
| Caribou | Eskimo, Mackenzie (and north part of Eastern Woodland) |
| Bison | Plains |
| Salmon | North Pacific Coast, Plateau |
| Wild Seed | California |
| Eastern Maize | Southeast, Eastern Woodland (except north nonagricultural portion) |
| Intensive Agriculture | Southwest, Nahua-Mexico, Chibcha, Inca-Peru |
| Manioc | Amazon, Antilles |
| Cuanaco | Cuanaco |
Note that three of these “food” areas-Eastern Maize, Intensive Agriculture, and Manioc-refer to domesticated species, while all the rest refer to natural resources. There arises from this partial inclusion of the technological aspect of the techno-environmental equation the further anomaly that the area singled out as “Intensive Agriculture” is divided into three discontinuous sub areas, each of which is several thousand miles away from the others. The existence of two or three widely separated areas of native high civilization in the Americas thus raises at once the question of to what extent mere propinquity may be advanced as an explanation of resemblance. He developed the concept of culture-area and age-area in his books The American Indian (1917), Man and Culture (1923) and The Relation of Nature to Man (1926).
The culture-area concept shoulder the burden for explaining cultural differences and similarities. Wissler sought to overcome some of the difficulties by attributing the characteristic features of each area to a “culture center” from which the assemblage of traits had diffused outward. The origin of a culture center seems due to ethnic factors more than to geographical ones. The location of these centers is largely a matter of historic accident, but once located and the adjustments made, the stability of the environment doubtless tends to hold each particular type of culture to its initial locality, even in the face of many changes in blood and language .
Elaborating further on the notion of “culture center,” Wissler (ibid. 183) set forth a “law of diffusion,” to wit, “that anthropological traits tend to diffuse in all directions from their centers of origin.” This law constitutes the basis of the “age-area principle,” which is a method for inferring the relative age of culture traits from their geographical distribution: the most widely distributed traits around a center would be the oldest, if the direction of diffusion were always from the center outwards. Needless to say, the “law of diffusion” is a highly unreliable guide to actual historical events and can be applied only with the greatest caution.
Culture area was chiefly determined by material traits and the economic base, but ceremonial and social trait-complexes were also used to distinguish them. Each culture area was perceived to have a culture center “from which culture influences seem to radiate” (Wissler 1917: 242). Thus, diffusion was seen as the
basic process in the formation of a culture area. Wissler perceived the significance of focal points of growth, resulting in culminations definable in spatial (culture centres) and presumably temporal (cultural climaxes) terms. The traits radiated outwards from the focal points and the traits that reached the furthers were understood to be the oldest. Culture areas thus contained both: a) a group of typical tribes that share most of the defining trait-complexes, and b) marginal tribes that have fewer of the typical traits (Freed. S. A and R. S. Freed 1883).
Wissler tried to explain the relation of culture areas to environment. He said that environment does not produce a culture, but stabilises it. As (at many points) the culture must be adapted to the environment, the latter tends to hold it fast. Cultures therefore incline to change slowly once they have fitted themselves to a setting, and to enter a new environment with more difficulty than to spread over the
whole of the natural area in which their form was worked out. If they do enter a new type of territory, they are subject to change. Once fitted to an environment, they are likely to alter radically only through some factor profoundly affecting subsistence. Wissler divided North America into ten culture areas where (according to Kroeber) subsistence areas seem to refer primarily to the basis of culture, and environment and ecological aspects also played a critical role. A. L. Kroeber recognised the significance of culture area theory, developed on it, as well as put the theory into practice by defining various culture areas among the North American tribes.
Kroeber’s contribution
Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876-1960)- Kroeber referred to ‘culture area’ as an unfortunate designation in that it puts emphasis on the area, whereas it is usually the cultural content that is being primarily considered. Being from the Boasian school of thought, Kroeber believed in cultural relativism. He said that cultures
occur in nature as wholes; and these wholes can never be entirely formulated through consideration of their elements, in this he critiqued Clark Wissler. He justified this with the example of the Navaho and Pueblos (or North Pacific Coast Indians) tribes. He pointed out that Navaho altar paintings may be the most developed in the Southwest, but Navaho culture is still close to that of the Pueblos and in many ways obviously dependent on it. So, he showed that at times a single trait can be very distinct in a culture and thus misleading if cultural traits are being followed, while holistic comparisons can provide a stronger association between cultures. The culture-area concept he thus believed should attempt to deal with such culture wholes.
Kroeber looked at geographic-ethnic culture-whole in its historical course, with the ultimate aim of searching for culture-historical laws. Kroeber applied the culture area approach to the ever-growing body of ethnographic and archaeological data worldwide. One of Kroeber’s greatest works was the ‘Handbook of the Indians of California’ published in 1925. It brings forth culture areas and subareas, and their historic implications. Kroeber’s enlarged interests in cultural areas and cultural continuities led to another of his major works, ‘Cultural and Natural Areas in Native North America’ (1939). Cultural and Natural Areas not only delineated cultural areas, but also related them to natural areas and, more important, introduced the concept of cultural climax.
Earlier element distribution studies had employed the concept of culture centers within areas, which were more complex and therefore presumed to be more inventive, and of margins, which were the simple, uninventive peripheral recipients of cultural achievements. Kroeber’s concept of cultural climax avoided the implication that greatest complexity meant the locus of inventiveness, and called attention instead to cultural intensification or accumulation. He described this as ‘hearth’ or‘ climax area’. He wrote that “when part of a cultural substratum fluoresces into a level of achievement higher than the surrounding groups, mainly on the strength of its own initiative, it can be called a climax area. These areas almost inevitably serve as important centers of dispersal” (Kroeber 1939: 222-9). He went on to develop this context in sociological terms looking at golden and dark ages of great civilisations, including the Egyptian civilisation by referring to these periods as peaks and troughs of civilizational growth. In his specific anthropological quest of visualising culture area, he plotted a real maps of California and North America on the basis of their culture area.
Kroeber explained that the weakest feature of any mapping of culture wholes is also the most conspicuous: the boundaries. Where the influences from two culture climaxes or foci meet in equal strength is where a line must be drawn, if boundaries are to be indicated at all. Yet it is just there those differences often are slight. Two people classed as in separate areas yet adjoining each other along the inter-area boundary almost inevitably have much in common. It is probable that they normally have more traits in common with each other than with the people at the focal points of their respective areas. This is almost certain to be so where the distance from the foci is great and the boundary is not accentuated by any strong physical barrier or abrupt natural change.
Kroeber provided an arial distribution of culture area, dividing North America into 84 areas and sub areas and all of these areas were clubbed under 7 grand areas. These 7 grand areas are Desert, Artic, Great Plains, Mountains, River Valleys, Coastal Plains and Terrains of rugged topography which do not constitute part of the remaining 6 other areas.
The concept of culture area held great significance in the trajectory of Anthropology. Julian Steward, another student of Boas developed six culture areas in South America, he connected to the prevalent environmental conditions. Steward traced different patterns of culture growth and diffusion within these cultural areas eventually leading to the ‘School of Culture Ecology’, within anthropology.
The culture area concept can be located in a time period when the western anthropologists were coming in touch with geographical areas consisting of native/ tribal/indigenous communities that had relatively less exposure with the colonising world. These communities had a social relation among each other and the
anthropologists found that they often shared similarities in cultural practices, especially among contiguous tribes. It was believed that this similarity or continuity of cultural practices was due to diffusion among neighbouring tribes over a period of time. However, there was no documented record of this diffusion.
Anthropologists, tried to construct this cultural history of where the cultural practices had originated as well as tribal commonality and continuity by mapping cultural spaces within geographical areas. Different anthropologist used the culture area concept for different purposes. The main proponents of the concept were from the American school of thought and looked at the concept from different positions.
Franz Boas utilised the concept to propagate an insight into creating a historical and cultural particularistic focus of studying a tribe holistically. Clark Wissler and A. L. Kroeber however, theorised culture area in a cross-cultural perspective cross-sectioned with time. Clark Wissler used culture area to trace world history (especially of the western hemisphere), while Kroeber sought to uncover regionally individualised type or specific growth of culture while looking at cultures in more holistic terms.
The contemporary relevance of this concept can be seen in the persistence of the notion of area specialisation in anthropology where schools as well as scholars are divided into specialists in China studies, or South Asian studies or Middle Eastern studies. Somewhere down the line the association of culture with geography remains and defines sub-disciplines within anthropology.
STEWARD ‘ S CRITIQUE
Steward (1955:82) has discussed the consequences of a reliance upon culture-area typologies with respect to three problems: ( 1) center and boundary change with passage of time; ( 2) culture within the area may change so that it resembles cultures in different areas at different times; ( 3) portions of the area may be regarded as containing radically different cultures despite sharing of many features.
All of these problems are well illustrated in the case of Kroeber’s Greater Southwest Area. First, archaeological studies of the Southwest do not confirm the notion of a single stable center, nor a small number of climaxes. Second, there are known to be at least two principal developmental sequences: one, the Hohokam sequence, running from the hunting and gathering Cochise through the agricultural but pre-historic Hohokam; the other, the Anasazi sequence, connecting pre-ceramic Basket Maker peoples with the modern Pueblos. Third, the area, despite widespread similarities in culture “content,” was inhabited in historic times by peoples whose social organization was as widely contrastive as that of the sedentary Pueblos, the pastoral Navaho, and the marauding Apaches.
- This concept, is very selective in the kinds of traits on which it focuses. As a result, local and regional differences are virtually ignored, and the concept of independent invention was often discarded.
- Anthropologists cannot agree on the number of culture areas and how groups should be classified within those divisions. The current division of culture areas tends to be the most popular; however, there are certainly variations on this scheme: Arctic, Subarctic, Pacific Northwest, Northeast, Southeast, Great Plains, Southwest, Plateau, Great Basin, and California.
