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, dividingNorth 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 Emergence of Anthropology 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 Wisslerused 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 whereschools 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