DIFFUSION, CULTURAL.

The concept of diffusion was born to controversy. The initial debate over this issue took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Contention

On one side were British thinkers such as G. Elliot Smith (with William J. Perry), who strove to trace all myths, rituals, and social institutions (except for those of hunters and gatherers) back to a single, seminal civilization—in Smith's case, that was Egypt (hence its characterization as pan-Egyptian and heliolithic). Pitted against the diffusionists were the evolutionists, such as E. B. Tylor (1832–1917) in England and the American Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881), who held that significant inventions are independently created in many societies because of the common mental and psychological characteristics of our species. Influenced by the biological evolutionism of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and evolutionary paradigms of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), they ascribed to an essentially unilinear theory of the development of culture and may be referred to as independent inventionists and isolationists. A more moderate form of diffusionism, which absorbed certain aspects of evolutionary thought, was maintained by German-Austrian anthropologists such as Fritz Gräbner (1877–1934) and Father Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954), who claimed that culture originated in several areas of the world that they called Kulturkreise ("culture circles"). They were referred to as the culture-historical (kulturgeschichtliche ) school.

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) vigorously contested the more extreme forms of diffusionism and evolutionism through what is known as functionalism. The functionalists held that biological models should not be applied to sociological inquiries and stressed that cultural traits, even when it is possible to prove that they have been imported, are frequently radically reinterpreted in the societies to which they are introduced.

In the 1920s, with Franz Boas (1858–1942) at the helm, American anthropology clung to an essentially atheoretical position that rejected the polarizing assumptions of both diffusionists and evolutionists and considered functionalism to be overly schematic and insufficiently historical. While accepting the fact that cultural traits were manifestly transmissible, they emphasized the distinctiveness of cultures and the contingent, selective nature of borrowing. Among Boas's students was Alfred L. Kroeber (1876–1960), who put forward the modified notion of stimulus diffusion, according to which the general idea or principle of a cultural trait is thought to be adopted from one culture by another culture, but not its specific signification and purpose. Such concerns led to the examination of the mechanisms of adoption and adaptation.

Elaboration

After more than half a century of dissension over the opposition between cultural diffusionism and independent invention, many scholars began to search for means to circumvent the counterproductive impasse. A landmark event in diffusionist thinking took place at the 1948 International Congress of Americanists in New York when a Mesoamericanist archaeologist, Gordon F. Ekholm, and an art historian of South and Southeast Asia, Robert Heine-Geldern, presented an exhibition of Old World and New World artifacts that revealed startling similarities. In a subsequent series of publications, they suggested possible Hindu-Buddhist influences on the Maya and the Toltec. The methodology of new diffusionists such as Ekholm and Heine-Geldern differed markedly from that of their predecessors in that it downplayed unicentric theory and emphasized the accumulation of overwhelming amounts of juxtaposed, concrete evidence. Their work was carried on with the utmost attention to detail by researchers such as Paul Tolstoy, who pointed out striking cultural parallels between the manufacture of bark cloth in Southeast Asia and in Mesoamerica. On the theoretical plane, Tolstoy drew an important distinction between diffusion as explanation (arguable) and diffusion as event (demonstrable). Empirically grounded studies were also continued in the investigations of Stuart Piggott, who plotted the path of wheeled vehicles across large swaths of Eurasia, displaying a good example of a finely worked case study of technological diffusion.

By the beginning of the twenty-first century and the age of globalization, the discussion had been entirely recast (whether conceived of as a quantitative or qualitative difference in how cultural ideas have moved around since the dawn of humanity). A leading figure of this approach to macro-and micro-analysis of cultural contagion is Arjun Appadurai. One of Appadurai's most frequently cited texts is the essay entitled "Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology" (now Chapter 3 in his Modernity at Large ), where he talks about the role of "imagination" in the transnational flow of culture that is associated with globalization. In the pathbreaking book entitled The Social Life of Things, edited by Appadurai, ethnohistorians look at the problem of how the objects of material culture change as they migrate, lending subtlety to the treatment of an unspoken diffusionism. It should, however, be pointed out that none of the anthropologists who are fascinated with such global phenomena claim any influence from the older schools of diffusionist thought and would undoubtedly disown it.

Resolution

While diffusionism remains unfashionable (indeed, virtually unmentionable) within anthropology, studies of diffusion in other fields are commonplace and fruitful. Investigations of the diffusion of innovations are regularly undertaken by researchers in agricultural economics, communication, education, sociology (especially early sociology and rural sociology), food processing and preservation, geography (particularly economic geography), general economics, industrial engineering, manufacturing, marketing and management, packaging, public health and medical sociology, psychology, public administration and political science, statistics, and other areas.

Prominent among scholars who undertake this relatively uncontested kind of pragmatic diffusionism, often employing sophisticated mathematical models, are Torsten Hägerstrand, Lawrence A. Brown, and Peter J. Hugill. These researchers have made fundamental contributions to the understanding of the diffusion of innovations in global communications, the analysis of world trade patterns, and the relationship between geopolitics (including its manifestations in war and espionage) and the transfer of technology. It is odd that the mere mention of diffusion among anthropologists is still capable of evoking paroxysms of indignation, whereas in most other disciplines it is considered a perfectly normal topic for discussion. One can only conclude that issues pertaining to diffusion in anthropology carry potent politico-ideological overtones and are borne on sensitive ethnological undercurrents that are wholly lacking in more utilitarian, less value-laden research fields.

The discipline of history has finally managed to extricate itself from the more acrimonious aspects of the debate over diffusionism. This is above all true of scholars aligned with William McNeill, who has for more than four decades identified intercivilizational contact as the main motor of human history. World history is now a vibrant subfield with its own lively journal (Journal of World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley) in which researchers routinely write about world systems, interaction spheres, interregional contact and exchange, and other highly productive topics in noncircumlocutory terms. It is intriguing to observe that world historians increasingly resort to reticular imagery to show that the transmission of goods and ideas is multidirectional and totally interwoven. A parallel, but not always congruent, line of intellectual history is that of world systems theory, which flourished in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly as advocated by the economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein. A major concern of world systems theorists was the movement of precious metals among polities, some of which were separated by enormous distances. The Marxian aspects of this theory, together with the postmodern reaction against it, undoubtedly is one source of contemporary anthropology's lingering unease with diffusionism.

See also Communication of Ideas ; Ideas, History of ; Oral Traditions .

bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

——. ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca, and Marcus W. Feldman. Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Christian, David. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

McNeill, J. R., and William H. McNeill. The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.

Rogers, Everett M. Diffusion of Innovations. 5th ed. New York: Free Press, 2003. The second edition, by Rogers with F. Floyd Shoemaker, was published as Communication of Innovations: A Cross-Cultural Approach, New York: Free Press, 1971.

Victor H. Mair