Cultural diffusion

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In

business suits
in the 20th century.

Types

Five major types of cultural diffusion have been defined:

  • Expansion diffusion: an innovation or idea that develops in a source area and remains strong there, while also spreading outward to other areas. This can include hierarchical, stimulus, and contagious diffusion.
  • Relocation diffusion: an idea or innovation that migrates into new areas, leaving behind its origin or source of the cultural trait.
  • Hierarchical diffusion: an idea or innovation that spreads by moving from larger to smaller places, often with little regard to the distance between places, and often influenced by social elites.
  • Contagious diffusion: an idea or innovation that spreads based on person-to-person contact within a given population with no regard for hierarchies. HIV/AIDS first spread to urban neighborhoods (Hierarchical diffusion) and then spread outwards (contagious diffusion)[1]
  • Stimulus diffusion: an idea or innovation that spreads based on its attachment to another concept. Occurs when a certain idea is rejected but the underlying concept is adopted. Early Siberian people domesticated reindeer only after exposure to the domesticated cattle raised by cultures to their south. They had no use for cattle but the idea of domesticated herds appealed to them, and they began domesticating reindeer, an animal they had long hunted.[2]

Mechanisms

Inter-cultural diffusion can happen in many ways.

explorers
, soldiers, diplomats, slaves, and hired artisans. Technology diffusion has often occurred by one society luring skilled scientists or workers by payments or another inducement. Trans-cultural marriages between two neighboring or interspersed cultures have also contributed. Among literate societies, diffusion can occur through letters, books, and, in modern times, through electronic media.

There are three categories of diffusion mechanisms:

Direct diffusion was common in ancient times when small groups of humans lived in adjoining settlements. Indirect diffusion is common in today's world because of the mass media and the invention of the Internet. Also of interest is the work of American historian and critic Daniel J. Boorstin in his book The Discoverers, in which he provides a historical perspective on the role of explorers in the diffusion of innovations between civilizations.

Theories

The many models that have been proposed for inter-cultural diffusion are:

  • Migrationism
    , the spread of cultural ideas by either gradual or sudden population movements
  • Culture circles diffusionism (Kulturkreise)—the theory that cultures originated from a small number of cultures
  • "Kulturkugel" (a German compound meaning "culture bullet", coined by J. P. Mallory), a mechanism suggested by Mallory[3] to model the scale of invasion vs. gradual migration vs. diffusion. According to this model, local continuity of material culture and social organization is stronger than linguistic continuity, so that cultural contact or limited migration regularly leads to linguistic changes without affecting material culture or social organization.[4]
  • Hyperdiffusionism
    —the theory that all cultures originated from one culture

A concept that has often been mentioned in this regard, which may be framed in the evolutionary diffusionism model, is that of "an idea whose time has come"—whereby a new cultural item appears almost simultaneously and independently in several widely separated places, after certain prerequisite items have diffused across the respective communities. This concept was invoked with regard to the independent development of

electronic computer
.

Hyperdiffusionism

Main article:
Hyperdiffusionism in Archaeology

Hyperdiffusionists deny that parallel evolution or independent invention took place to any great extent throughout history; they claim that all major inventions and all cultures can be traced back to a single culture.[5]

Early theories of hyperdiffusionism can be traced to ideas about

paleontologist Florentino Ameghino in 1880, who published his research in La antigüedad del hombre en el Plata.[6]

The work of

ethnographic data. Another hyperdiffusionist was Lord Raglan; in his book How Came Civilization (1939) he wrote that instead of Egypt all culture and civilization had come from Mesopotamia.[9]
Hyperdiffusionism after this did not entirely disappear, but it was generally abandoned by mainstream academia.

Medieval Europe

Diffusion theory has been advanced[

European miracle", the adoption of technological innovation in medieval Europe which by the 19th century culminated in European technological achievement surpassing the Islamic world and China.[10] Technological imports to medieval Europe include gunpowder, clock mechanisms, shipbuilding, paper, and the windmill
; however, in each of these cases, Europeans not only adopted the technologies but improved the manufacturing scale, inherent technology, and applications to a point clearly surpassing the evolution of the original invention in its country of origin.

There are also some historians who have questioned whether Europe really owes the development of such inventions as gunpowder, the compass, the windmill or printing to the Chinese or other cultures.[11][12][13]

However, historian Peter Frankopan argues that influences, particularly trade, through the Middle East and Central Asia to China through the silk roads have been overlooked in traditional histories of the "rise of the West". He argues that the Renaissance was funded with trade with the east (due to the demise of Byzantium at the hands of Venice and the Fourth Crusade), and that the trade allowed ideas and technology to be shared with Europe. But the constant warfare and rivalry in Europe meant there was extreme evolutionary pressure for developing these ideas for military and economic advantage, and a desperate need to use them in expansion.[14]

Disputes

Further information: Migrationism and diffusionism

While the concept of diffusion is well accepted in general, conjectures about the existence or the extent of diffusion in some specific contexts have been hotly disputed. An example of such disputes is the proposal by Thor Heyerdahl that similarities between the culture of Polynesia and the pre-Columbian civilizations of the Andes are due to diffusion from the latter to the former—a theory that currently has few supporters among professional anthropologists.[15][16][17][18][19]

Contributors

Major contributors to inter-cultural diffusion research and theory include:

See also

Notes

  1. ISBN 978-1-4292-4018-5
    .
  2. ISBN 978-1-4292-4018-5
    .
  3. Indo-Aryan migration
    ; Mallory, "A European Perspective on Indo-Europeans in Asia". In The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern and Central Asia. Ed. Mair. Washington D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man (1998)
  4. superstratum
    within the host culture).
  5. ^ Legend and lore of the Americas before 1492: an encyclopedia of visitors, explorers, and immigrants, Ronald H. Fritze, 1993, p. 70
  6. ^ Indians of the Andes: Aymaras and Quechuas, Harold Osborne, 2004, pp. 2–3
  7. ^ The Routledge Dictionary of Anthropologists, Gérald Gaillard, 2004, p. 48
  8. ^ Megaliths, Myths and Men: An Introduction to Astro-Archaeology, Peter Lancaster Brown, 2000, p. 267
  9. ^ Sociocultural Evolution: Calculation and Contingency, Bruce G. Trigger, 1998, p. 101
  10. ISBN 0-393-95115-4
  11. ^ Peter Jackson: The Mongols and the West, Pearson Longman 2005, p. 315
  12. ^ Donald F. Lach: Asia in the Making of Europe. 3 volumes, Chicago, Illinois, 1965–93; I:1, pp. 82–83
  13. ^ Robert Bartlett: The Making of Europe. Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change 950–1350, Allen Lane, 1993
  14. ISBN 9781101912379
  15. ^ Robert C. Suggs The Island Civilizations of Polynesia, New York: New American Library, pp. 212-224
  16. ^ Kirch, P. (2000). On the Roads to the Wind: An archaeological history of the Pacific Islands before European contact. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000
  17. doi:10.1016/j.jas.2006.02.006. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 2011-07-19.
  18. ^ Physical and cultural evidence had long suggested that Polynesia was settled from west to east, migration having begun from the Asian mainland, not South America. In the late 1990s, genetic testing found that the mitochondrial DNA of the Polynesians is more similar to people from southeast Asia than to people from South America, showing that their ancestors most likely came from Asia.
  19. PMID 18208337
    .

References

External links

  • "Diffusionism and Acculturation" by Gail King and Meghan Wright, Anthropological Theories, M.D. Murphy (ed.), Department of Anthropology, College of Arts and Sciences, The University of Alabama.
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