Diffusionism

Focusing on the notion that similarities among cultures resulted from components spreading from one culture to another, diffusionism is often seen as a reaction to the paradigm of classic unilinear evolutionism, which traced cultural development to the ability of cultures to innovate independently. The major names in the early years of diffusionism worked in the great museums of central Europe, studying the distribution of artifacts and coming to the conclusion that cultures were patchworks of traits, with each trait having its own origin and history. Grounded in museum empiricism and relatively modest in theory, diffusionism successfully attracted scholars away from evolutionism in the first few decades of the 20th century.

Some diffusionists, mostly German- and English-speaking, thought they could discover the earliest [Page 747]forms of human behavior by mapping the distribution of cultural traits in non-Western societies; the most widely distributed traits would be the oldest. Some diffusionists were determined to prove that all human culture originated in one place and then spread through diffusion, such as Englishmen G. Elliot Smith (1871–1937) and W. J. Perry, who created what is often called the” pan-Egyptian” or “heliolithic” (sometimes known as the “heliocentric”) school. The German-Austrian culture historical or culture circle (also known by the German word kulturkreis) school and the American historical particularists were more restrained. Since the North American school is usually discussed separately, the entry will concentrate on the English and German-Austrian approaches.