Anthropology of Diffusion Research Paper

The anthropological interest in diffusion began as an argument against evolutionary interpretations of history. Such interpretations had become part of popular culture in late-nineteenth-century Europe and Euro-America. The general idea was that cultural evolution and cumulative reason had taken humankind from a stage of savagery to one of civilization. The title of one of Lewis Henry Morgan’s (1818–81) works put it succinctly: Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877). Evolutionary theoreticians like Morgan, Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917), and Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), held that, while cultural borrowing between social groups certainly had occurred throughout human history, similar cultural and social forms emerged in different places and times, mostly due to the psychic similarity of humans the world over, and to a general uniformity in evolutionary stages.

Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) was the first to explicitly reject this explanation for cultural and social similarities. He argued that no culture had evolved in isolation, and that contact and borrowing between groups should be considered to be far more common in human history than instances of social and cultural innovation. Since Ratzel believed that the principal mechanism of diffusion was migration, he arrived at the conclusion that ‘migration theory is the fundamental theory of world history’ (Ratzel 1882, p. 464). The object of study for Ratzel was the reconstruction of how cultural and social forms had spread from centers of innovation. This reconstructive effort went under the name of cultural history (Kulturgeschichte in German). Among the most notable cultural historians were: Bernhard Ankermann (1859–1943), who, unlike the majority of cultural historians who wrote universal histories of humankind, believed that insufficient data only allowed for the reconstruction of diffusion in particular regions; Leo Frobenius (1873–1938), a student of Ratzel who elaborated the latter’s migration theory into a theory of cultural areas (Kulturkreise in German); and Fritz Graebner (1877–1934), the author of Methode der Ethnologie (1911), arguably the most influential theoretical and methodological work of cultural history. At the University of Vienna, Fathers Wilhelm Schmidt and Wilhelm Koppers formulated a theory of primary cultural units, which were said to be at the root of all existing cultures and to have evolved through processes of diffusion from the primeval culture of hunters and gatherers. At University College, London, Grafton Elliot Smith and his disciple William Perry tried to prove that from a single center of innovation, namely ancient Egypt, culture had diffused to the rest of the world:

towards the close of the period of the New Empire, or perhaps even a little later, a great many of the most distinctive practices of Egyptian civilization suddenly appeared in more distant part of the coast-lines of Africa, Europe, and Asia and also in course of time in Oceania and America (Smith 1916, p. 3).

As chief agents of diffusion, Smith and Perry identified the Phoenicians.

At Cambridge, UK, worked W. H. R. Rivers, who had been a member of the Torres Strait Expedition, and who had emerged as the most influential British anthropologist in the first two decades of the twentieth century. After conducting fieldwork among the Todas of southern India in 1902, Rivers turned to ‘ethnological analysis’—that is cultural history (cf. Rivers 1911). In two volumes, Rivers (1914) subsequently reconstructed the history of Melanesia by mapping the process of cultural diffusion in the area.

In the USA, Franz Boas (1858–1942) collected specimens, information in the native language about these specimens, and grammatical information necessary for the interpretation of this information. His ambition was to reconstruct a cultural history of the nonliterate people he studied. In particular, Boas developed his diffusionary analyses in the field of linguistic studies. At the same time, Boas was highly critical of cultural history’s reconstruction by way of presumption. Boas thought that too much in cultural history was guesswork. Also, he formulated his own ethnographic method in contradistinction to the logic of museum exhibitions, which, at the time, placed specimens next to one another without concern for the cultural and social context they had once been part of.

Common to the work of all cultural historians was a research orientation toward topics that can be summarized in the following four concepts: (a) cultural origins; (b) material culture; (c) culture areas; and (d) culture strata.

(a) Cultural origins: cultural history shared with evolutionary theory a profound interest in ultimate origins and long-term diachronic developments. It is this preoccupation that put the question of independent innovations versus diffusion into stark relief. Evolutionary theory suggested that the origins of cultural elements should be sought in innovation because cultural similarities indicated similar mental dispositions and similar reactions to similar environmental conditions (‘like causes produce like effects’). Cultural history responded that the origins of cultural elements could be found in the diffusion from centers of innovation since it was far more likely that similarity was an indication of contact than of similar dispositions and conditions.

(b) Material culture: methodologically, cultural history relied to a considerable extent on typologizing artifacts. Everything from techniques of mummification and architectural styles to types of domesticated animals, dyeing techniques, weapons, and tools were used as indicators of cultural diffusion. Specimens were taken to be cultural elements, and single artifacts, institutions, and ideas were studied like museum objects detached from their cultural and social context.

(c) Cultural areas (Kulturkreise in German) were conceptualized as areas of homogenous culture. Alfred Kroeber (1931, p. 646) considered culture areas to be organized in a center-periphery fashion, with centers ‘in which the culture is most typical and intensive and which are to be construed as foci of radiation,’ and border areas that intergrade with adjacent areas.

(d) Cultural strata (Kulturschichten in German) were considered to be layers of cultural diffusion, that is, superimpositions of cultural elements upon one another originating from waves of diffusion.

In the face of a methodological shift in anthropology, with direct observation during extended times of fieldwork replacing the study of museum specimens and survey studies with the help of questionnaires, the question of cultural origins waned. Consequently, the reconstructive work of cultural history, and its great reliance on artifacts, fell into disrepute in much of anthropology. Cultural interaction, however, continued to be a core issue and was now studied under the headings of culture contact, acculturation, and culture change. Acculturation, the key concept in this context, was defined as follows: ‘Acculturation comprehends those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous first-hand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups’ (Redfield et al. 1936, p. 149). Following World War I, culture contact had become a matter of self-conscious reflection:

The great world-shattering changes of the past decade, the War, the Russian Revolution, the Treaty of Versailles and the consequences of these events, have led men to question for the first time many of the previously unchallenged assumptions implicit in their own civilization, whilst it has prompted them to regard with real concern and a desire to understand civilizations unlike their own (Pitt-Rivers 1927, p. xii).

Some acculturation studies, like Pitt-Rivers’, were explicitly directed at the types of political domination that in so many instances produced culture change during colonialism. Thus, Richard Thurnwald (1932, p. 568f ) distinguished between two kinds of acculturation through colonial relations: on the one hand, the biological and cultural mixing between men and women, on the other, formal relations of tutelage. In the one instance, acculturation was a matter of intimate relations, of primary socialization into local traditions in the form of care, which attributed to women as ‘principal caretakers’ the role of keepers of tradition. In the other case, the social relations were ones of formal education or secondary socialization through ‘channels by which the new and foreign flows,’ such as ‘missions, schools, governmental ordinances, control of courts, etc.’

Soon, however, leading American anthropologists made acculturation studies turn on the issue of why some cultural groups resisted formal colonial tutelage and the ‘modernization’ it was to bring, and others did not. The cause was sought in the rigidity and closedness of some societies versus the adaptability and openness of others. One suggestion was that it was possible to distinguish ‘hard-shelled, vertebrate’ from ‘soft-shelled, invertebrate’ cultural systems (Social Science Research Council Summer Seminar 1954, p. 978). For instance, two Native American groups were studied with regard to how they received tribal members who returned as World War II veterans (Adair and Vogt 1949). One group was described as engaging in ‘antagonistic acculturation,’ that is, to resist culture change. The other group was described as ‘receptive,’ ‘flexible,’ and ‘intensely curious about the outside world’ (Adair and Vogt 1949, pp. 558–60)—what Margaret Mead (1938) once characterized as an ‘importing culture.’ These characteristics were attributed to different types of social organization, ritual systems, and collective dispositions. The attention to relations of domination that had been present in studies like those of Pitt-Rivers and Thurnwald had given way to a perspective that, at least implicitly, valued cultures that were open and adaptive to modernization.

Not all studies of culture change, however, were framed in a modernization-friendly perspective. Some classical studies—such as Eric Wolf’s (1958) of syncretism (i.e., the synthesis of old and diffused cultural elements) in the case of the Virgin of Guadalupe— attempted to provide an analysis of the specifics of acculturation. Other studies were explicit arguments against modernization-friendly theories. In particular, a critical anthropology of colonialism and neo- colonialism developed under the influence of Andre Gunder Frank’s (1969) thesis that underdevelopment was not a result of traditionalism, but of colonialist exploitation, and of Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1974) synthetic work about the dynamics of European expansion and the center-periphery structure of the world-system.

This type of anthropology tended to treat cultural diffusion as a secondary effect of economic structures and relations. The exceptions to this tendency—such as Michael Taussig’s ethnography, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (1980)—are noteworthy. Taussig’s work was, in part, an argument against the idea that European, colonial, or capitalist expansion would result in the sort of cultural imperialism that would erase all cultural differences and bring about the ‘coca-colonization’ of the world. Ethnographers had for some time provided examples of culturally creative responses to capitalism’s local encroachments in different parts of the world (see Nash 1981 for a review of this genre). World-systemic approaches also deviated from theories of cultural imperialism’s homogenizing effects in that they, in accordance with Wallerstein’s interpretation, saw the rise of national ideologies in response to globalization. They did not grant independent cultural logic, however, to the global periphery. Instead, they held the periphery to be open to radical change initiated by the center. Marshall Sahlins (1985, p. viii) has called this ‘a confusion between an open system and a lack of system.’

Increasingly, local responses and resistance to colonial and capitalist diffusion became a major research orientation in anthropology and ethnographic genre in its own right. At the theoretical level, work progressed toward an analysis of the channels, types of social organization, and cultural imaginations through which diffusion occurred in the late twentieth century. Much of this effort went under the name of globalization and transnational studies. One of its representatives, Ulf Hannerz (1992, p. 46), identifies four major organizational frameworks within which cultural diffusion now takes place: form of life (i.e., everyday life or life world), market, state, and movement. The frameworks differ with regard to centering and decentering tendencies, power–culture relationships, and their cultural economies. The social organization of cultural diffusion is thus complex, exhibiting great variation in scale, rhythm, encompassment, and types of responses. Another anthropologist of transnational processes, Arjun Appadurai (1991), identifies a number of ‘landscapes’ of modernity— ethnoscapes, ideoscapes, financescapes, etc.—which replace previous notions of well-bounded, highly localized entities such as ethnic groups, national cultures, and market centers. The landscapes are in themselves diffusionary, so that for example ethnoscapes ‘around the world are no longer familiar anthropological objects, insofar as groups are no longer tightly territorialized, spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious, or culturally homogenous’ (Appadurai 1991, p. 191). People travel, migrate, seek refuge and work, and live with images and ideas that also travel—and the people know that they do, would be one way of summarizing Appadurai’s diffusionary argument.

In a world of rapid communication technologies, mobile populations, a culturally saturated international economy, and transnational connections that transcend national borders and local lives, anthropologists must reckon with ‘the new power of the imagination in the fabrication of social lives,’ Appadurai (1991, p. 199).

The kind of diffusionary approach that Hannerz, Appadurai, and theoretically related anthropologists have developed has tended to emphasize certain types of diffusion. Rather than to focus on the diffusion of fairly isomorph cultural and social forms—like bureaucratic, educational, and scientific models—it investigates new forms of cultural diversity that are more likely to emerge in and through market, as well as other, socially more loosely organized networks (at least where the capitalist market is not a primary source of standardization and cultural isomorphism). Since the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the debate in the anthropology of diffusion has shifted from the question of cultural origins to the issue of the future of culture. If cultural historians argued against the idea that the origin of similar cultural elements was to be found in independent innovations due to the psychic unity of humankind, anthropologists of globalization and transnational connections argue against the idea that current processes of diffusion will result in a homogenous world void of cultural diversity. In the 1920s, anthropologists thought they witnessed the end of cultural diversity as colonialism and capitalism increased the levels of diffusion and acculturation even in remote areas. At the beginning of the twenty-first century anthropologists, while knowing that cultural diversity did not end with the rise of colonialism, search for answers about the character and consequences of contemporary forms of diffusion. Diffusion is at the heart of current anthropological debate in so far as it asks a fundamental question: to what extent is anthropology about cultural diversity, and could anthropology survive in a world without it?

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