Diffusionism: what it is, and characteristics of this anthropological school

Throughout the history of anthropology, a series of theoretical currents have been generated to explain the observed phenomena.

One of the most important in the last century was diffusionism. Then we will stop to learn about the characteristics that define this school, what novelties it contributed compared to other existing movements and other important characteristics.

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What is diffusionism?

Within the different theoretical currents that try to give a foundation to anthropological phenomena, diffusionism is one of them. This movement emerged when the 19th century gave way to the 20th. The basis of this school, according to its defenders, is that the different human societies, from their origin, have been creating their culture thanks to the imitation of neighboring groups, such as other tribes, peoples or cities.

Therefore, the culture of a certain group or ethnic group would be nurtured by what they have observed in other communities, which in turn observed it in other communities beyond. According to diffusionism, therefore, the end result is a mixture of very small parts of shared knowledge between the different peoples, mainly due to their geographical proximity.

Diffusionism arose in contrast to evolutionism, another trend that gained strength throughout the century XIX and that defended the progressive complexity that a culture would acquire, due to the creativity of being human. On the contrary, diffusionism attributes this complexity to the mere exposure to other close cultures with which it is sharing and exchanging elements.

One of the main promoters of this school was Friedrich Ratzel, German geographer. Ratzel's position regarding the great inventions of man was that they did not take place in different places in parallel, but rather They always arose in a specific place and from there they began to spread to neighboring areas and so on until they covered the entire world. known.

Friedrich Ratzel managed to influence other authors, such as his student, Leo Frobenius, who continued to develop the theoretical basis of diffusionism. Frobenius spoke of the so-called cultural circles, or kulturkreise, in German. According to this author, there were a series of these primitive circles, which would belong to the ancestral cultures to from which almost all knowledge would have spread to other areas, sometimes very far away.

Extreme diffusionism

If we take the theory of cultural circles to the extreme and follow the idea of ​​diffusionism to its purest essence, we find the texts of authors such as Grafton Elliot Smith, hyper-diffusionist, who defended the idea that the Ancient Egyptian civilization was the cultural origin of all the others, regardless of their geographical distance.

This is a really ambitious statement, because according to Grafton's theory, even pre-Columbian American civilizations would have been influenced by Egypt. The explanation that this author proposes is that of a pilgrimage of hundreds of Egyptian priests that took place seven millennia ago, seeking the source of life throughout the globe. This movement facilitated the diffusion of the culture and knowledge of Egypt to other places.

Grafton suggests that from Asia some of these priests may have made it to the American continent and transmit parts of their culture to the men who would later raise the Inca or Aztec civilizations, where they have been observed certain parallels that are those that this author maintains as proof of his approach to justify a hyperdiffusionism.

This aspect of the school is also known as monocentric diffusionism, because in this case they would be proposing a version of cultural circles in the one that only one would have existed at first, and from there the knowledge would have been transmitted to other places, creating in turn new circles.

Other authors who defend extreme diffusionism have proposed that Agriculture, as one of the main innovations in the history of mankind, is something that was only discovered once and progressively spread.or among all existing peoples. This discovery would have taken place in the region known as the Fertile Crescent, in the Mediterranean Levant.

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Polycentric diffusionism

However, other authors are more cautious and speak of a polycentric diffusionism, that is, of a few main areas from which all knowledge and inventions have spread. There would not be many, but neither would it be one, as in the Ancient Egyptian theory. Some of the anthropologists who represented this theory were Fritz Graebner or Wilhelm Schmidt.

These authors point to different points in the Old World where the first cultural circles could be located. They are located in the basins of the main rivers of Africa and Asia, such as the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Indus or the Huang He, also known as the Yellow River. But they also include other points in America where those first areas of influence could be formed. They propose the Andes area and also Mesoamerica.

In any case, Most diffusionist authors agree on the importance of the lands near the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean as the origin of the first and main cultural circles. It would be from these regions where the human being would have expanded, in all senses, both geographically and culturally.

According to these theories, the great technological contributions that would have allowed the changes of era would have occurred in these areas and from there they would have been progressively shared with nearby population centers until they spread to all civilized corners of the world. In this way it would have passed from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, for example.

Another author who addressed polycentric diffusionism was the American Clark Wissler, which added a new dimension to this theory. According to this anthropologist, cultural circles would have more influence and more efficiently transmit their knowledge to the closest areas. Therefore, the further we move away from these regions, this influence will weaken and the contributions will be more tenuous.

This mechanism works geographically but also temporally, since innovations cultural centers take a certain time to travel from a cultural center to the most far away. Therefore, the closer to that circle we find a certain feature, we could assume that that characteristic in question is older than a similar one found in a more peripheral region.

However, this diffusion mechanism proposed by Wissler had some criticism from authors who considered that the author was not taking into account an important factor when establishing his reasoning. The issue behind these criticisms is that not all the knowledge, customs, innovations or traits of a culture have to be transmitted at the same speed.

Australian archaeologist Vere Gordon Childe also represented diffusionism.. Said author spoke of cultural transmission among Indo-European peoples but also established a focus main in Ancient Greece as a cultural circle that was transmitted to all societies bathed by the sea Mediterranean.

Childe defended a more moderate diffusionism in which a part of the culture would indeed be transmitted between different societies, while other innovations would arrive due to the very conditions to which a certain society. In this sense, the author would be combining the postulates of diffusionism with ideas of a Marxist nature.

Finally, as an example of diffusionism taken to the extreme, we find the theories of Thor Heyerdahl, a Norwegian ethnographer. Heyerdahl undertook a series of boat expeditions between very remote regions to try to empirically demonstrate that very ancient civilizations had within their reach the means to have displaced and contacted other societies.

If this were the case, the principles of monocentric diffusionism that we had seen previously would gain strength, in which, for For example, Ancient Egypt could have been the cultural cradle of major innovations that would later be exported to very far away.

Diffusionism today

Today, diffusionism has been partially integrated into anthropology as a theoretical basis for so-called cultural borrowings between different societies. Therefore, it is accepted that all elements of human culture can be transferred to another human group, but this does not mean that it necessarily has to happen.

In fact, there are cultures that prefer a certain isolation from other societies in order to be able to preserve certain customs and traditions without being influenced or modified by cultures external. Therefore, today we could conclude that diffusionism has served to explain some phenomena of anthropology but it has not become a predominant school.

Bibliographic references:

• Harris, N.; del Toro, R.V. (1999). The development of anthropological theory: history of theories of culture. Twenty-first Century Publishers.
• Restrepo, E. (2016). Classical schools of anthropological thought. Cuzco: Vicente Torres Editor.
• Scarduelli, P. (1977). Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. Editorial Villalar.