Cultural Diffusion - Contention, Elaboration, Resolution, Bibliography
The concept of diffusion was born to controversy. The initial debate over this issue took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The concept of diffusion was born to controversy. The initial debate over this issue took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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 …
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 …
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, ge…
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