Alongside evolutionary theories, there developed the theories of diffusion, which underlined the phenomenon of cultural contact and mutual borrowing of ideas and artefacts. As we have seen, it is the diffusionist dimension that was incorporated in the revised theories of evolution, called multilineal and neo-evolutionary.
Providing a corrective to evolutionary theorists, the diffusionists asserted that changes in a society are not always orthogenetic; cultures change and enrich themselves through contact with each other. It is not necessary; in fact it is futile to ‘invent the wheel’ all the time. Austrian and German geographer-anthropologists contributed to this line of reasoning, which was also followed by the so-called Egyptologists from Great Britain.
Friedrich Ratzel, a zoologist turned geographer from Germany, was the first to introduce the concept of ‘culture circles’ (Kulturkreise in German). It was Fritz Graebner who used the qualities of culture and the quantity as criteria for gauging the likelihood of any two cultures being related historically. He thus identified culture areas such as ‘Tasmanian’, ‘Australian Boomerang’, ‘Melanesian bow’ and ‘Polynesian Patrilineal’ in the Pacific region. Similarly, Wilhelm Schmidt identified four culture areas in Africa: (1) Primitive Cultural Circle of Hunters and Gatherers; (2) Primary Circle of horticulturalists in whom patrilineal and matrilineal descent first occurred; (3) the Secondary Circle was a mix of Primitive and Primary traits, leading to intensive agriculture, sacred kingship and polytheism; and (4) Tertiary Circle of a complex blending of traits from different cultures—of the Secondary Circle—that resulted in the ancient civilizations of Asia, Europe and the Americas.
In contrast to these diffusionist theorists were the British scholars Elliot Smith and William James Perry, who propounded the fanciful theory that all great things originated from Egypt and spread to other cultures. In Perry‘s The Children of the Sun (1923), it is argued that Egypt was the source of agriculture, domestication of animals, the calendar, pottery, basketry, permanent dwellings and the urban centres. This extreme view is known as ‘heliocentric diffusionism‘; some have dubbed it as ‘Egyptology’. But this approach did not have many takers and it finally died out in the 1950s.
The German diffusionist approach was seriously taken up in American anthropology under the leadership of Franz Boas, who had migrated from Germany. Other anthropologists—of German origin or exposed to German anthropology—who contributed to what has come to be known as the Culture Area approach, were Robert Lowie, Edward Sapir, and A. L. Kroeber.
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