Diffusionism stresses the transmission of things (material or otherwise) from one culture to another, one people to another, or one place to another. An implicit presupposition of extreme diffusionism is that humankind is uninventive: things are invented only once, and then are transmitted from people to people, sometimes across the globe. This can be effected either by direct transmission between stable populations or through migrations by culture-rich peoples. In contrast, classical evolutionism assumes that humankind is inventive: each population has the propensity to invent the same things as the next, though they will do so at different rates.

By the time diffusionism was dwindling in importance, around the 1930s, it had left behind ideas which were picked up within other traditions: the idea of ‘culture areas’ is the most prominent example. This had already become an important facet of the ethnographic tradition of Franz Boas and his followers (see chapter 7). It also appeared within the evolutionism of Julian Steward (chapter 3) and within the functionalist and structuralist traditions which emerged in the first half of the twentieth century (chapters 5 and 8). Culture-area and regional approaches are a logical outgrowth of an emphasis on diffusion, and this chapter will cover these approaches with this point in the background.

Antecedents of diffusionism: philology, Müller, and Bastian

Diffusionism originated in the eighteenth-century philological tradition which posited historical connections between all the languages of the Indo-European language family.