Talk:Cultural diffusion

message: My social studies teacher just calls it cultural diffusion...
DarkestMoonlight (talk) 13:40, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Article title? 

message: Kulturkugel is not a "non-existent German compound" as we were told in an earlier version of this article. It's a German espression modelled on expressions like Billiardball "billiard ball" and used by native speakers of German well before Mallory used it in his Indo-Aryan migration hypothesis. It isn't even a real "compound", at least to the extent that English billiard ball and other expression containing the element ball are not compounds. Eklir (talk) 04:04, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Kulturkugel

message: While Kroeber did first propose Stimulus Diffusion, this was not the first conceptualization of cultural diffusion. V.G. Childe relied on cultural diffusion (without a term I think) to describe the spread of civilization across Europe in "The Dawn of European Civilization". And Kroeber's phd advisor Franz Boas, also relied on a well formulated concept of cultural diffusion. Kroeber's Stimulus diffusion was just a more specific version of these. Firenoodle (talk) 20:49, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Kroeber?

message: :Cultural diffusion is the spread of culture via interaction between individuals from one culture to another or within a culture.  
WP, as encyclopedia, is a reference after all!--John Bessa (talk) 15:48, 14 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposed first line

message: Attempts to explain similarities between two cultures by diffusion are often criticized for being ethnocentric, since they imply that the supposed "receptors" would not be capable of innovation. Some authors made such claims explicitly—for example, to argue for pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact as the "only possible explanation" for the origin of the great civilizations in the Andes and of Central America.
Those disputes are fueled in part by the overuse of cultural diffusion, starting in the late 19th century, as a blanket explanation for all similarities between widely dispersed cultures. The most famous proponent of this theory was Grafton Elliot Smith, who argued that civilization first formed in Ancient Egypt and then diffused to other places.
Diffusion theories also suffer from being inherently speculative and hard to prove or disprove; especially for relatively simple cultural items like "pyramid-shaped buildings", "solar deity", "row of standing stones", or "animal paintings in caves".  After all, the act of diffusion proper is a purely mental (or at most verbal) phenomenon, that leaves no archaeological trace, so diffusion can be deduced with some certainty only when the similarities involve a relatively complex and partly arbitrary collection of items, such as a writing system, a complex myth, or a pantheon of gods.
Another criticism that has been leveled at many diffusion proposals is the failure to explain why certain items were not diffused. For example, attempts to "explain" the New World civilizations by diffusion from Europe or Egypt should explain why a basic concept like the potter's wheel is not found in the Americas while writing is.
No actual quotations here I think, but the real problem is that besides not being sourced it was in the wrong section, as these criticisms are most commonly aimed at hyperdiffusionism - and when you search on that term you can source them. The relationship between this article and Hyperdiffusionism isn't great. Doug Weller talk 18:07, 10 July 2016 (UTC)
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