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[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Cultural Diffusion
The term ‘diffusionist’ was first used in 1893 to denote a scholar who believed that most folklore was borrowed from an Old World center of high culture, such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, or India. The term initially contrasted with it was ‘evolutionist,’ meaning, in this context, a folklorist who maintained that most traditional oral narratives originated in the area in which they were current. But, because the term evolutionist was more often employed to designate someone supporting a non-theistic theory of biological speciation, the word ‘inventionist’ came to replace evolutionist as the label for a believer in predominantly autonomous local cultural development.
The distinction between diffusionism and inventionism became progressively sharper as the two positions polarized. Increasingly, adherents of each school saw themselves as defensively compelled to refute the misinterpretations of the other school. In this respect, the relation between diffusionism and inventionism was much like that between evolutionism and creationism with regard to the origin of species, or that between uniformitarianism and catastrophism with regard to the history of the earth. In all three cases, polemics grew at the expense of mutual understanding.
In the case of uniformitarianism and catastrophism, it is not so much individual thinkers who bridge the gulf between conceptual extremes, as the schools themselves, which exhibit unexpected overlaps in the specific concepts advanced by each. Uniformitarians, who hold that the changes in our planet and its surroundings have been predominantly incremental over eons, nonetheless maintain that the universe originated in a gigantic explosion nicknamed the ‘Big Bang.’ In other words, they accept an initial catastrophe but deny most subsequent catastrophes. Catastrophists, on the other hand, attribute biotic extinctions, like those of the dinosaurs and the mammoths, to disasters of global scope. Yet they maintain that, between disasters, organic groups experience stasis, or complete cessation of collective change, speciation being restricted to the same brief periods of intense disruption that produce die-offs.....
