Innovation and diffusion, particularism and relativism

By the close of the 19th century, enough data had been amassed that it was clear that certain objects and ideas associated with “civilization”—the wheel, metalworking, patrilineality, monogamy, monotheism, and the like—were unevenly distributed over space and time. This appeared to support the evolutionary frameworks promulgated by Morgan and others, but a clear explanation of the cause of cultural differences was yet to be found. Soon there was consensus that cultural evolution occurred through one of two means: new technology and cultural practices were either locally invented in one place after another (innovation), or they were created in a few localities from whence they spread over a wide area (diffusion).

Because they could observe diffusion firsthand—a wide array of products (guns, livestock), ideas (Christianity), and peoples (European) had certainly spread rapidly throughout the colonies—the vast majority of academics supported the diffusionist hypothesis. They often conflated cultural complexity and biological evolution in ways that upheld the insidious racism of the era. For instance, many diffusionists posited that the “Negroid” and “Mongoloid” “races,” and possibly the lower forms of “Caucasoid” peoples, were essentially incapable of invention. Having made that claim, they suggested that the “cultural lag” evident among these peoples resulted from a combination of this biological shortcoming and these groups’ distance from well-known centres of innovation such as the Fertile Crescent and, later, northern Europe. Diffusionists also felt that such factors provided adequate explanation for the poverty and disenfranchisement experienced by the “lower races.” The most doctrinaire of the diffusionists were advocates of the Kulturkreis (German: “culture circle”) concept, which posited a very few centres of innovation.

Those who were skeptical of diffusionist claims offered an alternative theory that became known as independent innovation: humans were by their very nature inventive, and, given time, each culture group would invent whatever it needed. The logic of independent innovation implied that all the “lower” peoples were as intrinsically able as the “higher races.” This perspective suggested that the circumstances of the “lower” groups arose from economic or political causes rather than genetic ineptitude (see race). Such claims presented an inherent challenge to racist views and to the morality of colonial conquest.

Although the political implications of the innovation-diffusion debate were profound, they were generally of less interest to scholars than was its resolution—not least because it created the interesting methodological problem of how one might scientifically determine the primacy of either process. Otis T. Mason, curator of ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution (1884–1908), suggested one such method in an 1887 article published in Science: a systematic comparison of individual traits accomplished without reference to the materials’ cultural and environmental contexts. His suggestion did not imply an ignorance of the role that such contexts played in shaping each other; Friedrich Ratzel, Paul Vidal de la Bache, and other scholars had published widely on human geography, and Mason himself had used the term culture area to gloss such confluences a few years earlier. However, he held that the study of traits within such broad contexts would do little to advance an understanding of the laws that governed cultural evolution. A taxonomic approach was more appropriate to that pursuit: if a biologist could study variations in the wing form of birds, ultimately creating a sequence from the wing’s most basal to its most advanced form, an ethnologist could apply the same methods to see if a cultural trait such as basketry had been independently developed (as demonstrated by many basal forms) or spread through diffusion (with a single or very few basal forms). A series of such studies, analyzing a multitude of traits, would eventually result in a preponderance of evidence supporting either innovation or diffusion, thus resolving the question of causation in cultural evolution.

Shortly thereafter, Science published a letter challenging Mason; its author was Franz Boas, a German-born ethnologist (at the time, Boas was employed by the journal as an editor, but his letter represented only his own point of view, not that of Science). Over a period of weeks, Boas, Mason, and eventually John Wesley Powell (the director of the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology, the branch of the Smithsonian that employed Mason) exchanged a combative series of notes in the journal. Boas insisted that the description of vanishing cultures, rather than the elucidation of cultural evolution, was the most appropriate role for the social scientist; that cultures should be treated as holistic, indivisible products of historically particular events; and that, in ranking cultures as higher or lower according to their traits, the comparative method Mason espoused was intrinsically biased and, therefore, ascientific. Boas also held that museum exhibits—which at the time were organized by object type, having, for example, halls of armour, dress, and so on—would be better organized by tribe.

Boas’s philosophy became known as particularism, for it defined each culture as the product of unique, historically particular events. The evolutionists felt that particularistic culture histories were immaterial in their quest for lawlike statements about the human condition and thus dismissed many of Boas’s statements as mere truisms. They felt that it was obvious that history was different from place to place, for instance, but that, because local events had little or no effect on broad evolutionary trends, they were not of scientific concern.

Although the evolutionists dismissed some parts of Boas’s challenge rather handily, they strongly objected to his claim that their approach was not scientifically valid. Thus, Boas’s most important challenge was not particularism per se but his proposition that there were no truly objective criteria with which to rank cultures; instead, he held that all cultures should be viewed as equally able to fulfill the needs of their members. This perspective became known as cultural relativism.