Egypt and the Origin of Civilization: The British School of Culture Diffusion, 1890s -1940s. By Joshua
Smith (Vindication Press, 2011), pp.147.
“The British School of Culture Diffusion” was neither British – the leading light Elliot Smith was
Australian – nor was it really a school, rather a group of independent and tough minded scholars,
who nevertheless interacted with and influenced each other enormously. Elliot Smith was a world
renowned neuro-anatomist and expert on human evolution; W. H. R. Rivers was a pioneer in the
fields of psychotherapy, neurology, physiology and ethnology; and W. J. Perry taught university
courses in comparative religion and cultural anthropology at Manchester and London universities.
Despite their credentials, their theories on cultural diffusion have been treated with cruel derision in
the profession of archaeology and anthropology since the Second World War. Joshua Smith rightly
seeks to redress this situation by placing their ideas in an historical context, examining nonepistemic reasons why the profession dismissed such ideas, and returning to primary sources to
analyse what they in fact wrote rather than “what is claimed by their detractors”. (Modern
textbooks tend simply to repeat the negative comments of critics such as Glyn Daniel). I have put
similar revisionist views in my book Grafton Elliot Smith, Egyptology and the Diffusion of Culture
(Sussex, 2012), in press unfortunately at the time Smith’s volume appeared.
A useful account of the theoretical antecedents of Egyptocentric , and more general, concepts of
diffusion covers a range of thinkers, including Kircher, Stukeley, Prichard,Lacouperie, Humboldt,
Bastian, Ratzel, Tylor, Graebner, Kroeber and many others; and in the early twentieth century
Flinders Petrie, Peake, Fleure, Childe, and even Boas. Diffusionism entailed a diversity of conceptual
positions, but it was a contending paradigm in the formative years of anthropology (as historians
such as Trigger and Kuklick have shown – historians often do better than the profession in this area).
The “British school” was making wide-ranging claims about culture change at a time of
interdisciplinary fluidity, gathering information “from the fields of archaeology, linguistics, physical
anthropology, comparative mythology and...religion, Egyptology, ethnography, ethnology, and
prehistory” (p.8). When Elliot Smith set up his anatomy department at University College in 1919, he
tried to make it an interdisciplinary centre. He was a lifelong foe of narrow specialisms that
encouraged tunnel vision and also territorial jealousies that rebuffed the ideas of “outsiders” such as
himself. When UC lost out to Malinowski at LSE in a fight for Rockefeller funding, this presaged the
eclipse of difffusionism by functionalist-structural paradigms, which were more relevant to
colonialist interests. New questions were asked, older issues ignored. Patriotic factors also intruded,
especially in America, where what Smith calls “nativist isolationism” ruled (theories of exclusive
indigenous development that admitted of no transoceanic cultural contacts).
In his detailed analysis, Smith dispels many still current misconceptions. To give examples, they
include the charge that Elliot Smith’s heliolithic theory was anti-Darwinian or racist; or that it had
Egyptians directly carrying their culture traits across the world, when he postulated indirect
mitigated contacts, “wherein the receiving culture adapted the ideas to their pre-existing beliefs and
made their own modifications”. With respect to America: “He postulated multiple Asiatic and/or
Indian diffusionary waves that took place in the Pre-Columbian context” (pp.65, 78). Smith makes
admirable use of primary sources on his main topic, but relies heavily upon standard secondary
sources for related themes, such as the transition to structural-functionalism (Stocking, Urry,
Langham et al). He makes the point that British functionalism was “ahistorical to a fault because it
failed to offer any resolution to the omnipresent question of origins that always comes with the
study of anthropology” (pp.89-90), an opinion shared by Evans-Pritchard. Smith nicely broadens the
“diffusionist milieu” to include lesser figures such as Meek, Rattray, Fox and Armstrong; and treats
the diachronic versus synchronic debate (the diffusionists being allied with the former). Despite
being theoretically problematic in places, this book is an important contribution in a contested area.
Paul Crook
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