Recognizing and Understanding Diversity:
Culture Areas, Diffusion, and Change
Through Time
As part of the destruction of the Moundbuilder
Myth, the discipline of anthropology developed.
John Wesley Powell
Cyrus Thomas
Frank Hamilton Cushing
Lewis Henry Morgan
Out of their data gathering and that of those who
followed, the culture area concept developed.
Key elements behind the culture area concept:
Cultural ecology and adaptation (cultural evolution)
Form, Function and Meaning
Diffusion
Oral Tradition
Cultural Ecology & Adaptation
Cultural Ecology, Adaptation, and Cultural Evolution
Earlier notions of cultural evolution from the late 1800s,
especially Unilinear Evolution, were discarded.
•In unilinear evolution, cultures evolved from savages to barbarians
to civilized.
•The notion of progress was associated with it. Indians were
savages.
•Association with Social Darwinism
•It became part of "Manifest Destiny."
Progress &
Unilinear
Evolution
Multilinear Evolution: A More
Realistic Model
Cultures change at different rates based on
adjustments to environments.
Cultural ecology :cultures adapt to the
changes in the natural and social
environments in which they live.
Cultural ecology: the dominant viewpoint of
most anthropologists and many other social
scientists.
Julian Steward
Multilinear evolution and cultural ecology are
related concepts that help us account for the
extreme diversity of American Indian
cultures.
Form, Function, and Meaning
Form—physical characteristics or
attributes of an object or concept
Function—the role of the object or
idea, what it does
Meaning—what the object or idea
means to the people who have or use it
Diffusion and its processes
Stimulus diffusion—ideas, from
simple contact
Single trait diffusion—a few
things, from trade
Complex diffusion—whole cultural
complexes, from colonization
Independent Invention
Independent Invention: roughly the same ideas ,
concepts or physical forms appear in different
places without contact between the places
Just because things seem to be alike doesn’t
mean they are so because of contact and
diffusion!
Similar environmental and social conditions
lead to similar adaptations.
Oral Tradition
Historicity―Just how historical is it?
Does it contain temporal information that we can use?
Does it contain information about geography we can use?
Does it contain material "markers" that are archaeologically
recoverable?
Oral tradition's advantage is its immediacy, but that causes you
to think in terms of a "present" past
Organizing the information:
The functional prerequisites of culture
People
Language
Territory/Technology
Social Organization
Ideology (belief systems)
Alfred Kroeber
There was huge variation in languages.
Language Variation
For such a small population, Indian languages
are extremely diverse.
57 families grouped into 9 macro-families or
phyla
300 distinct languages
2000 dialects
California—at least 20 families
West of Rockies—17 more
Rest of the continent—20 more
Today English is the most commonly spoken
language, and many native languages are gone or will
soon be so.
Cultures Areas or Food Areas?
The Culture Area Concept
The Problem with Culture Areas
Actually, these categories have entered into the
popular culture in a big way. They are now the main
descriptors of Indian groups.
One needs to question whether it is still a useful
concept:
It locks Indian groups in time, using descriptions of
groups at the time of Contact.
Pan-Indian cultural activities and massive
influences of media have "blended" lots of cultural
traits.
Doesn't account for the ability of groups to adjust
to white and other Indian influences.