Diffusionist

Theory
What is Diffusionist Theory?
It is concerned with the spread of an innovation
through a population.
It emphasized cultural traits.
It is simply defined as the spreadness of a cultural
item or trait from its place of origin to other places.
Diffusionist research originated in the
middle of the nineteenth century.
The emphasis of this line of research is to
understand and explain how dominant
cultural forms are.
Diffusionists do not believe that change
occurs primarily due to the independent
origination of culture.
During the 1920's, a one university in the Western
United States (University of California, Berkeley)
purposely separated innovation from diffusion
and argued that innovation was relatively rare and
that the process of diffusion was quite common.
In 1938, Franz Boas argued that although the
independent invention of a cultural trait can occur
at the same time within widely separated societies,
a link such as genetic relationship is still suspected.
Lewis Henry Morgan, an American anthropologist, has
contributed to understand and give an explanation to
the question about socio-cultural change.
Lewis Henry Morgan agreed with British socio-cultural
anthropologists that human progress was often due to
independent innovation.
Lewis Henry Morgan infuriated his British
contemporaries when his research demonstrated that
social change involved both independent invention and
diffusion.
Cultural beliefs, religious beliefs, values, and
other cultural knowledge diffuse or spread
from one community to another.
The processes of transformation are never
linear, instead they are always uneven.
The diffussionist theory can not explain the
unevenness in the processes of
transformation.
In conclusion:
This theory provided an explanation that cultural forms are
moved from one location to another.
Both Franz Boas and Lewis Henry Morgan's contribution
about this theory are equally significant.
The researchers of this theory made an effort to
comprehend how cultures are distributed in terms of where
cultural features originated and how they move from one
community to another.
Thank you for
listening!
 Presented by:
Group 2 (21-MEN-01)

Lucy S. Fernandez
Gemma Rose E. Datangel
Rubilyn P. Zamora
Aaliyah Jade B. Tamondong
Alyssa S. Bianan