Talk:Cultural diffusion

Article title?
My social studies teacher just calls it cultural diffusion... DarkestMoonlight (talk) 13:40, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree it should be changed. Trans? it doesn't need to be fancy. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Alexw6 (talk • contribs) 18:26, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Ditto, WP refers to it as CD--John Bessa (talk) 15:46, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Kulturkugel
Kulturkugel is not a "non-existent German compound" as we were told in an earlier version of this article. It's a German espression modelled on expressions like Billiardball "billiard ball" and used by native speakers of German well before Mallory used it in his Indo-Aryan migration hypothesis. It isn't even a real "compound", at least to the extent that English billiard ball and other expression containing the element ball are not compounds. Eklir (talk) 04:04, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Of course it is a "real compound". It is still one coined by Mallory, just as "billiard ball" is an existing English compound, while "Calvinball" is one coined by Bill Watterson. As such, it is a "real German compound" that has never been used in German at all, just in an English language context as a "fake loanword." I also know that German "Kugel" means "sphere" in general, not just "bullet". You will need to read Mallory's paper to see that the intended meaning in this case is "bullet", because the simile is a projectile "penetrating" the host culture, not billiard balls bouncing off each other. --dab (𒁳) 13:52, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Kroeber?
While Kroeber did first propose Stimulus Diffusion, this was not the first conceptualization of cultural diffusion. V.G. Childe relied on cultural diffusion (without a term I think) to describe the spread of civilization across Europe in "The Dawn of European Civilization". And Kroeber's phd advisor Franz Boas, also relied on a well formulated concept of cultural diffusion. Kroeber's Stimulus diffusion was just a more specific version of these. Firenoodle (talk) 20:49, 17 December 2008 (UTC)

Proposed first line

 * Cultural diffusion is the spread of culture via interaction between individuals from one culture to another or within a culture. 

WP, as encyclopedia, is a reference after all!--John Bessa (talk) 15:48, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Text recently removed
Attempts to explain similarities between two cultures by diffusion are often criticized for being ethnocentric, since they imply that the supposed "receptors" would not be capable of innovation. Some authors made such claims explicitly—for example, to argue for pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact as the "only possible explanation" for the origin of the great civilizations in the Andes and of Central America.

Those disputes are fueled in part by the overuse of cultural diffusion, starting in the late 19th century, as a blanket explanation for all similarities between widely dispersed cultures. The most famous proponent of this theory was Grafton Elliot Smith, who argued that civilization first formed in Ancient Egypt and then diffused to other places.

Diffusion theories also suffer from being inherently speculative and hard to prove or disprove; especially for relatively simple cultural items like "pyramid-shaped buildings", "solar deity", "row of standing stones", or "animal paintings in caves". After all, the act of diffusion proper is a purely mental (or at most verbal) phenomenon, that leaves no archaeological trace, so diffusion can be deduced with some certainty only when the similarities involve a relatively complex and partly arbitrary collection of items, such as a writing system, a complex myth, or a pantheon of gods.

Another criticism that has been leveled at many diffusion proposals is the failure to explain why certain items were not diffused. For example, attempts to "explain" the New World civilizations by diffusion from Europe or Egypt should explain why a basic concept like the potter's wheel is not found in the Americas while writing is.

No actual quotations here I think, but the real problem is that besides not being sourced it was in the wrong section, as these criticisms are most commonly aimed at hyperdiffusionism - and when you search on that term you can source them. The relationship between this article and Hyperdiffusionism isn't great. Doug Weller talk 18:07, 10 July 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Trans-cultural diffusion. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20110719205425/http://www.anthropology.hawaii.edu/People/Faculty/Hunt/pdfs/Barnesetal2006.pdf to http://www.anthropology.hawaii.edu/People/Faculty/Hunt/pdfs/Barnesetal2006.pdf

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 10:44, 20 December 2017 (UTC)