Kulturkreis

Kulturkreis, location from whence ideas and technology subsequently diffused over large areas of the world. It was the central concept of an early 20th-century German school of anthropology, Kulturkreislehre, which was closely related to the Diffusionist approach of British and American anthropology.

The Kulturkreislehre approach was developed by German ethnologists Fritz Graebner and Wilhelm Schmidt, who drew from 19th-century theories of unilineal cultural evolution. Graebner and Schmidt posited that a limited number of Kulturkreise developed at different times and in different places and that all cultures, ancient and modern, resulted from the diffusion of traits from these centres of innovation. Proponents of this school believed that the history of any culture could be reconstructed through the analysis of its traits and the tracing of their origins to one or more of the Kulturkreise.

Later anthropologists questioned the accuracy of the theory for establishing culture histories and pointed out its many weaknesses. Its adherents, like other diffusionists, postulated contacts over unlikely distances and did not make allowances for independent invention. In addition, the basic complexes postulated by the Kulturkreislehre school—functionally related groups of traits such as the triad of agriculture, irrigation, and urbanism—had to be assumed to have originated in a particular place. Finally, the proponents of the theory often mistook analogous features (those that appear similar but have differing origins) for homologous ones (those that appear similar because they share an origin) and thus compared phenomena that were not really comparable. By the mid-20th century, most anthropologists considered cultural phenomena much too complex to be explained by the interaction of a small number of Kulturkreise.