German:
“culture circle” or “cultural field”
Plural:
Kulturkreise

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.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Elizabeth Prine Pauls.

particularism

anthropology
Also known as: cultural particularism, historical particularism
Also called:
historical particularism

particularism, school of anthropological thought associated with the work of Franz Boas and his students (among them A.L. Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead), whose studies of culture emphasized the integrated and distinctive way of life of a given people. Particularism stood in opposition to theories such as cultural evolution, Kulturkreis, and geographical or environmental determinism, all of which sought to discover for the social sciences a series of general laws analogous to those in the physical sciences (such as the laws of thermodynamics or gravity).

Boas’s own work emphasized studies of individual cultures, each based on its unique history. He held that the anthropologist’s primary assignment was to describe the particular characteristics of a given culture with a view toward reconstructing the historical events that led to its present structure. Implicit in this approach was the notion that resolving hypotheses regarding evolutionary development and the influence of one culture on another should be secondary to the careful and exhaustive study of particular societies. Boas urged that the historical method, based on the description of particular culture traits and elements, supplant the comparative method of the evolutionists, who used their data to rank cultures in an artificial hierarchy of achievement. He rejected the assumption of a single standard of achievement to which all cultures could be compared, instead advocating cultural relativism, the position that all cultures are equally able to meet the needs of their members.

Under Boas’s influence, the particularist approach dominated American anthropology for the first half of the 20th century. From World War II through the 1970s, it was eclipsed by neoevolutionism and a variety of other theories. However, the particularist approach, if not the term itself, reemerged in the 1980s as scholars began to recognize that distinctive historical processes differentiate peoples even in the era of globalization.

This article was most recently revised and updated by Elizabeth Prine Pauls.