Preserving Play: Diffusionism and Particularism

Abstract

Anthropology was, in part, formulated in response to an accumulation of 19th-century explorers’, travelers’, missionaries’, and colonial administrators’ reports about the “curious” customs of “primitive” peoples. Of course, ideas about the effect of customs or the influence of culture on the behavior of human beings can be traced back as far as the 14th century and perhaps even earlier (see Langness, 1974; also Harris, 1968).However, it was not until the publication of Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) that the first English-language definition of culture was presented: Culture, or civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society, (p. 1)