Some Limitations of the Culture Area Concept

Abstract

THE student of contemporary sociological theory cannot but be impressed with the extent to which some of the trends of thought in their genesis are traceable directly to the work of the American school of anthropologists. more recent textbooks, to cite but one example, are filled with references to cultural materials, and the cultural material itself is presented against a background of culture theory that has been formulated largely by the anthropologists and in the light of their experiences and research among primitive peoples. concepts were not originally formulated by the sociologists who are now so generally using them but because of their assumed value they were taken over. These newer concepts were quickly seen to be useful. They permitted an approach to the study of human behavior that had previously been wanting. As Kroeber has pointed out in his article on The Anthropological Attitude, they enabled the student of social life to regard it with an objectivity not previously achieved.' While the debt of the sociologists to the anthropologists is great, and while it is true that there has been a stimulation to work along new lines because of the sharing of concepts, there is a real danger that sociologists may accept too quickly, and accordingly too uncritically, some of the materials from the neighboring field. This danger may be seen in the willingness to accept the culture area concept and the application of it, without reformulation or modification, in the analysis of contemporary cultures .2 Two points may be raised: I) culture area concept, stated as it customarily has been in rather rigid geographical terms, is perhaps invalid when applied in the study of nonprimitive peoples, or, more specifically, in the study of the complex contemporary cultures. z) Geography is, in the modern world, secondary to modes and channels of communication in studying cultural distributions. Several writers have recently introduced material suggesting the validity of these two points. Professor Redfield in his discussion of certain Mexican groups demonstrates rather clearly that Wissler's formulation of the culture area concept, perhaps even in the study of pre-literates, certainly in studying contemporary civilizations, does not altogether hold. Wissler has always argued that the culture area is a type or unity-a functional interrelationship-characterized by a concentric grouping of the traits that characterize it around a culture center; and further, although this is incidental here, that there is relation between age and spread of traits. In his new volume, An Introduction to Social Anthropology, this position is virtually unchanged.3 natural diffusion of traits under primitive conditions might be expected to give rise to the type of culture area that Wissler has envisaged-a ripple-like distribution-but even this has been effec-