The Retreat from Migrationism

Abstract

One of the most persistent, though least acknowledged, explanatory para­ digms in culture history is that which attributes the growth and spread of culture to the movement of peoples. We are not here referring to diffusion, but to theories which specifically envision the movements and displace­ ments of populations. As will be shown presently, migration and diffusion theories have quite different intellectual pedigrees, and their relationship in practice has often been antithetical. But while diffusionism (like evolution­ ism) has had and continues to have its avowed champions, migration has never been formally articulated as a general principle of historical explana­ tion. It has nevertheless been invoked as an ad hoc explanation for cultural, linguistic, and racial change in such an extraordinary number of individual cases that to speak of a migrationist school of explanation seems wholly appropriate ( 13 1 , p. 169; 133, pp. 1 5, 30). Migration theory in a sense is as old as tribal mythology; indeed, it is a rare corpus of myth that does not include at least one migration episode. In this primeval form migrationism may be recognized as the handmaiden