We will not tackle here the problem of common origin and
diffusionism vs convergence as these topics have been treated in much depth and with great insight in Gregor and Tuzin' s edited book: 'Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia' (2001).
Dibua, DEVELOPMENT and
DIFFUSIONISM: Looking Beyond Neopatrimonialism in Nigeria, 1962-1985 xii (2013).
These are perhaps best seen in Alexander Goldenweiser's 1925 American Journal of Sociology discussion of
diffusionism and culture areas: "As one moves from the center to the periphery, the tribes become less and less fully representative of the culture area." (9)
But the real point lies elsewhere: it concerns the tacit equation of the "diffusionist type" with the "transmission of culture."
Diffusionism is a crude, simplistic explanatory model; diffusion, as the transmission of cultural traits, is a reality.
Blaut J (1993) The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical
Diffusionism and Eurocentric History.
Franz Boas's school of cultural
diffusionism and relationality), psychology (Ken Wilber's school of the potentially infinite-dimensionality of the psyche and reality's spirit of multi-stratified, multi-levelled multiple holonic evolution), psychiatry, cultural anthropology and earth sciences (Immanuel Velikovsky's school of catastrophism), semantics (Alfred Korzybski's school of space binding and time binding), etc., showing that the evolution of living forms is not necessarily always ascensive.
Klar, '
Diffusionism Reconsidered: Linguistic and Archaeological Evidence for Prehistoric Polynesian Contact with Southern California', American Antiquity 3 (2005): 457-84.
The term "diffusion" was coined by European anthropologists adepts to the
diffusionism, which preached that the process of introducing innovations and disseminating them was the basis of social change (Rogers, 2003).
There are numerous theories (evolutionism,
diffusionism, functionalism, and structuralism) where comparison is practiced.
It is a major resource without doubt, but since 1987 there has been a wealth of scholarship (Kuklick, Hiatt, Kuper, Livington, Kenny, Gardner) that would have grounded Curr's work within its intellectual context, and perhaps given the reader more confidence in Furphy's discussion of such concepts as evolutionism and
diffusionism, and might have led him to see how much Curr's views concurred with degenerationism.
Some approaches tried to do so, such as
Diffusionism (whose main idea is that similarities and differences between cultures are caused by the human tendency towards imitation), Culture and Personality--Benedict (1934) and Mead (1950) tried to relate beliefs and cultural practices to personality traits - or Functionalism and Structural Functionalism--Malinowski (1922) and Radcliffe-Brown (1952) considered that Anthropology had to focus on the observation and description of cultures' beliefs and institutions rather than on explaining the origins of the similarities and differences between them.