Trans-cultural diffusion facts for kids
Cultural diffusion is all about how ideas, styles, religions, and technologies spread from one person to another, or from one culture to another. Think of it like a ripple effect! It's different from how new ideas spread *within* one specific group.
For example, ancient people learned to use war chariots and how to work with iron by seeing others do it. More recently, things like automobiles and Western business suits have spread around the world.
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How Ideas and Things Spread
There are five main ways cultural diffusion happens:
- Expansion diffusion: An idea starts in one place and stays strong there, but also spreads outwards to new areas. Imagine a popular new dance move starting in one city and then spreading to nearby towns.
- Relocation diffusion: An idea moves to completely new areas, leaving its original home behind. This often happens when people move. For example, when people from one country move to another, they bring their food and traditions with them.
- Hierarchical diffusion: An idea spreads from bigger, more important places to smaller ones. It often moves from leaders or famous people down to others. Think of a new fashion trend starting with celebrities and then being copied by everyone else.
- Contagious diffusion: An idea spreads quickly from person to person, like a cold. It doesn't care about social status or distance. If one person learns a new slang word, they tell their friends, and it spreads fast.
- Stimulus diffusion: This happens when a specific idea isn't fully copied, but the main concept behind it is adopted. For instance, early Siberian people saw cultures to their south raising domesticated cattle. They didn't need cattle, but they liked the idea of having domesticated animals. So, they started domesticating reindeer, which they had always hunted.
Cultures can share ideas in many ways. When people move to new places, they take their culture with them. Visitors like merchants, explorers, soldiers, or even slaves can also carry ideas between groups. Sometimes, societies even offer money to skilled scientists or workers to bring their knowledge.
Marriages between people from different cultures can also help ideas spread. In places where people read and write, letters, books, and now electronic media help ideas travel far and wide.
There are three main ways ideas spread between cultures:
- Direct diffusion: This happens when two cultures are very close to each other. They might trade, marry, or even fight, which helps ideas mix. For example, people living near the border of the United States and Canada might enjoy both hockey (which started in Canada) and baseball (popular in the U.S.).
- Forced diffusion: This occurs when one culture takes over another and makes the conquered people adopt its customs. A sad example is when European powers forced Christianity on the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
- Indirect diffusion: This is when ideas pass from one culture to another through a middle group, without the first and last cultures ever meeting directly. For instance, Mexican food is popular in Canada, even though the two countries don't share a border. The ideas and recipes traveled through the United States in between.
Direct diffusion was common long ago when human groups lived close together. Today, indirect diffusion is very common because of mass media and the Internet.
Big Ideas About How Things Spread
Sometimes, a new idea seems to pop up in different places at the same time, even if those places are far apart. This often happens when certain basic ideas have already spread to those communities. It's like "an idea whose time has come."
This concept has been used to explain how calculus was developed independently by Newton and Leibnitz. It also applies to inventions like the airplane and the electronic computer, which were worked on by different people around the same time.
Hyperdiffusionism: One Origin for Everything?
Some people, called hyperdiffusionists, believe that almost all major inventions and cultures came from just one original culture. They think that new ideas didn't really develop independently in different places.
Early ideas about hyperdiffusionism even suggested that all of humanity started in South America. For example, a Spaniard named Antonio de León Pinelo claimed that the Garden of Eden was in present-day Bolivia. Later, in 1911, Grafton Elliot Smith said that all important inventions, like knowing how to work with copper, came from ancient Egypt. He believed that Egyptians traveled the world, spreading their knowledge. This idea was called "Egyptocentric-Hyperdiffusionism."
While hyperdiffusionism was once popular, most experts today don't agree with it. They believe that different cultures can invent similar things on their own.
New Ideas in Medieval Europe
Many historians believe that the "European miracle"—the rapid growth of technology in medieval Europe—was partly due to cultural diffusion. By the 1800s, Europe's technology had surpassed that of the Islamic world and China.
Europe adopted many technologies from other places, like gunpowder, clock mechanisms, shipbuilding, paper, and the windmill. However, Europeans didn't just copy these inventions. They often improved them, making them better and finding new ways to use them, often surpassing the original inventors.
Some historians, like Peter Frankopan, argue that trade routes through the Middle East and Central Asia (like the Silk Roads) were very important. They believe that the Renaissance in Europe was helped by trade with the East, which brought new ideas and technologies. The constant competition and wars in Europe then pushed people to develop these ideas even further for military and economic benefits.
Debates About Diffusion
Even though the idea of cultural diffusion is widely accepted, experts sometimes disagree about how much it happened in specific cases.
For example, Thor Heyerdahl suggested that similarities between the cultures of Polynesia and ancient civilizations in the Andes were because ideas spread from the Andes to Polynesia. However, most modern anthropologists do not support this theory.
See also
In Spanish: Difusión transcultural para niños
