“The science of ethnology,” Dr. Rivers wrote recently, “is now in the throes of a struggle between two widely different views concerning the history of human culture. Workers in the science, especially in this country, have for the last forty years been dominated by the belief that the similarities of custom and belief which are found in widely separated parts of the world are the result of the uniform reaction of the human mind to similar conditions. To such an extent has this become a dogma that it has blinded its adherents to the obvious fact that the conditions under which the similarities occur are often about as dissimilar as could well be. Only recently has there been a return to the older view that these similarities are the result of diffusion from a common source by means of migration.”[1]
That the similarity of cultural phenomena in different places is explainable by migration or borrowing was held to a slight extent by Morgan, Bastian,[2] and Tylor,[3] but the fructification of this line of study was due to F. Ratzel,[4] who stated that there was no necessary spatial limit to the migration or borrowing of cultural objects or of whole complexes. L. Frobenius[5] extended Ratzel’s idea, and
- ↑ W. H. R. Rivers, Journ. Egypt. Arch. ii. 1915, p. 256.
- ↑ Bastian, however, strongly held that the social evolution of peoples was due to the action of internal causes on the basis of general ideas common to all peoples (his “Elementargedanke”). This evolutional conception profoundly influenced contemporary and later students. Thilenius and, later, Ehrenreich modified this conception by that of “convergence,” i.e. similar phenomena besides arising from the similar psychic disposition of man and from migration or borrowing, may arise from the assimilation of originally different phenomena under the influence of the same natural or cultural environment. To Thilenius is due the adoption of the biological principle of “convergence” into ethnology.
- ↑ Journ. Auth. Inst. ix. 1879, p. 23; xi. 1881, p. 401
- ↑ Sitzber. d. Akad. d. Wiss. München, Hist. Cl. 1886, p. 181; Anthrpo-Geographie ii. 1891, p. 705; Geograph. Zeitschr. iii. 1897, p.268, and his studies on the African bow in 1887, 1891, and 1893.
- ↑ “Der Westafrikanische Kulturkreis,” Petermann’s Mitt. xliii. 1897, pp. 225, 262; xliv 1898, pp. 193, 225; Zeits. f. Ethnol. xxxix. 1907, p. 311.
