the most perfect harmony inwardly, among its elements, and outwardly with its surroundings, and yet most of the elements may originally have been absorbed from other cultures. Under these circumstances we are, in other words, always faced by the possibility of having to deal with a heterogeneous culture, and we must act accordingly. This means that, instead of taking the culture as a unity, we must disintegrate it into its elements. Then in every single case we are called upon to show whether the particular element is to be presumed to have appeared on the spot or whether it came from the outside.[1]
If we find that an element owes its appearance to culture diffusion, we will have a new problem before us that is no less burning than the question of the reality of culture diffusion itself was to the previous generation, viz. the question of its kind. This may be briefly expressed as follows: Is a culture diffused in complete complexes, or do the elements wander individually? Graebner has said "dass ein als selbständig gedachter Kulturkomplex naturgemäss alle notwendigen Kategorien des Kulturlebens, also etwa religiöse Vorstellungen, soziale Verfassung, Wohnungsart, Waffen, Gerät, usw. umfassen muss".[2] Here the stress must be laid upon the words "selbständig gedachter”; for, if rightly understood, they show that this whole train of ideas rests upon an abstraction. A culture is never independent. It is not built up like a geological sediment series, in which each stratum has no inner connection with the foregoing one and the following one. It is true that we read in Father Schmidt: "Man kann überhaupt kein Kulturelement eines Kulturkreises mit dem analogen Element eines anderen Kulturkreises in eine innere Entwicklungsverbindung bringen".[3] This, however, is absurd. By this means the exaggerated Kulturkreislehre assumes a serious likeness to Cuvier's old catastrophe theory in geology. But as scarcely anybody will assume that a new culture with all its elements is suddenly created like Aphrodite, of the foam of the sea, it is a logical necessity that somewhere or other it has developed out of an earlier culture and thus at any rate at this place has most certainly been brought "in eine innere Entwicklungsverbindung" with it. And if we examine the course of events while a
- ↑ In thus trying to secure "clean lines", i. e. employable material for comparison, we must of course also eliminate the features which are either directly conditioned by nature or which lie in the function of the element itself, for instance that an Eskimo wears a frock in winter and that his knife has an edge; but on the contrary not the form of the frock and the knife (Cf. Graebner 1911; 116 seq). This is the same demand that is made by Porsild (1915; 119 seq.) as regards the Eskimos and in praxi exceeds all bounds.
- ↑ Graebner 1911; 134. Cf. the exactly similar arguments by Father Schmidt (Schmidt & Koppers, s. a.; 71).
- ↑ Schmidt & Koppers s. a.; 72.
