Diffusionism: A Uniformitarian Critique

Abstract

Ditfusionisni assume5 that ( I ) inventiveness is rare and theretore diffusion accounts tor nearly a11 sifniiicant culture change and (2) certain places arc permanent loci of invention and thus arc inore advanced and iiiore progressive than other places. It. however. inventivenesb and innovativeiiess are assumed to he uniibrnil y distributed di ffkrent spat i d models crnerpe , different diffusion proccsacs gain saliencc. inadequacies of cui-i-ent diffusion-of-innovation theory become evident. and new hypothese\ about broad-scale culture change are uncovered. This paper cxaininea the structure of diffusionism, put& forward a noncliflu\ioni~t alternative structure. and employs thc alternative to modify dilfu\ion-of-innovation thcory and t o a r g~i e five nondiffu~ionist hypotheha for culture history and present-day rural dcvclopinenl.

Thinking Geographically: Globalizing Capitalism and Beyond

“…Depending on the thinker, these features have included religion (Weber [1902] 2003), climate (Semple 1911;Huntington 1922;Sachs 2001), topography, culture, the Westphalian nation-state system, democracy, and individualism. These are, literally, Eurocentric explanations of Europe's economic success (Blaut 2000). From such self-conceptions, it proved a short step to the belief that Europe embodied a dynamism and success-indeed, civilization-that was absent outside the zones of European settlement (Said 1978(Said , 1994.…”

“…Attention to the geography of how we have come to know capitalism-unpacking its morethan-European origins and influences-raises questions not only about where capitalism was born (Blaut 1976) and how it became hegemonic but also about how we conceptualize it. Further, attention to the coimplicated spatiotemporalities of capitalism as we know it and to how economic processes coevolve with Thinking Geographically: Globalizing Capitalism and Beyond political, cultural, social, and biophysical processes undermines the economic parable that the invisible hand of capitalism is essential to eliminating poverty and realizing sustainability.…”

“…In the thirteenth century, when European travelers were stunned by the sophistication and prosperity of Asian empires and cities, the production and long-distance trade of commodities could be found throughout Asia and Africa-scattered across settlements that had come to constitute the nodes in rich trading networks traversing the Indian Ocean, into the China Sea (Abu-Lughod 1991; Blaut 1993). A detailed genealogy of these incipient capitalist practices remains to be developed, but we cannot assume that these undoubtedly variegated practices conformed with, or circulated around the ideal type of, capitalism as it came to be known in Europe.…”

Magicians, Sorcerers and Witches: Considering Pretantric, Non-sectarian Sources of Tantric Practices

“…acakra. Similarly, if inversion were the motive, then disciples would be encouraged to seduce the teacher's wife, since as already pointed out by Blaut (1987) and others, unsophisticated diffusionist models similar to those proposed implicitly or explicitly encode a political position and covert hegemony, and certainly this seems apparent in many scholarly appeals to diffusion as the source of tantric textual similarity. Equally, it appears to me that a single source model, as exercised, is ladened with multiple fallacies of historical reasoning, assumptions concerning authenticity and other questionable suppositions.…”

The Illusion of Diffusion in Information Systems Research

“…There are very many more who worked in this tradition (and rarely uncontentiously), both before and since Rogers's first contribution in the early sixties (Rogers, 1962). However it is the political geographer Blaut's account of diffusion that primarily informs this work (Blaut, 1987(Blaut, , 1992(Blaut, , 1993. Linking diffusion firmly to European colonial expansionism between the 15 1 h century, and its culmination in what Hobsbawm ( 1987) describes as the Age of Empire, Blaut thus attributes the beginning of diffusionist thinking precisely to 1492.…”