KULTURKREIS

( (German: culture circle, or cultural field), ) plural Kulturkreise, concept of a culture complex as an entity that develops from a centre of origin and becomes diffused over large areas of the world. It was the central concept of an early 20th-century German school of anthropology. The theory developed under the ethnologists Fritz Graebner and Wilhelm Schmidt, who believed that a limited number of Kulturkreise developed at different times and in different places and that all cultures, ancient and modern, resulted from the diffusion of cultural complexesfunctionally related groups of culture traitsfrom these cultural centres. Proponents of this school believed that the history of any culture could be reconstructed through the analysis of its culture complexes and the tracing of their origins to one or more of the Kulturkreise. Later anthropologists questioned the accuracy of the concept for establishing culture histories and pointed out its many weaknesses. The basic complexes must be taken as axioms, arbitrary clusters of traits assumed to originate in a particular place. The proponents of the Kulturkreis theory often mistook analogous features for homologous ones and compared phenomena that were not really comparable. Contacts over unlikely distances were postulated, and allowances were not made for independent invention. Finally, most anthropologists considered the real complexity of cultural phenomena much too great to be explained by the interaction of a small number of Kulturkreise.