Kulturkreiselehre
KULTURKREISELEHRE. Kulturkreiselehre (doctrine of culture "circles"), also called the cultural-historical method, refers to a model developed at the beginning of the twentieth century by German-speaking ethnologists to provide ethnology with a cultural-historical perspective. The intention of these scholars was to change the study of preliterate peoples into a historical science, freeing it from the naturalistic approaches that, influenced by positivism, had been dominant since the beginning of the nineteenth century and that still form a theoretical model of reference.
In anthropological works in English and the main Romance languages, the German word Kreis is often translated as "circle" or "cycle," but this translation is inaccurate because the use of Kulturkreis as a concept is intended to indicate the context—the complex of conditions in which a particular culture is developed and spread and, at the same time, the entire extent of its important characteristics. These aspects are not an integral part of the concept of a "circle," whereas the term cycle is concerned exclusively with the chronological aspect. For this reason it would be more appropriate to use the expression culture ambit-complex, which is, like the common expression culture area, a concept particular to modern historical and idiographic thought developed in the United States through criticism of the generalized ideas of history devised by writers such as Franz Boas (1940).
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