Jianing Yan

Cultural transmission? Cultural fusion?

The word diffusion is derived from the Latin word, “diffundere”, which means “to spread out” (if a substance is “spreading out”, it is moving from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration).  A distinguishing feature of diffusion is that it results in mixing or mass transport, without requiring bulk motion.

Then, what is cultural diffusion?

I asked about 200 peers in my friend circle do me a favor, answering my question: Could you please use a few words to describe your understanding about “Cultural Diffusion” when you first heard it?  In the following article, I will cite some descriptions from their answer to introduce this topic.

“Culture will be exported and imported and mixed”. Sounds interesting!  The question is, does “exported and imported” means “transmited”?

It seems that other friends gave me more specific answer.

From the above picture we can see, the main idea is “Spread of culture from a point of origin to other places”.  Like this picture my friend sent to me.

Also, some of them gave me several examples to demonstrate the abstract concept.

From cultural diffusion, people sharing their own cultural with others, learning and accepting a different kind of cultural from your friends, internet or media.  Here is an interesting example from the last picture.  If you know Chinese, you can see the dialogue between us.  My friend Yang was surprised when I sent him the question about cultural diffusion.  Then he asked me, Ohh my dear sister, can you speak Chinese?  I said I can’t because I want to use this picture as an example to illustrate my topic.  Then he said, used mine!  I said, you were not even using English to answer my question!  Interestingly, he said, you can see this sentence contains both Chinese and English, is this a kind of cultural diffusion?  Well, I can’t say no because he is true.^^  Not only English is a second language in China, more Americans love to learn Chinese and begin to accept Chinese English, such as “Long time no see”, “Good good study, day day up” etc.

It seems that it is so harmonious and unintentional during the cultural diffusion no matter from the words or the examples of cultural diffusion we talked before, like my friend Camilo said:

My friend Xiao also shared the same opinion:

Oops, the answer of mine kind of disclosed what I plan to say.  Despite the unconscious and contagious diffusion, there are another type of diffusion take place when one culture defeats another and forces its beliefs and customs onto the conquered people, which is known as forced diffusion or hierarchical diffusion.

Like my friend Yao said, colonization is a typical example of forced diffusion.  To illustrate, when the Spanish took over lands in the Americas, they later forced the original inhabitants to convert to Roman Catholicism in the 16th and 17th Centuries.  The term “ethnocentrism” is often applied to forced diffusion as it refers to the idea of looking at the world only from one’s own cultural vantage point.  As a result, people participating in this form of diffusion often believe that their cultural beliefs are superior to those of other groups and in turn force their ideas upon those they conquer.  In addition, “cultural imperialism” is usually placed into the category of forced diffusion as it is the practice of actively promoting cultural characteristics such as language, food, religion, etc., of one nation in another.  This practice is normally within forced diffusion and that frequently occurs through military or economic force.

In fact, even now, some friends of mine treat the nature of cultural diffusion as economic forced.

I kind of agree with this point.  I find a phenomenon since I came to United States.  Before I came here, many elders said that everything in America is much cheaper than in China!  From clothing’s brand such as GAP, GUESS, to bags like Coach, CK, they are all cheap!!  But after I came here, all I wanted to say was “What??!!”.  I am sure they just known part of the life here. At least, they didn’t know about the tax here.

However, we cannot deny the advantage of this kind of cultural diffusion.  Continue the topic, if I were not come here, I can never experience the life by myself.  All the descriptions from others are just others, not mine.

Then, what’s the cultural diffusion contributes to ?

See, the common word above may be the “Globalization”, which is known as the process of international integration arising from the interchange of world views, products, ideas and other aspects of culture.  Within the cultural diffusion, the interaction between cultures may cause the final cultural fusion.