Mauss thought the idea of cultural ‘diffusion’ was mostly nonsense; not for the reasons most anthropologists do now (that it’s pointless and uninteresting),11 but because he felt it was based on a false assumption: that the movement of people, technologies and ideas was somehow unusual. The exact opposite was true, Mauss argued. People in past times, he wrote, appear to have travelled a great deal – more than they do today – and it’s simply impossible to imagine that anyone back then would have been unaware of the existence of basketry, feather pillows, or the wheel if such objects were
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