ABSTRACT
The diffusion of traits has been prevalent in primitive cultures and in the higher civilizations. Agriculture and pottery have spread through Central, North, and South America, probably from one place of origin, and there has been a wide diffusion of these traits in the Old World. Stories built upon certain plots have a wide geographical distribution which usually is continuous or nearly so and hence implies diffusion. Even suicide is sometimes a culture trait and may spread in typical fashion. The hara-kiri of the Japanese is clearly a culture manifestation, as was also the so-called “Red Death,” which followed in the trail of an illiterate muzhik by the name of Basil Volosatz, who in the latter half of the seventeenth century induced many hundred Russian peasants to commit suicide by immolation. After Peter the Great had issued the severest edicts against the practice it subsided, but it lingered on and as late as 1860 a number of people in Olonetz committed suicide in this manner. In recent years there was in the United States a mild epidemic of suicide among college students, and the phenomenon had appeared among German students more than a century previously, inspired in part, perhaps, by Goethe's “Werther.” In the latter part of the eighteenth century, suicide was prevalent in English military circles, and it appears to have passed from them into French military circles, although some writers attribute the increase in suicide in France at this time to the influence of certain eighteenth-century French writers, notably, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Madam de Stael; and perhaps the French justification of suicide was a phase of the Stoic influence which marked the “back-to-nature” doctrines then prevalent in France. 1 Among many primitive peoples, too, suicide may be a culture trait, as, for example, among the Eskimo, the Trobriand Islanders, and the Maya. In other cultures, such as that of the Plains area of North America, it is absent or extremely rare. 2
