The Kulturkreis (roughly, "culture circle" or "cultural field") school was a central idea of the early 20th-century German school of anthropology that sought to redirect the discipline away from the quest for an underlying, universal human nature toward a concern with the particular histories of individual societies.
It was the notion of a culture complex as an entity that develops from a centre of origin and becomes diffused over large areas of the world.
The theory was developed by the German ethnologists Fritz Graebner, the founder of the Vienna School of Ethnology, and Wilhelm Schmidt.
"Building on the ideas of Andree, Ratzel, and his own teacher, H. Schurtz, Frobenius made a giant step through his two pioneering works "Der westafrikanische Kulturkreis" (1897) and "The Origin of African Civilizations" (1898a), which cleared the way for a new scientific approach in ethnology.
"[2] Arguing against the idea, then current, that "natural people" were remnants from the prehistoric era who could reveal the true nature of humanity, Kulturkreis scholars brought history back into the study of allegedly timeless peoples.