Cultures, Environments, and Regions

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Cultures, Environments, and Regions
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Culture

• Culture closely identified with anthropology
• Has many definitions
• An all-encompassing term
• Identifies tangible lifestyle of a people and
  prevailing values and beliefs
• Examples of definitions??
• Culture consists of components

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Components of Culture

• Culture region
• Area within which a particular culture system
  prevails
• Culture trait
• A single attribute of a culture
• Culture complex
• Discrete combination of culture traits

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Components of Culture

• Culture system
• Culture complexes grouped together because they
  have culture traits in common
• Geographic regions
• Term preferred by many geographers instead of
  culture region
• Culture realm
• Most highly generalized regionalization of
  culture and geography

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Cultural GeographiesPast and Present

• Colonization and Europeanization (and
  Americanization?) of the world have obliterated
  much of the world's earlier cultural geography
• Two Maps
• Indigenous North American cultures
• Modern cultures in Africa

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Cultural Homogenization???
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Cultural GeographiesPast and Present

• The world is made up of constantly changing,
  often overlapping mix of traditional and modern
  regions

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The Cultural Landscape

• A distinctive cultural environment
• Composite of artificial features
• Carl Sauers definition includes all identifiably
  human-induced changes in the natural landscape
• Sequent occupance
• Cultural imprints of successive societies on a
  place, contributing to the cultural landscape
• Can the whole of a cultural landscape be
  represented on a map??
• Map U.S. CBD vs. Japanese city

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Cultural Hearths

• Sources of civilization
• First large clusters of human population
• Progress in farming techniques
• Exploitation of local resources
• Complex society less subsistence time
• New ideas, innovations, and ideologies spread

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Cultural Hearths
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Cultural Diffusion

• The spreading of culture
• Independent invention
• Expansion diffusion
• Relocation diffusion

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Expansion Diffusion

• Three types of ED
• Contagious diffusion nearly all adjacent
  individuals are affected
• Hierarchical diffusion main channel of diffusion
  lies through some segment of those susceptible or
  adopting what is being diffused (leapfrog)
• Stimulus diffusion ideas may not be adopted but
  may result in local experimentation
• Hamburger sales in India

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• Spatial flows of
• A) Expansion diffusion
• B) Hierarchical diffusion

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Relocation Diffusion

• Acculturation less technologically-advanced
  culture is modified by contact with a
  technologically-superior culture
• Transculturation cultural borrowing when
  different cultures of (about) equal complexity
  and technology come into close contact
• Assimilation adoption of cultural elements so
  complete that the two cultures become one

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Migrant diffusion

• An innovation loses usage at its source but is
  adopted farther away
• Forces that work against the diffusion process
• Time-distance decay
• Cultural barriers

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Cultural Perception

• Perceptual Regions
• Based on our knowledge about regions and cultures
• Sometimes difficult to put a culture region on a
  map
• Example
• The Mid-Atlantic

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Cultural Perception

• Perceptual regions in the United States
• Regional identity example
• The South

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Perceptual Region Texas
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Cultural Environments

• Complex relationships
• Societies modify their natural environments from
  slight to severe
• No society can completely escape the forces of
  nature
• Ivan before and after

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Grenada, West IndiesRavaged byHurricane Ivan
September 2004
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Climate

• Monsoon-ish climate
• Wet Dry Seasons

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Wet SeasonDry Season
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Climate

• Hurricane belt Grenada is just on the cusp(12
  degrees N)
• Ivan

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Ivan from above
12o N
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Hurricane IvanBefore After
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Hurricane IvanDevastation
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Environmental Determinism

• Human behavior is strongly affected by and even
  controlled or determined by the environment that
  prevails
• Not new Aristotle
• Believed by many until the middle of the
  twentieth century
• Ellsworth Huntington

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Environmental Determinism

• Some geographers recognized exceptions to the
  environmentalists hypotheses
• S.F. Markham wrote a book based on climatic
  changes and their effects on cultural development
• Now agreed (mostly) to be defunct

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Possibilism

• Natural environment limits choice
• Depend on the peoples needs and technology
• As a culture rises in affluence, influence of
  environment declines

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Other Cultural Environments

• Political Ecology
• Studies the environmental consequences of
  specific political-economic policies
• Changeable weather seems to influence significant
  numbers of people
• Human will is powerful

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Resources

• Dr. Sallie Marston, Univ. of Arizona
• Video Semiotics of Landscape
• PowerPoint Marston-LandscapeSemiotics

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Discussion Question 1

• A few years ago, several people in a small
  village near a large East Asian city got the flu.
  Within days, hundreds of people in the city came
  down with the same flu, and it spread to the
  surrounding countryside. Meanwhile, the Asian
  Flu appeared in cities around the globe (London,
  NYC, San Francisco, Moscow).
• What processes were at work in China and
  worldwide spreading this malady? Do the
  processes differ?
• If you were unable to get immunized, how would
  you use your knowledge of geography to best
  protect yourself (and family)?

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Discussion Question 2

• Our Perceptual Regions
• Draw a map of North America
• Draw in the international border(s)
• Divide your map into regions and label them
• Why did you define the borders and regions as you
  did?
• What underlies our different perceptions?