Cultural Geography

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Cultural Geography
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Human Culture

• What is it ??

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Culture

• Summary of a group of peoples learned way of
  life
• Behavioral patterns
• Understandings
• Adaptations
• Social systems
• Learned and transmitted behavior

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Components of Culture

• Language
• Clothes
• Diet
• Articles of use - artifacts
• Customs patterns of behavior
• Interpersonal arrangements, family structure,
  educational methods
• Values and ethics

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Identity Behavioral Geography

• Culture groups
• Few or many characteristics
• Subculture
• Races
• Humans a single species
• Secondary biological characteristics
• Modern methods blood types, dna
• Ethnic groups
• Ethnocentrism

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Folk Culture

• Cultures that preserve traditions
• Characteristics
• Conservative, resistant to change, distinctive
  religions
• Urban folk cultures
• Immigrant groups
• Examples
• Diffusion of house types in the US
• Amish

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Popular Culture

• Culture of people who embrace innovation and
  conform to changing norms
• Rapid diffusion
• Mass culture
• Food, clothing, items that are mass produced
• Mass taste
• Geographic variation of market penetration
• Marketing of popular culture

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Components of Culture

• Cultural Traits
• Cultural Complex
• Functionally related set of cultural traits
• Culture Region
• Region of shared cultural characteristics
• Cultural Realm
• Set of spatially connected cultural regions,
  uniformity of cultural characteristics

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Culture Realms (Regions)

• Delineation/ definition of regions
• Visual clues
• Settlement patterns
• Architecture
• Clothing
• Regionalism

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Cultural Subsytems

• Ideological
• Technological
• Sociological

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Theories of Cultural Evolution

• Theory of human stages
• Hunter-gatherers
• Pastoral nomadism
• Transhumanance
• Settled agriculture
• Subsistence and commercial agriculture
• Historical materialism
• Technology and human progressive control of the
  environment
• Conflicts with Malthusianism

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Cultures and Environments

• Environmental determinism
• Human events explained by environment
• Cultural ecology
• Societies adapt to their environment
• Challenge-response theory
• Possibilism (what is possible)
• Physical environment influences, but does not
  control, human events

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Cultural Hearths

• Cultural Hearth
• Center of innovation
• Cultural innovations exert an influence on
  surrounding regions
• Cradle of Culture
• Cultural development and maturity
• Development of characteristics of a civilization
• Writing, trade, labor specialization, government,
  science mathematics

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Hearth Regions

• Near East
• Nile Valley
• Indus Valley
• East Asia
• Europe
• West Africa
• Andean America
• Meso-America

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Hearth Region Characteristics

• 10,000 B.C. to 1000 A.D.
• Domestication of animals, cultivation of crops
• Development of long distance trade
• Pottery, metal working, textiles
• Formation of cities
• Development of alphabet and writing
• System of government

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Cultural Change

• Innovation
• Spatial Diffusion
• Relocation Diffusion
• People move carrying cultural traits with them
• Expansion Diffusion
• Ideas spread through trade, advertising, media
• Contagious versus Hierarchical Diffusion
• Age-Area Principal

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Trade Cultural Diffusion

• Stabilizing forces for Culture
• Existing Infrastructure
• Inertia (time period for change)
• Self sufficiency cultural isolation
• Resistance to change yielding to interaction
• Trade cultural change
• Change of systems of production
• Desire for products (not necessarily need based)
• Increase in standard of living
• Specialization of production
• Economic geography

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Acceleration of Diffusion

• Travel and transportation
• Friction of distance
• Decreased cost
• Movement of information
• Elimination of space/distance barrier
• Electronic highway