Introduction To Human Geography. A Disciplinary Approach Author Steven M. Graves

Human
Introduction to
Geography
A Disciplinary Approach
Steven
Graves
1
Edition
Introduction to Human Geography:

A Disciplinary Approach
Geography the
Jedi Way
SUBTITLE STYLE
Title Style
 2015
Steven M. Graves
Department of Geography
California State University, Northridge
Table of Contents
Preface..................................................................................... 5
Geography is not what you think it is. ....................................... 1
Geography as Discipline – Key Aspects of the Geodi Way ............. 1
Geography is a Way to See the World – Geodi Googles ................ 3
Geography is a Way to Ask Questions – Geodi Mind Tricks ........... 5
Geography is a Way to Solve Problems – Light Sabers.................. 6
Geography is a Way to Communicate – Jedi Language ................. 7
Critical Concepts ............................................................................. 8
How this book is arranged............................................................... 8
What is it? ................................................................................................. 8
Where is it? ............................................................................................... 8
What does it look like? .............................................................................. 8
Why is it here or there? ............................................................................. 9
How does it fit in?...................................................................................... 9
Core Concepts ................................................................................ 9
Location .................................................................................................... 9
Region ..................................................................................................... 10
Diffusion .................................................................................................. 10
Process and Pattern ............................................................................... 13
Co-location .............................................................................................. 15
Chapter End Matter ....................................................................... 16
Chapter 2 CULTURE now and then ....................................... 17
Does Culture Exist? ...................................................................... 17
Heading 2.........................................Error! Bookmark not defined.
Heading 3 .................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Chapter 3 Agriculture and Foodways ..................................... 29
Introduction ......................................Error! Bookmark not defined.
Landscape of Food ....................................................................... 30
Map it out: Where does my food come from? .............................. 30
Why do we eat this stuff? .............................................................. 30
Physical Environment.......................Error! Bookmark not defined.
Migration ....................................................................................... 31
Cultural Integration ...........................Error! Bookmark not defined.
Doing Geography .............................Error! Bookmark not defined.
Teach Spatial ................................................................................ 16
Key Terms and Concepts.............................................................. 43
For Further Reading ...................................................................... 44
Chapter 4 Linguistic Geography ............................................. 45
Introduction ................................................................................... 45
Language on the Landscape......................................................... 46
World Languages .......................................................................... 47
American Dialects ......................................................................... 51
Mapping Dialects .......................................................................... 52
Why Omaha? .......................................................................................... 53
Ethnicity and Dialect...................................................................... 54
Toponyms – Place Name Geography ........................................... 55
Toponymy and Place Marketing .................................................... 56
Language and the Environment .................................................... 57
Chapter 5 Religion ................................................................. 59
Most people believe in the supernatural and consider it sacred.
Those beliefs help many cope with the stresses and joys of life. At
one point, those stresses and joys were as often as not a product of
human interaction with the natural environment. Today, religion
reflects and conditions our interaction with the natural environment,
but also many other aspects of our daily lives. .............................. 59
What is it? ..................................................................................... 59
What does it look like? The Landscape of Religion ...................... 61
Shrines .......................................................................................... 63
Religious Holiday Space – ............................................................ 63
Cemeteries.................................................................................... 64
Where is it?: Religious Realms ..................................................... 65
American Christianity .................................................................... 68
Islam ............................................................................................. 71
Judaism......................................................................................... 72
Hinduism ....................................................................................... 73
Why Here? .................................................................................... 74
The Big Picture ............................................................................. 77
Religion and Politics................................................................................ 77
Religion and Economics ......................................................................... 77
Religion and Language: .......................................................................... 78
Religion and the Environment ................................................................. 78
Heading 3 ................................................................................................ 79
Chapter 6 Politics ................................................................... 80
Chapter 7 Heading 1-Section Title ......................................... 81
Heading 2...................................................................................... 81
Heading 3 ................................................................................................ 81
Chapter 8 Ethnicity ................................................................. 82
Chapter 9 Heading 1-Section Title ....................................... 105
Heading 2.................................................................................... 105
Heading 3 .............................................................................................. 105
Chapter 10 Economics ......................................................... 106
Chapter 11 Heading 1-Section Title...................................... 106
Heading 2.................................................................................... 106
Heading 3 .............................................................................................. 106
Chapter 12 Urbanization ...................................................... 107
Heading 2.................................................................................... 107
Heading 3 .............................................................................................. 107
Chapter 14 Health and Disease ........................................... 108
Heading 2.................................................................................... 108
Heading 3 .............................................................................................. 108
Chapter 16 Crime and Punishment ...................................... 109
Heading 2.................................................................................... 109
Heading 3 .............................................................................................. 109
Chapter 18 Gender .............................................................. 110
Heading 2.................................................................................... 110
Heading 3 .............................................................................................. 110
Chapter 20 Environment and Nature .................................... 111
Heading 2.................................................................................... 111
Heading 3 .............................................................................................. 111
BOOK FORMATTING......................................................... 112
Chapter 22 Formatting Tips .................................................. 112
Chapter 23 Section Breaks Are Key ..................................... 112
Chapter 24 About Pictures and Captions ............................. 112
How to Generate a Table of Contents ......................................... 113
How to Create an Index .............................................................. 114
Chapter 25 How to Change the Headers and Footers .......... 114
Chapter 26 How to Create a Numbered Paragraph .............. 114
Chapter 27 How to Save Time in the Future......................... 114
How to Create a Document ......................................................... 115
Chapter 28 More Template Tips ........................................... 115
Chapter 29 Index.................................................................. 116
Preface
This text was conceived and executed with several key goals in mind. The first and
most obvious goal of ours was to provide a text at little to no cost to a generation of
students who face exceptional and ever rising cost constraints as they seek a college
education. Students should be able to acquire this text in a variety of digital and print
formats so that needs can be met on terms set by the student, not administrators or
book publishers.
The second critical goal set forth by the authors of this text was to introduce students
to a contemporary version of geography. Instead of prompting students to remember
an encyclopedia of the United States or the World, our focus is squarely on helping
students learn how to think about their world as accomplished geographers think about
it. We want students to learn how “to do geography”, as they learn “about
geography”. We hope students will finish the semester with some disciplinary skills
in addition to the more common subject knowledge associated with traditional
introductory geography texts.
A third goal identified by the authors was to make a geography text that is exciting
while academically demanding. This means that the authors have endeavored to
illustrate key concepts and skills with examples and data that are contemporary,
engaging and relevant. We also believe that even freshmen must be introduced to
some measure of the theory that makes modern cultural geography so captivating. It
seems absurd to us that all “the good stuff” is essentially reserved for graduate
students, while entry-level students are fed a steady diet of intellectual junk food.
Lastly, we hope to introduce students to a series of hands on exercises that students

will find exciting and illuminating.
The U.S. focus of this text is purposeful. It is not to suggest that there is no merit in
addressing international concerns. Overwhelming evidence points to a crippling, and
one might suggest dangerous, ignorance of world geography, but nearly as much
evidence exists showing that students are woefully ignorant of U.S. geography as well.
American students frequently know little of the conditions in their own country, nor
the processes that have created the America that they live in. It is with these very real
concerns that we suggest that students have at least two introductory human
geography courses. One should focus on domestic geography, the other on the non-
Western world, perhaps using a regional approach. This book seeks to serve students
in the former course.
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Chapter
P E O P L E A N D L A N D S C A P E S
GEOGRAPHY IS NOT WHAT

YOU THINK IT IS.
Geography is not just a subject, but rather a discipline. Geography
allows those trained to use it to ask questions, to see patterns in
data, to solve problems and to communicate solutions.
I C O N K E Y
The popular afternoon television show Jeopardy is probably the most common way
 Valuable information Americans are exposed to geography. This is a huge problem because although it
 Test your knowledge
does more than any other medium to advance geographic knowledge among
Americans, it advances it down a dead-end street. A typical geography question on
 Keyboard exercise
Jeopardy might ask contestants to identify the capital of Nebraska, or a mountain
 Workbook review range in Switzerland. Professional geographers rarely ask questions like that. By
focusing on “geography as subject” Jeopardy continually reinforces old-fashioned
notions about geography, and in the process leads many Americans to think that
geographers do little more than memorize rivers, crops and capitals. This
misconception is akin to suggesting that historians memorize an endless score of
dates, or that English majors spend all their time preparing for spelling bees.
Countless school curriculums and K-12 textbooks have mimicked the unfortunate
focus upon geography-as-trivia by TV game shows over the past several
generations in the U.S. As a result, the much more helpful notion of “geography as
a discipline” has been all but stomped out of the American imagination. College
freshmen rarely consider geography as a major. Many folks, including high school
guidance counselors, do not realize that one can major in geography at most large
universities. Students, parents and even faculty outside of your Geography
Department often don’t realize that geography provides students and scholars a
robust set of analytical tools and lucrative career paths.
One of the primary goals of this text is to introduce readers to an updated and what
we think is a more viable version of geography. We hope to help students to begin
to see, think, solve problems and communicate as a geographer - while at the same
time learning some “old school” geography so they can defeat friends and family at
trivia or Jeopardy!
Geography – So Boring. How did it get this way?

There are probably several reasons accounting for the general misunderstanding
most Americans have about geography. Certainly, geography has a long enough
history. Scholars have been writing “geographies” since at least the time of Ancient
Greece and Ancient China. For many centuries, “doing geography” was largely a
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
matter of writing rich descriptive narratives about a region or location. This sort of
geography is necessary. Descriptive geographies are interesting for those of us who
have a healthy intellectual curiosity about the people and places of the world. This
sort of geography also proved immeasurably valuable to the cause of imperialism,
colonization and the military adventures that regularly accompanied the age of
exploration.
As the methodologies of science, and indeed social science evolved during the 19th
century, the production of mere descriptions of regions and locations fell short of
what geographers (and others) thought appropriate. One group of geographers,
began trying to make a causal connection between the culture and/or economics of
places and the local environmental conditions. Known as environmental
determinism this brand of geography, sought to show how things like climate,
topography and soil conditions were key determinants in the evolution of societies.
Perhaps not surprisingly, many of these scholars found that they were personally a
product of ideal environmental conditions. The most advanced societies (and
presumably most talented individuals) were found in places where favorable
environmental conditions existed. Places where it was too hot, cold, rainy, dry, etc.
produced inferior people and inferior societies. The bigotry and racism implicit or
explicit in such positions is clearer today. Despite their inability to scientifically
prove their theories, a few geographers, like Ellen Churchill Semple and Ellsworth
Huntington commanded an outsized audience in the early 20th century. Most
serious academics of the time forcefully rejected environmental determinism, and
by the time World War II began, the implications of pseudo-scientific scholarship
had within the eugenics movement and even upon the development of fascism was
clear. Geography was tainted for its involvement and many geographers reacted by
going back to the safe “geography as rich description” approach.
In the aftermath of World War II, the retreat of geography back toward a non-
scientific niche doomed the popular perception of geography, especially in
America, to the intellectual backwaters and trivia contests.
This fact is a tragedy for a number of reasons. By the 1960s, geographers had
begun adopting legitimate scientific methodologies via spatial statistics during a
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period known now as the quantitative revolution, a revolution that continues today
largely among the users of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Coupled with
accompanying revolutions in our ability to collect, store, manipulate and analyze
spatial data, geographers can tackle a wide array of pressing social, economic and
political issues.
Beginning in the 1970s and accelerating into the 1990s, geographers were also
playing a significant role in an exciting expansion of theoretical approaches to
understanding how the world works. Economic, political and cultural theorists,
emerged from among the ranks of geography departments in the UK and later the
US, playing important roles in an overall flowering of critical theory, during a
period known as the cultural turn. Many geographers today focus squarely on the
mechanics that regulate the production and maintenance of knowledge itself, in
some ways a final frontier of social science.
Today, geography is a very vibrant discipline offering to the uninitiated a surprising

number of avenues to understand the world – and to get a quality, high-paying job
in either the public or private sector. The next section offers a greatly reduced
introduction to the ideas and strategies that make geography a very useful discipline
for understanding and solving a myriad of society’s problems.
Geography as Discipline – Key Aspects of the Geodi Way

If you go to the library at your college or university and head to the section housing
books about geography, you may be disappointed to find there’s almost nothing
there. You might mistakenly believe that geographers don’t write books or that
geography is exceptionally limited in its scope. Both assumptions would be wrong.
Libraries have lots of books written by geographers, but because geographers study
almost any subject ¸books written by geographers can be found scattered
throughout the library. Geographers have written books and scholarly articles about
an astounding array of subjects – far too many to consider here. A geographer can
study almost anything that takes place. What are you interested in? You can
probably study as a geographer. The following paragraphs provide a basic guide to
geography as discipline. We call it, only half-jokingly, “the Jedi discipline”,
because like the fictional characters in Star Wars, geographers have a way of doing
things that are simultaneously unique and exceptionally powerful.
The “icon key” at left was produced by using the Heading 8 style for the words
“icon key” and the List Bullet 5 style for the text below—which uses a Wingdings
symbol for the bullet character. To change the bullet symbol, click Bullets and
Numbering on the Format menu. Click Modify, and then click the Bullet button.
Select a new symbol, and then click OK twice.
Geography is a Way to See the World – Jedi Googles
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The ability to
“read” the
landscape is the
first skill of the
Geodi. It sounds
simple enough,
but advanced
ability in this
skill takes many
years to develop.
Still, one can
begin acquiring
the ability to see
as a geographer
by developing an
awareness that
all landscapes, the human and physical environment all around you, can be read,
somewhat like one reads text in a book. With some practice you will develop a
measure of landscape literacy, the ability to understand a significant number of
messages inscribed in the environment. All landscapes are telling a story, it is for us
to learn to read it.
You already have a some skills in this area. You have been developing your
abilities since you were a small child. You probably can tell when you are in a
dangerous neighborhood. There isn’t a signpost at the borders of high crime
districts warning, “Caution – Lock your Car Doors Now”, but still you know.
How? You have learned to read the landscape. Rubbish on the street, graffiti, bars
on windows and unkempt lawns are common markers of neighborhoods that suffer
from crime; and over the years you’ve learned to interpret the symbolism of those
markers. People who are
“street smart” have developed
this Geodi skill well.
The first steps you must take

as you develop your
landscape literacy skills is to
begin looking more closely at
stores, streets, houses, parking
lots, road signs, empty lots,
farm fields and anything else
that passes your windshield.
Don’t simply focus on the
“pretty” scenes. Don’t focus
on the important or
impressive any more than you
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focus on the common, the ordinary or the vernacular elements of your world.
Ask yourself repeatedly, “What is this landscape trying to communicate?” Look for
patterns and try to guess what forces have created the patterns you see. Ask, “Why
is this here (and not somewhere else)?”
Each chapter in this book will feature multiple images of landscape. Most will offer
a quick “reading” of the landscape pictured. A large image database, available via
the internet is available at the American Landscape Project, and many hundreds of
the images contained therein feature robust captions in an effort to help you learn to
read the landscape confidently.
Geography is a Way to Ask Questions – Geodi Mind Tricks

Epistemology is a term that refers to how we know what we know. Our
epistemology is our way of knowing. Most of the time, we don’t think about it too
much. “I just know it!”, is the what you might respond if someone challenged you
on your epistemology. However, to scientists, social scientists and other serious
thinkers, understanding one’s own epistemological biases is a very important
concern. Geographers have a favored epistemology – a spatial one. When
geographers seek to better understand the world around them, they have a strong
tendency to frame questions in terms of place and space. In other words, when
geographers want to know “why?” they first ask the question “where?”
Geographers frequently argue that our special, spatial “way of thinking”, or “habit
of mind” is sorely underdeveloped in the United States. Most geography instruction
in K-12 American schools favors place-name geography and memorization over
developing spatial thinking as a foundation upon which one can build knowledge
through inquiry based learning.
Ignoring questions of space and place can have consequences. For instance, your
author once overheard a conversation on a large college campus about why the
majority African-American students always took the elevator in a campus building,
rather than climbing stairs. This was an obvious trend, and the people witnessing it
were quick to assign race/ethnicity as the primary causal factor motivating students
to use the elevator. Had these folks been geographers, they probably would have
thought about the spatial aspects of the situation first, and would have realized that
race/ethnicity was probably not as important (or important at all). Instead, a
geographer would have asked, “where did these students grow up?” Had they
asked that question, it may have occurred to them that many of the black students
on that campus were from New York City, and they were probably conditioned by
their urban upbringing to use elevators rather than stairs to get to the third floor.
5
By privileging
matters of place
and space in
their quest for
knowledge,
geographers may
bias their
conclusions –
arguing that
location is a
significant
causal variable
in causing
whatever
phenomena is
under
investigation. Favoring one epistemology over others is nearly unavoidable.
Historians, sociologists, political scientists, economists and other scholars have their
own epistemological biases. As long as these competing means to comprehend
reality can be given a fair audience, then a more robust, multi-perspectival
understanding of our life world can be achieved. There is danger in discounting
epistemologies and perspectives unfamiliar to you – and that’s another reason to
love geography. Knowing about other places, makes you not only more
knowledgeable, but more permits you to develop greater sympathy for others for
those in situations different from your own, and empathy with those with whom you
can find common ground.
Geography is a Way to Solve Problems – Light Sabers

Geographers have a very powerful toolbox largely built upon the spatial
epistemology of our discipline. The tools in the geographer’s toolbox are generally
referred to as our methodologies. There are many, many dozens of methodologies
at the disposal of the geography student. Geographers share many methodologies
with other disciplines in the sciences, social sciences and even in the humanities.
Methodologies are essentially a set of rules that govern both the collection of data
and the analysis of the data. Generally, geographers tweak the methodology a little
in order to fit in with the spatial epistemology used in the discipline. For example,
if a geographer were to go to the student union to survey students about a new
campus policy, many of the questions included in the survey would be the same as a
survey administered by a student in political science, history or sociology.
However, a geography student would insist that the survey have a spatial element
included among the demographics. Instead of simply asking about a survey
respondent’s age, gender, ethnicity, the geographer would likely be most interested
in address, or ZIP code, or at least “hometown”. Like many other disciplines,
geographers use statistics; often in a manner that is indistinguishable from other
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disciplines. Once again though, geography has a separate set of spatially-aware

stats that are uniquely suited to answering spatial questions. Whereas others might
start a statistical inquiry by calculating mean, median and standard deviation.
Geographers might begin a similar inquiry by calculating spatial mean, spatial
median and standard distance. There are a vast number of spatial statistics, some of
them exceptionally complex and some far less so. The laboratory manual
accompanying this course introduces students to a few basic statistical
methodologies used in geography.
The primary tool in the geographer’s toolkit in recent decades has been Geographic
Information Systems or GIS. GIS is the “light saber” of the modern geographer.
GIS software allows geographers to analyze data that cannot be analyzed with any
other software, allowing geographers to solve problems that would prove intractable
to those without skills in GIS. This software is used by other disciplinary
practitioners, but it a core methodological tool in geography.
Geography is a Way to Communicate – Jedi Language

Because you are reading this, you have some command of the rules that govern the
English language. You no doubt can write in this language as well, indicating that
you are literate. You can communicate with words. You probably are reasonably
adept at communicating with numbers as well – so you may be numerate as well.
Without these two key skillsets, you probably would not be in college. Another
skill you should seek to develop is your ability to communicate with non-textual
visual imagery – graphics. If you can “read” graphics and create “readable”
graphics, then you could be considered graphicate. If you can read and create
legible, communicative maps, then you can be considered cartographicate.
Cartography is the specialized language of geography. The ability to communicate

a large amount of information or an idea using maps is an excellent skill to develop.
In the last decade, thanks to Google Maps/Earth, GPS and a massive increase in the
value placed on spatial data by the government, military and private enterprise,
cartographicy has blossomed a valuable type of literacy.
It makes sense that maps have reentered the public’s consciousness in recent years.
Besides the explosion in spatial data available with which cartographers can create
fun or informative maps, changes in the pace of our lives as well the tendency for us
to be overwhelmed by data in the digital age have made well-constructed maps a
welcome coping mechanism. Not only are they cool, but they allow our brains to
process very rapidly a far greater amount of data than we could if we encountered
the same data as a textual narrative or in a massive spreadsheet. Maps allow us to
see patterns and process that we would be hard-pressed to discern otherwise.
Although some folks find maps easy to read almost innately, it can be very
challenging to author a map. Good cartography is both an art and a science, but it
can be learned and there is a few great jobs out there for professional cartographers.
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All geographers, even those who specialty is not cartography, should endeavor to
become reasonably adept at making maps. Luckily, most us can now create a map
of respectable quality using GIS software. Most GIS programs have helpful default
settings that are useful starting points for apprentice cartographers.
Critical Concepts
Now that you understand that geographers have a special way of 1) seeing, 2)
thinking, 3) solving problems and 4) communicating – it is time to move on to
learning some of the core concepts that will appear throughout this text.
How this book is arranged xxxx

Each chapter covers a thematic topic, like politics, economics, religion or language.
Each of these topics is treated as a geographer is likely to approach them.
What is it?
Each chapter will begin with a brief overview of the topic or subject. There is a
conscious attempt to keep the “what” section as small as possible to avoid a
devolution into an encyclopedic “geography of everything” type text. Many links,
mostly to Wikipedia serve as opportunities for students to explore content with
which they lack familiarity.
Where is it?
The second part of each chapter will answer the question, “Where?” in the language
of geography: cartography. Each of the topics is presented as much as possible via
maps. Students are introduced to maps displaying the critical data that characterizes
the economic, political, linguistic, etc. conditions that frame their everyday lives.
This is a purposeful gesture to increase cartographic literacy among students using
this text. Students will be expected to be able to critically analyze the maps, so that
they may also learn to create maps of their own, an increasingly critical skill the
graphics-driven media environment of this age.
What does it look like?

Next, you’ll be introduced to sample landscapes, so that you may begin to see how
the topic of interest manifests itself in the built environment. This is how we
generally encounter each of the topics of concern: we move through the landscape
experiencing them. However, most folks don’t actively engage the landscapes as a
text, or a stage. In other words, most are generally unaware that the landscape is
rich with meaning that can be deciphered and read like a text. The landscape is a
type of data that is typically overlooked, left unquestioned by us all as we move
through it. We hope that you’ll become a far more active reader of the landscape,
able to use the visual cues around you to ask questions about why things are the
way they are.
8
Why is it here or there?

The third section of each chapter will be designed to help students gain some critical
insight into why the maps of their world appear as they do. Answering “why?” is
the key component of the modernist project: it is what social science seeks to
accomplish. The chapter will examine patterns of migration, interaction with other
facets of culture and the environment to reveal both the complexity of our collective
culture.
How does it fit in?

Some chapters feature on-line laboratory exercises to help students learn how to see,
think and solve problems using the disciplinary tools of geography. The
epistemology and methodologies of the geographer are the core element around
which the chapters are arranged.
Core Concepts
Location
Geographers have a number of basic concepts that function effectively as tools in
the main problem solving strategies used by geographers. First among these are the
concepts associated with idea of location. Each physical object has an absolute
location . There are a variety of strategies for expressing or communicating
absolution location. If you order a pizza, you will provide the delivery person your
address, including an apartment number – and maybe even some additional details.
The property address system as we know it here in the United States was created by
the government to help the postal service deliver letters and packages many years
ago. It’s a pretty logical system, and most of have learned the logic behind it well
enough to figure out where we’re going even without a GPS. If you were to travel
to other countries, you may be surprised to find that some, like Japan, have very
different address systems than we have in America.
Figure 0-1: Graticule globe
Wikipedia
Another common system for expressing absolute location is by using a grid
geographic coordinate system, that we generally express as “latitude and
longitude”. Grid coordinate systems were devised thousands of years ago to aid in
navigation and map making. There are many dozens of coordinate systems, but the
most common system we use today was invented by Eratosthenes, vastly improved
by Ptolemy and formalized into something we’d recognize today by Englishman Sir
George Airy in 1851. Many folks own smart phones that have global positioning
system (GPS) software pre-installed. These phones, and other GPS devices
(handheld, in-car, in cameras) use the basic logic of the grid system to help you
navigate. GPS devices express latitude and longitude coordinates using a specific
style formalized in 1984 called “World Geodetic System”. Hence, this system is
called WGS1984.
Most folks don’t need to know the details of how GPS works, but you should be
able to recognize the basics of latitude and longitude, and be able use it to navigate
the streets, hiking trails or other places you frequent. You surely use WGS1984
9
more often than you think. For example, if you call to have a pizza delivered, the
driver may punch in your address on his GPS device, and his software translates
your address into latitude and longitude coordinates. This combination of numbers
appear on a map on the screen of the phone/GPS unit as a point location. The
software then uses a computerized algorithm to find the shortest route between the
delivery person’s latitude/longitude coordinates (another point location) and the
coordinates associated with your address.
Region
Another common device to express location is idea of a region. Each absolute
location, like your address or latitude/longitude coordinates, is situated within
multiple larger locations - regions. Your address is on a street/road – which is a
region expressed as a line on a map. Your address is also (at least in the US) within
a ZIP code region, a city, a county, a state, a country, etc. Each of these regions is
mapped as a polygon on a map.
Regions are not all created equal. States, counties and cities all have very specific
boundaries. Regions that have very defined boundaries are called functional
regions. When you cross the boundary into or out of a functional region, then some
sort of rule changes. Laws are different. Even the boundary used by pizza
franchises, like Dominos or Pizza Hut have rules. If you do not live inside a defined
polygon on a map, generally centered on the pizza franchise, then you may not get a
pizza delivered to you from that location.
Formal regions have less well-defined boundaries or fuzzy boundaries, so the term
“formal” is a bit misleading. Nevertheless, these regions can be identified by some
trait commonly exhibited within the region. Most often, formal regions have a
hearth or core area – where the trait is most evident, and then a peripheral area
where the trait is less evident. An example would be the Mormon region in the
United States. The core area would be around Salt Lake City, where a large
majority of people belong to the LDS Church. Away from Salt Lake City, the
percentage of people who identify with the LDS church decreases until at some
distance, one would find that it would not be logical to call the region “Mormon”
any longer (http://www.asarb.org/)
Even less well defined than the formal region is the kind of region that exists in the
imagination of people – the vernacular region. Such regions are important because
people believe them to exist – and they do in many ways, but precisely where the
boundaries, or even the core of such regions are vary depending on the individual’s
imagination. A good example of a vernacular region is “Dixie”, a name frequently
applied to the American South. Just which states, towns and counties are in Dixie is
hard to say. Where “the South” begins and ends is impossible to say – but clearly,
Figure 0-2: Dixie - from Wikipedia
Dixie exists in the minds of millions of Americans.
Diffusion
10
The core-periphery pattern that characterizes formal and vernacular regions is the
result of the friction of distance, perhaps the most fundamental principle shaping
the spatial behavior of people, ideas and institutions. In the simplest terms, there
exists what might be best thought of as a force, somewhat like gravity, that impedes
the spread or diffusion of ideas, behaviors, people and…whatever. The friction of
distance creates patterns on the landscape characterized by distance decay. These
patterns are so pervasive and predictable that it lead geographer Waldo Tobler to
call the process “The first law of geography”. Tobler argues that “Everything is
related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things”
Tobler W., (1970) "A computer movie simulating urban growth in the Detroit
region". Economic Geography, 46(2): 234-240. Put more simply, things that are
near each other are more often similar than things that are far apart. According to
Tobler, the idea was self-evident and he didn’t realize that he had captured the
essences of something so fundamental when he wrote it down in 1970. Though
very simplistic, it is a useful notion to keep handy as you learn to think like a
geographer. Tobler’s first law appears in many guises throughout this text – and
operates regularly in your daily life.
The process of diffusion is a prime example of how

the first law of geography works. Think of an idea,
invention or behavior of any sort – and consider its
origins. Somebody or some people must have
invented or thought it up or acted in an innovative
way. The location where “the invention” or
innovation occurred first is known as the hearth-
which is a synonym for “home”. Hip hop culture,
for example was invented in the South Bronx region
of New York City in the mid-1970s. Therefore the
Bronx is the cultural hearth of hip hop. Figure 0-3: Cultural hearth of hip hop
Wikipedia.
It took some years for people outside the Bronx to

discover hip hop, but once that happened hip hop music spread or diffused around
the globe. The diffusion of hip hop demonstrates several key spatial patterns
recognized by those who study the diffusion of culture. First, hip hop music took
nearly a decade for it to emerge from the Bronx. There were many barriers to
diffusion preventing many people, even just a few miles away in Manhattan, from
knowing anything about this newly created genre of music. Those barriers were
largely social, economic and cultural, but they kept the music of Black and Latino
youths from reaching the ears of music fans (and music executives) in the rest of
New York – and the rest of the world.
In the late 1970s, a group of rappers from New Jerseys copying the rapping style
they had learned in visiting friends in the Bronx made a record with a band called
“Rapper’s Delight” (Youtube). After a few months, this record sold millions of
copies while introducing the world to a commercialized (New Jersey) variation of
11
hip hop, called “rap music” (see Graves, 201xx). The original version of hip hop
music, rather than using a band of musicians, used a DJ who manipulated turntables
and records to create musical accompaniment to the rapper or MC. The variation
on the original formula created in the Bronx, but modified in New Jersey is a great
example of stimulus diffusion.
Numerous modifications on the original style of hip hop have been created in most
of the places where the innovation has been accepted. For example, many of the
early lyrics from hip hop pioneer Afrika Bambaatta were anti-gang; but when hip
hop diffused to Los Angeles in the 1980s, local rappers produced hip hop albums
appear to glorified gang membership and gang violence. It’s all hip hop, but as
ideas spread they adapt and change to fit local conditions or local preferences.
Hip hop also exhibited a couple of other well known as diffusion tendencies.
During the 1980s, hip hop diffused slowly, spreading mostly to other boroughs
within New York as well as Northern New Jersey. This pattern is known as
contagion diffusion (sometimes expansion diffusion) because the pattern is
reminiscent of the way a contagious disease spreads from person to person. Early
rap acts outside of the Bronx were from Queens, Harlem, Brooklyn and Long
Island. It wasn’t until a duo known as DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (Jeffrey
Townes and Will Smith) emerged from nearby West Philadelphia around 1988, that
a non-New York act made it onto the record charts.
The very next year, a bunch of hip hop acts had hit records – almost all of them
from Los Angeles – America’s second largest city. This phase of hip hop
expansion followed a pattern known as hierarchical diffusion. Like many
inventions or innovations, hip hop began in a very large city – at the top of the
urban hierarchy in the United States. Eventually, other large cities, like Atlanta
and Houston produced hip hop acts, often with a distinct regional style. After about
20 years, even small towns or rural areas had accepted hip hop and were producing
home-grown hip hop artists. Hip hop has diffused internationally as well –
appearing in large cities of foreign countries, and then diffusing to less populated
areas far removed from its origins in the South Bronx.
There were a number of impediments or barriers to the diffusion of hip hop from
the Bronx. In addition to the simple ignorance (people didn’t know about hip hop),
there were significant biases against hip hop because of its association with one of
America’s most infamous ghettos. The spatial segregation of specific ethnicities in
the Bronx (African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Haitians, Jamaicans, etc.) is a
effective barrier to diffusion, and as you’ll read in later chapters functions
effectively as a barrier to the movement of people and ideas on a number of fronts.
It is worth noting that Motown Records, the most successful of all black-owned
recording companies eschewed hip hop for many years, which in turn helped doom
its survival. It was eventually acquired by hip hop specialty company DefJam
records.
12
Though hip hop is essentially an international phenomena today, there are a few
locations that have witnessed the construction of effective impermeable barriers to
the diffusion of hip hop. The places that hip hop cannot be heard, would largely be
in those places where very serious religious or political costs are attached to those
listening or producing western music. Record stores have been bombed in Pakistan
by supporters of the Taliban. More often than not though, the music “gets through”
and becomes a source of resistance to authority. Other barriers to diffusion that
might exist for something like hip hop music would be the lack of radios,
incompatibility of the culture or some measure of bigotry or bias that would
undermine the acceptance of hip hop.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2010/04/rap-in-the-capital-
hip-hop-tehran-style.html
Process and Pattern

Geographers are exceptionally interested in patterns or regularities on the landscape.
All scientists look for regularities (and irregularities) and try to figure out the causal
forces behind them. Our goal is to understand why the things are the way they are,
so that we may better understand them. Often we hope to be able to make
predictions about how things will change. Geographers are no different, but we
have a tendency to look for regularities/irregularities and the processes that
cause/undermine regularities on the landscape. Sometimes we simply observe and
try to make sense of it. More often, geographers use maps to plot whatever we are
observing (or trying to observe).
13
Data that shows a clustered pattern is almost always interesting to geographers.

Clustering is common because most phenomena are affected by the friction of
distance, as outlined by the first law of geography. Clustering can be observed by
plotting data on a map with points, as is evident in figure xx below. In the map,
payday lenders, represented by red triangles, cluster in large numbers near the
entrance to the joint military base McCord/Lewis in Washington. This map
strongly suggests that the payday lending industry considered military personnel an
attractive target demographic, though the industry denied that this was the case in
congressional testimony. This map helped convince legislators in Washington D.C.
and Seattle that the payday lending industry should be more forcefully regulated.
Oftentimes “eyeballing” the pattern of points on a map is not sufficient to detect a

pattern. When that is the case, then geographers turn to any number of spatial
statistics to determine if the pattern of points on a map are clustered. By using GIS
software, geographers may employ a technique known as nearest neighbor analysis
to determine if points on a map are “clustered”, “random” or “dispersed”. Image xx
to the left is the “readout” graphic from a statistical test of payday lenders in one
region of Los Angeles. As you can see, the clustering of this type of business
cannot be attributed to random chance, therefore we can be more certain there is a
some logic driving the plainly evident pattern. Businesses, diseases, crimes and a
number of other phenomena can be measured to check for the level of spatial
clustering – helping decision makers make better choices.
14
Lots of things cluster together and we’ll examine several

instances of it throughout the text and you may get a chance to
measure some patterns yourself for clustering if your instructor
is using the exercise manual accompanying this text.
Clustering can also be observed on a choropleth map, when

the data values associated with proximate polygon are more
similar than the data values associated with polygons far away
from each other. Put more simply, regions that are similar
cluster. A special term, spatial autocorrelation is often applied
to such patterns. Like the point clustering patterns above,
spatial statistic are available to geographers seeking to measure
the degree of clustering, dispersion or randomness in a choropleth map.
The well-known election map of 2000 (see figure xx) shows a clear pattern of
clustering that does not need statistical analysis to notice. However, you may want
to compare the degree of clustering seen in this map against another election map –
or a map of something unrelated like cancer rates. That way you could determine
which was more clustered, or if you were comparing patterns over a period of years
– a trend that would allow you to make predictions.
Co-location
Clustering is a type of co-location, and generally we think of as occurring when a
thing or behavior (e.g. voting for George Bush, payday lenders, night clubs) cluster
or agglomerate. Co-location also describes the spatial pattern when different things
appear in close proximity to each other (e.g. payday lenders and soldiers). When
that
happens,
one can say
there is a
spatial
relationship
between the
two things.
Occasionally, this indicates a causal relationship – and seeking causal relationship

is one of the significant goals of the scientist.
You may notice when you are driving around that there seems to be large number
of obese people living in neighborhoods that contain a large number of fast-food
restaurants; and residents of neighborhoods with few local fast-food joints are less
likely to be obese.
You could test this observation by first collecting data from the local health
department. You would map the obesity rate by neighborhood (census tract or ZIP
code perhaps). Next you would plot all the fast-food restaurants in the study area so
15
that you could count the number of fast food outlets per neighborhood. Then you
would run some statistical tests on the data. Perhaps you would start by measuring
the amount of correlation between fast food restaurants and obesity rates. If you
found that as the density fast food restaurants rises, so does obesity rates, then you
may have grounds to argue there is a spatial relationship. Unfortunately, correlation
can be misleading, so you may want to test the relationship using regression
analysis, a more complex statistical technique that helps researchers determine the
strength and direction of causality between a number of independent variables (fast
food, ethnicity, income, access to parks, etc.) and a dependent variable (obesity).
No doubt you have seen patterns and wondered, “why is that here?” The chapters
that follow are designed to help you answer those questions. Some of the
techniques may seem challenging to you, but college students should be able to
observe patterns, ask questions and do introductory analysis on data sets as a
geographer would do in the course of trying to solve a problem.
Chapter End Matter

Teach Spatial
http://teachspatial.org/
http://gispopsci.org/
16
2
Chapter
CHAPTER 2 CULTURE NOW AND

THEN
That elusive set of rules that govern the way we act is a product of
where we are from and where we live. This chapter explores the idea
of culture and how place and space shape the way we think and what
we do in myriad fashion
Does Culture Exist?

It’s generally a foregone conclusion that culture exists. Most introductions to the
concept of culture in college textbooks don’t bother to problematize the concept.
Instead, they simply posit that culture is something akin to a collection of socially
created rules that govern people’s thoughts and behaviors. Culture, they often
argue, is a “learned way of life”. While it is easy to acknowledge that people do
follow innumerable, mostly unwritten, rules as they make decisions about virtually
everything they do, it is also important to point out that it is dangerous to reify
culture. In other words, it is important to understand that culture should not be
treated as something that is real or material. Instead, culture should be treated as an
abstract concept. Culture doesn’t exist, only the idea of culture actually exists. The
reason this distinction is important to make is to help students avoid falling into the
trap that causes us to treat culture as something separate and above people, like
some unknown, mysterious force that controls the wills of individuals. We, and the
societies we live in, are much more complex. The idea of culture is helpful
sometimes when we need to explain behaviors that appear at the group level, but
it’s very dangerous to let down ones guard and assume that individual ideas and
actions are controlled by culture. By keeping in mind that culture is an idea, it
prompts us to be alert to how the rules of society are formed, reformed, tossed out,
replaced, and contested. It provides a better balance between society’s rules, known
as structures, and agency, which is the power of the individuals and institutions to
navigate those rules.
Folk Culture
Almost nobody living in the United States today adheres to a folk culture.
Generally, folk cultures are those groups who have few or no modern conveniences,
live according to age-old customs and are economically primitive (cashless
economy, little occupational specialization, etc.). Probably only the Amish and
17
maybe some native Alaskan

groups approximate a folk life
existence today, but even that is
doubtful. Much of American folk
life disappeared in the mid-19th
century when the telegraph and
the railroad began invading
spaces once isolated from the
culture and economics of the rest
of the world. The geography of
places, specifically a degree of
isolation from the network of
non-local places is the key
element preserving folk cultures.
Folk culture therefore is local culture for local people. Once non-local practices
significantly alter what was once unique to the region and/or local people alter their
practices to suit non-local conditions or markets, then those practices cannot be
accurately labeled “folk”, but instead should be recognized as popular culture.
Often the distinction between the two is messy.
Folk culture represents a long-standing fascination among geographers. Part of the

attraction is a certain sentimentality or nostalgia for past landscapes. Many books
have been written about mundane things like house types, barns, and banjo playing
styles. Some academics call this kind of study worthless, but that criticism is
probably unwarranted. It is worth noting that academics are entitled to study
phenomena they and the public find interesting. Not all study must be applied – if it
were, entire humanities departments might not exist on campuses across the globe.
More importantly, an understanding of folk practices in other times and places helps
us understand the evolution of modern or popular culture that characterizes the
lives of nearly all of us today. Many of the daily behaviors we exhibit are traceable
to the folkways of our ancestors. Investigations into folk ways and folk landscapes
also help us better understand the evolution of complex interactions between people
and their physical environment. Today, many of these interactions are masked by
advanced technologies that shield people from their physical environment.
Understanding how people adapted to the constraints and challenges presented by
the climate, soils and topography proves both illuminating and practical as we face
significant environmental challenges.
Folk Regions
In the United States, there are essentially four major, and several additional minor
cultural regions that can be identified by mapping out various folk practices.
Though the folk cultures that created these regions are largely extinct, the long-term
impacts of those folk cultures are still very much in evidence in the everyday lives
of Americans living within each region today. Religion, politics, music preferences,
18
foodways are but a few of the legacies of the folk cultures that once dominated
various regions of the US.
INSERT FOLK REGIONS MAP
Folk Housing
The type of houses Americans built
before the introduction of mass
produced housing is an excellent
medium through which students can
begin to investigate folk culture
practices using the Jedi techniques
discussed in the introductory chapter.
Folk housing offers students learning to
read the landscape an accessible and
fun way to interpret the effects of the
natural environment, economics,
ethnicity and even religion on the Figure 2-1: New England Large House, Manchester by the
production of something as ordinary – Sea, MA. Note the large central chimney and room addition at
the rear.
but vitally important – as the house.
The following sections introduce the
four major regional folk cultures and the most common housing types associated
with those regions.
Yankee
The northernmost folk culture
dominated by New Englanders, and
headquartered probably in Boston
was the Yankee subculture. The
term “Yankee” is used frequently to
reference to any American,
particularly by persons not from the
US. Americans also occasionally
refer to themselves as “Yanks” or
“Yankees”, but in this context, the
term is applied only to people from
the northeastern reaches of the
United States. Yankees can be found
in New England, but also are
dominant in northern Ohio, northern
Figure 2-2: Temple Front House with attached barns, Keene, NH.
Indiana, northern Illinois and parts of This house features a series of attached barns. Consider the dangers
Michigan and Wisconsin. The and benefits of this design strategy. Note the sap buckets hanging
from the tree in the foreground.
culture fades in strength the further
west one goes, and disappears almost
completely in Minnesota.
19
Yankee subculture tapers off by the time it

gets to Minnesota partly because of the effects
of distance decay. Places distant from the
Yankee hearth of Boston, were less likely to
adopt these practices. People from the Upper
Midwest (Minnesota, Dakotas, etc.) were also
less likely to be English-descent Yankees.
Instead, they were often descendants of
German, Russian, Ukrainian and
Scandinavian immigrants. In addition, by the
time the Upper Midwest was ripe for settlement, folk housing practices were
beginning to give way to popular housing – designed and built for mass
consumption at the national level.
Folk housing in the Yankee region evolved over the period of a few generations to
help the largely English settlers cope with the harsh winters of the region, many of
which were especially challenging during the 17th and 18th centuries. Look for
steeply pitched roofs, massive centrally positioned chimneys and extra large rooms.
Ponder how the design of these houses responded to the climatic conditions of that
time and place. Keep in mind that the families that lived in these houses were
largely farmers, and needed space to complete a variety of chores necessary to their
survival, like preparing food, sewing,
craftworks, etc.
There are several variations on a single floor

plan that features a large central chimney.
The smallest version is called a Cape Cod
House, and is not surprisingly very common
in and around Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
The New England Large house is in many
ways a two-story version of the Cape Cod
and is still common around much of the
Yankee subcultural region. A later, stylized
version known as the Temple Front House and its close cousin known as the
Upright and Wing are found further west as popular style elements crept into the
more purely functional folk house design. Finally, there is the Salt Box House,
named because of the unusual asymmetrical roof line that characterizes the gable
ends of the house.
Midland
Immigrants that came to the middle Atlantic states, like Delaware, Pennsylvania,
Virginia and Maryland were more likely to come from continental Europe
(Germany, Scandinavia, Holland, etc.) than their Yankee and Southern
counterparts. As a result, folk housing in this region had more diverse cultural
inputs than other American folk regions. In some ways, this makes the Midland
folk region the most mainstream in terms of politics, religion and cultural practices.
20
The folk housing of the Midlands

evolved in the Middle Atlantic states,
and good examples of it can be found in
the Piedmont region as well. This is
because westward bound pioneers
leaving the Atlantic seaboard frequently
were forced south (in to regions like the
Shenandoah Valley) upon confronting
the Appalachian highlands. Much of the
folk housing of the Midwest originated
due east in the Middle Atlantic.
Folk housing of the Midlands is simple and there are only a few designs. There are
a few log house models, but by far the most common are the single story hall and
parlor and the two story I-house. The latter two housing types are only two rooms
wide and feature gable end chimneys. The hall and parlor is perhaps the archetype
of housing worldwide because its basic size and design is common internationally
and has an exceptionally long history.
The I house, is on the other hand

confined largely to the Midwest and the
Piedmont. Reputedly, the I house was
named by folk geographer Fred Kniffen
after he noticed how common this house
type was Iowa, Indiana and Illinois.
Though you can find it in cities and
small towns, during the 18th and 19th
centuries, the I house became the
absolute standard “farm house” of the
Midwest and it signaled membership in
agricultural middle class for those who
lived in one. Its unusual dominance on the landscape in the Midwest is highly
suggestive of the massive size of the middle classes in this region of the country.
The I house can be read as an important landscape symbol that tells a story about
the culture, economics and politics of the region where it is so very common.
Upland South
In the areas of the American South,
where the influence of African-American
culture is diminished is known as the
“Upland South”. Upland South culture
can be found in the hilly /mountainous
regions of the South, but it also exists in
the Southern US where soil conditions
discouraged plantation agriculture (and
therefore slavery). This is the “white”
21
South, though by no means is this region

devoid of black folks. One might also call
it the “Hillbilly South”, though some
might find the term offensive. In any case,
the Upland South is similar to, but distinct
from the Lowland or Deep South in a
variety of ways – beginning with the
earliest immigration sources, that were
Scottish, Irish and English – with some
Germans thrown in for good measure.
People of the Upland South tended to be
poor, so their houses are modest.
The folk housing the Upland South were

mostly of log construction. As is the case
elsewhere, there is a base model from
which more elaborate houses were built
using a common floor plan or theme.
The simplest Upland South house is the

cabin and porch. Essentially, it is a one
room house, with a porch and single
chimney. Presumably, settlers on the
frontier would construct a single room or “single pen” cabin upon setting up a
homestead. If conditions proved ideal enough to remain in the location, additional
rooms or pens could be added, and in the process different house types emerged
from the single pen “starter home”.
If the settler built a

second pen, with a
separate chimney and
connected the two pens
with a single porch
featuring a breezeway
between the two rooms,
then the house is called a Dogtrot House
or cabin. Dogtrots seem to get their
colorful name because a hound could
walk or trot between the two room of the
house. The heat of the South would
make a breezeway an ideal “third room”
in which family members could do
chores, play or simply relax.
Sometimes, the owner of a single pen

cabin would adjoin a second room, but
22
attach it directly to the first room so that a single central chimney could serve both
rooms, and one wall was shared. This type of house, called a “saddlebag house”,
references the appearance of a pack horse laden with cargo.
Interestingly, most saddlebag houses did not have an internal door connecting the
two rooms, forcing inhabitants to go outside to go from one room to the next.
Luckily, the weather is mild in the South and most saddlebag houses come
equipped with a porch.
Lowland South
The part of the American South
where slavery was prevalent is
known in academic circles as the
Lowland South. In some areas,
African Americans constituted over
90 percent of the population, and
therefore had a massive impact on a
variety of cultural practices, religion,
language and the economy. Today,
the legacy of these folkways remains
strong, especially in those locations
that have remained somewhat cut-off from outside influences and in-migration.
The economic structures of the Deep South, deeply intertwined with the history of
slavery and Jim Crow Laws are reflected in the folk housing of the region. Unlike
the Midlands region, where the most common folk house (the I house) was a
substantial two story affair, or New England where even larger, more comfortable
houses was the norm; the Deep South features only two sorts of housing – those for
rich and those for poor. The housing built for rich folks though largely falls outside
the realm of “folk housing” and therefore is less important in this chapter.
Folk housing in the Deep South,

like New England, evolved in a
climatic extreme. Building
techniques, before the age of
advanced chemistry, air
conditioning – or even electricity
had to account for the unique
challenges of heat and humidity.
In order to combat termites, wood
rot and flooding, houses were
frequently constructed using pier
and beam construction – a
technique that raises several feet from the earth, keeping the wood elements. See
image xx above. There may also be some cooling effects generated by building
23
houses above ground, though this may make cold floors on the occasionally chilly
winter days.
The climate also affected the choice of building materials. Where it was available,
wood from cypress trees was prized for building houses, and especially for roofing
material. Cypress wood is naturally rot and insect resistant, unlike the more
abundant and inexpensive pine wood that most were forced to use to build houses.
This explains why many examples of folk architecture in the South have
disappeared from the landscape.
The most common folk house of the

Lowland South is the shotgun house.
Several theories regarding the colorful
name have been forwarded. If you open
the front door and all the interior doors of a
shotgun house, you often can see through
to the backyard. Theoretically, you could
fire a shotgun through the front door and pellets would fly out the backdoor. The
word may also come from an African-Haitian word that sounded similar to shotgun.
The design of the house is simple. It’s one room wide, a single story and can have
multiple rooms stretching back away from the street it faces. Long and skinny,
these houses seem to have African origins, but fit perfectly within the French long
lot cadastral system common in New Orleans (see chapter xx for additional
information on cadastral systems).
There are multiple variations on the shotgun house. For the most part they are very
modest because they were generally houses for working class blacks. Shotgun
houses were occasionally expanded by building a second house in parallel, sharing
a common center wall, roof and porch to produce a “double shotgun”. For extra
space, some folks added a second story to the rear rooms of the house, creating
what is known as a
“camelback shotgun”. The
second story rooms were only
added to the rear portions of
the houses in order to avoid
incurring additional property
taxes, which in certain
locations were collected based
on the area of the house facing
the street.
Shotgun houses proved so versatile and utilitarian, they diffused outward to many
other parts of the United States, and can be found where large numbers of African-
American migrated and also where “company housing” was built to attract and
retain workers in industrial districts across the country.
24
There are a number of other “folk regions” in the US that have unique housing as
well, including the Cajun South, the Pennsylvania Dutch region, the Mormon West
and the French-influenced areas, but they will be included in the discussion of
ethnic housing in chapter xx.
Folk Music to Popular Music

Music is another significant part of our lives that is heavily affected by the folk
ways of our ancestors. Folk music is homemade music, produced by largely
unschooled musicians for local audiences (see discussion of hip hop music chapter
xx). The instrumentation, lyrical content and performance techniques are, like other
folk practices rooted in the local conditions. The ethnicity of the musicians and
their audiences also play a significant role in the evolution of musical form. There
are thousands of folk music genres scattered across the globe. This text will explore
briefly only a few American folk music styles, focusing on the geographic factors
that have shaped the sonic landscape of the United States.
Perhaps the oldest known American folk music, brought

from Scotland and performed mostly in churches was
called “lining out” or “line singing”. Associated
originally with New England where it died out, but not Figure 2-3: Amazing Grace, in
before it spread to other more remote parts of the US Lining Out style, Old Regular
where it can be still found in a few churches. Lining Baptist, Kentucky
out, and it southern cousin “call and response” are products of an earlier time when
few people in a church congregation could read a hymnal, and therefore had to rely
upon a preacher or leader to sing the line first. The congregation would sing it back,
repeating the lyrics and melody. White churches and black churches both adopted
this style of singing in the Deep South. Why do you think this style of music went
extinct in New England and remained in Appalachia and the Deep South for so
long?
Work songs and spiritual tunes crafted by slaves and free blacks of
the South, typically with an African emphasis on percussion and
syncopated rhythms also had a long folk history in the United
States. The musical styles that developed among blacks in the
South was a product of inherited musical traditions, locally available instruments
and the living conditions forced upon them. From the earliest forms, evolved better
known musical genres, like jazz, blues and gospel.
In the American west, there would have been cowboy songs, and certainly a
number of folk tunes coming up through Mexico that were also “homemade” and a
product of the local geography.
In almost all folk environments, lightweight, homemade instruments or a capella

music is the norm. Pianos and other large and/or expensive instruments are rarely
used in folk music, except by musicians who happened to live in a port city. So, for
25
example, most of the great piano-based musical traditions in the US are along the
Missisippi River (New Orleans, St. Louis, etc.).
Rather, in the mountains or out on the plains, easy to carry instruments are the
norm. Therefore, harmonicas, violins, guitars and banjos are common. Other
“instruments” like jugs, washboards, spoons, etc. were used along with hand claps,
whistles and other vocalizations. It was also not uncommon for musicians to build
their own instruments from locally available materials. Gourd banjos and cigar box
guitars are excellent examples. Musical instruments and the style in which they
were played before the introduction of amplifiers also shaped the nature of folk
music. Take for example, musicians that played music at barn dances found that
certain instruments functioned better than others in that noisy environment. Drums
were too big to carry around, so they had to use banjos (they have a resonator to
make them louder), fiddles (violins) and guitars. The dulcimer, was a common
Appalachian instrument, but it couldn’t cut it at the barn dance. The mandolin was
similarly quiet, so players began to use it more as a rhythmic percussion instrument,
rather to carry the melody. Consider how these adaptive strategies echo the
development of early hip hop in the Bronx, New York.
American music has nearly always been a product the

hybridization of European and African musical
traditions, with the occasional Latin American input.
Perhaps the earliest example of this All-American
Figure 2-4: Link to Youtube -
hybridization came from Stephen Foster of Pittsburgh. Camptown Races, a typical Stephen
As a youth, Foster would hang out along the boat Foster Song
docks in Pittsburgh where he became enamored with the music of the Lowland
South, sung and played by African American boatmen who had come north on
steamboats from New Orleans. He blended those sounds with what he learned
taking music lessons from his classically trained, German music teacher to come up
with something uniquely American and wildly popular during his day. Though
technically not “folk music”, because it became internationally famous – the
manner in which Foster blended African and European elements established a
template that essentially all musical innovations to come followed. Clearly all of
the musical genres invented in the US can be explored, so a few select examples
will follow.
Rock n’ Roll
The most famous American musical invention is, without a doubt, rock n’ roll
music, and like all other musical forms, it was rooted in the time and place of its
invention. Rock n’ roll was invented in Memphis, Tennessee, a crossroads location,
where youth living there in the aftermath of World War II could be influenced by
the various musical traditions popular both locally, and regionally. There was blues
of the nearby Mississippi Delta, bluegrass from Kentucky, jump from St. Louis and
swing from Texas. Of course, gospel singing was ubiquitous. All of these musical
styles could be heard on radio programs in Memphis, and if you lived in the right
26
neighborhood as a kid, you probably had friends whose parents listened (or played)
any one or more of these musical styles.
Elvis Presley is the most famous of the kids to come out of Memphis, blending
gospel, blues, bluegrass, country, western and R&B music. Presley’s first record
released in 1954 had only two songs. On the “A Side” was “That’s All Right”, an
R&B tune previously released by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (1946). On the “B
Side” was another song from 1946 called Blue Moon of Kentucky, but this was a
bluegrass song by Bill Monroe, himself the inventor of that genre of music. In
hindsight it is an incredible mish-mash of musical inheritance that may have been
nearly impossible to create in another location.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU3ZFNIa0t0 Crudup
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmopYuF4BzY – Elvis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4syA9aNnNa0 – Bill Monroe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AAOM-
BRxcg&list=PLB46080D8ADBF3494 - Elvis
Presley was a particular musical genius,

but clearly, geography played a role
allowing that genius to develop. The
proof is in the number of other stars that
emerged from the same location in the
same year. Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash
and Jerry Lee Lewis were also famous
early rockers that got their start in
Memphis and recorded for Sun Records.
Each of these performers’ biography
includes accounts of significant contact Figure 2-5: The Million Dollar Quartet demonstrate the power
with African American musical mentors. of place in the formation of Memphis' most famous musical
innovation.
Carl Perkins, for example, grew up the son of sharecropper on a cotton plantation,
where his father built him a homemade cigar box guitar. After later acquiring a
factory built guitar, he took informal lessons from “Uncle” John Westbrook, a black
man who was a fellow sharecropper. At nights he listened to the “Grand Ol’ Opry”
the nation’s most famous country and western radio program, broadcast from
Nashville, Tennessee. As a result, Perkins’ most famous song, “Blue Suede Shoes”
so confused the record buying public, that it topped the country, R&B and pop
charts simultaneously. Blacks, whites and bubblegum pop teenagers all embraced
the song. Reputedly, black audiences were surprised to learn that Perkins was
indeed a white guy (see also the story of Charlie Pride, the first African American
country music star).
27
A similar process shaped African American musicians from the Midsouth as well.
Chuck Berry, the most famous and influential black rocker of the early era of rock
n’ roll was from St. Louis, another river town rich with opportunities for young
musicians to absorb musical influences from contrasting, nearby, regional styles.
Berry simply reversed the standard pattern of influence (white boys listening to
black blues) and adopted western swing (white) elements into his own blues-based
sound. Maybellene, a huge early rock n’ roll hit for Berry was essentially an R&B
adaptation of Bob Wills’ tune Ida Red, itself a traditional mountain song of
unknown origins, but recorded in the 1920s.
Seattle’s Grunge Rock – Isolation Effects

A more contemporary example of a folk-like, regional musical innovation
becoming international is Seattle’s so-called grunge rock that enjoyed exceptional
popularity during the early 1990s.
The Pacific Northwest had earlier produced a few bands during the mid-1960s with
a specific approach to popular music. According to music geographers that have
researched the evolution of the sound, the dance hall environment where many
dozens of bands competed for audiences found that singers couldn’t be heard, so
lyrics or even singers themselves grew increasingly less important. Listen to the
songs of bands like Kingsmen (Louie Louie) and the Ventures (Walk Don’t Run)
and you’ll see (hear) how the performance venue shaped the sound.
In the mid-1980s, aspiring rock musicians from the Pacific Northwest usually
moved to Los Angeles if they wanted to “make it big”. Seattle was considered a
backwater by record company talent scouts. No popular bands had come from that
region in a generation. The bands that remained in the Seattle area, like their
brethren from the 1960s, began creating a new sound and a new style designed to
please local audiences, with little reference to the sound/style considered marketable
by music executives. After a number of years of incubating in isolation in Seattle, a
remarkable number of bands emerged from the region playing a brand of hard rock
that included a punk aesthetic. Lyrically, these bands eschewed the themes common
to Los Angeles-based hard rock (girls/money/partying). Though they often had long
hair, they often wore decidedly unfashionable working men’s clothing (flannels,
boots, jeans) that earned the whole group the label “grunge rock”. After the band
Soundgarden proved the sound/look marketable, a slew of other Seattle bands were
signed by major record companies whose executives had long relied on geography
as an indicator of a new band’s chance for success. They seemed to argue, “if one
new band from Seattle sold millions of records, there must be more there!” Quickly,
the isolation that had been critical in the development of the Seattle scene was
replaced by intense attention to local bands who were no longer playing for local
audiences, but rather now for record executives, international audiences, and
millions of dollars.
28
3
Chapter
CHAPTER 3 AGRICULTURE AND

FOODWAYS
What you eat and why you eat it has a lot to do with where you live.
This chapter explores how people’s diets are shaped by the interplay of
culture and the spatial economics of contemporary agribusiness.
I C O N K E Y
Despite what seems like a constant barrage of advertisements on TV about weight-
 Image Gallery loss strategies and exercise regimes, a number of recent studies have found that
 Find the Data
roughly 30% of all Americans are obese, and another one-third are overweight.
That means only about one-third of Americans are “in shape”. Kids aren’t much
 Geographer Toolbox
better – roughly one-third children in the US are obese or overweight . This isn’t
 GIS Lab exercise just a problem for those who want to look good in a swim suit. Being overweight
has serious consequences for people’s health , and the costs associated with our
expanding waistlines are substantial – and everyone pays the price.
The United States is not the only chubby country. We’ve got the MOST
overweight/obese people, but other countries have a higher percentages (see figure
xx below from http://vizhub.healthdata.org/obesity/ )
Figure 3-1: Percentage of

Overweight Adults Worldwide in
2013 according to healthdata.org.
Note the stark contrasts in Africa,
and the relatively good scores in
France and Italy
Click on the map to see the
interactive version.
29
How did it get to be this way? This chapter explores in part the roots of the
worldwide obesity epidemic by using a spatial approach to trace the path of your
food from farm to fork. Special attention is given to where food comes from and
how we come to embrace (or reject) specific diets.
Landscape of Food
About half of all the land
in the US is dedicated to
the production of
agricultural products.
Not all “agriculture” is
consumed as food. Some
farmers grow things like
cotton , switchgrass (for
biofuel) or even
marijuana for medicine
and/or recreational
purposes. Most crops
though do wind up, one
way or another, in our
bellies. For many, Figure 3-2 Holstein Cattle - Chino, California. These dairy cattle are part of a factory
farm system created to delivery vast quantities of milk to Southern California. The
farmlands and ranchlands constant demand for suitable land for suburbanization threatens to push agriculture
further from Los Angeles.
are common scenes, but
for city dwellers they may be hard pressed to recognize agricultural practices on the
land. In the United States there are several important agricultural landscapes that
you can learn to read.
There are also important messages written into the landscape of food consumption.
Restaurants, grocery stores and other markets all vie for the attention of the hungry
customer. Together these landscapes are representative of a $300 billion industry
that employs hundreds of thousands of people and feeds millions.
The landscape of food consumption and production is varied because of the vast
number of ways in which we grow food and the perhaps even more numerous ways
in which we buy food; at restaurants, grocery stores and farmers markets.
As you drive around, can you find examples of food production? What types of
farming can be found near your hometown or college? What types of agriculture is
dedicated to crops that are not eaten? Are the crops staples, or are do farmers grow
exotic crops for wealthier consumers?
Why do we eat this stuff?

Why we eat what we eat is a complex question. The answer might seem as simple
as “I eat what tastes good”, but opinions vary wildly on the issue of taste preference
30
from country to country –and even within the United States. Taste preference for
food vary within and across ethnicities – and even house to house among people
that would seem alike in almost every way. Still, there are trends that characterize
regions in the US and around the world and many of these foodways have roots in
the local geography of a place. It has been said, “you are what you eat,” but
geographers might add the rejoinder “what you eat depends on where you eat.” Part
of that is a factor of traditions, but often understand the evolution of tradition
requires an understand of the environmental context.
Migration-Ethnicity
A lot of the taste preference Americans have developed can be attributed to our
ethnic ancestry. Eating is a daily ritual, and as such, it is becomes heavily ingrained
in our cultural routines. What you like to eat is probably not that different from
what your parents and grandparents like to eat. The same was true for your
grandparents, and so – these habits have exceptional staying power in our culture.
This fact is part of the reason behind our obesity crisis. Our lifestyle has changed
rapidly as technology and the economy has evolved, but much of our food culture
has been stubbornly resistant to change. The foodways that served our ancestors
who were farmers or laborers engaged in strenuous daily activities, provides too
many calories and /or fat for a generation working and living in the information age.
Ultimately, American foodways are largely European where a large percentage of

Americans trace their ancestry. Beef, pork, chicken, bread, pasta, cheese, milk and
a number of the fruits and vegetables we eat would be readily recognized by
Europeans 200 years ago. Many dietary staples would be recognized by our
ancestors from 2,000 years ago. Other parts of our diet can be traced to Asia and
Africa as well – this is especially true of Asians, many of whom have migrated
more recently to North America.
Corn – America’s Pride and Shame.

A sizeable portion of the American diet is purely American. We have adopted a
number of foodstuffs favored by Native Americans. Maize, or as it is commonly
called in America, corn is perhaps the most American part of our diet.
Domesticated by the indigenous people of Mexico thousands years ago, it has
proven a versatile and hardy plant. Much of the world eats corn in some fashion
today. Most folks know sweet corn well. We eat it as “corn on the cob”; buy it
canned, frozen and fresh “off the cob”; and in a variety of dishes. Many are less
familiar with field corn, although it is far more common because it has a vast
number of uses. Field corn is too hard to eat raw, so it is modified. Some of it is
processed into corn meal or corn starch, that is then used in to make things like corn
chips, tortillas and sauces. We also consume a lot of corn syrup and high fructose
corn syrup (HFCS) made from field corn. Corn syrups are used as a sweetener,
thickener, and to keep foods moist or fresh. Politics is one of the main reasons!
31
THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SWEET
One of the controversies surrounding corn sweeteners is their role in the obesity
crisis in the United States. Some critics argue that the body responds differently to
HFCS than cane sugar, and since it has largely cane sugar as the most common
sweetener, it has led to a variety of health issue. Of course the corn industry
disputes such charges. Since this isn’t a biology course, there is no intention to
wade into questions human metabolism, but geography is at the heart of why we
use HFCS in such vast quantities.
The main reason we use so much HFCS, rather than popular alternatives cane sugar
or beet sugar is that it’s cheaper. HFCS is cheaper in part because corn grows well
in more regions of the US, but also because of the politics of sugar production.
Sugar cane and sugar beets are the two main sources of granulated sugar in the US.
Sugar cane production requires a rainy climate and a very long, warm growing
season. Only Hawaii, parts of Texas, Louisiana and Florida can produce sugar
cane. The yield, or tons of cane per acre, is highly dependent on climate conditions
– and only Hawaii is ideal. Yields there are triple what they are in Louisiana. Sugar
beets are more widely grown in the US because they grow well in temperate
climate. In the California desert, a top production area, it is a winter crop. Sugar
made from beets constitutes just over half the crystal sugar consumed in the US.
Because climate and labor conditions are so much better for the cheap production of
sugar elsewhere in the world, the US government has heavily subsidized (corporate
welfare) this industry since the 1930s, and markedly increased the subsidy in the
late 1970s. The government even buys left over sugar that couldn’t be sold at an
32
above-world market price. The government also restricts imports from many
countries, especially Cuba a geographically obvious source of sugar for US
consumers. This is great for sugar farmers, but candy and soft drink manufacturers,
along with everyone, else pays higher prices for cane sugar than they would if there
was competition. As a result, HFCS is cheaper. You may have had a “Mexican
Coke” – a Coca-Cola made with cane sugar, rather than with HFCS. They are
made that way, because cane sugar in Mexico costs about half of what it does in the
US. Corn production is also heavily subsidized in the United States, but in a way
that makes it much cheaper than it should be – leaving food processors little choice
in their choice of sweetener.
The nearly $8 billion subsidy paid to corn farmers is four times greater than that
paid to the sugar industry. This has consequences. One is that there is generally a
huge surplus of corn. In 2014, there was about 1.63 billion bushels of corn left
unsold. Some years it’s higher. One side effect is that only a tiny fraction of corn
in the US is consumed directly by humans. A little less than half of it is used to
make biofuels, particularly ethanol that may have helped power the car that
transported you to class today.
About half of the field corn grown in the US becomes animal feed. Both the grain
and the stalks/leaves, called silage, are used to feed cattle. Chickens and hogs also
are fed corn. Even cat and dog food often has corn in it. Exceptionally cheap corn
helps make meat less expensive than many other types of food. College students on
a budget already know that it’s a lot cheaper to buy lunch at a local fast-food burger
joint than it is to buy a healthy green salad. School lunch programs operate on
many of the same principles – they support agribusiness and give kids cheap, often
33
unhealthy food. In 2011, congress declared that pizza (or more accurately the
tomato sauce) was a “vegetable”, over the objections of health advocates. The
availability of cheap, often unhealthy meats and grains increases the popularity of
such food – often in the form of fast-food in regions of country where poor people
live.
Fast food map Los Angeles.
Because a significant percentage of poor people cannot afford health care, the costs
associated with a poor diet are passed on as yet additional costs of the politics of
farm production. You’ll read more about the political power and geography in
chapter xx.
Geography of Barbecue (BBQ)

Clearly, not all our foodways are by-products of geo-politics and economics.
Barbeque (BBQ), another old and favorite American dish that involves cooking
meat very slowly over indirect heat (it’s not the same as grilling meat over open
flame) is a great example. The Spanish, who probably learned how to BBQ from
Caribbean Indians, appear to have introduced this cooking technique to settlers long
before American independence.
BBQ is most popular in the US South, but there are a number of regional variations,
domestically and internationally. Part of the reason it gained popularity in the
American South is hot and humid climate. Before the invention of refrigeration,
once an animal had been slaughtered, the meat had to be either eaten quickly or
somehow preserved to avoid spoiling. There are several ways to preserve meat, but
one that gained favor in the US South was to smoke it in a BBQ pit. Pit BBQ
allows people to cook large amounts of meat in a few hours, makes some of the less
desirable cuts of meat easy to eat and tasty and provides a valuable source of protein
in a region where diets tend to be overly rich in carbohydrates.
Other areas of the US copied the process, but as the practice diffused, adopters were
forced to adapt to local conditions. As a result there are more than a dozen
recognizable BBQ styles in the US alone – each with a unique combination of meat
preference and cut, wood used for smoking, and strategies for adding spices. In the
Carolinas alone, there are more than a half-dozen variations in the type of sauce or
marinades. There are dozens more international BBQ styles in places like Jamaica,
Mexico and South Africa.
MEAT
The primary type and cut of meat used in BBQ varies by region. Part of this stems
from the agricultural potential in the region during the last century or two. In
Appalachia and the Piedmont regions, there is a strong preference for pork BBQ. In
these heavily wooded regions of the US, Anglo early settlers raised hogs for meat,
34
because poor farmers could free-range hogs in the nearby woods. The hogs would
wander the nearby forests where they would eat acorns, tree nuts and whatever else
they could forage. Sometimes pork BBQ is served as ribs, but often its “off-the-
bone” “whole hog” served chopped or “pulled” into little pieces and served on a
bun. In more wide-open, grassy regions like most of Texas, the Great Plains and
California, beef evolved as the preferred meat for BBQ. In some places beef ribs
are preferred, in others – it’s brisket or other cuts. Chicken, turkey and fish are also
BBQ’ed, depending on local availability.
WOOD
The type of wood that is widely available locally is another critical ingredient in
creating BBQ regions. Hickory, a hardwood tree found in the forests of the Eastern
US is a favored wood for smoking the pork BBQ of that region. In Texas, they use
Oak or Pecan trees in much of the state, but out in West Texas where beef BBQ is
the rule, they use the wood of mesquite trees. It’s dry out in West Texas, and
mesquite trees are abundant in the desert southwestern US. Most mesquite trees are
shrubby, but their wood is hard, burns slowly and has a unique flavor - making it
great for BBQ. In California where Santa Maria BBQ was invented by the
Spanish/Mexican settlers, they roast tri-tip steaks over the wood of Coast Live Oak
trees. Maple and Apple trees furnish wood for smoking chicken and flavoring pork
in other parts of the US, particularly in New England, where BBQ is not as popular.
Even the side dishes change regionally – again based on the local availability of
beans, bread and greens.
SAUCES AND RUBS
The last, and perhaps most geographically random, element of the geography of
BBQ is the flavoring strategies. Many regions apply a sauce. The most widely
known and copied comes from Kansas City. Variations on the KC formula (over-
sweetened!) are available at most supermarkets in the US, alongside ketchup.
Many South Carolinians favor a mustard-based sauce, perhaps an innovation
introduced by Germans who migrated there a century or more ago. Many East
Carolinians pour a vinegar-and-hot pepper sauce on their BBQ. In the more
mountainous areas of the Carolinas, they add a tomato sauce to that mixture. In
Louisiana, of course, the Cajun influence means that their BBQ sauce is going to
contain their special style of hot-sauce (like Tabasco brand). Memphis, another city
famous for its BBQ traditionally didn’t use a sauce at all, but instead put a “dry rub”
of paprika, pepper, chili powder, garlic etc. on their meat (typically ribs). Santa
Maria style in California is also a simple “dry rub” BBQ.
Agricultural Regions
What sort of food farmers grow in any location is conditioned by several factors.
First is probably climate. Weather is a controlling factor for many products. Many
crops and some livestock just can’t survive in some climates. Other crops are
35
exceptionally hardy – and might even need harsh weather conditions to thrive. In
the United States, the availability of water, either via rain or irrigation is the main
consideration for farmers. Secondly, farmers need to be profitable – and the more
profitable the better, so farmer’s choose carefully the crops and animals they raise.
There are roughly five major agricultural zones in the United States, each aligned
with a climate zone.
Corn and Wheat Belts

Perhaps the biggest agricultural division can be found along the 100th parallel. This
line marks roughly a transition zone from the more humid eastern half of the US
from the drier western half. In the middle parts of the US, where the land is flat and
ideal for crops, farmers east of the 100th parallel generally plant corn and soybeans.
Frequently this area is called the “corn belt”, and is centered on Iowa (see section
xxxx)
Farmers on flat lands west of the 100th parallel tend to plant wheat. Corn and
soybeans are more profitable per acre, so they are preferred by all farmers, but
where it is too dry and/or cold for corn and soybeans, farmers will plant wheat
instead. The “wheat belt” runs from the panhandle of Texas up through the
Dakotas. There are hundreds of types of wheat, but Americans focus on only six
varieties - and these are largely characterized by when they are planted. For
example, “winter wheat” is planted in the fall and harvested in the spring. It
accounts for about three-quarters of all the wheat produced in the US, and it is used
to make bread and rolls. Kansas is at the heart of the winter wheat belt. Further
north, in the Dakotas, wheat farmers plant what we call “spring wheat” because
they do so in the spring, and harvest it in the fall. This type of wheat tends to be
used more for bakery goods, like pastries or cakes. Durum wheat is a special spring
wheat that is planted mostly in North Dakota is used largely to make semolina flour
used to the production of pasta. Clearly this is a favorite wheat variety in Italy.
Wheat is the leading agricultural export from the US – and the US leads the world
in wheat exports, thanks to shifting government policies and climate change,
overall wheat production has fallen in the US since the 1970s. From 1900 to the
present, the growing season north of Bismarck, North Dakota used to be a few
weeks shorter. Today, the first killing frost of the year in these parts is often in
October, allowing the grain to ripen a few weeks longer, boosting the profitability
of corn over wheat. The effect has helped slow the steady out-migration of young
people from North Dakota.
Cattle Ranching
Further west, in the rain-shadowed areas between the Sierra Nevada and the Great
Plains, there are plenty of prime flat-land valleys, but less than 20 inches of rain per
year. This leaves two options – irrigation or ranching. In much of the area,
ranching is the only option. Arid lands cattle ranching is probably the least
profitable type of farming on a per-acre basis. Vast stretches of land, generally in
locations where only short-grasses grow naturally, are suitable for grazing cattle but
36
little else. Typically, cattle grazed in these wide-open, marginal lands are kept for a
period while they grow toward a “market size”, at which point they are “round up”
and placed in a feedlot. Once confined to a feedlot, the cattle are fed a steady diet of
grain (see above) until they are suitably heavy for slaughter. Some ranchers
however, especially in recent years, keep their steers on a grass-only diet. Grass-fed
beef is considered by some consumers to be both healthier and better tasting – and
therefore it commands a higher market price.
Irrigated Drylands
In some dry locations, such as California and Arizona, farmers are able to apply
vast amounts of water to fields that would otherwise be too dry for most crops. An
elaborate system of irrigation canals, pumping facilities and water storage
landscapes, built with taxpayer money, allow farmers in these regions to grow an
enormous variety of foods. Because these the Southwest has abundant sunshine,
good soils and long growing seasons – the addition of irrigation this agricultural
region are exceptionally productive (and profitable). California’s Great Central
Valley has individual counties with larger farm economies than states that are well-
known for being “farm states”. Much of the fruit and vegetables in produce
sections of groceries across the US come from California and Arizona.
Red Dirt and Chickens

In some locations, particularly the very humid Southeastern United States, the over-
abundant rainfall has made many of the possible cropland areas poorly suited for
planting corn. Partly this is a result of the various root diseases, insects and other
blights that undermine profits, but it is also because the soil in much of this region
has been leached, a process by which essential soil nutrients are washed away from
the soil by excessive rainfall. The famous “red dirt” of Georgia is not ideal for
many crops. Still, farmers adapt and they search for agricultural activities that
maximize the local potential offered by the soil. A common option is to forgo crop
Figure 3-3: Chicken Production in the US.
Click to view in browser.
production and focus on raising poultry. Southeastern states dominate the “broiler”
industry – chickens raised for meat.
37
Speciality Crop Areas

In yet other locations, very specific and local conditions create conditions that allow
farmers to focus on a very specialized crop. Oftentimes, these crops are very
profitable because the supply is limited by geography – increasing demand and
therefore the price of crops. You can probably think of several states that specialize
in very specific crops. Idaho is famous for potatoes, Georgia for peaches and
onions, Washington for Apples. Thanks to irrigation and its special climate,
California is the dominant producer of a number of crops including broccoli,
carrots, cauliflower, celery, lettuce, spinach production. California produces more
than 99% of America’s almonds, artichokes, dates, figs, raisin grapes, kiwis, olives,
plums, pomegranates, pistachios and walnuts.
Dairy Lands
Though milk cows are raised in most of the US, and California produces the most
milk - the Northeast and Great Lakes region constitute America’s Dairyland.
Profitable markets in the region’s populous urban markets, as well as the Northern
European ethnic background have contributed to dairy’s dominance. Areas closer
to markets specialize in liquid milk, and those areas a bit more distant to New York,
Chicago, Boston, etc. specialize in butter, cheese and ice cream. Hay farming is
also, quite important in these regions.
Von Thunen’s Model -

Another reason California leads
the production of so many crops is
that has a very large population,
and it makes good sense to grow
food that spoils easily, or is costly
to transport close to the customers
who buy it. Economist (and
honorary geographer) Johann
Heinrich von Thunen recognized
this principle many years ago as he
developed a theory of agricultural
land rent that is now widely
known as the Von Thunen Model.
Figure 3-5: Cattle or Stock Cars used to be
common sites on rail roads. This one is in a train In order to understand this theory
museum in Los Angeles. What factors led to the you have to make a number of
demise of this technology?
assumptions that may or may not
apply in the real world. First, you
must assume that the land is flat, of equal quality (soil, water, etc.) and there are no
roads. Second, there is only one city (or market) where farmers sell their goods.
Third, farmers are economically rational – they want to and know how to maximize
profit. Once you accept those assumptions, then it becomes possible to understand
how land rent models work.
Figure 3-4 : The refrigerated rail car radically
changed the way distance factored into the
operation of the Von Thunen Model. Can you
38
think of other farm commodities that were
affected?
Von Thunen argued that farmers who live closest to the city should focus on the
production of milk and/or fruits and vegetables because those products have the
shortest shelf-life and are expensive to transport. It would be foolish, especially in
1826, for farmers living at great distance to the city to specialize in foods that spoil
quickly. Instead, farmers that live far from the city should specialize in grain crops
that can be stored for long periods of time. Farmers that live near the city will also
find their land is more valuable, and therefore must engage in “intensive”
agriculture – the type that costs/makes the most money per acre, and generally
requires the most labor. Farmers living far from the market, because they spend a
large portion of their money transporting crops to market, must engage in
“extensive” agriculture – that kind of farming that requires cheap land, needs fewer
farm hands, and spreads over great stretches of land.
Technological innovations, particularly refrigeration and rapid transportation has

undermined some of Von Thunen’s model applicability today, but the logic behind
it is still very potent – and a number of current agricultural maps reflect the ongoing
importance of transportation costs to agribusiness. New York City, Los Angeles,
and Chicago all have large areas where farmers remain engaged in market
gardening and liquid milk production within a one-day drive from each city’s
massive central grocery warehouse districts. Large grain farms continue to be rare
in those same areas. The biggest changes from Von Thunen’s original model are
the location of forestry operations and the livestock feedlots. No longer are large
numbers of hogs and cattle fattened inside metropolitan borders, and forestry
regions tend to be the most far removed from urban areas.
Agriculture around the World

Farming outside North America is different, but is subject to the same climatic
constraints and market logics that are found in the US and Canada. Some locations
are in direct completion with farmers in North America, but most international
agriculturalists are engaged in subsistence farming, which keeps them largely out
of the marketplace. In some parts of Africa and Asia, over 80% of the population is
engaged in agriculture, yet food shortages are common. In the US, agricultural
workers account for only 2% of the population, freeing the rest of the population to
pursue other activities. International farming can be very efficient– some of it far
more efficient than western farming techniques when measured only on using a
caloric balance metric. The problem with many places in the world is that the land
is too poor, or the mouths too numerous.
Herding and Ranching

In the places where there isn’t enough rain or it’s too cold for field crop – livestock
predominates. Lots of places ranch cattle like the US, particularly in South
America, but sheep ranching is quite popular in many regions where the British
cultural influences linger. Herding, the nomadic version ranching occupies large
stretches of the world’s lands, but a tiny fraction of the world’s population.
Nomadic herding requires those who tend herds of animals (cattle, sheep, reindeer)
39
to move frequently in search of pasture land that can be grazed. Without constant
migration, herders could overgraze the land and destroy their all-important
livestock.
Wet Rice Cultivation
Rice feeds more people on earth than any other crop. Billions rely on rice as the
main staple of their diet outside of North America. The great rice production areas
of the world are in Asia, where the seasonal monsoon climate and quality soils
make it a logical option. Rice is grown in the United States, mainly on irrigated
acreage in California and the Mississippi Delta using advance machinery – even
airplanes – but for much of East and South Asia, rice cultivation remains an
exceptionally labor and land intensive style of agiculture. Not only is a lot of rice
still planted, weeded, harvested and processed by hand in Asia, there is a significant
amount of manual labor involved in the maintenance of the fields (paddies) and
dikes in order to maintain proper water levels necessary for the rice mature
properly. Luckily for those who depend on rice for sustenance, it is a wildly
productive plant, capable of providing a generous caloric yield per acre (similar to
potatoes and corn). Moreover, thanks to a generation of scientific advancements in
rice genetics and fertilizer science, known as the Green Revolution, rice farmers in
Asia can get two, and sometimes three crops from the same field each year.
Because rice is a carbohydrate-rich food, people in wet rice regions must

supplement their diet to remain healthy. Many Asians, even urban dwellers, have
very intensive garden patches – sometimes on the balconies of high rises. Paddy
rice farmers also introduce fish and other forms of aquaculture into their fields.
Adding fish, often a species of carp, helps reduce pesticide and fertilizer demands,
40
while adding a good source of protein and a valuable commodity at local markets.
Fish that eat mosquito larvae may also contribute to a reduction in disease.
RICE AND MATHEMATICS?
Paddie rice farming may contribute to the success of Asians on math tests as well.
At least that’s the argument forwarded by Malcolm Gladwell a journalist who
writes best-selling books that rely on (suspect?) statistical analysis to explain society
and cultures. One argument that he forwards is that Asians may be good at math
because of the amount of work required by wet rice cultivation. The theory goes
that because people from these regions are so accustomed to the exceptionally
burdensome effort and careful planning required to survive in a wet rice
environment, the dedication required to do well in math is a sort of built in
characteristic of the culture. Alternatively, those cultures living in locations where
agricultural abundance is easier to produce, the relationship between effort and
reward is undermined. This theory is an attempt to replace racial narratives about
intellectual talent with a cultural or environmental ones. While geographers often
argue that cultural and physical environments have significant influence upon each
other, the specter of environmental determinism continues to challenge a full
embrace of ideas like this. This is a reminder to all of us to keep in mind the logical
pitfalls associated with the ecological fallacy.
Slash and Burn – Shifting Cultivation

In some ways, the opposite of wet rice farming is slash and burn agriculture,
sometimes also known as swidden
farming; and in Latin America as
milpa. Whereas paddy rice
farming is predominates in the
wet-dry monsoonal climate,
requires good soils, a large labor
input and feeds millions, swidden
farming is practiced almost
inclusively in the equatorial
rainforests where few people
living on poor soils require a lot of
land to feed themselves– but at
least it requires little labor. By
some estimates, slash and burn agriculture is the world’s most efficient style of
agriculture on a calorie-for-calorie basis.
Slash and burn works like this – in the rain forest where soils have been leached of
essential nutrients, farmers must cut down a patch of forest in order to allow it to
dry so they can burn it. The ashes of the burnt forest act as a fertilizer for the soil,
allowing farmers a few good years of crops, before the rains once again wash away
the nutrients of the soil – and forcing farmers to burn a new patch of forest. The
exhausted fields are left fallow, and eventually the forest regrows. Eventually, after
41
many years, the farmer will return to the same patch of re-grown forest and begin
the process anew. Because this type of farming requires a lot of land, but very little
labor, it is known as land rotation system, a kind of extensive farming.
Slash and burn farming is sustainable as long as the population engaged in it

remains small. For thousands of years, indigenous people of Asia, Africa and Latin
America have engaged in slash and burn agriculture without seriously threatening
the critical balance between themselves and the forest. Population growth in places
like Brazil have threatened precious rainforest reserves as ever larger patches of
land are cleared for agricultural purposes. Inga Alley Cropping offers an intriguing
alternative to slash and burn, while not seriously disrupting existing lifeways.
In the Americas, slash and burn farmers often plant the so-called “three sisters,”
corn, beans and squash, an ingenious solution to a variety of problems. Corn
provides carbohydrates to the diet, and supports the vining bean plant. The beans
provide protein, a critical need in locations where fish and/or game are scarce.
Beans also are nitrogen fixers, meaning they fertilize the soil for the other two
crops. Squash is highly nutritious and functions in the field to sustain soil moisture
and discourage weed growth because it grows on the ground and its leaves are so
broad. It is reported that planted together, a strategy called intercropping, generates
a sort of natural pesticide. After the harvest, the dying plants can be plowed back
into the ground as an excellent mulch / fertilizer.
Plantation Agriculture
In many of the coastal areas where European colonial powers once ruled, plantation
agriculture is dominant. In this agricultural system, agricultural land is dedicated to
growing cash crops, generally at the expense of staple crops. Many parts of Africa,
Asia and Latin America rely on plantation style agriculture to generate badly
needed foreign currency. Some of the more popular plantation crops are bananas,
cotton, tea, cacao trees, and coffee.
There are multiple, serious problems with the plantation agricultural systems, but
most countries find themselves hard-pressed to find viable alternatives. Food
insecurity is the first problem. Because the best land is given over the production of
export-oriented cash crops, little may remain for the production of food for local
consumption.
Secondly, most plantation regions are guilty of monocropping – or relying on a

single crop. Not only are monocrop economies vulnerable to crop failure (insect
invasions, diseases, droughts), such economies can be devastated by unfortunate
swings in market conditions. The US has regions where monocropping is common,
but the US as a whole has a diverse farm economy. Many third world countries do
not have this luxury. In those situations, if the market price for the main farm
commodity falls, the entire economy can be in trouble and the greatest burden is on
the poor people – many of whom might work on the plantations themselves.
Commodity prices can fall when too many competitors join a market, bloating the
42
supply and crashing the price. Coffee in particular has seen wild price swings since
the 1960s. Part of the cause of the famous debt crisis of the 1980s, was the failure
of export agricultural commodity prices brought during a spike in oil prices that
caused a global recession.
Plantation agriculture also is tied to a variety of nearly intractable problems

surrounding land tenure in regions that rely upon it. Export oriented plantation
economies were developed by colonial powers during the 18th and 19th century.
The indigenous people were robbed of their land and often became tenants, laboring
on plantation farms or peasants confined to marginal lands less desired by the
landed elites. The descendants of both groups continue in their roles for many
generations, creating a permanent underclass and an oligarchic elite. Violent
classes between land reform advocates, often backed by Cuba or the USSR, and
those who favored the status quo, often backed by the United States erupted
frequently during the 20th century. The economic hopelessness and violence that it
helped spawn continues to spur international migration – much of it to the United
States where opponents of Latin American land reform also constitute the core of
the vocal opposition to immigration reform.
Because plantation agriculture is often highly competitive, and sometimes highly

profitable endeavor – efficiency is a paramount concern. Large plantation
operations can take advantage of economies of scale that small-hold farming
cannot, so there is significant pressure from the market (and the agribusiness
corporations who own large plantations) to keep massive farms on the best land
intact. In those rare instances where land reform has taken place, and good lands
were redistributed to the poor; the export economy has faltered. Zimbabwe’s land
redistribution is the classic modern example.
WE ARE THE WORLD
In the mid-1980s a drought, war and bad

governmental policies in the Horn of Africa
led to one of the great humanitarian crises of
the modern era. Famine struck Eritrea and
Ethiopia leading in part to half-million or
more deaths. A documentary news crew
broadcast news of the famine back to the rest
of the world, shocking many into action. Two
of the better known charity relief efforts came
from pop / rock musicians. Live Aid, Band
Aid and USA for Africa were efforts launched by famous pop musicians, raising
money and awareness of the crisis. Many gave freely and were led to believe that
the crisis was largely the result of a natural disaster. While there was drought, few
at the time understood that during the famine, Ethiopia was a net exporter of food.
Grain and other agricultural commodities were being shipped to first world
countries – often as animal feed, while thousands were starving. Transportation and
43
safety issues complicated food delivery, but in the end, the mass starvation was a
result of land distribution and poverty as much as it was drought and desertification.
Poor people, if they can’t grow food, cannot buy food either.
Key Terms and Concepts

For Further Reading
Goldwyn, Craig. Make Your Own Signature BBQ Sauce: A Taxonomy of
America's Regional BBQ Sauces. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-/make-
your-own-signature-b_b_206598.html
44
4
Chapter
CHAPTER 4 LINGUISTIC GEOGRAPHY

The language we speak is the most important element of our culture. What we speak, and how we
speak are extraordinarily powerful markers of our identity. Language shapes our world view, both
constraining and liberating what we can know and feel. Language, like other elements of our culture
is a product of geography and a force acting upon the lives of people in all places.
Introduction
What we speak and how we speak is the most powerful marker of who we are, not
only as individuals, but as groups. Our language constrains and liberates our
thoughts and feelings; and battles over the control of words and phrases are central
to how power is exercises in most communities. The pen, or the turn of phrase, is
indeed mightier than the sword.
A language is a system of communication that persons within a community use to

convey ideas and emotions. The study of languages is called linguistics.
Sometimes, people who speak (or sign) the same language find it very easy to
communicate with each other. Chances are, people who communicate easily speak
a very similar version of version of a language, known as a dialect. On the other
hand, dialects can become so different from each other that they border on
becoming a different language because they extend past what is called mutual
intelligibility. Consider that many speakers of American English find that they
cannot understand speakers of Scottish English if their dialect is extreme. Part of
the problem is the differences in difference in accent, which refers to the way
people pronounce words. For example, the Scottish “roll” their tongues when they
pronounce words with the letter R in them and Americans do not. Americans
pronounce “to” like “tu” and the Scottish pronounce it like “tae”. A dialect is more
than just accent, because it different dialects use different vocabularies and may
structure sentences differently than Americans. A Scotsman might use “wee bairn”
to describe a small child, where Americans might use “little kid” instead. So
different is Scots English that some linguists even consider it a separate language.
There are other forms and uses of language as well. In places where two or more
languages are spoken, a pidgin language may develop. Pidgin languages are
simplified versions of a language or several languages that help people
communicate, especially in matters of trade or business. Lots of pidgin languages
have formed around the world, especially in border areas and in places where
colonial empires were built. Sometimes a pidgin will become more complex and
evolve into a language in its own right; a native tongue. Linguists call these newly
45
created tongues creole languages. Most creole languages remain unofficial, but
some like Haitian Creole, a blend of French and West African languages, become
an official language with rules about
spelling and syntax, formally taught in
schools, etc.
Louisiana has a fascinating mixture of

all these elements. Louisiana Creole,
the creolized language of many people
in south and southwestern Louisiana is
spoken by people who call themselves
Creoles. It, like the language of Haiti,
is a hybrid of French and African
languages, plus probably a healthy
dose of Haitian Creole as well. Many Figure 4-1: Linguistic Map of Louisiana
other people in the region speak a Percent of Persons Speaking French at Home.
Yellow – 4-10%; Orange 10-15%; Red 15-20%; Dark Red: 20-
variant called “Cajun French”, which is 30%. Source: http://www.mla.org/map_data
less a creolized language, and more a
very wayward dialect of Canadian
French. The popular culture chapter in this text discusses how the linguistic
differences among French speakers in South Louisiana is express in terms of music
and ethnic identity.
Language on the Landscape

Spoken languages, like songs, jokes and other intangible elements of culture is a
mentifact, and is therefore invisible on the landscape. However, written elements
of language are quite common on the landscape in the form of signs. Because signs
generally have words on them, they provide an easy and fascinating opportunity to
practice reading the landscape, as
a geographer. Be careful though,
because frequently the words on
the landscape do not “tell” the
same story as the landscape in
which they are found. Consider
for example, a sign that is not
uncommon near the entrances to
college or high school campuses
that reads, “This is a drug free
campus”. Do you believe that
there are any college campuses
free of drugs? There are probably Figure 4-2: Motel Sign. The sign above, once just off U.S. 101 in Oxnard,
California made use of a font that conformed to the "western" theme used
few high schools that could by the business to attract tourists. This helped reinforce their effort to sell
legitimately claim to be drug free, “down home cooking” and “friendly hospitality”. How do you think the
and even fewer colleges. Why do aqua background and the use of neon (visible at night) fit with the overall
motif of the business?
46
you think then, school administrators would place a sign like that on a campus? Are
they naïve? Are they making claims for political gain? Are they just trying to
create a drug-free environment and believe that a sign will encourage students to
abstain from using drugs? If you see a sign proclaiming something that is clearly
false, or laughably untrue, and you realize that the location in which the sign is
erected makes it obvious the message on the sign is erroneous, then you are reading
the landscape. Try reading the landscape of the house in the photo below.
Figure 4-3: House with Realtor Sign: Attempt to read the sign and landscape of the photo of this working class neighborhood in
Louisiana above. Can you spot the irony? Focus your attention on the sign and the windows of the house in the foreground.
Not only are words inscribed on signs occasionally misleading, but often they don’t
match the media or materials used in the sign. For example, a sign made of wood
might be appropriate and effective for a restaurant specializing in Bar-B-Q ribs or
cowboy boots, but would seem inappropriate and misleading for a store that sold
laptop computers or high-definition televisions.
World Languages
There are hundreds of languages around the world and many thousands more
dialects. Often, the world’s languages are arranged into a sort of family tree, with
languages that share similarities occupying a close spot on a branch and more
distant relatives sharing a common proto-language that forms the trunk of the tree,
much like an ancestor who died thousands of years would on a human family tree.
The major world language families are Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic

and the Niger-Congo. The distribution is displayed on the map below.
47
With nearly a billion speakers, more people communicate using Mandarin Chinese,
a Sino-Tibetan language, than with any other in the world. However, there are
multiple dialects of Chinese, so you may find that even in the United States people
from China who are from Beijing have a hard time understanding other Chinese
Figure 4-4: Map of Major World Language Families. Note that much of India and Southwest Asia share a common language with
Europe. What does this suggest about ancient migration patterns? Why do you suppose the people of Madagascar speak a language
related to Malaysia, rather than East Africa?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Primary_Human_Language_Families_Map.png Source: By PiMaster3 (Own
work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
immigrants who came from Guangdong province in Southern China. The Chinese
language has been translated into English using several different systems over the
years, so you may find older Americans (or older maps) calling China’s capital city
things like Peiping or Peking. The Chinese use a character based orthography or
writing system that has a complex relationship to the spoken language. Chinese
characters (logograms) have been adapted for use in Korea, Japan and Vietnam;
even though those languages are not in the Sino-Tibetan language family. Because
Chinese characters represent entire words, literate Chinese readers must know over
3,000. An even bigger challenge has been designing software that can write
Chinese using a standard computer keyboard (or cell phone key pad) developed for
another language system, using around 50 keys. Several ingenious methods have
been invented, but each requires significant effort and may have implications for the
adoption of certain technologies by Asians using a character based writing system.
The second most commonly spoken language is Spanish, a member of the Indo-
European language family and one of a number of Romance languages that evolved
from a common ancestor known as Vulgar Latin. While certainly there were swear
words in that language, “vulgar” in this instance refers to its use among the common
people (unlike Classical Latin). Other Romance languages include, Portuguese,
Italian, French and Romanian. There may be as many as two dozen additional
Romance languages (Catalan, Romansh, Sicilian, etc.) Many of the less well
known members of the Romance family are found in mountainous locations, on
48
Figure 4-5: Languages in Europe:. This map displays many of the language boundaries of Europe. Note how often the boundaries follow physiographic features on the
lands, such as mountains or water bodies. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Languages_of_Europe_map.png
islands or other isolated locations. Each language in this language family will
MAP READING:
When languages feature words and linguistic structures that are similar, but they remain generally
and language unintelligible to speakers of other Romance languages.
families are drawn
In addition to the Slavic languages of Eastern Europe, the other major linguistic
on a map, those
family in Europe is Germanic which dominates Northern Europe. English,
languages that are
similar should be German, Dutch as well as the languages of Scandinavia are related. Most people in
draw using the same North America speak English, as do other locations that were once part of the
color family. In the British Empire. In fact, the map of world languages offers important clues into the
map above Slavic military history of the world. Languages, as well as other elements of common
languages of culture, were carried by armies and navies where ever they roamed.
Eastern Europe
(Russian, Polish, German and English are closely related members of the Germanic language family,
etc.) all share shades but English has become the most international of all languages, with more people
of green, while speaking it than any other. English isn’t a particularly easy language to learn, it
Basque, which is includes an enormous number of words adopted from other languages; loads of
not related to any irregular spellings and verbs, and the it is awash in slang; so why has it become the
family is marked in world’s most popular second language? The answers lie mostly in the political and
yellow. military prowess of England and the United States. British naval power and their
49
ambitious colonization program during the 18 and 19th centuries expanded the use
of English around the globe. During the 20th century, the United States’ ascension
into the realm of military and technological superpower elevated the status of
English even further. An example can be found on jet airliners around the world.
Most communication between pilots (and traffic controllers) is in English in large
part because the airplane was invented by Americans and the British began the first
international commercial flights. It’s similar to the doctrine of first effective
settlement, discussed earlier, but now with a technology. Consider the other
technologies, invented by Americans, and used worldwide. Many users, especially
early adopters of such technologies, find them easier to use if they know English.
Certainly, the massive cultural influence of rock and hip hop, plus the success of
Hollywood has spread the appeal of English worldwide.
C O O L L I N K
Some locations, particularly those that were difficult for armies or navies to conquer
H T T P : / / W W W . F E
boast unique languages. Locations that are isolated by high mountains, on islands,
S T I V AL . S I . E D U /
across vast wastelands or deep in swamps have a tendency to house people who
2 0 1 3 / O N E _ W O R speak uncommon languages. Hungarians and Finns speak a language that is
L D _ M AN Y _ V O I C different than most of the rest of Europe. People on the islands of Corsica and
E S / M AP . A S P X Sardinia speak a language similar, but different than their neighbors in Italy.
Others, like Armenian and Greek are very far removed from their “cousins” on the
Indo-European family tree, and so are called linguistic isolates.
Perhaps the best example of this

is found in the Eastern Pyrenees
Mountains of Spain and France
where people speak Basque.
This language is so unique, that
it appears to be unrelated to any
other in the world. There are
theories that suggest the
language is exceptionally old,
perhaps dating back around
40,000 years, before the time
that most European’s ancestors
migrated (with their proto- Figure 4-6: Basque Restaurant, San Miguel, California. Basques came to
the United States and largely settled in California where the landscape resembles
language) into Europe. Some their home territory in Spain.
genetic evidence suggests there
has been less interbreeding
between Basque people and their European neighbors, which may account for how
this language survived when presumably other very old European languages went
extinct. The rugged mountains where Basques have lived for thousands of years
surely played a role in protecting their language and culture from invasion and
succession.
50
Over the centuries, membership in a language or even a language family has proven
critical in the fates of both individuals, regions and nations. When the Germanic
Archduke of Austria Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Bosnian
Serb, it touched off World War I. Though there were numerous additional reasons
for the First World War, the first alliances were based on linguistic alliances. The
Russians had agreed to help their Slavic cousins in Serbia. The Germans were
allied with the Germanic Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The earliest rumblings of World War II in Europe were also generated when
Adolph Hitler attempted to expand Germany’s borders to include parts of
neighboring countries where a significant population of German speakers lived.
German speaking Austria was effectively became part of Germany in early 1938.
Nazi Germany later that year forcibly annexed parts of Czechoslovakia known as
“the Sudetenland” because the language created a right to take that land for
Germany. Later all of the Czech and Slovak areas were taken. It was when
Germany invaded Poland, to take land where the language was once primarily
German, World War II began.
It should be noted that many wars have been fought between people of similar
linguistic heritage, (Germany vs. England, e.g.), but the longstanding alliances
between the U.S. and other English speaking nations of the world is no doubt a
product of the way our common language has shaped a common core of values that
bind us in ways that are especially strong.
C O O L L I N K :
American Dialects
M O D E R N
L AN G U A G E Your ability to communicate
A S S O C I A T I O N efficiently with other Americans
M AP D A T A may depend on where you (or
C E N T E R
perhaps your parents) grew up.
H T T P : / / W W W . M Some parts of the United States have
L A. O R G / M AP _ D
very distinct dialects that others find
A T A
challenging to understand. People in
the Midwest and much of the West
Coast, on the other hand, speak a
kind of “ordinary” American English
that is used by national television
news anchors, and spokespersons for Figure 4-7: Menu Sign This menu sign from Jim's Steaks in Philadelphia
various products advertised on TV uses the word "Hoagie" to refer to the large bready sandwich, that most of
the United States calls a "sub" sandwich. Can you think of other words for
and radio. these sandwiches?
There are quite a few regional dialects

in the United States. Some argue that distinct dialects exist within different
boroughs of New York City, or that Cincinnati has its own dialect. The map in
figure ff is a very clever use of youtube videos to plot differences in the
pronunciation of words can be found in the US. However, the main dialect regions
51
C O O L L I N K :
H T T P : / / A S C H M A N
in the United States align
N . N E T / AM E N G / # L
reasonably close to the
A R G E M A P
main folk culture regions.
In the northeastern states,
they speak in the family of
Yankee dialects. In much
of the Mid-Atlantic and
Midwest, people use the
Midland dialect, and the
South is broken into
Upland and Lowland
Southern dialects.
L I S T E N :
A T O U R O F Mapping Dialects Figure 4-8: Water Tower - Florence, Kentucky. This monumental sign welcomes
motorists leaving "the North" into "the South" just below Cincinnati on Interstate 75.
B R I T I S H A C C E N T S Why do you think the vernacular "Y'ALL" is included so prominently?
Maps of dialects in the United States are fascinating to inspect, generating a lot of
laughs at the “crazy things” other American say; but keep in mind there are
significant cultural differences frequently at play as well. You should check out
Joshua Katz’s excellent dialect survey and the accompanying maps. Possibly the
L I S T E N :
most entertaining for students is the “What do you call a soft drink?” question.
T O U R O F
Most Americans use “pop” or “soda”, but in much of the south, people use the word
AM E R I C A N
A C C E N T S
“Coke” to refer to any soft drink, even a Pepsi or a Dr. Pepper. This is funny to
others, but you probably use “Frisbee” to refer to a flying disc, or perhaps
“Kleenex” to refer to a facial tissue.
C O O L L I N K :
R E G I O N A L
D I AL E C T M A P S O F
T H E U S
Figure 4-9: This map depicts where people use the words, "pop" - blue, or "coke" - green, or "soda" -red, to refer to a soft drink.
52
Why Omaha?
Have you ever called a toll free (1-800-) phone number to order some product,
make hotel reservations, or get service for something like your internet connection
or cable television? If you have, there’s a chance you’ve been connected to an
American from another part of the United States. Sometimes, you’ll be connected
to someone from India, Ireland or the Philippines. Maybe you were connected to a
“computer voice” that prompted to push buttons and enter data with your key pad.
Did you have trouble understanding the accent of the person on the line? Did they
have trouble understanding you? Difficult phone calls to toll free numbers are more
L I S T E N :
O M AH A ,
common today than they once were. They are partly a product of cost saving
N E B R A S K A strategies by companies, and a general lack of concern for customer service. From
the late 1970s, when toll free calling began to become common through the early
1990s, the operator on the receiving end of many 1-800 calls was likely to be in
Omaha, Nebraska.
L I S T E N :
W E S T E R N
This Midwestern city has developed as one of the leading cities in the United States
N O R T H for telecommunication because of its central location. During the Cold War, the US
C A R O L I N A military placed the Strategic Air Command just outside Omaha. This central, but
isolated, location made it harder for other countries to strike at this key element of
our national defense. Because the Strategic Air Command was nearby, Omaha
L I S T E N :
benefitted from the nation’s most advanced (and secure) telecommunications
T A N G I E R S
network. This telecom-munications network permitted nearby businesses to
I S L A N D , experiment with toll free call centers. Nebraska’s location in the Central Time zone
V I R G I N I A made Omaha more convenient for workers there to make and receive calls from
both coasts. Perhaps most importantly, the local dialect is what some linguists call
“Middle American”. This accent or dialect is the most ordinary and easy to
L I S T E N : understand speech pattern in the US for most Americans. Is it any surprise that a
O U T E R B A N K S , city located on a plain, in the center of the continental United States would have a
N O R T H “neutral” accent? The growth of the call center industry in Omaha spurred on
C A R O L I N A additional growth in telecommunications, high tech and other service industries.
Had Omaha been isolated by mountains, or swamps; or if it was on the coast, not
only would its dialect be quite different, but so would its economy (and probably
L I S T E N : politics, religion and other elements of its culture).
S O U T H
L O U I S I A N A Several places in the United States have site and/or situations that are partly
responsible for significant linguistic differences from what folks in Omaha have
experienced.
Appalachian English, sometimes affectionately (sometimes derogatorily) referred to

L I S T E N :
as “hillbilly”, is commonly spoken by people by many people who live in the less
S E A I S L AN D S ,
S O U T H
accessible reaches of the Appalachian (and Ozark) Mountains. Many of the people
C A R O L I N A
who moved into these areas during the 18th and 19th century were from Scotland or
Ireland. Their speech patterns, though certainly changed since those times, have
perhaps undergone fewer changes because the inaccessibility of those regions
discouraged waves of immigrants from elsewhere. Because these locations have
been spatially isolated, there’s a good chance that dialect innovations made by
53
people in these mountains are prone to spreading throughout the neighboring

communities, but rarely enter the speech patterns of the rest of the United States.
Similarly isolated dialects can be found in other remote locations, such as islands or
in swamps. Check out the links on the left.
Ethnicity and Dialect

Ethnicity is frequently expressed through dialect; and conversely a dialect may be a
marker of one’s ethnicity. Geographers contend that both are products of the
peculiar spatial experience of each group. Each of the dialects spoken in the United
States, or anywhere for that matter, bears the mark of the ethnicities and therefore
source points of the people who once lived there.
So for example, the dialects of New York City bears the imprint of the massive
numbers of Italian, Irish and other second wave immigrants that moved there in the
mid-19th century. They adopted English, but retained some elements of the
languages and dialects they brought
across the Atlantic. Intermarriage and
decades of living and working together
no doubt created dialects that
hybridized elements of speech into a
new working whole.
Today, speech patterns in regions of

the US that border Mexico are
progressively reflecting the influence
of the many Spanish speaking
immigrants that live there, so that
many places it is easy to find people
using a hybridized “Spanglish”. These
influences may be much, much older
though. African American Vernacular
English, sometimes called Ebonics,
demonstrates not only the power of
place, but perhaps also the
stubbornness of cultural change.
N E W Y O R K T I M E S
Ebonics is a source of some controversy for a couple of reasons. In 1996, the
E D I T O R I AL : Oakland, California school board passed a resolution recognizing “Ebonics” as
O A K L A N D A N D language. This sparked some measure of outrage among politicians and pundits,
E B O N I C S - 1 9 9 7 many of whom characterized Ebonics as mostly lazy, street slang. The primary
motivation of the Oakland School Board was to find additional funding to help
black students in their district better master standard American English by tapping
into funds used to teach English as a second language. Linguists were generally
sympathetic to the side of the Oakland school board and weighed in with studies
54
that show that a proper understanding student’s home dialect or language was useful
for teachers who sought to instruct students in Standard English.
The controversy in Oakland revealed several interesting issues for cultural

C O O L L I N K :
geographers. First, it is curious how some everyday practices like language exert a
P B S . O R G “ D O
special resistance to cultural change. In this case, elements of African language
Y O U S P E A K
AM E R I C A N ” -
systems appear to, even after centuries, remain lodged the speech patterns of many
E B O N I C S black folks today. Second, the controversy highlighted the important role space and
place plays in the maintenance (and diffusion) of dialects. The long history of
social, and later spatial, ghettoization of Blacks has helped preserve relic speech
patterns brought from Africa. The effects of isolating people on an
island/mountain/swamp was somewhat replicated elsewhere in the US through
restrictive covenants and other discriminatory housing practices. It is also apparent
to anyone who has listened to the speech of white southerners, or urban white folks
who were raised in predominantly Black neighborhoods (or regions) that those
speech patterns easily transcend racial and ethnic lines. Finally, the Ebonics
controversy of the mid-1990s, was depressing because of the rush to judgment by
those who knew nothing of linguistics. The vitriolic response in the media to an
suggestion that a dialect might be given some of the same pedagogic considerations
as a language was surprising. The dimensions of the controversy highlighted very
clearly how important language is to the creation and maintenance of political-
cultural order.
Toponyms – Place Name Geography

Toponyms are the words we use to name places. Toponyms are applied to huge
places, like “Russia”, and to small places like “Windsor Arms Apartments”.
Toponyms, if they are interpreted carefully, may offer a number of clues into the
history of a location and the priorities
of the people (or person) who named a
place.
Many of the place names that are very

common to us, those used to refer to
states, cities and towns are compound
terms. These toponyms often utilize a
generic indicator and a specific one.
For example, Charleston, Boston and
Newton are all city names that have the
“ – ton” suffix, which is a short-hand
way of writing “town”. So you could read “Charleston” as “Charles’ Town”,
especially if you’re in South Carolina. As you might guess there was some famous
“Charles” years ago (King Charles II of England) for whom the town was named.
The use of the word “town” or “ton” is an indication that the founders of Charleston
were not only English, but also happy with the king; which in turn should also
suggest when Charleston was founded – well before the unrest that led to the
55
American Revolution. Charleston, West Virginia, founded around the time of the
Revolution, was not named after any English King, but still uses an English generic
suffix.
The English weren’t the only folks who settled in the United States, so there are
numerous other generic terms for “town” scattered across the landscape. In those
areas where German speakers settled in large numbers, town names have a
tendency to use “burg”. Pennsylvania has lots of “burgs”, including Pittsburgh.
Sometimes, as in the case of Pittsburgh, “burgh” appears to be a corruption of the
word “borough”, an Anglo term for an administrative district in a town or rural
township. The corruption may have come courtesy of the many Germans who
settled in these areas. Because German and English are quite closely related, the
evolution of town names was both easy and common. Other common markers of
German settlement in the U.S. can be found in the numerous cities named in honor
of German cities; including multiple places in the US named Hanover, Berlin or
Hamburg.
Where the French settled in large numbers in North America, towns with the suffix
“-ville”, as in Louisville, are common. Many of these are in Louisiana, where
French speakers were once very dominant in the southern reaches of the state. Still,
there are many dozens of other cities with French names as well, including Detroit,
St. Louis and Des Moines.
Other immigrant groups, especially those that settled rural areas have left their mark
on the landscape, even though many other cultural elements have disappeared.
Russians, Poles, Italians, and other came later so there are fewer toponyms
associated with these groups. Far more common are cities that have names supplied
by the American Indians. Chicago, Milwaukee and Seattle are perhaps the largest,
but perhaps far more common are names for physical features, like rivers,
mountains and valleys.
A good example of American cultural hybridization can be found in places like

Anaheim, California (home of Disneyland). This town’s name combines a
reference to Saint Anne (or St. Hannah – revered particularly in Greek Orthodox
and Islam), originally applied to the “Santa Ana” by the Spanish missionary
Juniperro Serra. Later “Ana” was adopted by German settlers who added “-heim”
(home) in order to indicate “home by the Santa Ana”.
Toponymy and Place Marketing

Toponyms are also used to great effect by real estate developers, who seek to
convince potential home buyers, or even renters of the quality of their location or
their building. One of the most common ways real estate people market their land
and buildings is by making an “appeal to snobbery”. It’s a simple ploy that
frequently uses a reference to a place or activity associated with rich or powerful
people. For example, an apartment complex on Maple Street, might be named
56
“Chateau Des Maples”, to make it

sound French, and therefore more
exotic. A gated community trying to
appeal to upscale homebuyers might
be dubbed “The Oaks at Hunter
Crossing” in order to evoke large
landed estates, where wealthy folks
who engage in sports like fox hunting
might live. The more comical efforts
at leveraging snob appeal appear on
the signs of liquor stores, or nightclubs Figure 4-10 Mall Sign, Agoura, California: This sign made of
materials, and engaging terminology that evokes exclusivity in
in rundown neighborhoods. Casinos attempt to generate 'snob appeal' for businesses here.
have employed this strategy for years,
cashing in on the ability of the
landscape to make people feel like “high rollers”. It’s really quite silly once you
think about it; but clearly it is effective or it wouldn’t be so very common place.
Language and the Environment

The environment shapes language and in turn, attitudes about nature are shaped by
R E S E A R C H language. There are the obvious things, like the large number of words in Castillian
F I N D I N G S : Spanish for rough, hilly terrain versus English. However, it is probably a myth to
H I G H argue that Eskimos have 50 words for snow. The point is that languages do adapt to
A L T I T U D E S A N D the physical environment so that their speakers have a better chance of surviving.
S P O K E N
L AN G U A G E S A new line of research in linguistics
finds that other elements in the
environment may have an effect on the
way language sounds. One
anthropologist recently found that
languages developed in high latitudes
with “ejective sounds” using a burst of
are more common among cultures living
at high altitudes.
Another fascinating recent study of

R E S E A R C H
F I N D I N G S :
particular interest to geographers is from
L AN G U A G E
the world of cognitive psychology.
Researchers have found that the way Figure 4-11: Road Sign, West Texas - The word "draw" is a
A F F E C T S H O W
regional expression for a stream. In other parts of the US, you'll
Y O U T H I N K people think spatially is shaped by their find locals use words like: river, creek, brook, wash, or run.
language. For example, Australian
Aboriginals who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, don’t have words for left and right, so in
order to give people directions or even remark on something mundane, like “there’s
a bug on your left leg”, they must reference cardinal directions (north, south, east
and west). In order to do that, they must know at all times where they are. You
57
must know which way is north too if you’re going to understand which leg has a
bug on it. If you turn in fright, then a new instruction would have to be issued. For
people born into languages that rely upon cardinal directions, their brains become
hard wired like a GPS. They are acutely aware of where they are at all times, and
researchers have found it difficult to disorient even small children by blindfolding
them, placing them in windowless rooms, etc. These effects spill over into many
other areas as well, including how people experience time and how they see cause
and effect. It’s just another example of what you know being shaped by how you
know it. It reminds us to pause a moment before dismiss what others think of as
“truth”.
CHAPTER END MATTERS
58
5
Chapter
CHAPTER 5 RELIGION
Most people believe in the supernatural and consider it sacred. Those beliefs
help many cope with the stresses and joys of life. At one point, those stresses
and joys were as often as not a product of human interaction with the natural
environment. Today, religion reflects and conditions our interaction with the
natural environment, but also many other aspects of our daily lives.
What is it?
Religion comes in many forms. Most scholars characterize religion as a system of
beliefs that connect humans to the supernatural. Religious beliefs and practices are
generally considered sacred because practitioners believe these rules, rituals, and
beliefs were conceived by a supernatural power, god(s) or person that has
extraordinary power or insight. Religion is also generally practiced in a group
setting, so those committed to a religion, or adherents, are bound by beliefs and
practices that become the basis for group and individual identities. Religious beliefs
and practices are a product of the
natural and social environments from
which they evolved and in turn
critically inform the adherents how
they should think and act about a wide
range of issues, from politics to
economics to interaction with the
natural environment.
Religion in general is hard to

characterize though because it comes in
so many different forms. One way of
Figure 5-1: Mission Church - San Gabriel, California. Mission church
categorizing religions is to look at how architecture was surely a tool to help Catholic missionaries attract local
a religion gets new members. Some Indians who had no formal architectural traditions.
religions actively recruit people into

their faith. You may have had young men in white shirts and black ties come to
59
your door and encourage you to

join the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter Day Saints. These
missionaries from the Latter Day
Saints church, known as
Mormons, are members of one of
the more high profile proselytic
faiths. These are universal
religions because anyone can join.
Most Christians actively seek new
members, and many go to great
lengths to achieve that goal. Other
religions rarely proselytize. Closed religions are called ethnic religions, and
generally you have to be born into them to become part of that religious group.
Judaism and Hinduism are the two best known ethnic religions; so it would be very
rare indeed to have a Jewish rabbi invite you to temple so that you might consider
becoming a Jew.
Religions can also be lumped together on other criteria. Religions can have a single
god or many gods. Those focused on a single deity are called monotheistic. Islam,
Christianity and Judaism consider themselves monotheistic religions. Other
religions have multiple deities, with various responsibilities, personalities and
capabilities. The religions of Ancient Greece and Rome are the best examples of
polytheistic religions. Some religions are pantheistic in which the divine is
everywhere and in everything. Practitioners of some religions direct their energies
inward in an attempt to achieve an elevated state of mind, while others seek
paradise through outward deeds or acts of devotion. Frequently these categories get
messy and overlap in many ways.
Some religions are easy to recognize for Americans. Adherents meet regularly as a
group, or congregation, in a building. Some religions are harder to recognize. They
may not have a building, or meet in groups. Other presumably profane (i.e. not
sacred) belief systems make take on many of the characteristics of a religion: they
may have texts that are treated as sacred, or nearly sacred; they may have many
followers who engage in well-practiced rituals; they may even have holidays, and
special clothes for priest-like figures. Fascism and Marxism, for example, have
been likened to religion. Whether that is a fair characterization is certainly open for
debate.
Even within a single religion, there are frequently lots of sub-divisions or

denominations, and within those sub-divisions, even more sub-divisions and so on.
Even with a single small group of believers or congregation, individuals will
interpret or understand religious doctrine or practice differently, making it difficult
to say much definitively about any specific set of beliefs.
60
Frequently, small religions, or denominations within a religion are called cults.

This can be a derogatory term, but isn’t necessarily so. Many conservative
Christians characterize Mormonism as a cult. So when Mitt Romney, a Mormon,
ran for President in 2012, there was some consternation from some sectors. Of
course, many of these same people were convinced that President Obama was
Muslim, so it may have had a negligible effect on the outcome.
What does it look like? The Landscape of Religion

Religious practice shapes the landscape in a myriad of ways. The landscape is
capable of revealing a great deal about the belief systems and values of the
dominant or even minority religions of a place or region.
Christian churches are the most obvious part of the religious landscape of the
United States. Churches may
be grandiose, like many
Catholic Churches, or simple
like the buildings used by the
Amish. Both rely upon a
particular understanding of the
Bible. Lots of other religions
have temples, shrines and other
houses of worship as well that
sometimes pass unrecognized
by Christians. Dozens of other
spaces on the landscape are
given special consideration as
sacred space, including cemeteries, mountains, trees, and other more unusual
spots.
For some, clearly the architecture of the church reflects the desire of its
congregation to glorify their God. They attempt to create as best they can a
monument worthy of a “House of God”. Catholic churches, and certainly
their cathedrals and basilicas qualify as monuments. Inspiring architecture
may help people feel the presence of the supernatural, instruct the faithful or
recruit new converts. Consider how useful stained glass artwork would have
been to telling stories from the Bible a century ago, when congregations may
have had poor literacy skills. Consider the impact of what we would today
consider modest, the mission churches of California upon the mission priests’
ability to recruit Indian converts in the late 18th century. Architecture, and
landscape in general is a very powerful communicative medium.
Approaching in size and grandeur of the Catholic buildings are many new
mega-churches, which have become popular in the Deep South among Evangelical
Christians. These churches, which are sometimes called “Six Flags Over Jesus” by
local towns people, may feature multiple buildings; gymnasiums, classrooms,
61
coffee shops and bookstores, in addition to the

more common chapels and rectories. These
churches offer a lot of services for the
convenience of their congregations, and therefore
are easy to justify as great recruiting tools.
Churches would claim that buildings that bring
people to the faith are worth the cost and effort.
Still the extravagance of the building programs
has created some controversy. Some feel that
these mega-churches threaten to overwhelm, and
destroy smaller congregations without the money
to compete. Government officials and businesses
have also occasionally questioned the tax-exempt
status of churches that appear to operate in as
business enterprises.
Elaborate church buildings also draw the scorn of those who believe that Christian
doctrine calls the faithful to “go humbly before the lord” in all areas of life. Amish
and certain orders of the Mennonites are the two groups in the US that perhaps best
embody this notion. Some of the more conservative Amish groups don’t build
church buildings at all, but rather gather to worship in private homes. This is
because they focus on a particular passage in the Bible that suggests that God “does
not dwell in temples made with hands”.
Other congregations also prefer simple church architecture. Some of the oldest
churches in America, those built by
Puritans in New England adhered to strict
rules regarding simplicity. They built
churches without stained glass, crucifixes,
or statues or other artwork. The buildings
were generally square, to help enforce
communalism and also functioned as the
civic center as well; because there was not
yet a separation between church and state.
Many other congregations have carried
forth the tradition of very simple churches, believing important to spend precious
church monies on things other than buildings.
Of course impoverished congregations lack funds to build elaborate churches, so

they may seek out buildings that were not originally designed as sacred space. The
adaptive reuse of profane space as sacred space brings into question the process by
which spaces become sacred. What process, for example, transforms an abandoned
gas station or convenience store into a proper church? Can any place be a “House
of God” or are certain places unavailable for such a distinction.
62
Shrines
Clearly the practice of turning
profane, ordinary, spaces into
sacred ones is commonplace. In
areas where Catholicism is
prevalent, small folk-art shrines,
generally dedicated to the Virgin
Mary, and enclosed in an artificial
grotto; sometimes fashioned out of
an old bathtub, thereby lending the
colorful name “Bathtub Mary”, or
“Madonna on the Half Shell” to
these home-made devotional
spaces. Similar are the impromptu, frequently temporary shrines erected to victims
of car crashes or other accidents. Candles, crosses, crudely painted bicycles and
other memorability may be piled together at the site of an accident, temporarily
creating sacred space for the unfortunate few who may have known the victim.
Occasionally, the site of a particularly

public tragedy will instantly become
sacred space; inviting religious-like
pilgrimage and even dark tourism. The
“ground zero” location in New York
City, Dealy Plaza in Dallas and Ford’s
Theater in Washington, D.C. have taken
on elements of sacred space because
people come to remember, grieve and
engage metaphysical questions.
Behavior in such locations often
approximates that which one would
witness in more formally recognized
sacred spaces; with people talking in hushed / reverent tones, etc. Other spaces in
the United States, like the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. have taken on the
status of quasi-sacred space.
Religious Holiday Space –

Religious holidays, particularly Christmas, transforms a great deal of public space
into quasi-religious space. Most of it is rather mundane, and quite removed from
any sort of actual religious doctrine or practice, such as what one might find in
shopping malls, or along roadsides. So, even though Santa Claus and Saint Nick
are obviously tied to the Christian tradition, they are also widely embraced as
symbols of a public holiday that is celebrated enthusiastically by non-Christians and
even in non-Christian nations, like Japan. More controversial though is the use of
63
more purely public space, like courthouses or

parks for the display of crosses and menorahs
during holidays. Judges frequently have to
decide exactly when and how specific public
spaces can be used for what purposes.
Other examples of an uneasy intersection of

church and state occur when public funds are
used to promote, organize or otherwise regulate
large religious festivals. Mardi Gras, which for
the faithful, is a celebration preceding the start of
the Lenten fasting season attracts huge crowds, many of who are tourists, to New
Orleans each year. Many other towns in the Gulf Coast regions have public
celebrations, frequently including a parade. St. Patrick’s Day parades, Halloween
festivals and many other such celebrations require significant public endorsement,
but seem to pass without controversy.
Cemeteries
Cemeteries are common landscapes that often function as religious space, though
they are often regulated and maintained by the public. How a society treats the
corpses of their dead, and how they treat the places where the dead are buried (if
they bury their dead) may reveal a
great deal about the beliefs of the
people who build them.
The Abrahamic faiths generally

have a similar set of beliefs about
the “end of time” in which
humans, and the remains of
humans shall reconcile with the
divine. For this reason, it is
tradition for people in these faiths
to bury their dead so that the
remains of the deceased may be
brought back to life, or resurrected in some form at the end of time. This belief has
multiple implications in geography, not the least of which is the amount of space
given over hosting the remains of the dead, especially in large cities like New York;
or very old cities like Cairo. Some cultures hold these grounds inviolable. Other
traditions are more flexible, allowing for the removal of remains from gravesites so
that the space may be re-used or recycled. Some burial sites may add new remains
to existing mausoleums, or crypts; particularly when a family “owns” a particular
site.
Before the 20th century it was common practice in many parts of the United States
to buried loved ones somewhere on a family’s property. Backyard cemeteries may
64
have made sense generations ago, but are generally forbidden today for a variety of
reasons, not the least of which is the fate of cemeteries upon the sale of a property.
Many Americans find cemeteries “creepy”, so having a number of unknown people
buried in your backyard would be even more so. It’s certainly enough to inspire
movies, like Poltergeist, among others.
Americans’ attitudes toward cemeteries have evolved. The Puritans of New

England paid little attention to matters of cemeteries and gravestones. All were
buried without much ceremony in a common plot, often without permanent
markers. Later, New Englanders marked burial plots with morbid-looking “winged
death heads” and “skull and crossbone” imagery to remind the living of their own
mortality. Later, as religious practice evolved, so did the nature and variety of grave
markers; as well as the function of cemeteries. For some time during the 19th
century, cemeteries were treated much like parks are treated today, a place where
death and dying could be encountered in a pleasant, tranquil setting; a place for a
stroll or a picnic. The design aesthetics of these early cemeteries influenced the
development of public park space in the United States.
Traditional “monumental” cemeteries are costly and difficult to maintain.

Headstones marking the location of burial sites erode, crack and break. Wealthier
families, especially generations ago, were also prone to building large monuments
to family patriarchs in an attempt to raise the stature of the deceased in perpetuity.
Of course, over many generations they too deteriorate and may become hazards.
The cost of simply trimming grass has led to the popularization of “memorial
garden” type cemeteries that have only flat grave markers that permit lawn tractors
to mow grass quickly and efficiently. The sight of heavy machinery passing over
the remains of loved ones may violate the sense of propriety for some. The other
“problem” with lawn-style cemeteries is the uniformity of the gravestones. Many
people hate the thought of commemorating a loved one with a generic marker, so
they leave mementos or plant flowers; which undermines the ease of maintenance.
More recently, the costs associated with burials

have invited an increasing number of people to
consider cremation, or “natural burial” to
mitigate the environmental consequences of
conventional American burial rituals which
often involve a large number of processes that
slow down the inevitable decomposition of a
corpse. Natural burials exclude coffins, burial
vaults, embalming and traditional headstones,
etc.
Where is it?: Religious Realms

Most people in the world adhere to some sort of
belief, however most people belong to one of
65
two major world religion families: Abrahamic and Indian. Abrahamic religions
(Christianity, Judaism and Islam) all evolved in the Middle East, cover much of the
world today and share a number of commonalities. Indian Religions (Hinduism,
Buddhism, Shinto, etc.) evolved on the Indian subcontinent and spread northeast
across Asia. People who are not part of either of these grand traditions, may adhere
to a local (or folk) religion; or may not belong to any particular religion.
There is wide variation in the religiosity of people worldwide. In some parts of the
world, essentially every person’s life is centered around their faith. This is
particularly true in the Muslim world, and many parts of the developing world. In
much of the developed world, religious fervor is not as great. Americans, contrary
to what many people here think, remains a fairly religious country; especially when
it is compared to other regions with advanced economies, like Europe and Japan.
The map below shows the distribution of the major world religions using national
boundaries. Religions certainly cross boundaries, so this map isn’t as accurate as
one might like, but it does provide a general picture of the distribution of world’s
faithful.
66
Christianity, with about 2.2 billion followers is the religion with the most adherents,
but many in the developed world are not committed to their faith. This is a process
called secularization, and it characterizes much of Europe’s Christianity. Christians
are also split into various, generally peaceful, factions. The “Great Schism” of 1054
led to the creation of two great branches of Christianity: Eastern and Western. The
Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church, which now includes multiple, national
Orthodox churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, etc.). Many people of
Southeastern and Eastern European areas (and their descendants who have migrated
to the US) are Orthodox. They have many similarities and important differences
with Western Christians. One the landscape, you may recognize the distinctive
“onion dome” architecture.
Western Christians or the Roman Catholic Church also broke apart during a period
called the reformation that began in 1517. A number of highly religious Catholics
began protesting the manner in which Roman Church was being run. They
demanded reforms and have since become known as Protestants. They were upset
about a lot of things, but eventually their demands included among other things, that
the Holy Bible could be interpreted by individuals, thereby removing the total
authority of the Pope. Because increasing numbers of Europeans could read, and
many people fancied themselves capable of interpreting holy texts, a large number
of Protestants formed denominations of their own, splitting from one another like
branches from a tree. A series of religions wars followed. Much of Germanic
67
speaking people of Europe abandoned Catholicism altogether. Those who could

not worship as they wished migrated to other locations where they felt safe, or at
least comfortable, if not dominant. The United States was a destination for many of
Europe’s religious refugees, but it is not true that religious refugees were always
tolerant of other religions once they arrived in the New World– quite the opposite is
true. In fact, Rhode Island was established as a colony in part by those fleeing
religious persecution in other parts of colonial America. The United States was
forced to separate church and state because it was the peaceful solution in
religiously pluralistic society that the US had become.
American Christianity
Just as Americans are quite ignorant about the diversity of religion in other
countries, outsiders (and a lot of Americans) are unaware of the diversity within
American Christianity. So great are the differences, that it would seem sometimes
that it is inappropriate to lump all the various denominations and congregations
together under a single label. Nevertheless we do, and so it is worthwhile to
examine the distribution of the main American denominations.
68
C O O L L I N K :
About 60 million
A S S O C I A T I O N
American are Catholic.
O F Catholics are the largest
S T A T I S T I C I AN S religious group in the
O F AM E R I C A N country. Catholics are
R E L I G I O U S concentrated in New
B O D I E S
England, around the
Great Lakes and along
the southern US border
from Louisiana to
California.
Massachusetts is about
50% Catholic, but
several southern states
have fewer than five percent. Many large cities, including those in the Midwest (St.
Louis, Chicago, Cleveland) also have large percentages of Catholics.
Evangelical Protestants are concentrated (by percent of adherence) in the Deep

South and Appalachia, mostly in places where the Catholics aren’t. However, large
69
number of Evangelical Christians are in places like

Los Angeles (nearly 1 million) and Chicago (.5
million). Evangelicals emphasize a personal
relationship with Jesus Christ, are prone to be more
literal in their interpretation of the Bible and are
very interested in spreading their beliefs. They
often have very charismatic church leaders. There
are about 50 million Evangelicals, but they are
spread among dozens of denominations. The best
known of these groups are the Southern Baptists
(16 million), some Lutherans (e.g., Missouri
Synod) and a variety of Penecostal churches; each
also broken into many dozens of sub-
denominations, and local variations; plus a very
large number of so-called Non-Denominational
churches.
Mainline Protestants make up the other large

category of Christians in the United States. These folks tend to be more (sometimes
significantly so) progressive (or liberal) theologically and politically/socially than
their Evangelical brethren, less likely to be Biblical literalists and less likely to
knock on your door to get you to come to their church. Among the Mainline
Protestant denominations are the Episcopalians, Methodists (United), Lutherans and
the Presbyterians are probably the best known mainline protestant groups. As one
might guess, the Mainline Protestants are found in the middle of the United States.
Methodists are really quite common in the Great Lakes/Midwestern states
(Pennsylvania to Nebraska); Lutherans are dominant (or nearly so) in the Upper
Midwest. The United Church of Christ, which is what the old New England
Congregationalists have “become” are common in New England.
Mormons (LDS) are not considered Protestants, because they do trace their history
through the reformation; but back to church to the time of Christ. Mormonism
originated during the early 19th century during a period of great religious fervor in
the United States known as the Second Great Awakening. During this time, many
new religious denominations were
established, and churches flourished.
Joseph Smith Jr. founded the LDS
Church after translating the Book of
Mormon, which he found near his home
in Upstate New York, written in an
ancient language on gold plates. The
Book of Mormon tells a story of
Christians during the time of a man
named Mormon who lived in America
before Europeans came, and before
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Christ was born. Though some Christians consider the LDS church “a cult”, and
chose to focus on things the Mormon’s history of polygamy (now virtually extinct).
It is probably smarter to focus instead on the vast similarities between the Mormons
and Evangelical Christians since both have conservative cultural practices, a focus
on family life and strongly held religious convictions. The acceptance of Mormons
by most American Christians was obvious in the 2012 Presidential election cycle
when LDS member Mitt Romney ran as a Republican with minimal attention to his
faith.
Just as important as where things are, is where things aren’t. In this case, it’s
important to note that many parts of the Midwest and West, there is no dominant
religious group. Either there is a great
mixing of all denominations, or folks
just aren’t that religious and therefore
don’t belong to a church.
In some areas (Oregon, Maine) of the

U.S., less than 1/3rd of the population
appears to belong to any faith.
Nationally, about 13% of Americans are
agnostic. Note that West Virginia, also
appears to have low rates of
“adherence”; but this would seem out of
line with the rest of the cultural traits of
that state. Can you guess why this map
show some very rural areas with low
rates? Could it be that folks in these locations just don’t belong to a church that is
included in national surveys of church membership?
Islam
Islam is the world’s second largest religion with over 1.5 billion adherents. Like
Christianity, Islam is not monolithic; it has broken into several sub-faiths, but the
about 80% of are Sunni. An important minority of Muslims are Shia, and they live
primarily in Iran and Iraq, as well as sects such as Syria’s Alawhites. Many other
factions exist within the two main groups. Americans tend to think that all, or most,
Muslims live in the Middle East and North Africa, but far more Muslims live in
places like Indonesia (Southeast Asia) Pakistan, Bangladesh and India (South Asia).
Keep in mind that Nigeria has nearly as many Muslims as Egypt, which is the most
populous Muslim country in the Middle East.
Because there are about 2.6 million Muslims in the United States, and it is one of
the fastest growing religions in the world, and the Islamic world is constantly in the
news and Americans are generally ignorant about Islam, it is valuable to know a bit
about Islam.
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First, Islam is the religion and Muslims are the followers of Islam. The holy text of
Islam is the Qur’an (or Koran -- there are various spellings of many Arabic words).
Islam has a number of commonalities with Christianity and Judaism. In fact,
Muslims believe essentially that all three faiths are variations of the same universal
truth, and recognize Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as prophets. Of course, Muslims
believe that earlier versions of Islam were corrupted over the years (becoming
Judaism and Christianity) and it wasn’t until the Koran was revealed verbatim to the
last prophet Muhammad that the universal truth of Allah was properly codified, and
written in Arabic.
Islam has several characteristics and practices that American students should know.
First, Islam is strictly monotheistic. To them (and Jews), the Holy Trinity (Father,
Son, Holy Spirit) is not sufficiently monotheistic.
There is an expansive set of Islamic Laws that covers virtually every aspect of
Muslim life, so it cannot be treated here, but it does seem logical that non-Muslims
should be familiar with the Five Pillars, which are core elements of Islam. First,
L I S T E N : one must “take the Shahadah”, meaning they must recite an oath as a basic
T H E S H A H A D A H profession of faith to become a Muslim. The Sunni version of it translates roughly
( V I A Y O U T U B E )
thus: “There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the prophet of Allah”. The
Shahadah is repeated many times, frequently as part of the second pillar, called
Salah, which is five daily prayer sessions. Prayers are often recited at a Mosque,
where Muslims worship, but any place will suffice when it is time to pray. The
third pillar is alms giving, or donating to money to help the poor and other people in
need. It’s not exactly charity, because Muslims who can afford it are obliged to
give a certain percentage of their wealth as zakat, and together these amounts likely
exceed all other worldwide sources of aid to the needy. The fast (sawm) of
Ramadan is the fourth pillar and it requires Muslims of faith and good health to fast
(no food or water!) from sunrise to sunset for the entire month of Ramadan. There
is good food and fellowship at sunset each day during the fast, and a holiday, Eid al-
Fitr, marking the end of the fast. Some Muslims observe a shortened work day
during Ramadan, but basketball fans may recall Muslim NBA players Hakeem
Olajuwon and Kareem Abdul Jabbar who played exceptionally well during the fast.
The final pillar is the pilgrimage to Mecca called the Hajj. All Muslims, if they are
able, must travel at least once in their lifetime to the holiest location in the Muslim
world at a specific time of year and engage in a series of rituals alongside as many
as three million other Muslims. Clearly it is one of the world’s greatest spectacles,
but the size of the crowds in recent years have challenged Saudi authorities to
ensure the safety of pilgrims.
Judaism
The oldest of the Abrahamic religions is Judaism. It is monotheistic, rooted in the
Middle East, text based and fragmented like Christianity and Islam, but unlike its
Abrahamic cousins, it is not a universalizing religion. Jews (the followers of
Judaism) are broken into several groups. Those are in turn also broken into sub-
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groups. In the most basic sense, one can divide Jews into three broad categories
based on their interpretation of Jewish Law, starting with the most conservative,
orthodox groups, a conservative group and a more liberal or Reform group. It’s
also plausible to add a fourth group; those that are only culturally Jewish –
essentially accepting Jewish culture without accepting the religion. Anywhere
from about 11 to 15 million people in the world call themselves Jewish. About
40% live in the United States (mostly in New York, Miami, LA and other select
large cities) and about 40% live in Israel, the historic Jewish homeland. About 10%
live in Europe and scattered elsewhere. Jews who identify as having a relatively
recent European ancestry are often called Ashkenazi, and they are by far the most
numerous. The other large group of Jews that are defined geographically are those
that identify with a Middle Eastern or Mediterranean heritage. They are called
Sephardic Jews; though it should be pointed out that these categories can be
slippery and defined differently.
Jews make up a little less than 2% of all Americans, but they have had an outsized
effect on American culture. Safe in the United States from widespread persecution,
Jews have thrived in the U.S. thanks in part to a historical cultural emphasis on
education and career success. Still, Jewish people have for the most part become
part of the American mainstream, assimilating to the point of disappearing in some
communities. Intermarriage with non-Jewish people, and a low birth rate has
contributed mightily to the assimilation process. Orthodox communities on the
other hand are growing more quickly and less likely to marry outside the faith.
Hinduism
There are probably around one billion Hindus in the world, making it the third
largest religion. Most Hindus live in India, and Nepal, but there are well over a
million living in the United States, largely in
large urban areas like Los Angeles and New
York City. Hinduism is the oldest of the major
faiths and probably has more branches and
versions of any as well, making it challenging
to describe in a coherent fashion. The Indian
Supreme Court has even challenged its
description as a “religion”, arguing instead that
it should be considered a way of life instead.
Still, most westerners have trouble
understanding Hinduism without framing it
within our existing notions of religion. For
example, Hinduism doesn’t have people who
get kicked out of the faith for having alternative
beliefs; there are no heresies. Therefore, some
Hindus are monotheistic, some polytheistic,
some pantheistic and others still atheists.
73
There are some more common ideas and practices in Hinduism that college-
educated Americans ought to know a little bit about, especially since we have
incorporated some of these notions into our own vocabulary. You’ve no doubt
heard people say something like, “bad karma”, if they witness someone doing
something mean-spirited. This is a Hindu notion that people get, sooner or later, the
life they deserve, but with a twist on the common American understanding – the
good or bad you do in this life may carry over to the next life in a process called
reincarnation. People who can adhere to their dharma, or achieve a sort of
harmony with an ideal lifestyle (righteousness), may lead them to eventually
experience nirvana, a state of blissful enlightenment that is the goal for many
Hindus. Yoga, what many Americans think of as simply a set of stretching
exercises, is actually a set of practices that Hindus use to help achieve spiritual
goals; there are a number of different Yogas each with different elements, but for
the most part, they are paths to spiritual well-being, not just physical well-being.
Hindus have loads of holidays, some public and some more private. They have a
host of rituals as well. In contrast with Christians, burial is not common, but rather
cremation. Vast numbers of Hindus make pilgrimages as well. One of the better
known is the one made by Shakti Hindus to the banks of the Ganges in the holy city
of Varanasi, where the river absolves sin. Many Hindus go to Varanasi to die for
this reason.
Why Here?
So why is the US largely a Christian nation? Partly it’s because of Christianity’s
fundamental nature: it seeks out
new converts. European
conquest of the New World
(and elsewhere) was largely
undertaken for economic and
military reasons, but the
religious justifications; the God
part of God, Gold and Glory,
were very real to those who
came here as missionaries
centuries ago. Religion also
helped to salve the conscious of
those who recognized the crass
economics of colonial expansion. Religious intolerance of some Christians by
other Christians also is partly responsible for the religious character of the US
today.
Mostly however, the United States is largely a Christian nation because most of the
people who migrated here from Europe were Christians. Africans brought to the
US as slaves, and many Native Americans who were already here, were forced to
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convert to Christianity by militarily powerful, intolerant and genuinely faithful

Europeans.
For many generations, Americans

were given little choice in terms of
religion. Partly this was due to the
strong sanctions against adopting new
beliefs; partly it was due to the lack of
knowledge or opportunity to explore
other religions. For the most part,
people inherit their religion from their
parents and think little of adopting a
new one, just as their parents and
grandparents had before them. When
people do adopt a different faith, or even subtly diverge from familial practice, it
often signals significant life changes like marriage, a long distance move, war or
other major upheaval.
The map of American Christianity is a little harder to explain. Much of the pattern
can be explained by ethnicity. The Spanish converted the ancestors of much of the
population of Americans living in the American Southwest. The fact that places
like California already had many established Catholic churches, would have been
some comfort to those considering migrating to California. Other largely Catholic
areas of the US were where Catholic immigrants to the US found jobs and enough
religious tolerance to move, and then upon becoming a majority attracting
additional Catholics.
Lutherans, largely migrated from the Germanic countries of Northern Europe. It’s
hardly surprising then that they found the colder climates of Minnesota, Wisconsin
and the Dakotas much to their liking; they were environmentally pre-adapted to
these areas.
Baptists were not the first group to migrate into the American South, in fact they
remained a small minority throughout the colonial period. Their numbers grew as a
result of their focus on spoken/oral religious services. This set them apart from the
Anglican/Episcopal churches favored by the earliest southerners because many of
the later immigrants to the South could not read; and schooling was far less
imporant in the southern US than in New England or the Middle Atlantic states. It
became the religion of the ordinary people of the South. Prior to the Civil War,
American Baptists split into two large groups over slavery. The Southern Baptist
Convention was born, and increased in popularity. Most blacks at that time
attended the same church as whites, so today still many black families belong to
some version of the Baptist faith.
75
Mormons are largely found in the Intermontane

West because this was a safe place for them to
practice their religion in the 1800s. Early
Mormons found themselves the victims of
extreme religious intolerance in Missouri and
Illinois where they had hoped to settle and build
their community. After the founder of the
church, Joseph Smith, was murdered in 1844, the
Mormons moved to what is now Utah in search
of a place isolated from persecution. Although
there was a short “war” between Mormon settlers
and the US Army largely over the degree of
sovereignty the Utah territory had over its own
affairs, the isolation of Utah and Idaho has helped
Mormons maintain a reasonably unique cultural realm.
While religious persecution may have driven early Mormons into some of the most
desolate, isolated lands in the United States, religious intolerance (or just the fear of
it) keeps other religious minorities in large cities. Jews, Muslims, Hindus and
Buddhists in the United States tend to be found in many of the same large urban
areas. Why? Partly this would be explained by the patterns of economic
opportunity and migration. On the positive side, it is easier for those who want to
find people of their own religion and culture are more likely to do so in a large city.
Religions frequently preach fellowship. On the darker side, there is also a argument
to be made that there is safety in the numbers afforded minority communities in
large cities where a critical mass of defensive support can be mustered against
discriminatory practices. There tends to be a sort of apathy (or tolerance) in large
cities. Urban folks are more used to diversity and feel little threat in “the other”.
A final spatial pattern

discernible in the US is the
manner in which particularly
unusual or novel religious
practices, like snake handling
in Appalachia. Though
similar in outcome to the
search for isolation practiced
by Mormons; remoteness
itself seems to be capable of
fostering innovation in
religious practice or doctrinal interpretation. The American West, which at one
time featured thousands of isolated towns and villages attracted dozens of Christian
splinter groups and fostered via isolation the creation of dozens more. Mt. Shasta in
northern California is home to several “new age” cults (or religions).
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The Big Picture

Religion affects a great number of elements of any culture, and
is itself a product of culture. Economic activity, politics,
ethnicity, language, and the environment all interact with
religion in complex and compelling ways. The vast extent of
the interactions can’t be spelled out here (even if we could); so a
few examples will have to suffice.
Religion and Politics

In the United States, as is the case elsewhere, religious affiliation
is a good predictor of political behavior. Evangelical Christians
and Mormons rank among the most politically conservative
voters in the US year after year. This relationship was greatly strengthened by the
so-called “Reagan Revolution” of the 1980s, when for the first time since the Civil
War, conservative Christians (largely from the South) abandoned the Democratic
Party in favor of the Republican Party. Certainly part of the switch was motivated
by the Democrats stance on Civil Rights, but hot-button religious issues,
particularly abortion, drove many Evangelicals to the Right. Leading the charge
were several high profile television ministers, such as Jerry Falwell and Pat
Robertson. The new alliances, particularly with the pro-business/anti-taxation
element of the Republican Party forged during the Reagan era have caused some
Evangelical Christians some discomfort however. The numerous Biblical
restrictions on usury, for example, have made it difficult for some Evangelicals to
fully support Republican policies calling for less regulation of interest rates charged
to people taking out loans.
Religion and Economics

Because many religions condemn charging
interest on loans, there was little reason to
loan money in many parts of the world for
many centuries. Jewish people, who faced
fewer restrictions on usury, faced little
competition in the banking
industry until attitudes began
to change in modern times.
This may explain in part why
Jewish folks have
traditionally involved with the
banking industry. In a very
similar fashion, many
Evangelical Christians and
Mormons expressly forbid the
consumption of alcohol. It is
therefore not surprising that
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few wineries exist in Utah or Alabama. On the other hand, California’s long
association with Catholicism has helped advance the very profitable viticultural
industry in that state. Muslims and Jews (and some Christians) abstain from eating
pork because of religious restrictions; therefore pig farming would be very rare in
Israel or the Muslim world. Many parts of India abstain from eating any meat, so
any sort of animal husbandry would be an unlikely career path.
Religion and Language:

Consider for example that one cannot fully interpret the Koran without a full
understanding of the Arabic language.
Religion and the Environment

How Christians have understood their relationship with the natural environment has
had fascinating consequences in American history. The Puritans of New England,
having fled Europe while there were still plenty of vestiges of various nature
religions in the religious practices of their neighbors, they held a pretty dim view of
the great forests of New England. To them, the city was were Christians were most
likely to find orderliness, which was a characteristic of God. Farming landscapes
were good too, as long as they were free from the chaos that characterized the wild
places on earth (where Satan was influential). Great examples of these views are
found in the literary works of 18th century authors, like Nathaniel Hawthorne (e.g.,
The Scarlett Letter), but the notion that the wilderness is a chaotic place for
sinfulness can be found today in numerous “slasher films” frequently filmed at
some summer camp in a forest. The NHL ice hockey team, known as the New
Jersey Devils derives their name from the same fear of the
woods.
In the 19th century, American attitudes began to change toward

wilderness locations. Rather than always being a place of
chaos, where you’d become bewildered, people like John Muir
argued that wilderness was where one could commune with the
Almighty. As the industrial revolution and modern capitalism
wrought massive changes, cities were increasingly accused of
being the locus of moral degradation and spiritual corruption.
Those two philosophical positions still battle for supremacy

and geographers have found that religious affiliation has a great
deal of influence over what people think about things like climate change or
deforestation. If your religion commands you to be a good steward of the natural
environment, you will likely to have a different view of environmentalism than if
you have believe, as some Fundamentalist Christians do that ecological catastrophes
are a sign of the approaching Apocalypse, and therefore a welcome sign of the end-
of-days.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Religion_economy.png
Heading 3
HEADING 4
xx
dscape, GIS, etc.
79
6
Chapter
CHAPTER 6 POLITICS
That elusive set of rules that govern the way we act is a product of where we are
from and where we live. This chapter explores the idea of culture and how place
and space shape the way we think and what we do in myriad fashionc
80
CHAPTER 7 HEADING 1-SECTION

TITLE
Heading 2
Heading 3
HEADING 4
Not sure what to do with this chapter. I’d like to riff of Don Mitchell’s Cultural
Geography book, but I also want to include some old school “folk geography” and
quite a few pop culture elements, but I don’t know if they really all belong in the
same chapter.
81
8
Chapter
CHAPTER 8 ETHNICITY AND

IDENTITY
Personal identity can be very complex. Ethnic identity alone is determined by
cross-cutting factors, including language, racial characteristics, national heritage
and religion. These identities factor into a wide variety of cultural practices –
including politics, religion, marriage and economics. Geography play a significant
role in the creation, maintenance and erosion of ethnic identity.
“What are you?” It seems a simple enough question. You’ll be asked it on job
applications. You may be asked the same question by new acquaintances or even
old friends. In the United States, no matter how complex the answer to that
question may be, it can be nearly impossible to respond in any way other than the
most simplistic terms. Check this box. Some folks find it easy to check a single
box, or provide a one-word answer. Others may find checking a single box, or
providing a one-word answer makes no sense at all. Moving from one cultural
region of the world to another can make answering such questions even more
confusing – because “what you are” may is likely to change, even though you are
still the same person. This is because your identity is yet another socially
constructed idea. It’s made up. And because it’s constructed in our collective
imaginations, it’s also subject to change through time and across space.
Geography is an especially powerful tool when it comes to understanding questions

of race, ethnicity and identity.
Governments create much of what we know as identity “options”. In the United

States, that begins with the US Census Bureau, but a number of other government
agencies have since the earliest days of the colonial period, been interested in
establishing categories into which people could be placed.
82
Slavery was a founding institution in the colonies of the New World. Though
nearly universal and as old perhaps as agriculture itself, slavery as it was practiced
early on in the Americas shaped much of the “rules” regarding ethnic identity we
use today. Nearly 100 years before the English established the Jamestown colony
in Virginia, the Spanish brought African slaves to North America. The indigenous
people of the Americas, “Indians” were also captured and sold into slavery . In both
instances, race was the predominant characteristic qualifying someone to be a slave
in the European system. Most people whose ancestry was African or indigenous
American were at risk.
Race
Essentially, three visual determinants are used in the
United States to classify someone by race. The first
factor is the pigmentation of the skin. People with
darker skin are distinguished from those with lighter
skin. Second, people with darker skin are further
categorized by the texture of their hair. People with
naturally straight hair, but dark skin are generally not
considered “black” or “African-American”, but
rather reserved for another category. Finally, people
are categorized by the shape and color of their eyes.
People with brown “almond shaped “eyes, and
straight hair, are placed in the “Asian” category.
Using this “three-factor test” generates three groups:
White, Black and Asian. Americans use this test,
very clumsily, all the time, and a lot of people are
left out – poorly categorized or not categorized, so additional measures have been
created by society.
There is substantial reason to doubt whether race even exists. Clearly, the three-
factor test used widely in the United States is a social construction – meaning we
made it up. On a deeper level, anthropologists, biologists and geneticists argue
quite a bit about whether the concept of race is scientifically valid. Clearly there are
genetic markers for physical characteristics, like skin color or hair texture, that be
identified by DNA testing, but only a few of these DNA markers match up well
with our very convenient social constructions. We could choose from thousands of
alternative genetic characteristics to classify people. If our social constructions
were to change, and we suddenly decided to group people by height, fingerprint
patterns and blood type (rather than skin color, hair texture and eye shape), we
would have an entirely different set of races lumped together quite differently across
the globe.
Because there is as much genetic variation among people of the same race, as there
Figure 8-1: Fingerprint patterns vary across the
globe much like skin color, but because they are is between people of different races, statisticians would argue that race fails the
difficult to see, they were not chosen as markers simplest definition of what constitutes a “group”.
of race.
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Despite the fact that the concept of race, is essentially dead among scientists, it
remains a vital reality in the lives of many people and in most societies. Clearly
race exhibits spatial characteristics on the landscape that are of interest to
geographers.
Language and Ethnicity

Hispanics make up about 17% of the US population, but they can’t be categorized
by race. Hispanics constitute an “ethnic” group in the United States because they
share a common linguistic heritage. Hispanics may include people from any “race”.
Asians (Filipinos, e.g.), Whites and black folks all speak Spanish. A sizeable
percentage of Hispanics whose ancestors came from Latin America have a mixed
racial background – part European and part Indigenous American. These folks,
traditionally labeled “mestizo”, frequently identify so strongly by language that they
are not sure what race to put on government forms. Oftentimes, mestizos in the US
select “other” when prompted to self-define by racial category. Therefore, maps of
race in Los Angeles large swaths of the race “Other” in the same neighborhoods
that are linguistically “Hispanic”. Complicating the issue of race among many
Hispanics is the varied way the expression “La Raza” (translated “the race”) is used
by people who speak Spanish. It was used for years by the Fascists in Spain to
celebrate the uniqueness of Spaniards, but has since been adopted / adapted by
various Latino groups to refer to a host of sometimes competing claims to ethnic
identities that are not based on race as the term is used above.
No other group in the United States is so widely categorized by language as

Hispanics. Clearly many dozens of languages other than English are spoken at
home by millions of Americans, and those who speak those languages generally
identity themselves by language before they would use a racial category. Americans
of Chinese, Koreans and Japanese descent think of themselves as quite different
from each other, but the government (and indeed many non-Asian Americans),
frequently collapses all these linguistic/national identities into the monolithic, but
over-expansive “Asian” category.
Switzerland is a
country that is
overwhelmingly
“white”, with less than
10% of the population
non-European. Still,
in many ways,
Switzerland is highly
multi-ethnic because
of its linguistic
diversity. The
majority of Swiss
84
speak German, but there are sizeable numbers of persons that speak French and
Italian. Even Romansh is recognized as an official language in Switzerland, though
only about 1% of the population speaks.
The jigsaw-puzzle like linguistic map of Switzerland is similar to those found in

other rugged, mountainous or inaccessible regions where the friction of distance is
significant (see chapter 5). What makes Switzerland somewhat unusual though is
the manner in which the Swiss have embraced their linguistic diversity, even
requiring school-aged children to become bilingual. Together since the year 1291,
the Swiss have focused on commonalities – such as their neutrality, love of
democracy and Alpine sports to build a special sense of nationhood. It probably
helps that Switzerland has one of the highest qualities of life in the world (health,
wealth, happiness), – but they have shown the world that people of diverse
backgrounds can live together quite happily and thrive perhaps because of it.
Religion
In some parts of the world, religion is the primary
marker of ethnic identity, but in the United States,
religion is not widely used as a marker of identity. The
US government collects little to no data on religious
affiliation because to do so would infringe upon the
separation of church and state. Jews and Muslims are
probably the two groups in the US that would most
likely self-identify using religion – but even that is not
common.
In areas where racial or linguistic markers are not

readily available, religion can become the primary
marker of ethnicity. The recent conflicts in Iraq Figure 8-2: Once Brothers is a
between Sunni and Shia factions are a good example. documentary film by ESPN detailing
the emotional toll on former Yugoslav
Perhaps the most tragic example in recent memory was teammates who saw their former
country and friendships torn apart by
the violent dissolution of the country of Yugoslavia – ethnic strife.
the “anti-Switzerland” of Europe. http://vimeo.com/36827025
From 1918 to around 2003, Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic country in southeastern

Europe held together by a common language, a strong leader and numerous
common cultural practices. Translated literally, “Yugoslavia” means literally
“Land of the South Slavs” – and so there was a strong linguistic bond helping hold
this country, with multiple religions groups together; as it does in many countries.
However, after the death of their leader, Marshall Tito, in the 1980 the religious
differences among the groups proved unmanageable. The country broke up quite
violently largely according to the religious identification. The Bosniaks (Bosnian
Muslims) follow Islam, and they now inhabit much of is called Bosnia-
Herzegovina. The Slovenes and Croats (Croatians) are largely Roman Catholic,
and they now occupy the countries of Croatia and Slovenia. The Montenegrins,
Macedonians and Serbs (Serbians) are Eastern Orthodox Christians, and they now
85
live in Montenegro, Macedonia and Serbia respectively. Of course, given the years
that they all lived together sometime significant minorities of each group lives in
another group’s primary territory. Today, they largely get along, although each of
the separate countries have taken steps to create official languages from the various
dialects of the common Serbo-Croation language they all speak.
National Heritage
Where your ancestors are from may be how you identify yourself as well – this may
be a case of nationality-as-ethnicity. Certain groups in the US do this regularly,
others couldn’t even tell you if they have a nationality. Most of the time in the US,
this comes in the form of hyphenated identities, such as Chinese-American,
Mexican-American, etc. However, it would be unusual to hear someone self-
identify as “English-American” or “Canadian-American”, even though the England
and Canada have been significant sources of migrants over the years. Part of that
stems from the fact that English migration largely took place many generations ago,
and that English (and Canadian) culture is so similar to American culture, that in
some ways, differentiating one’s self makes little sense. Another reason surely
stems from the “melting pot” trajectory of many of European immigrants to the
United States. European immigrants to the US over a number of generations have
so frequently married people from other European countries that the countries of
national origin have been forgotten. Intermarriage, is the most effective means by
which groups assimilate into the host culture. This is especially true for Americans
whose ancestors came to the US a long time ago.
For some more recent immigrants, and for groups that either 1) chose not to
assimilate; and/or 2) were discouraged from assimilating, national identities may
remain. It is interesting to observe the rooting interest of ethnic groups during the
Olympics and during the World Cup soccer tournament. These events provide a
window into the processes of identity construction and maintenance. Though not
always a reliable measure of national identity, most Americans who identify simply
as “American” would have trouble cheering for any country other than the United
States.
Region
The US Government also uses much broader stokes to classify minority groups as
well. “Asian” is probably the most absurdly broad category, because it lumps
several hundred people from a vast continent together. People whose ancestry lies
in China, Japan, Korea, India, Pakistan and parts of Russia could be technically
“Asians”.
White people are also overly broadly categorized. Clearly, this category is used to
classify people who are European, or whose ancestry is mostly European; but it also
appears to include people from Saharan Africa and the Southwest Asia(Moroccans,
Egyptians, Iraqis, Saudis, Turks,etc.).
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African-American is another similarly confusing category, because 1) Africa is

made up of about 50 countries – but only the Sub-Saharan ones count 2) some
immigrants from Africa are white (South Africans). Some African-American reject
the term, preferring “black”, partly because “African-American” has no equivalent
to “European-American”, and partly because of the manner in which the term
“black” was culturally appropriated as source of cultural pride / power during the
Civil Rights era.
American-American?
There’s some that consider all the hyphenated versions of Americans is too much.
What do people call themselves who would rather not be classified, or those who
think they’re being left out? What about the millions who aren’t really sure what to
check off on the “ethnicity” or “national origin” question? “American” is an option
that a lot of white folks chose, especially in the Appalachian South. This could be
interpreted as a bit xenophobic, but for families from that region (the author
included), many of whom trace their American roots back to the 1600’s – the
number of ethnicities represented in the family tree is too varied, and sometimes lost
to time, to call oneself anything other than “American”. Anyone with complicated
family tree is almost by default “American”.
During the last two census periods (2000, 2010), there has been an effort by small
political groups in some southern states to make “Confederate-American”, or
“Southern White” as an official ethnic designation. This seems clearly an
outgrowth of the racially charged, anti-Federal politics still quite common in the
South, but there may be some logic to it as well. Ethnic groups should be allowed
to self-identify. Certainly many of the official and unofficial strategies we use to
“place people in a box” are illogical. One could make an argument that because
many people in the American South have a unique dialect, religious beliefs, politics
and social customs – they may indeed be entitled to call themselves whatever they
want.
MEXICO-CANADA-UNITED STATES – FOOD AND ETHNICITY
There’s a well-circulated speech by a Mexican-American essayist Richard

Rodriguez compares the assimilation strategies pursued by the United States and its
neighbors to the north and south.
Rodriguez points out that Mexico has largely realized the American dream of
becoming a true “melting pot”. Racial minorities in Mexico are not very visible.
There are several million indigenous people living in Mexico for sure – the Nahua,
Mayans and Zapotecas come to mind, and there is a small population of Afro-
Mexicans as well, but their experience has been different than equivalent groups in
the US. The main factor was the high rates of intermarriage between Europeans
(Spaniards), the native population and Africans. The host culture of Mexico is
mixed. Rodriguez likened it to a burrito – a lot of things rolled up into a single
creation. Therefore, it makes little sense for the host culture to aggressively
87
discriminate against any of the constituent elements of the mixture. As a result,

Mexican identity and culture is more cohesive, generally happy and perhaps more
monolithic than that in the US.
Rodriguez points out that Canada, a country known for its typically genial multi-
national culture has become a welcoming place for immigrants by celebrating
diversity and respecting the rights of all who come to maintain their identity. As a
result, Canada has had little of the racialized ethnic strife that has marked many US
cities over the decades. Of course, some French-speaking Canadians have argued
for cessation, but it was handled in an orderly, democratic fashion (and rejected
twice). This strategy though has perhaps undermined the growth of a solid, national
identity in Canada. Short of perhaps a love of hockey and beer, it’s hard to think of
what makes Canadians “Canadian”. Rodriguez notes that you will never be asked
to go out to a Canadian restaurant. Canadian cuisine maybe largely unknown
because without the cultural hybridization of the type one finds in the US and
Mexico, it is difficult for a new cultural practices to emerge.
The United States has pursued to some degrees both the Mexican and the Canadian
models. Many of the nationalities that migrated to the US have assimilated in true
melting pot fashion, but others have not for a variety of reasons. There is some
pressure to do so – to act “like an American” – to adopt “American” ways, cultures
and traditions. On the other hand, Americans are regularly encouraged to respect
the diversity of the many dozens of ethnicities who constitute the American “salad
bowl” at the same time. The result has been complicated. Neither Mexico, nor
Canada has had the sort of ethnic tensions, riots and violence that the US has seen,
but neither of America’s neighbors have spawned the sort of cultural innovations
the US has become so well known for – rock n’ roll, rap and jazz; air planes, light
bulbs and movie theaters; football, basketball and skateboarding.
Space Makes Race

Spatial processes are responsible for the creation of ethnicities. Geographers like to
note “space makes race”. Hypothetically, if there was no friction of distance, and
people were free to move about the globe at will, then we would all look alike
(generally speaking), we would all speak the same language, we would likely have
fewer religions (a single religion?), and we would likely think of ourselves a
earthlings, rather than “Americans”, “Germans”, “Chinese”. Or maybe not. There
may be some psychological reason compelling people to consider themselves part
of some group – and not another. What is clear is that geography factors heavily
into the formation of such groups.
In the early history of humankind, there were no ethnicities. All belonged to a

single, very small group. As our species grew more numerous and the search for
resources (or adventure) led groups to venture out of Africa, our languages evolved,
multiple religions were established and our bodies changed in response to the new
local climates and conditions in which people found themselves.
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Ebony and Ivory – Physical Geography of Race

Human beings have a number of physical adaptations to climate, but skin color is
perhaps the classic example. Humans living in the tropical regions of the world are
exposed to much more sunlight during the course of a year than those living closer
to the North or South Poles. Researchers suggest that the variations in skin
pigmentation may have taken as little as 100 generations to appear across the globe
and there is evidence that the process is reversible.
Theory holds that dark skin is an evolutionary adaptation that helps protect people
from the damaging effects of ultraviolet radiation that comes from the sun. Darker
skinned people had an evolutionary advantage over lighter skinned people in very
sunny locations. However, sunlight also provides vitamin D, an essential dietary
nutrient, especially for lactating mothers. People living in sunlight-deprived areas,
like Europe, get less vitamin D from the sun than those in Africa. Dark skin, great
where sun is plentiful undermines the production of vitamin D. Therefore, persons
with lighter skin could absorb more vitamin D, and had a slight evolutionary
advantage over those with darker skin in places like Europe.
The inability to get vitamin D into the system may also have factored into the
development of lactose tolerance – and the dairy industry among Europeans. Most
adult mammals cannot drink milk because of an inability to produce lactase, an
enzyme that metabolizes lactose. Most Europeans can drink milk. Was this
because millennia ago they were, as a group, so deficient in vitamin D / calcium that
the rare persons that were lactose tolerant had a massive evolutionary advantage
over those who were lactose intolerant? Moreover, did dairy farming become a
staple of European farming because Europeans were lactose tolerant or did lactose
tolerance develop among Europeans because they raised cattle? In any case, where
was and continues to be foundational, causal variable in the construction and
maintenance of our ideas about who we are, what we do and why we do it..
Baby’s Got Back – Geography and Standards of Beauty

Cultural variables are also partly determine our “race” or biological characteristics
as well. Some of these characteristics, like skin tone, height, or body morphology
are partly determined in part by the localized standards for physical attractiveness.
Across the globe there are differences in what men and women consider attractive.
Preferences regarding height, weight, eyes, hair, skin tone and body morphology
vary. For centuries many, the Chinese (men presumably) valued tiny feet and
8-3: Youtube - Click to Watch. This video
cartoon, inspired by the Dr. Suess story, "The therefore would bind the feet of girls and young women. In West Africa, where
Sneetches" cleverly captures the desire of maternal societies and a cult of fertility, coupled with food insecurity, may have led
some groups to build identity, and construct
"the other" through reference to physical to a preference for large buttocks, especially on females. In Japan, a place with a
appearance. (8:45 minutes) vastly different agricultural and religious history, this taste preference is muted or
even reversed.
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In the United States,

especially during the 1970s
and 1980s, there was great
emphasis on tanning the skin
to achieve a standard of
beauty. Working on one’s
tan however would have
made little sense to earlier
generations that sought to
shelter from the sun as much
as possible to prevent
tanning. A standard
explanation for this shift in
cultural practice is rooted in
time and space. Once, a tan was a sign of poverty because it indicated excessive
exposure to the sun by agricultural field laborers. Following the industrial
revolution, impoverished people – now working in factories - were kept pale by
working long-hours indoors. The wealthier classes finding themselves now
indistinguishable from the impoverished classes, chose to tan in order to signify
their status via their ability to engage in outdoor leisure activities, like going to the
beach. It should be noted that in recent years, the threat of skin cancer and shifting
demographics have confounded this beauty standard once again.
Over the course of thousands of years, these preferences – rooted in local conditions
(and perhaps random fascinations) lend themselves to evolutionary changes in body
morphology. They also help explain some differences in the lyrical content of pop
music as well.
Identity Maintenance
Once these various categories of identity are created, they are in constant danger of
alteration or elimination. People
can move away from a region,
draining a group of the critical mass
needed to sustain a group identity –
this is the clearance model. New
people can move in, overwhelming
the “host” group and eroding their
identity – this is the changeover
model. There are other processes
that could affect the maintenance of
ethnic identity as well.
Several of the key ways identities

are preserved, maintained or
enforced are spatial. The simplest
way this happens is when people live in an inaccessible location. In the United
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States for example, Cajuns and Creoles (French speaking people of Louisiana) have
managed to maintain their identity for hundreds of years, partly because they lived
in a swampy part of Louisiana where railroad and highway infrastructure was late to
arrive. People on various islands, in mountainous regions and other hard-to-get to
places find their identity insulated from the degrading effects of immigration and
emigration.
The less benign practice of ethnic ghettoization attempts to force the maintenance
of identity in many locations. The term ghetto has been historically used to identify
areas of a city where specific minority groups were forced to live. In recent years
the term has been largely used by Americans to make reference to African-
American neighborhoods – especially if the residents in the neighborhood were
poor. In reality, ghettos are not reserved for solely reserved for black folks and they
can be found in many large cities around the world. Many cities’ Chinatown
district would have qualified as a ghetto before legal changes made housing
discrimination unlawful. The Nazis confined Jewish people to ghettos during their
reign of terror across Europe.
A less value-laden term, ethnic enclave probably better describes neighborhoods

dominated by a single ethnicity today. Some more well-off ethnic neighborhoods
are called “ethno-burbs”. The largely concentration of Asians in Los Angeles’ San
Gabriel Valley is a good example of an ethnoburb.
It is reasonably easy to understand why a group of people invested in racist/bigoted

ideologies and/or sheer ignorance would seek to isolate people who are different
from themselves. Keeping groups separate makes it easier for groups in power to
maintain a status quo. Residential proximity might lead to people from different
groups falling in love, mating, having offspring or just learning from one another.
Any of which could lead to the dilution of the “purity” of identity – whatever that
identity is based upon (race, religion, nationality, language, etc.).
Environmental Racism
In addition to keeping specific groups
of people residentially separated,
ghettos seem to have served a variety
of other functions as well. Ghettos
have served as dumping grounds for a
variety of social ills and civic
disamenities. Prostitution, the illicit
drug trade and gambling are often less
vigorously policed in ghetto districts,
signaling those involved that such
activities are more widely accepted
8-4: Altgeld Gardens: Chicago, IL. This public housing project built
among minority residents, when in fact after World War II to house black veterans after the war was built
such activities are as likely a sign of on an abandonned landfill. It remains a black neighborhood and
numerous toxic hazards remain in the vicinity.
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the lack of political power among ghetto residents.
Ghettos are also frequently subject to industrial disamenities - health hazards not
found elsewhere in the urban environment. Air, water and ground pollutants are
frequently worst in poor, minority neighborhoods leading to the construction of
what some have called environmental racism. Clearly black and brown residents
in many cities suffer from higher rates of things like asthma and obesity than non-
Hispanic Whites. These statistics may be caused partly by ethnic cultural practices
and poverty, but it is also clear that poor people are least able to move from polluted
neighborhoods – some of which were established long before the Civil Rights era.
Minority groups also have more trouble defending their right to healthy
neighborhood via the political process.
In addition to the obvious toxic pollutants, environmental hazards in the form of

things like predatory lenders, fast food, noise and even the lack of disaster planning
may undermine the ability of residents living in poor minority neighborhoods to live
as long and well as fellow citizens across town. For example, during Hurricane
Katrina (2005), black residents of New Orleans were neglected by the city’s
hurricane evacuation plan because the plan was designed to cater to people who
owned automobiles. A significant percentage (100,000 people) of the city’s black
population relied on public transport and were
therefore unable to take advantage of the city’s
evacuation plan.
Positives
While many of the effects of ghettoization
undermine the quality of life of minority groups, it
must be noted that there are positive outcomes
from ghettoization as well. This is not to justify
the official and unofficial discriminatory practices
(see section below), but to argue instead that the
spatial concentration of minorities creates
situations that affected groups have leveraged to
their advantage.
First, diversity is preserved via

ghettoization, just as those who
engineered these elements of
cities hoped. By undermining
the prospects of intermarriage
and assimilation, excluded
groups remain somewhat distinct
from the host culture. If every
minority group melted perfectly
into the host culture, then
everyone would be robbed of
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many of the wonderful cultural aspects of a diverse society. Large cities are
exciting and enriching precisely because they have diversity. Certainly, lots of
people enjoy the wide variety of ethnic foods in cities where ethnic identities remain
strong –but there’s far more at risk should the distinctiveness of ethnic populations
erode. Minority religious traditions, languages, philosophies, arts and economic
practices would all suffer if complete assimilation were to occur.
Other benefits accrue to ethnic groups remain living in close proximity to each
other. Mutual support, in a variety of forms – economic, political, recreational, etc.
is easier when residents live close by. A reduction in some types of conflict may
occur if people of like values and traditions are neighbors. Opinions regarding how
late a party should go, or what a proper lawn should look like may vary less in
neighborhoods where residents come from a common background. Recent
immigrants, even those seeking to shed their ethnic heritage, no doubt would find
an ethnic enclave an easier place to begin the acculturation and assimilation process
than a neighborhood dominated by a host culture group.
Ethnic minorities seeking to preserve their traditions or identities also stand a

greater chance of exercising political power if they live together; concentrating
voting power in specific areas. A number of voting districts are gerrymandered in
order to help promote (or deny!) the interests of specific ethnicities. Even simple
pleasures, like finding someone who also likes to play ethnic games like dominoes
or cricket; or finding a bakery that makes a ethnic-specialty food (e.g., pan de
meurto, king cakes, laffa bread or knishes) is easier when people who share an
ethnic identity live in proximity.
Space and Race

Geography plays a significant role in the construction of ethnic
identity. During the early period of human history, there was
probably not strong sense of “us and them”, because finding a “them”
would have been difficult. The Chinese symbol for “China” also
mean middle or center. It seems to suggest that the Chinese, like
many other ancient civilizations, thought of themselves as the center of the world –
they were “the people”.
Contact with outside groups created a sense of difference and thus the evolution of
ethnicity begins. Migration and invasion heightened the importance of identity.
People who had never given their identity much thought might have found
themselves, after migrating elsewhere, considered strange or peculiar – a source of
fascination or ridicule and scorn. People once part of the majority – and therefore
not “ethnic” may become “ethnic” by migrating to a location where they are in the
minority. Alternately, one may move from a location where they are considered an
ethnic minority to another location where they are not considered ethnic. This
could happen if they migrated to a location where their ethnicity was in the
majority, or it could happen if they migrated to a location where the characteristics
93
that classified them as a specific ethnicity did not exist. The social construction of
ethnicity is fluid.
African-American and Blackness

In some states in the US, for many years, there was an official policy that any
person that had any ancestry from Africa was considered African-American –
regardless of their physical appearance. It is interesting to note that before the great
period of European migration in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a much larger
percentage of Americans were of mixed ancestry. In 1930, the US Census Bureau
stopped using the designation “mulatto” to indicate people of mixed ancestry.
Subsequent censuses (1940-1960), “black” and “white” were the only options. It
wasn’t until the 2000 census that the government allowed people of mixed heritage
to once again identify by more than a single category.
8-5: Cumberland Posey, a famous baseball player from Homestead, Pennsylvania was considered "black" because local people knew
of his family’s partial African ancestry. He had to play baseball in the "Negro Leagues". His first cousins, (right) moved to Ohio in the
1920s where locals were unaware of their ancestry – so they became “white” and each male served in a white regiment in the military
during World War II. The act of moving about 100 miles changed the family on the right’s racial classification.
It was only during the 20th century, during the height of the Jim Crow era, that
stricter “blood laws” were enacted. Some states declared specific percentages (one-
fourth, one-eighth) of ancestry as a legal limit to be considered legally white or
black. Some of these laws remained intact until the late 1960s, when the Supreme
Court struck them down. Such laws were necessary in part because even the US
Army was segregated until 1948 – the military had to know which type of unit each
individual should be assigned to. Similar laws, known as “blood quantum” rules
have been applied to determine membership in various American Indian tribes.
The effect of these laws remains strong in the United States. Persons of mixed
ancestry generally are pressured by society to identify align themselves with a
single heritage – especially if they are “black”…even just a little bit. Black people
were the group targeted most often by the old blood laws. Those definitions linger.
The “average” African-American is about 20% “white” according to DNA
evidence. About 10 percent of African-Americans are more than half white – yet
still identify (or are identified) as “black”. Even very well-known people, like
94
President Barack Obama and golfer Tiger Woods are shoved into a single ethnic
category – sometimes over their very public objections. Woods is considered
“black” in America, but he calls himself “Cablinasian” – a made up word that
reflects his ancestry that includes Caucasians, Black, American Indian and Asian.
In Thailand he is embraced as “Thai”, the home country of his mother. The
unfortunately lesson here is that in America, it frequently doesn’t’ matter who you
think you are – if everyone else insists that you are something different.
In South Africa, where race-based apartheid government policies lasted until the
mid-1990s, a variety of tests were devised to determine individual’s inclusion as a
“white”, “coloured” or “black”. One of the criteria was judged using the so-called
“pencil test” in which a pencil was stuck in an individual’s hair. If it did not come
out easily, the individual might be classified as “black”. In one famous case, a girl
whose parents were both legally recognized as white, was reclassified as
“coloured”, and subsequently removed from her all-white school – though her
parents remained “white”.
In other countries, such as Brazil and the Caribbean, light skinned persons of mixed
ancestry are generally considered “white”. One could be white or black –
depending where they live. Brazilians who were considered white in their home
country often find themselves “black” once they move to the United States. Such
migrants must navigate a potential minefield of bigotry and anger. Americans may
simply consider these immigrants “black” without reflecting much about the way
the person from Brazil might self-identify. Discrimination could ensue. If the
immigrants deny their African heritage by claiming “whiteness”, then American
blacks may be off-put or upset.
Ethnicity and the

Economy
Your ethnicity may
guide (not determine!)
your career choices.
Students on multi-ethnic
campuses can see this
process unfolding across
the university campus.
Certain ethnicities are
easier to find in
engineering and
business buildings.
Other ethnicities are
particularly rare in 8-6: A graphic from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Note the significant differences in
majors like occupation by gender and ethnicity.
http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20110914.htm
Anthropology or
95
Agriculture. Gender biases are perhaps even stronger (see graphic xxxx, chapter
xxxx). Students chose majors in part because of the values placed on certain career
paths by their family and/or community. These biases play out in a number of areas
in the economy.
Some of these difference come from what varying ethnicities value. Some groups
seem to value most careers that are high-paying. Other groups seem to value
prestigious occupations. Still others value occupations that have intrinsic rewards
or those with specific fringe benefits, like ample vacation time, or good health care
packages. Some folks just hate to have a boss.
About 13% of white males are self-employed. Black males are about half as likely
to be self-employed. Men from Israel or Korea are about mostly like to be self-
employed at around 30%. Immigrants come to America sometimes pre-equipped
with specific skills – especially if they are coming a great distance. Because it can
be expensive to get into the US, groups including Koreans and Israelis often have
some business experience prior to arriving in the US. Other migrant groups,
especially those from nearby countries like Mexico or Honduras, generally have a
shorter, less costly journey into the American economy, allowing them to arrive in
the US with a less fully developed set of business skills. Again, proximity –
location factors into a robust understanding of why things are the way they are.
Other elements of occupational choice are a bit more mundane. You may get a job
in a field because some relative helped you get started. Particularly in big cities,
where employment niches get a chance to fully develop, you’ll find specific job
categories or business dominated by a single ethnicity. A great example is the
motel or hospitality industry where South Asian-Americans run about half of all
motels. Interestingly, most of these South Asians are Gujuratis, a linguistic ethnic
group mostly from India, but also from Pakistan. Even a last name dominates –
lending itself to the catch phrase used to describe these establishments: the “Patel
Motel.” It appears that a single Gujurati man who opened a sort of youth hostel in
the US during the 1940s, may have started a snowballing process. He was able to
demonstrate that a farmer from India could succeed in this particular industry,
inspiring others. Many of the others that tried, and succeeded in running a motel,
invited friends and relatives to work for them; and naturally after a few years those
employees ventured out and started running a motel for themselves. This particular
industry has built in advantages for impoverished immigrants seeking a better life
for their family – including built-in “day care” and housing; do-it-yourself attitude
and a willingness to sacrifice greatly for long-term success.
Other sectors of the economy may have a less random origin. For example,
Koreans own almost all stores that sell hair-care products for African-Americans. It
is somewhat bizarre reality, but it can be traced largely to a few international trade
policies adopted by the US and South Korea decades ago that made Korean wig
manufacturers and distributors more competitive than those from other countries.
They came to dominate the industry, and the web of familial and linguistic ties (and
96
barriers) has made it difficult to non-Koreans (including African-Americans) to

break into a business that largely caters to African-Americans.
Ethnic Regions
If you zoom out from the scale of the city, you will see ethnicity articulated on the
landscape, sometimes over vast distances. In the United States, there are a handful
of regions that are heavily influenced by a single ethnicity, but barriers to entry to
any of these places is uncomplicated; and most Americans don’t really care too
much about it. The US constitution does a reasonably good job of protecting the
rights of minorities of all stripes. In other parts of the world, regional and ethnic
differences can be explosively dangerous.
Three main ethnic regions dominate the United States. Around a dozen small
ethnic regions, known sometimes as ethnic islands, occupy areas as small as a
county. The map in figure xxxx shows that the largest ethnic region, in light blue is
German-American. It’s hard to discern what would make such a vast region
“ethnic” because so much of it conforms to, or possibly creates, the culture of the
host country. Clearly some areas are more culturally Germanic than other locations
within the vast swath of counties that are predominantly German-American. For
example, people in Wisconsin may drink more beer, eat more knackwurst and
sauerkraut, and celebrate Oktoberfest more heartily than people in Southern Oregon
97
– but for the most part, German-America is difficult to characterize as distinct from
the Mid-South which appears on the map as “American-American”.
The other large ethnic regions are the Mexican

Borderlands and the so-called “Black Belt” in
the Deep South. These latter two regions are
distinguished by cultural traditions that are more
recognizably distinct from the mainstream.
Foodways, musical traditions, holiday
celebrations and a host of other cultural practices
mark these two regions as culturally unique. In
the Southern Black Belt, you might eat a soul
food supper with collard greens, black-eyed peas
and chitterlings (chitlins) with sweet potato pie at
a Juneteenth celebration. In the Mexican
Borderlands, you might eat gorditas, pozole and tamales with churros for dessert at
a Día de Muertos party. You might not as well – those characterizations are
stereotypical – but either scenario would be very atypical in Iowa or Vermont.
There are a number of much smaller ethnic islands. They are too numerous for an
introductory textbook, but so interesting that at least a few deserve some attention in
hopes that students will be interested in visiting or learning more. Italian-
Americans are the dominant group in many areas in the Northeast. The Irish live in
many of the same locations as the
Italian-Americans. Norwegian-
Americans, as well as other descendants
of Scandinavian ancestors form a
number of ethnic islands in Minnesota
and the Dakotas. Cajuns, descendants of
French-Canadians migrants dominate
regions of swampy southern Louisiana.
People who claim Spanish ancestors are
numerous in much of northern New
Mexico.
Process
The processes that create ghettos, ethnic islands and ethnic regions are varied.
Much of it is mundane or ordinary. Other causal factors are more interesting and a
few are downright ugly. There is an element of accident to a number of migration
stories – and accidental or random processes should not be discounted. It’s not
unusual to hear a story about why some great-great-grandfather moved to a certain
location be a simple as “my car (wagon) broke down here” or “I only had enough
money to get this far”. Chaos theory and stochastic processes help social scientists
explain and/or predict a number of social and cultural phenomena. Less random
processes were at work as well.
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Environment and Ethnicity

Many of the locations that are attractive to migrants are those that remind them of
their homelands. It makes some sense that Scandinavians found Minnesota to their
liking. The Spanish found a familiar Mediterranean climate in Southern California.
Germans may have found the Midwest similar enough to the North European plain.
When cultures are well suited to thrive in a new environment, they enjoy some
measure of cultural preadaptation. For example, Dutch people from Holland,
having generations of experience with draining the Zuiderzee using an elaborate
system of drainage ditches, windmills and dikes found taming the marshy, tall-grass
prairies scattered across the Midwest of little trouble. Other Europeans settlers
considered these soggy wetlands wastelands. On the flip side, the English were
cultural maladapted to settlement in both the Massachusetts and Virginia colonies
– occasionally resulting in catastrophic failure. They had to learn new strategies for
survival in the extreme climates of the North America, where heavy forests and
unusual soils posed considerable challenges. Mormon migrants to the Great Basin
8-7: Preadaptation and in Utah were forced likewise to quickly adapt to different climate conditions from
European Colonization in those they were accustomed back East. It’s really very surprising that the Cajuns
Rural North America. Terry
G. Jordan managed to survive in the swamps of Louisiana at all.
Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, Vol. 79,
No. 4 (Dec., 1989), pp. 489- Doctrine of First Effective Settlement (Zelinsky 73, and Kniffen 65) xxxx
500
Enforced Ethnic Regions
Smaller ethnic regions, ghettos, enclaves and islands, have frequently been
engineered to purposefully isolate specific groups. North American Indians were
forcibly removed from their lands, eventually restricted to small parcels called
reservations – sometimes near ancestral lands of the tribe. Occasionally, Indians
were relocated to reservations many hundreds of miles from their homes. The
99
8-8: Trail of Tears Map. How different or similar are the topography, climate, flora and fauna of Oklahoma to the homeland areas
from which Indians were removed?
famous “trail of tears” was a product of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which led
to the relocation of some 46,000 Native Americans to Oklahoma from various
locations in the American Southeast. Dozens of similar evictions characterized the
settlement of the American West.
Following the Civil War, a wide variety of

strategies, aimed at limiting the geographic
distribution of African Americans evolved in the
United States. Early on, very simple legal
measures were enacted that restricted African
Americans to certain locations, especially in the
Jim Crow South. Such laws were found
unconstitutional in 1917 in Buchanan v Warley.
More sophisticated measures were soon invented.
Restrictive or exclusionary covenants were
written into the deed of sale for many homes sold 8-9: A homeowner's deed containing restrictive
in the 20th century. These legal documents and exclusionary convenants, sold in Ohio for
housing in Florida.
required owners to do things like not build
garages, erect fences or porches – and not sell the
house to undesirable ethnicities. Black folks were frequently the target of this
discrimination, but Jews, Catholics, Asian and other ethnic groups also found
themselves victims of legalized housing discrimination – depending on the
peculiarities of local bigotry. For example, it was once illegal to sell or rent
property to Jewish people in Beverly Hills.
After 1948, when the Supreme Court found laws enforcing ethnic housing
discrimination unconstitutional, other means to keep specific groups segregated
from each other evolved. Realtors, fearing a loss of profits through the degradation
of home values, sometimes would simply refuse to show/sell minorities houses in
specific neighborhoods. Other practices might involve making it harder or more
expensive for specific ethnicities to buy or rent in certain neighborhoods. Banks
and other lenders also practiced mortgage
discrimination, which could effectively keep
ethnic homebuyers out of selected
neighborhoods by denying loans, or making
them irrationally expensive. There is evidence
that this last practice continues to some degree
today. Another related practice, redlining, is
discussed in chapter xxxx.
One of the most controversial practices, known

as blockbusting was used to some effect, 8-10: This sign was erected in 1942 near a proposed
housing project in Detroit. Rioting followed. Note the
especially in cities in the Industrial Midwest. use of the American flag, during World War II.
The practice worked like this: realtors would Eventually the national guard arrived to protect the black
residents.
try to convince white home owners that once a
black person had moved into a neighborhood,
100
the value of housing would fall. If they could scare the white owners enough, they
would buy the property, at below market value¸ and seek to sell it to a black owner
at above market value. Real estate speculators, land developers and lenders all
made substantial profits from the scam, white and black both lost money – while
reinforcing residential segregation largely through white flight. The Fair Housing
act of 1968 outlawed the practice.
More benign, perhaps subconscious, actions also likely create and maintain ethnic
neighborhoods. One realtor behavior called steering may be widespread still today.
Steering happens when a realtors, in an attempt to sell a prospective buyer a house,
8-11: Good Times was a television show focuses the buyers attention on houses in neighborhoods predominated by persons
that helped viewers understand some of of the prospective buyers ethnicity. Whether this is always a purposeful,
the issues of life in public housing projects.
It also reinforced many negative discriminatory act, or simply a logic geared to help find people homes in
stereotypes about African Americans. It neighborhoods where they “feel at home” is less clear.
was implicit that the TV family lived in
Cabrini-Green, Chicago's most infamous
project. Watch an episode: Even some of the actions taken by national and local governments seem to have
http://youtu.be/6OTwW2_8Bao
contributed to ghettoization of minority groups. There is some debate about the
intentionality of the government, and the overall-long term effect of American
public housing efforts, but public housing projects appears to have, at the very least,
contributed to the maintenance of ethnically segregated neighborhoods in many
cities where they were built. They certainly became for many years icons of black
ghettoization in the United States.
8-12: Housing Projects in St. Louis (left) and Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes in the mid-1990s. These well-intentioned public housing efforts concentrated poor minorities in
small areas of the city. Crime and other social dysfunction was common. Later programs replaced large scale housing projects and have relieved some of the segregation.
Jedi Googles - Reading Ethnicity on the Landscape

Ethnicity is heavily inscribed onto the landscape. It appears in many forms and
helps us better understand each other. Landscape also can be misleading as well,
helping undermine enlightened understandings, while helping create or maintain
faulty stereotypes about the other.
101
One of the prime sources of simplified ideas about ethnicities are found in touristic
landscapes, like ethnic-themed destinations (Chinatown), “wild west” themed
locations and ordinary tourist traps.
Ethnic islands, or enclaves dominated by a specific

ethnicity often try to attract visitors by theming their
location as a tourist destination. Many cities’
Chinatowns have done so successfully over the
years, turning degraded slum areas into attractive
spots for tourists to spend cash. Much of the
architectural motifs in Chinatowns are exaggerated
to conform to touristic expectations about what
Chinatown should look like, even if one would be
challenged to find actual examples of such
architecture in China itself. Local residents
(Chinese-Americans) have every right to cash in on
the erroneous beliefs held by Americans, but it can
also be argued that places like Chinatown may
reinforce negative stereotypes. On the other hand, if
such destinations did not build upon silly notions about what Chinatown should
look like, then others might not visit at all, perhaps foregoing any opportunity for
outsiders to learn about Chinese Americans or Chinese culture.
More dubious tourist attractions have been built, playing upon the ethnic heritage of
many dozens of towns and regions. Some claims to authenticity are more dubious
than others. The towns of Kingsburg (Swedish) and Solvang (Danish) California
both attempt to leverage muddled Scandinavian imagery to attract visitors. For
example, both make ample use of windmills on the landscape, assured that few
Americans are aware that the Dutch (Netherlands) are the ones who are most
famous for them. Still visitors crowd the streets, particularly of Solvang, happy to
be strolling along buying sweets in a miniature fantasy land.
Perhaps the most unfortunate representations of ethnicity in the US seem to involve

Native Americans. Indian imagery is used to sell everything from trinkets at
roadside stands to motel rooms to slot machines. Surely no other ethnic group is so
consistently misused a tool for touristic
commerce. This long standing trend may
help explain why Indians remain the only
ethnic group so consistently used (and
8-13: Buffalo Bill was a late 18th century
misused) as mascots for sporting teams.
entertainer whose popular "Wild West" show
helped to greatly simplify American knowledge of Part of the reason Indian imagery is so
Indian culture. Hollywood adopted the imagery
which is preserved to this day, despite its compelling is that it is hopelessly tied to 8-14: This sign welcomes visitors to a national park. Is this
inaccuracies. Click to enlarge. an appropriate representation of Native Americans? Why
our collective ideas about frontier times on would this imagery be linked to a park known for large trees?
the American West. Most people have Would the imagery of any other ethnic group be used in such
a manner?
little idea of the staggering diversity of
102
languages and cultural practices among the hundreds of Indian nations, tribes and
bands that continue to exist in the United States. Instead most Americans, at least
casually, think of Indians as a monolithic ethnicity – noble, but war-like, silent,
primitive and respectful of nature. Most of the time, Indian imagery is derived from
a few tribal practices common only among plains Indians and heavily modified by
Hollywood.
Tipis (or TeePees) a folk housing tent-house favored by nomadic tribes, such as the
Lakota, Sioux and Blackfoot, can be found representing Indians from California to
Maine to Florida, though there is ample evidence that tipis were little used outside
the Central Plains. Indian headdresses, scalping, bows and arrows, horseback riding
8-15: Touristy tipis. Clockwise from upper left - Upstate New York, San Bernardino, California; Moab, Utah and Holbrook, Arizona. None of these locations were likely to have
had Indians that used this sort of housing. Why are people drawn to this imagery? How does it maintain stereotypes about Native Americans?
and other elements of the Hollywood stereotype of Indians can be found readily on
the landscape in diverse – spatially inappropriate locations.
Mapping Ethnicity – Patterns of Land Settlement and Division

Blkjafsd
Black Ghetto Typology

Ford and Griffin (1979)
103
Early Southern, Classic Southern
Early Northern, Classic Northern
New City
104
CHAPTER 9 WELCOME TO THE

JUNGLE-URBAN GEOGRAPHY
Heading 2
Redlining
Reverse Redlining
Heading 3
HEADING 4
Body text I’m not sure what’s going on here. It’s block formation and
xx
dscape, GIS, etc.
105
8
Chapter
CHAPTER 10 ECONOMICS

TITLE
Heading 2
Heading 3
HEADING 4
same chapter.
Starbucks in San Francisco: http://coolmaps.esri.com/Starbucks/
106
9
Chapter
CHAPTER 12 URBANIZATION
What you eat and why you eat it has a lot to do with where you live. This
chapter explores how American diets are shaped by the contest between culture
and the economics of contemporary agribusiness.

TITLE
Heading 2
Heading 3
HEADING 4
Tweet Map: http://www.mapbox.com/labs/twitter-gnip/brands/#5/36.897/-102.437
107
Chapter
10
CHAPTER 14 HEALTH AND DISEASE

TITLE
Heading 2
Heading 3
HEADING 4
same chapter.
108
Chapter
11
CHAPTER 16 CRIME AND
PUNISHMENT

TITLE
Heading 2
Heading 3
HEADING 4
xx
dscape, GIS, etc.
109
Chapter
12
CHAPTER 18 GENDER

TITLE
Heading 2
Heading 3
HEADING 4
same chapter.
110
Chapter
13
CHAPTER 20 ENVIRONMENT AND
NATURE

TITLE
Heading 2
Heading 3
HEADING 4
xx
111
BOOK FORMATTING
HEADING ONE
CHAPTER 22 FORMATTING TIPS

The “picture” icons are Wingdings typeface symbols formatted in white with a
shaded background. To insert a new symbol, select the character and then click
Symbol from the Insert menu. Select a new symbol, click Insert, and then click
Close. To create new icons, format a one-character paragraph as the Icon 1 style.
To change the shading of the Icon 1 style, click Borders and Shading on the
Format menu. Select a new shade or color, and then click OK.
CHAPTER 23 SECTION BREAKS ARE

KEY
In this manual, section breaks are the secret to success. Double-click the section
Using the Break
break above to activate the Page Setup menu. Click the
command, you can insert a Margins tab. As you can see, this section (page) has margins
page, column, or section of 1.25 inches top and bottom, 2.33 left, and .83 right—with
break.
headers and footers of .67 inches. Special section margins
make it possible for this manual to use framed Styles—such as the Icon 1 style—
which will move with the text.
• Breaks in a Word document appear as “labeled,” dotted double-lines.
• To insert a section break, click Break on the Insert menu. Select one
option, and then click OK.
CHAPTER 24 ABOUT PICTURES AND

CAPTIONS
Assuming that you see your paragraph marks, you’ll notice a paragraph mark
attached to the lower-right corner of the picture. Click the picture, and notice too,
the name of the style—not surprisingly, the Picture style. Pictures attached to
paragraph styles make it possible for pictures to act like paragraphs.
112
FIGURE 21.1 uses this caption text. In Word, the Caption style can be automatically numbered and labeled. Click Caption on
the Insert menu to access and control the caption settings, Press the F1 key to search for additional information and Help on
captions.
This is Heading 5. To change the picture, first click it to select it. Point to
Like all styles in Picture on the Insert menu, and then click From File. Clear
this margin, it can the Float over Text check box. Select a new picture, and then
flow with the text. click Insert. To change the color of the picture, double-click
the graphic to activate the drawing layer—where you can
group or ungroup picture objects, and re-color or delete objects. Click an object, and
then click Drawing Object on the Format menu. Select a new shade, and then
click Close. To delete an object, select it, and then press DELETE. Click Close
Picture.
To crop the picture, click the picture. Hold the SHIFT key down and re-size the
picture by moving the picture “handles” with your mouse.
Try this: Click in the framed text below, and choose Body Text from the Style list
on the Formatting toolbar. The headline should now appear as the paragraph below
this paragraph. To change the paragraph back to Heading 5, click the Undo toolbar
button, or click Heading 5 from the Style list.
Framed text, like To cut and paste framed text, click on the bounding border of
this heading, can the frame to reveal the frame handles. Press CTRL+X to cut
be cut, copied and the frame from the page. Place your cursor before the first
pasted like regular letter of the paragraph that you want the frame to appear next
paragraph text. to. Press CTRL+V to paste the frame next to the paragraph.
How to Generate a Table of Contents

To create a Table of Contents, click where you want to insert the Table of Contents.
On the Insert menu, click Reference, and then click Index and Tables. Click the
Table of Contents tab. Select any formatting preferences, and then click OK. The
Table of Contents will be automatically created with words contained in Headings 1
through 3.
Note
113
The TOC is generated from text formatted with Heading styles used
throughout the document.

How to Create an Index
To create index entries for the Word automatic indexing feature,
select the text to be indexed, point to Reference on the Insert
menu, and then click Index and Tables. Click the Index tab. (For
more information, click Microsoft Word Help on the Help
menu, type index into the question space, and then click the Search button. Finally,
select the “Create an Index” Help topic.)
CHAPTER 25 HOW TO CHANGE THE

HEADERS AND FOOTERS
Written exercise In print layout view, double-click the header or footer to
pages 121 - 123 in your activate it, or click Header and Footer on the View menu.
workbook.
You can change or delete the text just as you would regular
document text. To specify placement and whether the header or footer should be
different on odd and even pages, or different for the first page only, click Page
Setup on the File menu, and then click the Layout tab.
CHAPTER 26 HOW TO CREATE A

NUMBERED PARAGRAPH
To create a numbered paragraph:
1. In the Font list on the Formatting toolbar, click the List Number style;
or
2. Click the Numbering button on the Formatting toolbar.
If you choose to format more than one paragraph, Word will automatically number
the paragraphs.
CHAPTER 27 HOW TO SAVE TIME IN

THE FUTURE
When you save the manual template with your changes, it will be easier to create
documents in the future. To customize this manual:
114
1. Insert your company information in place of the
To link a picture to sample text on the cover page, as well as the inside-cover
your template, link the
picture when you insert it by
page. If you plan to use styles such as the “Icon Key” or
clicking on the Link to File Icon 1 style, set them now (see instructions, page 1).
box.
2. Click Save As on the File menu. In the dialog box, click Document
Template in the Save File as Type box. (The file name extension should
change from .doc to .dot.)
How to Create a Document

To create a manual from your newly saved template, click New on the File menu to
re-open your template as a document. If you followed the steps above, your
company information should appear in place. Now, you are ready to type your
manual.
CHAPTER 28 MORE TEMPLATE TIPS

There are three ways to view the various style names of the template sample text:

1. In normal view, click Options on the Tools menu.
Click the View tab. In the Style Area Width box, dial a
number, and then click OK;
2. In any view, click a paragraph and view the style name

on the Formatting toolbar; or
3. On the Format menu, click Styles and Formatting to display the Styles
and Formatting pane.
115
CHAPTER 29 INDEX
accent, 8 link, 54
adherents, 22 margins, 51
background, 51 mentifact, 9
border, 52 monotheistic., 23
bullet, 2 Mormons (LDS), 33
caption, 52 mutual intelligibility, 8
color, 52 number, 53
creole languages, 9 orthography, 11
cults, 24 pantheistic, 23
culture, 3 picture, 51, 52, 54
denominations, 24 pidgin language, 8
dialect, 8 proto-language, 10
drawing, 52 re-size, 52
footer, 53 section break, 51
frame, 52 secularization, 30
graphic, 52 shading, 51
group, 52 style, 51, 52, 54
header, 53 symbol, 2, 51
help, 53 Table of Contents, 52
idea of culture, 3 template, 54
Islam, 34 Toponyms, 18
language, 8 ungroup, 52
linguistic isolates, 13 Wingdings, 51
linguistics, 8
116

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Human

Introduction to Human Geography:

Lastly, we hope to introduce students to a series of hands on exercises that students

GEOGRAPHY IS NOT WHAT

Geography – So Boring. How did it get this way?

Today, geography is a very vibrant discipline offering to the uninitiated a surprising

Geography as Discipline – Key Aspects of the Geodi Way

Geography is a Way to See the World – Jedi Googles

The first steps you must take

Geography is a Way to Ask Questions – Geodi Mind Tricks

Geography is a Way to Solve Problems – Light Sabers

disciplines. Once again though, geography has a separate set of spatially-aware

Geography is a Way to Communicate – Jedi Language

Cartography is the specialized language of geography. The ability to communicate

How this book is arranged xxxx

What does it look like?

Why is it here or there?

How does it fit in?

The process of diffusion is a prime example of how

It took some years for people outside the Bronx to

Process and Pattern

Data that shows a clustered pattern is almost always interesting to geographers.

Oftentimes “eyeballing” the pattern of points on a map is not sufficient to detect a

Lots of things cluster together and we’ll examine several

Clustering can also be observed on a choropleth map, when

Occasionally, this indicates a causal relationship – and seeking causal relationship

Chapter End Matter

CHAPTER 2 CULTURE NOW AND

Does Culture Exist?

maybe some native Alaskan

Folk culture represents a long-standing fascination among geographers. Part of the

INSERT FOLK REGIONS MAP

Yankee subculture tapers off by the time it

There are several variations on a single floor

The folk housing of the Midlands

The I house, is on the other hand

South, though by no means is this region

The folk housing the Upland South were

The simplest Upland South house is the

If the settler built a

Sometimes, the owner of a single pen

Folk housing in the Deep South,

The most common folk house of the

Folk Music to Popular Music

Perhaps the oldest known American folk music, brought

In almost all folk environments, lightweight, homemade instruments or a capella

American music has nearly always been a product the

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4syA9aNnNa0 – Bill Monroe

Presley was a particular musical genius,

Seattle’s Grunge Rock – Isolation Effects

CHAPTER 3 AGRICULTURE AND

Figure 3-1: Percentage of

Why do we eat this stuff?

Ultimately, American foodways are largely European where a large percentage of

Corn – America’s Pride and Shame.

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF SWEET

Fast food map Los Angeles.

Geography of Barbecue (BBQ)

Corn and Wheat Belts