Introduction to

Geography
Arthur Getis, Judith Getis, &
Jerome D. Fellmann
Cultural Geography
Chapter 7
Overview
 Components of Culture
 Interaction of People and Environment
 Subsystems of Culture
 Culture Change
 Cultural Diversity
 Language
 Religion
 Ethnicity
 Gender and Culture
 Other Aspects of Diversity
Components of Culture
 Culture is learned, not biological
 Through imitation, instruction, example

 Culture is not homogenous

Components of Culture
Spatial Hierarchy of Cultural Geography
 Culture trait
 Single distinguishing feature of a culture
 Culture complex
 Group of culture traits that are functionally interrelated
 Culture system
 Collection of interacting cultural traits and cultural
complexes that are shared by a group within a
particular territory
Components of Culture
Spatial Hierarchy of Cultural Geography
 Culture region
 Portion of the earth’s surface occupied by people
sharing recognizable and distinctive cultural
characteristics
 Culture realm
 Collective of culture regions sharing related culture
complexes and landscapes
Interaction of People and
Environment
 Cultural ecology
 Study of the relationship between a culture group and
the natural environment it occupies
 Environments as controls
 Environmental determinism
 Peaked in popularity in late 19th - early 20th Centuries

 Taught that physical environment, in particular

climate, determined which cultures would become the
most advanced and economically developed
 However, cultural variations that occur around the
world are not determined by a society’s physical
surroundings
Interaction of People and
Environment
 Environments as controls (continued)
 Possibilism
 People, not environments, are the dynamic forces of
cultural development
 Physical environment offers a set of opportunities
and limitations
 Human impacts on environment
 Cultural landscape
 The earth’s surface as modified by human action

 Tangible physical record of a given culture

 Relationship exists between technological

advancement and impact on the environment
Three Subsystems of Culture
 Technological subsystem
 Material objects and techniques people use to carry out
their productive activities
 Cultural divergence
 Cultural convergence
 Technologically advanced countries
 Many people employed in manufacturing or services

 High per capita incomes, levels of education,

nutrition, life expectancies, medical services
 Economic and political power
Three Subsystems of Culture
 Technological subsystem (continued)
 Technologically less-advanced countries
 High percentage of people engaged in farming

 Lower GNI and per capita incomes, life

expectancies, literacy rates
 Labels
 Advanced-less advanced

 Developed-underdeveloped

 Industrial-nonindustrial

 The North-The South

 Can be misinterpreted to mean “superior-inferior”

Three Subsystems of Culture
 Sociological subsystem
 Common patterns of interpersonal relations, behaviors
and interactions
 Regulate how the individual functions relative to the
group, whether it be family, church or state
 Includes religious, political, educational and other
social institutions
 Social institutions are closely related to the
technological subsystem
Three Subsystems of Culture
 Ideological subsystem
 Ideas, beliefs, knowledge and means of their
communication
 Passed from one generation to the next
 Changes in ideological subsystem may affect
sociological and technological subsystems

 Cultural integration
 Interlocking nature of all aspects of culture
 Means that any cultural object or act may have a
number of meanings
Culture Change
 Cultures are always in a state of flux
 Change within cultures is induced by:
 Innovation
 Spatial diffusion
 Acculturation
Culture Change: Innovation
 Change results from ideas created within the
social group and adopted by it
 Premodern and traditional societies typically
are slower to innovate and accept change
 Cultural lag
 Agricultural Revolution
 Occurred independently in several areas
 Affected every aspect of society
Culture Change: Innovation
 Culture hearth
 Area of innovation from which key culture elements
diffused to exert an influence on surrounding regions
 Only a few produced the trappings of civilization
 Innovation is common in modern societies
Culture Change:
Spatial Diffusion
 Process by which a concept, a practice, an
innovation or a substance spreads from its point
of origin to new territories

 Two processes are involved

 People move to a new area and take culture with them
 Or information about an innovation can spread

 Parallel innovation
Culture Change:
Spatial Diffusion
 Barriers to diffusion - Receiver culture may
selectively adopt some goods or ideas and reject
others

 Syncretism is a major feature of culture change

 Fusion of old and new culture elements
Culture Change: Acculturation
 Process by which one culture group undergoes
major modification by adopting many
characteristics of another, usually dominant,
culture group
 May involve changes in the original cultural patterns
or either or both of the two groups involved
 May occur in a conquered or colonized region
 May occur when a population relocates
Culture Change: Acculturation
 Amalgamation theory
 Multiethnic societies become a merger of the culture
traits of their member groups
 “Melting pot”
 “Salad bowl” or “lumpy stew”

 Assimilation
 Completion of integration process
 Does not necessarily mean that consciousness of
original identity is reduced or lost
 Competition theory
Cultural Diversity
 Prominent differentiating culture traits of
societies and regions
 Language
 Religion
 Ethnicity
 Gender
Language
 Organized system of speech by which people
communicate with each other with mutual
comprehension

 Most important medium by which culture is

transmitted

 Nearly 7000 different languages are spoken in

the world
 Many languages are disappearing
Language
 Language (linguistic) family
 Group of languages thought to have descended from
a common ancestral tongue (proto-Indo-European)
 E.g., Indo-European languages
 Spoken by about ½ the world’s peoples

 Subfamilies exist within language family

 E.g., the Romance languages and the Germanic
languages
Language:
Language Spread and Change
 Language spreads through dispersion of
speakers or acquisition of new speakers

 Language spread may, through segregation

and isolation, give rise to mutually unintelligible
tongues

 Language evolution may be gradual and

cumulative or it may be massive and abrupt
Language:
Language Spread and Change
 Evolution and spread of English
 Within ≈400 years developed from localized language
of 7 million islanders to international language
 English today
 ≈ 400 million native speakers
 ≈ 600 million use it as a second language
 Millions more have some competence in English as a
foreign language
 Official language of 60 countries
 Dominant language facilitating increased global
interaction
Language: Standard and
Variant Languages
 A speech community usually possesses both a
standard language and a number of dialects
 Standard language
 Comprises accepted community norms of syntax,
vocabulary, pronunciation
 Dialect
 Ordinary speech of areal, social, professional or other
subdivisions of the general population
 Most dialects exhibit spatial patterns

 Linguistic geography
 Study of the character and spatial pattern of geographic,
or regional, dialects
Language: Standard and
Variant Languages
 Pidgin
 New auxiliary language which is an amalgam of
languages, usually a simplified form of one of them with
borrowings from another
 Simplified grammatical structure and reduced
vocabulary
 Not the mother tongue of any of its speakers, second
language for all its users
 Generally used for commerce, administration or work
supervision
 If a pidgin becomes the first language of a group of
speakers, a creole has evolved
Language: Standard and
Variant Languages
 Creole
 Native tongue developed from a pidgin
 Acquires more complex grammatical structure and
enhanced vocabulary
 E.g., Swahili, Afrikaans, Haitian Creole and Bazaar
Malay

 Lingua franca
 Established language used habitually for
communication by people whose native tongues are
mutually incomprehensible
 It is a second language for its users
Language:
Language and Culture
 Language embodies the culture complex of a
people, reflecting both environment and
technology

 Linguistic differences between the sexes

 A common language fosters unity among people

 Bilingualism or multilingualism complicates

national linguistic structure
Language:
Language and Culture
 Toponyms
 Place-names (language on the land)
 Record of past and present cultures

 Toponymy
 Study of place-names
 Revealing tool of cultural geography
Religion
 Cultural innovation

 Value system that involves formal or informal

worship and faith in the sacred and divine
 Joins adherents into a single moral community

 May intimately affect all facets of a culture

 Varies in its cultural role – dominating in some

societies, unimportant or even repressed in others
Religion:
Classification of Religions
 Monotheism/Polytheism

 Universalizing religions
 Claim applicability to all persons and seek conversion
 Christianity, Islam, Buddhism

 Ethnic religions
 Identified with a particular ethnic group
 Judaism, Hinduism, Shinto
Religion:
Classification of Religions
 Tribal (traditional) religions
 Ethnic religions specific to small, preindustrial
cultures having close ties to nature
 Animism
 Shamanism

 Secularism
 Indifference to or rejection of religion and religious
belief
 An increasing part of many modern societies
Religion:
Principal Religions
 Judaism
 Monotheism laid foundation for Christianity and Islam
 Emerged 3000-3500 years ago in the Near East
 Ethnic religion, determining factors of which are
descent from Israel, the Torah, Jewish traditions
 Diaspora
 State of Israel was a fulfillment of Zionism
Religion:
Principal Religions
 Christianity
 Jesus, a Jewish preacher, is believed to be the
messiah promised by God
 The new covenant he preached was not a rejection of
traditional Judaism but a promise of salvation to all
humankind, rather than to just a chosen people
 Universalizing religion
 Division of Christianity, by dissolution of Roman
Empire, into Western Church and Eastern Church
 Protestant Reformation of 15th and 16th Centuries
 Catholic vs. Protestant cultural landscape
Religion:
Principal Religions
 Islam
 Mohammed revered as the prophet of Allah (God)
 Koran contains rules of worship, details of doctrine and
instructions on the conduct of human affairs
 Observance of “five pillars” and surrender to will of
Allah unites faithful into community that has no concern
with race, color or caste
 Spread quickly outward from source region of Arabia
through Islamic political and military expansion
 Disagreement over succession of leadership after
Mohammed led to division between Sunnis and Shi’ites
 Cultural landscape - mosque
Religion:
Principal Religions
 Hinduism
 Oldest major religion (≈ 4000 or more years old)
 No founding event or initial prophet

 Ethnic religion
 Adherents may believe in one god or many or none
 A Hindu is one born into a caste, a member of a
complex social, economic and religious community
Religion:
Principal Religions
 Sikhism
 Syncretism of Islam and Hinduism
 Rejects formalism of both
 Proclaims gospel of universal tolerance
Religion:
Principal Religions
 Buddhism
 Reform movement of Hinduism
 Universalizing faith
 Founded in 6th century B.C. in northern India
 Moral philosophy taught by Siddhartha Gautama
 Enlightenment and salvation lie in “four noble truths”
 Spread to other parts of Asia
 Today - Various schools of thought
 Cultural landscape
 Stupa
 Temple or pagoda enshrining Buddha image or relic
 Monastery
Religion:
Principal Religions
 East Asian ethnic religions influenced by
Buddhism
 Confucianism
 Taoism
 Japanese Shinto
Ethnicity
 Usually refers to the ancestry of people who
share common characteristics
 Language, religion, national origin, unique customs
 Ethnocentrism
 Feeling that one’s own ethnic group is superior
 Territorial segregation
 Strong and sustaining trait of ethnic identity
 Ethnic enclaves
Gender and Culture
 Socially created distinctions between femininity and
masculinity
 Gender relationships and role assignments differ
among societies
 Influenced by economic development, religion, customs
 General egalitarianism in hunting and gathering cultures

 Agriculture altered the structure of gender roles

 Ideal Victorian woman

 Subordinate role of women changed only in the later

20th century in more-developed countries - Feminist
revolution
Gender and Culture
 Mixed impact of economic globalization on female
participation in the paid labor force
 On worldwide basis, increase in women’s share of paid
employment; however, has not necessarily reduced
gender discrimination
 Distinct gender-specific regionalization has emerged
 Arab or Arab-influenced Muslim areas of western
Asia and North Africa – proportion of female
population that is economically active is low
 Sub-Saharan Africa – highly dependent on female
farm labor and market income
Gender and Culture
 Mixed impact of economic globalization on female
participation in the paid labor force
 Distinct gender-specific regionalization has emerged
(continued)
 Japan – Males nearly exclusively run the huge
industrial and political machinery
 Scandinavian countries – economic and social
equality is more advanced than perhaps any portion
of the industrialized world
Other Aspects of Diversity
 Culture is the sum total of the way of life of a
society
 Economic development levels, language,
religion, ethnicity and gender all are important
and common distinguishing culture traits, but
they only tell a partial story
 Many other elements of culture exist, including:
 Architectural styles
 Music
 Food
 Games
Other Aspects of Diversity
 Spatial interaction, another aspect of culture, is
the subject of chapter eight