Material and Non-Material Culture

• Culture includes knowledge, language, values, customs, and material objects.
• These are passed down from person to person and generation to generation within a human group.

Material Culture

• Includes physical or tangible creations like clothing, shelter, and art.
• These are made, used, and shared by members of society.

Nonmaterial Culture

• Includes the ideas, attitudes, and beliefs of a society.
• Consists of abstract human creations like attitudes, beliefs, and values that influence behavior.
• Cultural lag is a gap between a society's technical development and its moral/legal institutions.

Cultural Universals

• Patterns or traits are globally common to all societies.
• A family unit is an example; every society recognizes a family structure that regulates sexual reproduction and the care of children.
• They often revolve around basic human survival or shared experiences.
• Examples are birth, death, illness and healing; language, personal names, and jokes are also universals.

Cultural Reproduction

• Humans reproduce biologically and socially; physical reproduction occurs through having children.
• Culture is learned behavior that must be taught for culture to reproduce itself.
• Humans learn through observation and practice; mimicry drives cultural diffusion.
• People copy things they like, incorporating successful adaptations.
• Shared culture has changed due to changes in the channels through which it is shared.
• Culture was shared orally and in person, then written, then electronic; we now have access from anywhere at any time.

Culture Hearths

• Human beings have always shown learned behaviors i.e. they learn by observation
• Cultural evolution describes the increasing complexity of human societies over time.
• The earliest cultures were simple. People lived in small groups, ranged across large areas, and lived off the natural landscape.
• All cultural elements have a place of origin
• Culture hearths provided cultural elements that diffused to other places later.
• Culture hearths provide operational scripts for societies and are associated with domesticated foods.
• Although maps show areas of ancient civilization, any place can generate new ideas.

The Cultural Landscape

• Cultures rely on natural resources.
• Those resources tend to be local for rural cultures, or brought from great distances for urban cultures.
• Cultures influence landscapes and vice versa.
• Physical landscapes are formed over thousands/millions of years; humans adapt their lifestyles to them.
• Human-environment interaction involves the relationship between people, their culture, and the physical landscape
• Cultural ecology refers to the types of landscapes created by the interaction of people and their physical environment.
• Environmental determinism is the idea that a particular landscape necessarily produces a certain kind of people, but this is a simplistic and reductionist idea.
• Technology, not behavior, is the key factor i.e. technology renders physical conditions less impactful on cultural behaviors
• Possibilism, is a good term to use as landscapes set limits on a group of people that may or may not require a large adaptation, or a large modification of the environment itself.
• Humans can now survive in very inhospitable environments.

Landscapes are Cultural Byproducts

• How local resources are used generates the visible landscape.
• Architecture, economic activities, clothing, and entertainment are all visible to anyone interested in looking at a place.
• The cultural landscape is variable because physical and cultural landscapes vary across space.
• Different people can have different adaptations to similar places and vice versa.
• Cultural landscapes reflect history and narrative; power is written into the landscape.
• The landscape acts as a record of history, power, representation, and can be read like a book.
• Largest landscape differences are between rural and industrial areas.
• They also contrast places less/more integrated with the world with globalized places becoming homogenized.

Cultural Change

• Adaptation and change occur as people move into new places
• Places are changed and people change over time
• Circumstances change depending on location
• Divergence could be as simple as borrowing a term to describe something new/invented
• Culture Regions are mental constructs whose lines are imaginary i.e. English-speaking world/Latin America.

The Changing Cultural Landscape

• Folk culture has been declining in the face of popular culture.
• Politics have led to nationalistic policies that put hardship on minorities
• Growth of a state-sanctioned national culture is beginning of popular culture
• Economics has caused small rural communities the shrink globally since the Industrial Revolution.
• Spatial confinement of a folk culture does not make reproducing it easy.
• Migration into popular culture induces assimilation and acculturation
• Changes in infrastructure have aided the diffusion of pop culture.
• Technology i.e. the internet has made popular culture diffuse fast by reducing friction of distance
• Migration has resulted in cultural interchange i.e. the USA.

Popular Culture

• Popular culture is culture that is bought.
• Driven by marketing & industries that convince shoppers that needs are best met through sales.
• Without sales, the companies that produce pop culture will go bankrupt.
• Popular culture industries must continuously reinvent themselves i.e. fashion drives constant sales for new or old consumer staples.
• Constant reinvention is necessary to convince consumers and stave off feelings of social disadavantge.

The Interface Between the Local and the Global

• The basis of pop culture is commerce.
• Commodification transforms a cultural attribute into a mass-market product, regardless of resembling the original or representing authenticity.
• Companies change depending on cost-effectiveness and profit-margins, even incorporating global products into the local market.