The Essence of Culture

• This chapter discusses the roots and meaning of culture.
• It aims to allow students to distinguish the components of culture.
• It will allow people to discuss views about human environmental relations and their impact on culture.
• It teaches the structure of culture.
• It explains the differences between various forms of cultural change.

The Essence of Culture

• Culture encompasses learned behaviors passed down through generations via imitation, instruction, suggestions, and examples.
• Compliance is often rewarded, while non-compliance is censured.
• Culture is not homogenous.

Cultural Transmission

• Culture is transmitted between generations through imitation and instruction.
• People learn culture based on their age, sex, status, and occupation.
• Culture provides a framework of roles and functions.

Defining Culture

• Writers and the popular press define culture as the arts such as literature, paintings, and music.
• Social scientists define culture as specialized behavioral patterns, understandings, adaptations, and social systems summarizing a group's learned way of life.

Visible and Invisible Culture

• Visible aspects of culture include building patterns, farming practices, and political organization.
• Invisible aspects includes ways of earning a living.
• Culture consists of language, beliefs, values, norms, behaviors, and material objects passed down.
• Though specifics vary, all societies develop shared ways of perceiving and participating in the world.

Cultural Variation Importance for Geographers

• Knowledge about cultural differences is important to geographers, because geography focuses on time and space.

Cultural Differences Over Time

• Cultural differences over time may be as vast as those between hunters and modern Americans.

Cultural Differences in Space

• Cultural differences in space result in human landscapes with subtle and obvious variations.
• Variations can be as subtle as the varying feel of Paris, Moscow or Johannesburg.
• Variations can be as obvious as the contrast between rural Zimbabwe and the US Midwest.

Human Geography and Cultural Practices

• Human geography attempts to describe the pattern of cultural practices across the earth.
• It seeks to understand why humans have so many different cultures, even though they are one species.

Subcultures

• Subcultures have distinct cultural patterns within a broader cultural group.
• Individuals are expected to adhere to conventions specific to both the overall culture and their subculture.

Pluralism in Human Geography

• Human Geography recognizes cultural pluralism within regions.
• It seeks to examine the content and influence of sub-cultures.
• Analysis and recording of contested cultural interactions is important.

Culture Traits

• Cultural traits are the smallest distinctive units of culture.
• They are units of learned behavior and elementary expressions of culture.
• Cultural traits are specific elements like customs, beliefs, language, food, or traditions, that are shared by a society’s members.
• Culture traits define and shape a group’s identity.

Range of Cultural Traits

• Cultural traits range from spoken language to tools and games.
• A characteristic (trait) can be an object, technique, or belief.

Interrelated Traits

• Cultural traits are interrelated and functionally connected.
• Culture complex and systems are examples of this.

Culture Complex Example of the Masai

• Cattle are an interrelated complex example for the Masai society.

Interrelated traits Culture Complex

• Cars in U.S. society are a culture complex.

Culture System

• A culture system refers to interacting cultural traits and complexes shared by a group in a territory.

Cultural Region

• A cultural region is a portion of Earth's surface occupied by populations sharing recognizable cultural characteristics.

Cultural Realm

• A cultural realm is a set of cultural regions at the broadest scale.

Cultural Ecology

• Cultural ecology explores the relationship between a cultural group and its natural environment.

Environmental Determinism

• Environmental determinism is the belief that the physical environment exclusively shapes humans and their cultures.
• This view does not explain the global level cultural variation

Environmental Factors and Cultural Variation

• Environmental factors do not solely determine cultural variation globally.

Environmental Possibilism

• Environmental Possibilism states that the natural environment constrains or limits culture.
• It makes some variations more or less possible.
• According to Vidal De La Blach, Possibilism is a form of environment-culture - interactionism.

Cultural Autonomy

• Cultural Autonomy is the opposite of environmental determinism.
• Cultures are equally likely to develop in any environmental setting.

Possibilism

• People, not environments, are the dynamic forces of cultural development. Possibilism peaked in popularity in the late 19th to early 20th centuries.
• The physical environment provides opportunities and limitations.

Cultural Variations

• Cultural variations worldwide are not solely determined by physical surroundings and climate.
• Geographers do not accept cultural autonomy.

Human Impact on the Environment

• Human actions modify the earth's landscape.

Cultural Landscape

• The cultural landscape is is the Earth's surface modified by human action.
• It is a tangible record of a given culture.
• There is a existing relationship between technological advancement and environmental impact.

Cultural Hearths

• Cultural hearths describe centers of innovation that influence surrounding regions.
• Several major cultural hearths developed during the Neolithic period.
• These hearths possessed unique cultural traits and were urban centers.
• Key aspects of cultural hearths -- trade, organized agriculture, a stratified society, and the export of technology and skills.

Cultural Convergence

• Cultural convergence involves sharing technology, organizational structure, and even cultural traits and artifacts.

Cultural Divergence

• Cultural divergence highlights how cultures can follow different paths of development.

Structure of Culture Subsystems

• The structure of culture is made up of 3 subsystems: Ideological subsystem, Technological subsystem, Sociological subsystem

Interlocking Nature of Culture

• The interlocking nature of all aspects of culture = Cultural Integration.
• All aspects are also linked to Mentifacts, Artifacts, and Sociofacts.

Mentifacts

• Mentifacts consist of ideas, beliefs, knowledge and their expression.

Artifacts

• Artifacts are composed of material objects, and techniques for their use.

Sociofacts

• Sociofacts is are the sum of accepted patterns of interpersonal relations.
• This includes economic, political, kinship and other associations.