human geography
Ch. 2: Roots and Meaning of Culture
Overview
1. As used in geography, culture means the specialized behavioral patterns and social systems that summarize the learned way of life of a group of people. It includes both tangible and intangible characteristics that differentiate people and their occupied landscapes.
2. Recognition of culture traits, culture complexes, and culture regions helps summarize conceptually and spatially the infinite complexity of human societies. Culture realms are broad segments of the earth's surface that have presumed fundamental similarity in a number of salient cultural complexes and characteristics. The presumed homogenization of world culture as an expression of the globalization of social, political, and economic traits across earth space has cast doubt on the enduring validity of culture realm distinctions.
3. The physical environment does not shape human thought or actions; environmental determinism is a now-rejected concept. Possibilism is the viewpoint that humans are the active agents in shaping culture, selecting from the environment the opportunities their cultural needs and technological levels make evident and attractive.
4. Humans, in their utilization of the natural environment, create cultural landscapes, altering—perhaps destroying—the natural landscape and erecting upon it a built environment that, in modern societies, dominates everyday life and activity patterns.
5. Earlier cultural stages were in closer contact with the physical landscape. Paleolithic populations were hunter–gatherers, gradually improving their tools, extending their areas of occupancy, and engaging in inter-group contact and trade. The Mesolithic period was marked by increasing cultural divergence as populations passed from food gathering to food production and developed differing ways of life and economy. The Neolithic era designates a stage of cultural development in which new tools, technologies, and social structures were developed among sedentary populations.
6. Culture hearths were centers of innovation and invention, showing many traits in common as a result of multilinear evolution and independent invention. Diffusions of cultural traits and complexes from hearth regions dispersed local innovations over wider areas. Common cultural characteristics that are independently developed or spread through diffusion encourage cultural convergence, particularly as transportation, communication, and human mobility improve or increase.
7. For analytical purposes it is convenient to recognize subsystems of culture and their identifying components: the ideological, technological, and sociological subsystems are associated with respective sets of mentifacts, artifacts, and sociofacts. The subsystems do not stand alone; they are united into coherent integrated cultural wholes. Cultural integration implies the interlocking nature of all aspects of a culture.
8. Innovation is cultural change initiated within the social group itself. Resistance to useful innovation is termed cultural lag. Spatial diffusion is the process by which ideas or innovations are transmitted between groups across space. Such spread may take the form of relocation or expansion diffusion. The latter type may further be subdivided into distinctive forms of contagious and hierarchical diffusion. Acculturation is exhibited when a culture group adopts characteristics of another, dominant group.