Themes in Cultural Geography

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Themes in Cultural Geography

• Different lenses on the world

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Five Themes

• Culture Region
• Cultural Diffusion
• Cultural Interaction
• Cultural Ecology
• Landscape Studies

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Review
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Culture Region

• Can be defined by
• A culture trait (formal region)
• A combination (complex) of culture traits (formal
  region)
• An organizing structure or system (functional
  region)
• Popular culture (vernacular region)

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Cultural Diffusion

• The expansion of a culture trait through space
  due to
• Immigration (relocation diffusion)
• The neighborhood effect (contagious expansion
  diffusion)
• Communications and commerce (hierarchical
  diffusion)
• Adaptation and significant reinterpretation
  (stimulus diffusion)

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Cultural Interaction

• Cultures are integrated systems in which each
  part (trait) is linked to others
• This situation makes it possible to identify
  culture regions defined not be single traits but
  by complexes of traits

Culture complex
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Cultural Ecology

• Human-environment relationships
• To what extent does the environment affect
  culture?
• environment culture
• To what extent does culture rework the
  environment?
• culture environment

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General Trend

• Environmental determinism has been rejected
• Current approaches are based on ecology and
  possibilism
• Much greater focus on human impacts on the
  environment than on the environments
  culture-shaping force

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Greek Worldview
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Tropical degeneration

• Insensitivity is in them a vice of their altered
  constitution. They have an unpardonable
  laziness, invent nothing, plan nothing and in no
  way extend the sphere of their understanding
  beyond what they see pusillanimous cowards,
  nervous and without any nobility in their minds,
  their discouragement and absolute lack of
  anything that constitutes a reasoning animal
  makes them useless to themselves and to society.
• C. De Pauw Recherches philosophiques sur les
  Américains ou memoires intéressans pour servir à
  lhistoire de lespèce humaine, (Paris
  Jean-Michel Place, 1768).

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Environmental Determinism (mixed with Racism)

• None of these tropical peoples has a native
  civilisation, or is fitted to play any part in
  history, either as a conquering or as a thinking
  force, or in any way, save as producers by
  physical labour of material wealth. None is
  likely to develop towards any higher condition
  than that in which it now stands, save under the
  tutelage, and by adopting so much as it can of
  the culture, of the five or six European peoples
  which have practically appropriated the torrid
  zone, and are dividing its resources among them.
  Yet the vast numbers to which, under the conjoint
  stimuli of science and peace, these inferior
  black and yellow races may grow, coupled with the
  capacity some of them evince for assimilating the
  material side of European civilisation, may
  enable them to play a larger part in the future
  of the world than they have played in the past.
• James Bryce, British Ambassador to the US, 1892

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Seeing like a colonist
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Cultural Ecology Today

• Organism-environment relationship is reciprocal
  and mutually constitutive, that is, it is a
  two-way street. The same is true of
  human-environment relations.
• Animals adapt to their environments over eons,
  genetically
• People adapt through culture but also rework
  their environments
• Culture is in part a strategy for environmental
  adaptation, mainly (but not entirely) limited to
  humans learned, cooperative behavior produces
  major environmental modifications as well as
  modifications of human behavior

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Possibilism

• Scientific philosophy that the environment does
  not determine elements of culture, but it does
  set bounds on the possible or probable forms that
  culture will take
• Natural environments offer opportunities and
  constraints from which culture groups must
  choose, based on their knowledge and internal
  power relations

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Cultural Landscape Studies

• start with what you see

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Case Study Orrtana PA
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Houses

• How old do they appear to be?
• Are there particular styles from a certain
  period?
• Do the styles change over time?

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Culture is written on the landscape

• Why does the old house have a separate kitchen?
• Why does the new house have a big lawn?
• Why is the new house far from the road?
• Why is the old house near to the road?
• Why does the old house have a porch?
• Why doesnt the new house have a porch?

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Other Buildings

• What are they for?
• What do they tell you about the way people lived
  in the past and present?

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Pennsylvania Barn
Why do you think it has a forebay?
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Springhouse
What is it for?
Why is it here? How does its design vary from
place to place and what might that variation
indicate?
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Vegetation

• What appears to be the natural vegetation of this
  area?
• What kinds of plants are people cultivating here
  now?
• How has the possibility of growing fruit trees
  shaped life in this place?
• How have people reworked their natural
  environment to favor fruit trees?
• How do people reshape these trees, and why?

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Commerce

• How is this retail activity reflected in the
  visible landscape?
• What is being sold?
• Who is selling to whom?
• How do spaces of consumption relate to other
  kinds of space in this place?

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Good landscape-based geography

• Get a feel for the place
• Try to partially escape the outsiders
  perspective
• Discover elements of an insiders sense of place
• Rather than analyzing the place in abstract terms
  or simply describing features, try to understand
  how it feels to live here
• Ask What are the meanings people attach to
  places and things in this landscape?
• Sense Topophilia (Tuan)

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Q. What can we achieve besides explanation? A.
Understanding
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REVIEW

• Throughout the semester, each chapter will
  address these 5 themes
• Culture region
• Cultural diffusion
• Cultural Interaction
• Cultural Ecology
• Landscape Studies
• These provide different lenses on the world,
  helping to answer different kinds of questions