Chapter 6 Vocab APHUG

Culture

All of a group’s learned behaviors, actions, beliefs, and objects.

Cultural Trait

Visible and Invisible elements that make up a society.

Cultural Complex

A series of interrelated traits.

Culture Hearth

The area in which a unique culture or a specific trait develops.

Diffusion

How cultures develop in hearths and spread to other places.

Taboos

Behaviors heavily discouraged by a culture.

Traditional Culture

Passing down long-held beliefs, values, and practices and are generally resistant to rapid changes in their culture.

Globalization

Specifically refers to the increased integration of the world economy since the 1970’s.

Popular Culture

Cultural traits such as clothing, music, movies, and types of businesses that spread quickly over a large area and are adopted by various groups.

Global Culture

Elements that can quickly be adopted worldwide.

Cultural Landscape

The visible imprint of human culture on the natural or physical environment.

Artifacts/Material Culture

Tangible things, or those that can be experienced by the senses.

Mentifacts/Nonmaterial Culture

Consist of intangible concepts, or those not having a physical concepts.

Sociofacts

The ways people organize their society and relates to one another.

Placelessness

Created when cultural landscape is strikingly similar from location to location.

Cultural Landscape/Built Environment

The physical artifacts that humans have created and that form part of the landscape.

Traditional Architecture

Reflects a local culture’s history, beliefs, values, and community adaptations to the environment, and typically utilizes locally available materials.

Postmodern Architecture

Developed after the 1960’s, it is a movement away from boxy, mostly concrete or brick structures toward high rise structures made from large amounts of steal and glass siding.

Contemporary Architecture

This style uses multiple advances to create buildings that rotate curve, and stretch the limits of size and height.

Ethnicity

Refers to membership within a group of people who have common experiences, and share similar characteristics such as ancestry, language, customs, and history.

Ethnic Enclaves

Clusters of people of the same culture.

Cultural Regions

Usually determined base on characteristics such as religion, language, and ethnicity.

Cultural Realms

Area where cultures have a few traits that they all share, such as language families, religious traditions, food preferences, architecture, or a shared history.

Scared Place

Places and natural features that have religious significance.

Diaspora

When one group of people is dispersed to various locations.

Charter Group

The first group to establish cultural and religious customs in a space.

Ethnic Island

Ethnic concentrations in rural areas.

Sequent Occupance

The process in which ethnic groups move in and out of neighborhoods and create cultural imprints on the landscape.

Neolocalism

The process of re-embracing the uniqueness and authenticity of a place.

Nationality

People’s connection to a particular country.

Centripetal Forces

Forces that unify a group of people or a region.

Centrifugal Forces

Forces that divide a group of people or a region.

Sharia

The legal framework of a country derived from Islamic edicts taken form their holy book, the Quran.

Blue Laws

Laws that restrict certain activities.

Fundamentalism

An attempt to follow a literal interpretation of a religious faith.

Theocracies

Countries whose governments are run by religious leaders through the use of religious laws.

Ethnocentrism

People who believe their own cultural group is more important and superior to other cultures (Kinda like the Nazis).

Cultural Relativism

The concept that a person’s or group’s beliefs, values, norms, and practice shoulder be understood from the perspective of the other groups’s culture.

Cultural Appropriation

The action of adopting traits, icons, or other elements of another culture.

Diffusion

The spread of information, ideas, behaviors, and other aspects of culture from their hearths to wider areas.

Relocation Diffusion

The spread of culture and/or culture traits by people who migrates and carry their cultural traits with them.

Expansion Diffusion

The spread of cultural traits outward through exchange without migration.

Contagious Diffusion

When a cultural traits spreads continuously outward from its hearth through contact among people.

Hierarchical Diffusion

The spread of culture outward from the most interconnected places or from centers of wealth and influence.

Reverse Hierarchical Diffusion

The process in which traits diffuse from a group of lower status to a group of higher status.

Stimulus Diffusion

When an underlying idea from a culture hearth is adopted by another culture but the adopting group modifies or rejects one trait.

Cultural Extinction

Obliteration of an entire culture by war, disease, acculturation or a combination of the the three.

Cultural Geography

The subfield of human geography that looks at how cultures vary over space.

Cultural Imperialism

The dominance of one culture over another.

Syncretic

Traditions that borrow from both the past and the present.

Tradition

A cohesive collection of customs within a cultural group.