AP Human Geography | Unit 3 Vocab Terms

Culture

The shared practices, technologies, attitudes, and behaviors transmitted by a society

Shared Practices

Birth, death, and marriage rituals, and education

Technologies

How cultural groups communicate and travel

Products

What different cultural groups produce

Attitudes and Behaviors

Gender roles, systems of government, age of maturity

Material Culture

Made of things people give value to

Non-Material Culture

Made of the ideas of a society, that they hold near and dear (values)

Folk Culture

Local and homogenous

Pop Culture

Regionally diffuses and heterogenous

Cultural traits

Developed over time through social interaction (Language, religion, clothing, fashion, artifacts, land-use, food preferences, architecture)

Cultural Relativism

Understanding the customs and beliefs from the perspective of the culture they originate from

Ethnocentrism

Judging other cultures from your cultural perspective

Cultural Landscape

The combination of cultural, economic, and natural elements that make up any landscape

Sequent Occupancy

Different cultures leave their marks on an area to show that they once resided in a place

Sense of Place

An emotional and cultural connection to a place

Placemaking

Making the cultural landscape unique (creating a sense of place)

Placelessness

A place to not have a unique identity or characteristics

Centripetal Forces

Factors that bring together or unite a society or culture

Centrifugal Forces

Factors that pull apart or divide a society or culture

Diffusion

The spread of a cultural trait from one place to another

Relocation Diffusion

A person migrates to someplace, taking their culture with them

Expansion Diffusion

A trait that spreads from person to person

Contagious Diffusion

A cultural trait that spreads rapidly between people with no specific pattern (similar to a virus)

Hierarchical Diffusion

The trait spreads from more influential people or urban areas to less influential people or rural areas

Reverse Hierarchical Diffusion

The trait spreads from less influential people or rural areas to more influential people or urban areas

Stimulus Diffusion

An idea spreads, but gets changed in some way to adapt to the place’s culture

Colonialism or Imperialism

A country establishes control or takes over an area

Creolization

The combining of cultures or languages into one culture or language

Lingua Franca

A language that allows for communication and trade between people who speak different native languages

Cultural Hearth

The location where a culture was born (a culture’s origin

Urbanization

Growth of cities and migration of people from rural to urban areas

Globalization

Different areas of the world are becoming interconnected and dependent on each other

Time-Space Convergence

Travel and interaction between places becomes faster and more efficient

Cultural Convergence

Cultures interact and become more similar with each other

Cultural Divergence

Conflicting beliefs, disagreements, or geographical isolation can cause cultures to become less similar to each other

Monotheistic

Believes in only one god (Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Judaism)

Polytheistic

Believes in multiple gods (Hinduism, Buddhism)

Ethnic

Followers are limited to a few ethnic groups concentrated around its cultural hearth (Hinduism, Judaism)

Universalizing

Actively seeks new people (Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Buddhism)

Language Family

A group of languages descended from a shared common ancestor

Dialect

A regional variant of a language, where it may be spoken or written differently

Toponym

The name for a place

Assimilation

One group adopts another culture, losing their own culture in the process

Acculturation

One culture adopts the traits of another culture without losing their core traits

Syncretism

Cultural traits from two cultures blend together to form a new culture

Multiculturalism

The coexistence of multiple cultures within an area