AP HuGeo: Unit 3 Key Terms

Culture

A group's learned behaviors, actions, beliefs, and objects.

Cultural traits

The visible and invisible building blocks of culture

Cultural norms

The shared standards and patterns that guide the behavior of a group of people

Cultural hearth

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

Traditional Culture

Term that describes long-established behaviors, beliefs, and practices passed down from generation to generation.

Cultural landscape

The visible reflection of a culture, or the built environment

artifacts

These make up material culture, as tangible things that can be experienced by the senses.

Global Culture

Cultural elements that have been adopted worldwide

globalization

The process of intensified interaction among peoples, governments, and companies of different countries around the globe with increased integration of the world economy.

Material culture

Tangible things such as art, clothing, food, music, sports, and housing types that make up a culture

Popular culture

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

diffusion

The spreading of information, ideas, behaviors, and other aspects of culture over wider areas

Relocation diffusion

The spread of a cultural trait by people who migrate and carry their cultural traits with them

Expansion diffusion

The spread of cultural traits through direct or indirect exchange without migration

Contagious diffusion

When a cultural trait 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 importance

Reverse hierarchical diffusion

Trait spreads from a lower class to a higher class.

Stimulus diffusion

When people in a culture adopt an underlying idea or process from another culture, but modify it because they reject on trait of it.

Indigenous culture

Members of an ethnic group residing in their ancestral lands who possess unique cultural traits

sociofacts

Ways people organize their society and relate to one another.

mentifacts

Beliefs, values, practices, aesthetics central and enduring to a culture's identity

Nonmaterial culture

Intangible concepts such as beliefs, values, practices, and aesthetics that make up a group's culture.

Taboos

Behaviors heavily discouraged by a culture

Cultural patterns

Related sets of cultural traits and complexes that create similar behaviors across space.

ethnicity

Membership to a group of people who share group cultural traits such as ancestry, language, customs, history, and common experiences.

nationality

Membership to a group of people who share a 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 Islamic legal framework for a country

fundamentalism

Attempt to follow a literal interpretation of a religious faith

ethnocentrism

Belief that one's own cultural group is more important and superior to other cultures.

Cultural relativism

The concept that a person's or group's beliefs, values, norms, and practices should be understood from the perspective of the other group's culture.

Cultural appropriation

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

Diaspora

Global migration of people from one place to another as a religious group

Charter group

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

Third place

A term that refers to a communal space such as a coffee shop, fitness center, or bookstore that is separate from home (first place) and work (second place)

Sequent occupance

Ethnic groups moving in and out of neighborhoods and creating new cultural imprints on the landscape

Sacred place

Specific places and natural features with religious significance

Gender identity

"One's innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both or neither" - how individuals perceive themselves and what they call themselves.

Safe spaces

Spaces of acceptance for people such as members of the LGBTQIA+ community who are sometimes marginalized by society.

Gendered spaces

Spaces designed and deliberately incorporated into the landscape to accommodate gender roles, such as having strict spaces for women and men.

Ethnic neighborhood

Cultural landscapes within communities of people from similar cultural backgrounds outside of their areas of origin

Gentrification

The renovations and improvements conforming to middle-class preferences

Postmodern architecture

Developed after the 1960s, a movement away from boxy, concrete or brick structures towards high rise structures made of steel and glass siding.

Traditional architecture

Style of building that reflects a local culture's history, beliefs, values, and community adaptations to the environment, typically utilizing locally available materials.

Built environment

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

placelessness

Places without unique features due to cultural homogeneity.

Sense of place

Geographic place that has meaning by connecting memories and feelings to it

Placemaking

A community driven process in which people collaborate to create a place where they can live, work, play, and learn.

imperialism

Concept in which one country influences another by direct conquest, economic control, or cultural dominance.

colonialism

Type of imperialism in which people move into and settle on the land of another country

Romance language

Language family that developed due to the isolation of Latin speakers, diverging it into distinct regional languages.

Indo-European language family

A large group of languages that might all have descended from a language spoken around 6,000 years ago.

Language tree

The relationship between the near 15 families of language, relating several languages to each other and showing how they grow

Language branch

Collection of languages within the same family that share a common origin and were separated from other branches in the same family thousands of years ago.

Language group

Languages within a branch that share a common ancestor in the relatively recent past and have vocabularies with a high degree of overlap.

isolate

A language not assigned to a language family, and has no known historic or linguistic relationship with any other known language.

Lingua franca

A common language used by people who do not share the same native language

Creolization

Two or more separate cultural elements that blend together to create new cultural traits.

Pidgin language

A simplified mixture of two languages that has fewer grammar rules and a smaller vocabulary, but is not the native language of either group

toponyms

The names of places

Official language

One language designated by law to be the language of government

Homogeneous

Made up largely of ethnically similar people

Time-space convergence

The greater interconnection between places that results from improvements in transportation

Cultural convergence

Cultures become similar to each other and share more cultural traits, ideas, and beliefs.

Cultural divergence

The idea that a culture may change over time as the elements of distance, time, physical separation, and modern technology create divisions and changes.

linguists

Scientists who study languages

dialect

Regional variations of a language

Hinduism

An ethnic religion that includes the worship of many deities

Buddhism

Religion that grew out of the teachings of a prince named Siddhartha, the "enlightened one." - the oldest universalizing religion

Sikhism

A newer universalizing monotheistic faith founded by Guru Nanak during the 16th century that focuses on serving others, honesty, hard work, and generosity rather than rituals.

Judaism

One of the first monotheistic faiths based on the writings of the Torah

Christianity

Monotheistic faith that began when followers of a Jewish teacher, Jesus, evolved into their own religion based on Jesus being the son of God and savior of humans.

Islam

Religion followed by Muslims that believe that Allah revealed his teachings to humans through a series of prophets.

pilgrimage

A religious journey taken by a person to a sacred place of his or her religion

Secularized

Not religious

monotheistic

The belief in one god

polytheistic

The belief in many gods

Universal religion

Actively seeks converts to its faith regardless of their ethnic backgrounds

Ethnic religion

Belief traditions that emphasize strong cultural characteristics among their followers

adherents

Believers in a faith

denomination

Separate organization that unites a number of local religious congregations

sect

Relatively small group that has separated from an established denomination.

syncretism

Fusion or blending of two distinctive cultural traits into a unique new hybrid trait

multiculturalism

The coexistence of several cultures in one society with the ideal of all cultures being valued and worthy of study.

nativist

An anti-immigrant attitude

karma

The idea in Hinduism that behaviors have consequences in the present life or a future life

Acculturation

Ethnic or immigrant group moving to a new area adopts the values and practices of the larger group that has received them, while still maintaining elements of their own culture.

Assimilation

When an ethnic group can no longer be distinguished from the receiving group, ethnic group must give up their own cultural traits for those of the new area.

Collectivist cultures

People are expected to conform to shared responsibility within the family and to be obedient to and respectful of elder family members.