AP Human Geography - Unit 3 (Culture)

Culture

The sum total of knowledge, attitudes and habitual behavior patterns shared and transmitted by the members of a society.

Folk Culture

cultural traits such as dress modes, dwellings traditions, and institutions of usually small, traditional communities.

Popular Culture

Cultural traits such as dress, diet, and music that identify and are part of today's changeable, urban based, media influenced western societies.

Local Culture

Group of people in a particular place who see themselves as a collective or a community, who share experiences, customs, traits, and who work to preserve those traits and customs.

Material Culture

The art, housing, clothing, sports, dances, foods and other similar items constructed or created by a group of people.

Nonmaterial Culture

The beliefs, practices, aesthics, and values of a group of people.

Hierarchal Diffusion

A form of diffusion in which an idea or innovation spreads by passing first among the most connected places or peoples. An urban hierarchy is usually involved, encouraging the leapfrogging of innovations over wide areas, with geographic distance a less important influence.

Hearth

The region from which innovative ideas and cultural traits originate.

Assimilate

The process through which people lose originally differentiating traits, such as dress, speech particularities or mannerisms, when they come into contact with another society or culture.

Cultural Appropriation

The process by which cultures adopt customs and knowledge from other cultures and use them for their own benefit.

Neolocalism

The seeking out of the regional culture and reinvigoration of it in response to the uncertainty of the modern world.

Ethnic Neighborhood

Neighborhood, typically situated in a larger metropolitian city and constructed by or composed of a local culture, in which a local culture can practice its customs.

Commodification

The process though which something is given monetary value.

Distance Decay

The effects of distance on interaction, generally the greater the distance the less interaction.

Time-space Compression

The social and physiological effects of living in a world in which time-space convergence has rapidly reached a high level of intensity.

Cultural Landscape

the visible imprint of human activity and culture on the landscape

Placelessness

Defined by the geographer Edward Relph as the loss of uniqueness of place in the cultural landscape so that one place looks like the next.

Diffusion Routes

The spatial trajectory through which cultural traits or other phenomena spread.

custom

practice routinely followed by a group of people

neolocalism

The seeking out of the regional culture and reinvigoration of it in response to the uncertainty of the modern world.

authenticity

in the context of local cultures or customs, the accuracy with which the single sterotypical or typecast image or experience conveys an otherwise dynamic and complex local culture or its customs

reterritorialization

with respect to popular culture, when people within a place start to produce an aspect of popular culture themselves, doing so in the context of their local culture and making it their own

folk-housing regions

A region in which the housing stock predominantly reflects styles of building that are particular to the culture of the people who have long inhabited the area.

glocalization

The process by which people in a local place mediate and alter regional, national, and global processes

global-local continuum

the notion that what happens at the global scale has a direct effect on what happens at the local scale, and vice versa.

gender

Social differences between men and women, rather than anatomical, biological different between the sexes.

identity

How we make ourselves ; how people see themselves at different scales.

residential segregation

Degree of which two or more groups live separately from one another, in different parts of an urban environment.

invasion and succesion

the process by which new immigrants to a city move to and dominate or take over areas

sense of place

state of mind derived through the infusion of a place with meaning and emotion by remembering important events that occurred in that place or by labeling a place with a certain character.

space

the area of social relations

gendered

wether a place is defined for men or women

queer theory

highlights the contextual nature of opposition to the heteronormative and focuses on the poitical engagement of "queers" with the heteronormative, not really a theory more of a study

dowry deaths

the bride is brutally beat or killed for her fathers failure to fulfill the marriage agreement

barrioization

he dramatic increase in Hispanic population in a given neighborhood

ghetto

a poor densely populated city district occupied by a minority ethnic group linked together by economic hardship and social restrictions

sexuality

the properties that distinguish organisms on the basis of their reproductive roles

language

a set of sounds, combination of sounds, and symbols that are used for communication

standard language

the variant of a language that a country's political and intellectual elite seek to promote as the norm for use in schools, government, the media, and other aspects of public life

mutual intelligibility

the ability of two people to understand each other when speaking

dialect chains

a set of contiguous dialects in which the dialects nearest to each other at any place in the chain are most closely related

subfamilies

divisions within a language family where the commonalities are more definite and the origin is more recent

sound shift

slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin

Proto-Indo-European

linguistic hypothesis proposing the existance of an ancestral Indo-European language that is the hearth of the ancient Latin, Greek, and Sanskirt languages which hearth would link modern languages from Scandinavia to North Africa and from North America through parts of Asia to Australia

backward reconstruction

the tracking of sound shifts and hardening of consonants backward toward the original language

deep reconstruction

technique using the vocabulary of an extinct language to re-create the language that preceded it

nostratic

language believed to be the ancestral language not only of Prot-Indo-European, but also of the Kartvelian languages of the southern Caucasus region, the Uralic-Atlantic languages (including Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and Mongolian), the Dravidian languages of India, and the Afro-Asianic language family

language divergence

the opposite of language convergence; a process suggested by German linguist August Schleicher whereby new languages are formed when a language breaks into dialects due to a lack of spatial interaction among speakers of the language and continued isolation eventually causes the division of the language into discrete new languages

language convergence

the collapsing of two languages into one resulting from the consistent spatial interaction of people with different languages; the opposite of language divergence

Renfrew hypothesis

hypothesis developed by British scholar Colin Renfrew where in he proposed that three areas in and near the first agricultural hearth, the Fertile Crescent, gave rise to 3 lang. families:Europe's indo-European lang. North African and Arabian languages and the languages in present-day Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India

conquest theory

one major theory of how Proto-Indo-European diffused into Europe which holds that the early speakers of Proto-Indo-European spread westward on horseback, overpowering earlier inhabitants and beginning the diffusion and differentiation of Indo-European tongues.

dispersal hypothesis

hypothesis which holds that the Indo-European languages that arose from Proto-Indo-European were first carried eastward into Southwest Asia, next around the Caspian Sea, and then across the Russian-Ukrainian plains and onto the Balkans

Germanic languages

languages (English, German, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish) that reflect the expansion of peoples out of Northern Europe to the west and south

Slavic languages

languages (Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ukrainian, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, and Bulgarian) that developed as Slavic people migrated from a base in present-day Ukraine close to 2000 years ago

Creole language

language that begun as pidgin language but was later adopted as the mother tongue by a people in place of the mother tongue

monolingual states

countries in which only one language is spoken

multilingual states

countries in which more than one language is in use

global language

the language used most commonly around the world; defined on the basis of either the number of speakers of the language, or the prevalence of use in commerce and trade

Religion

A system of beliefs and practices that attempts to order life in terms of culturally perceived ultimate priorities.A system of beliefs and practices that attempts to order life in terms of culturally perceived ultimate priorities.

Secularism

The idea that ethical and moral standards should be formulated and adhered to for life on earth, not to accommodate the prescriptions of a deity and promises of a comfortable afterlife. A secular state is the opposite of a theocracy.

Shintoism

Religion located in Japan and related to Buddhism, focuses strongly on worship of nature and ancestor worship.

Taoism

Religion founded by Lao-Tsu and based on his book "Tao-te-Ching" or "Book of the Way". Focuses on proper form of political rule and on the oneness of humanity and nature.

Feng shui

"Wind-water" - Chinese art and science of placement and orientation of structures and objects to channel "life-breath" in favorable ways.

Confucianism

Philosophy of ethics, education, and public service based on the writings of Confucius and traditionally thought of as one of the core elements of Chinese culture.

Zionism

Movement to unite the Jewish people of the Diaspora and to establish a new homeland for them in the Promised Land.

Eastern Orthodox Church

One of the 3 major branches of Christianity that arose from the division of the Roman Empire by Emperor Diocletian; Arose from Constantinople.

Roman Catholic Church

Arose from Rome after the splitting of the Roman Empire.

Protestant

One of the three major branches of Christianity that arose from challenging of the Roman Catholic Church by many individuals.

Sunni

Branch of Islam that believes in the effectiveness of family and community in the solution of problems. Accept the traditions of Muhammad as authoritative.

Shiite

Branch of Islam that believes in the effectiveness of family and community in the solution of problems. Accept the traditions of Muhammad as authoritative.

Sacred sites

Place or space people infuse with religious meaning.

Minarets

Tower attached to a Muslim mosque having one or more projecting balconies from which a crier calls Muslims to pray.

Hajj

The Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the birthplace of Muhammad.

Interfaith boundaries

Boundaries between the world's major faiths.

Intrafaith boundaries

Boundaries within a single major faith.

Religious extremism

Religious fundamentalism carried to the point of violence.

Shari'a laws

System of Islamic law, based on varying degrees of interpretation of the Qur'an.

Jihad

Doctrine within Islam, commonly translated as "Holy War" and represents either a personal or collective struggle on the part of Muslims to live up to the religious standards set by the Qur'an.