Cultural Patterns and Processes

Culture

A body of material traits, customary beliefs, and social forms that constitute the distinct tradition of a group of people.

Cultural Traits

Visible and invisible forces that include a group's actions, possessions, influence on the landscape, shared belief systems, customs, and traditions.

Cultural Hearth

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

Folk Cultures

Small, homogenous groups of people who often live in rural areas, are relatively isolated, and slow to change.

Sense of Place

Gives inhabitants ties to the area where they live, providing them with a sense of ownership and belonging.

Diffusion

The spread of culture through various means such as relocation, stimulus, hierarchical, and contagious.

Cultural Regions

Broad areas where groups share similar but not identical cultural traits.

Formal (Uniform) Region

An area within which everyone shares one or more distinctive characteristic.

Functional (Nodal) Region

An area organized around a node or focal point.

Perceptual (Vernacular) Region

Based on how people think about a particular area, boundaries are often blurred.

Cultural Landscape

The visible reflection of a region's culture.

Modern or Popular Culture

Cultural traits that spread quickly across a large area and are adopted by various groups, often through media and the internet.

Globalization

The acceleration of cultural change around the world, impacting the spread of languages and cultural traits.

Space-Time Compression

The shrinking of the world due to advancements in transportation and communication, leading to increased cultural exchange.

Taboos

Behaviors heavily discouraged by a culture, often changing over time.

Relocation Diffusion

The spread of a cultural trait by people who migrate and bring cultural traits with them.

Stimulus Diffusion

When people in a culture adopt an underlying idea or process from another culture but modify it.

Contagious Diffusion

The continuous outward spread of cultural traits from its hearth through contact among people.

Hierarchical Diffusion

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

Acculturation

When an ethnic group adopts the values and practices of the larger group in a new area while still maintaining major elements of their own culture.

Assimilation

When an ethnic group can no longer be distinguished from the receiving group.

Multiculturalism

The coexistence of several cultures in a society, valuing and studying all cultures.

Nativist or Anti-immigrant

Attitudes that may form among the cultural majority, leading to violence or government actions against minority groups.