Cultural Patterns & Processes

Ethnic Enclaves

• Definition: Neighborhoods filled primarily with people of the same ethnic group.
  • Examples include "Little Italy" and "Chinatown."
• Cultural Impact: These enclaves enhance the cultural richness of their respective countries.

Unit Overview: Cultural Patterns & Processes

• Key Concept: Human behavior and culture are influenced by learned practices rather than biological inheritance.
• Cultural Regions: Areas where people share common cultural elements, such as language.
• Cultural Interaction: Different cultures may adopt each other's practices or form new blended cultures.
• Diffusion: Culture spreads as people move and interact, leading to changes over time.
• Geographical Tools: Geographers utilize maps and diagrams to highlight and analyze spatial patterns and relationships among cultural elements, such as language evolution, often represented through tree diagrams.

3.1 Introduction to Culture

• Essential Question: What characteristics and traits influence geographers' studies of culture?
• Culture Defined: The collective body of materials, customs, and social forms that define a group's tradition.
• Indigenous Culture: Cultural traits from members of an ethnic group living in their ancestral lands, often characterized by unique languages.
• Material Culture: The tangible aspects of a culture, including tools, housing, land use systems, and clothing.
• Nonmaterial Culture: Intangible aspects, such as beliefs, traditions, and values (e.g., religion and morals).
• Cultural Relativism: Judging culture by its own standards, not by the standards of another culture.
• Ethnocentrism: Evaluating other cultures based on one's own cultural standards.
• Taboo: Practices that are forbidden by a culture or religion, often left unmentioned.

3.2 Cultural Landscapes

• Essential Question: What characteristics reflect cultural beliefs in landscapes and resources?
• Cultural Landscapes: Physical environments transformed by human activity;
  • Examples: Street lights, rice fields, churches, cemeteries.
• Ethnic Neighborhoods: Areas that retain cultural distinctions within a larger community.
• Ethnicity: Membership within a group based on common ancestry, language, customs, and history.
• Built Environment: Physical creations by humans that are part of the landscape (e.g., buildings, roads, signage, and fences).
• Indigenous People: Original inhabitants of a territory whose culture is often distinct from the dominant national culture, often rooted in colonial history.
• Indigenous Community: A community of indigenous people working together to preserve their cultural traditions.