How Place and Space Shape Culture

• Culture is a particular way of life, such as a set of skilled activities, values, and meanings surrounding a particular type of economic practice

• Geographers understand culture to be shaped by the places people live and make meaning from their lives

• Social relations, politics, and the economy all play a role in the production of cultural practice by different groups in different places

Cultural Differences

• Geographers understand that culture groups are not homogeneous. Meaning all women are not alike just like all working class people are not alike

• Where people live can have an important impact on their sexual identity, for instance, when they are living in a place that is homophobic

Cultural Geography

• Cultural geography has experienced a dramatic change in the way it’s practitioners think about relationships between people and their worlds

• These new practices of conceptualizing culture and spaces are still developing but they focus on the importance of objects and material practices and how the shape the ways we experience and conduct our daily lives

Globalization

• Globalization is reshaping the world and brings different cultural groups closer together than they have ever been before

• Globalization doesn’t always lead to cultural homogenization, it is a diff entail process, meaning that it is deployed differently in different places and experienced and responded to differently

Contemporary Approaches in Cultural Geography

• Culture is not necessarily tied to a place and thus a fact waiting to be discovered. It is the connections among people places and cultures that are social creations that can be altered by new impulses from the economy or politics and so are always changing

• An ethnic landscape might change dramatically after a decade as the economy improves or declines and members of the group have access to additional or fewer resources that then shape their homes, vehicles, businesses and more