Concepts of Culture and Diffusion

Analyzing Culture

• Culture is a body of material traits, customary beliefs, and social forms that together constitute the distinct tradition of a group of people

• Visible forces

  • A group’s actions, possessions, and influence on the landscape

• Invisible force

  • Shared belief systems, customs, and traditions

• Visible + Invisible forces = cultural traits

• One generation passes its culture to the next in many ways

• Children learn in three basic ways

  • Imitation

    • ex. Leading a language by repeating sounds

  • Informal instruction

    • ex. A parent reminding a child to say please

  • Formal instruction

    • ex. A school teaching history

Origins of Culture

Hearths

• A Cultural hearth is the area in which a unique culture or a specific trait develops

  • for example: Classical Greece was the origin of democracy more than 2,000 years ago; New York City was the origin of rap music in the 1970s

• Geographers study how cultures develop in hearths and diffuse

Folk Cultures

Folk Cultures are…

• Small, homogenous groups of people

• Often live in rural areas

• Relatively isolated

• Slow to change

• An example would be The Amish

The Spread of Cultures

• Folk cultures provide a unique sense of place and belonging through homogeneity

• Sense of place gives inhabitants ties to the area where they live, thus giving them a sense of ownership

• Diffusion spreads culture in different ways - relocation, stimulus, hierarchal, and contagious

Spatial Dimensions of Culture

Cultural Regions

• Cultural Regions are broad areas where groups share similar but not identical cultural traits

• Wilbur Zelinsky divided the U.S. into 12 major cultural regions but people still consider themselves part of a larger American culture

Realms

• Cultural Realms are larger areas that include several regions

• Cultures within these realms have a few traits they all share, such as language families, religious traditions, food preferences, architecture, or a shared history

Types of Regions

• Formal (uniform) - An area within which everyone shares in common one or more distinctive characteristic

  • Examples could be language, political beliefs, or the economy

• Functional (Nodal) - An area organized around a node or focal point

• Perceptual (Vernacular) - Based on how people think about a particular area, boundaries are often blurred

Cultural Landscapes

• The cultural landscape of a region is the visible reflection of its culture

  • Examples are:

    • National Parks in the U.S.

    • Signage in Quebec is bilingual in French and English

    • Schools in Pakistan have gender-segregated schools

    • Office buildings in Shanghai are massive skyscrapers reflecting economic power

Modern or Popular Culture

• Modern or Popular culture consists of cultural traits (like clothing, music, movies, and businesses) that spread quickly across a large area and are adopted by various groups

  • Usually spreads via media, specifically the internet

  • Examples include European Soccer, Indian Bollywood movies, and Japanese anime

  • Often promotes uniformity in beliefs

Globalization and Cultural Change

Popular Culture vs. Folk Culture

• Pop culture emphasizes the new rather than preserving tradition

• Those who follow a folk culture preserve traditional languages, religions, values, and foods

• They may slow down globalization but rarely stop the traditional culture from changing, especially among young people

• For example in Brazil…

  • As the population expands to the interior of the rainforest, many indigenous people are being exposed to outside groups

  • Many young people continue to integrate into the larger Brazilian society which threats the existence of the folk culture

Impact of Space-Time Compression

• Space-time compression has accelerated cultural change around the world, including the spread of English

  • Some examples are found in transportation and migration

Geography Of Gender

• In folk cultures, people often have clearly defined gender-specific roles

• In popular culture, gender-specific roles are diminishing

  • Women have increasing access to economic resources, opportunities to work and serve as leaders

Taboos

• Taboos are behaviors heavily discouraged by a culture

• Examples are that someone may not be able to eat certain foods like pork or insects

• Taboos may change over time, for example in the U.S., it was once taboo for Protestants to marry Catholics, but it is not widely opposed now.

Diffusion of Cultures

• Relocation diffusion is the spread of a cultural trait by people who migrate & bring cultural traits with them

  • An example would be pizza

• Sometimes areas continue a trait even after it has lost its influence from their hearth

  • An example of this would be Disco music evolving in the U.S. in the 1970s but remaining popular in Egypt long after it faded in the U.S

• Stimulus diffusion is when people in a culture adopt an underlying idea or process from another culture but modify it because they reject one trait.

• Contagious diffusion is the spread of cultural traits continuously outward from its hearth through contact among people

• Hierarchical Diffusion is the spread of culture outward from the most interconnected places or canters of wealth and importance

  • Unlike contagious diffusion, hierarchical diffusion may skip some places while moving on to others

• Reverse hierarchical diffusion is when a trait diffuses from a lower class to a higher class.

  • An example would be tattoos

Contact Between Cultures

• Acculturation is when an ethnic group moves to a new area and adopts the values and practices of the large group that revived them. They still maintain major elements of their own culture.

  • An example would be Ethnic Enclaves in the U.S.

• Assimilation happens when an ethnic group can no longer be distinguished from the receiving group

• Multiculturalism is the coexistence of several cultures in a society, with the idea of all cultures being valued & worthy of study. This is the belief that the interaction of cultures enriches the lives of all

• A Nativist or anti-immigrant has attitudes that may form among the cultural majority and can bring violence or government actions against the minority group

  • An example would be Syrian refugees fleeing a civil war in 2011.

Language and Culture

• By the end of this section, you can explain cultural patterns and landscapes as they vary by place and region.

  • Regional patterns of language, religion, and ethnicity contribute to a sense of place, enhance place-making, and shape the global cultural landscape

• By the end of this section, you will be able to explain cultural patterns and landscapes as they vary by place and region.

  • Language patterns and distributions can be represented on maps, charts, and language trees

Cultural Landscape

• Remember, the cultural landscape refers to the earth’s surface modified by human action. Naturally occurring phenomena (forests, shorelines, wetlands, mountains) are not included.

Language and Culture

• There are 7,000 languages that people speak around the world, most by small, isolated groups

• By the end of the century, about half will be gone

• As these groups integrate into larger societies, people often learn the language of the majority and their traditional language becomes extinct

• As languages become extinct, a central part of the group’s historical identity is also lost.

Relationships Among Languages

• Language, like all elements of culture, has long been changing

• The earliest languages have spread from their hearths and faced many local, international, and global forces, including conquest, colonialism, imperialism, and trade

Origins of Language

• A linguist is a scientist who studies language

• It is believed that humans first began communication with spoken sound as recently as tens of thousands of years ago, or as long as a few hundred thousand years ago.

• Unsure how language diffused

  • By the dispersion of people, who carried language with them as they dispersed across the planet)

  • Transmission, people learn language from their neighbors

  • Conquest (imposing language on others)

Language Families

• Have all languages descended from one original language:

• Linguists believe that nearly all of the languages spoken today can be grouped into about 15 families of languages.

• A language tree shows the relationship among these language families and suggests how several languages are related to each other and how one language grows out of another

• The distribution of languages reflects human migration

Indo-European Language Family

• One of the 15 major language families

• Nearly half of the world’s population speaks one of the languages of the Indo-European language family

• About 2.8 billion native speakers of between 400 and 500 languages

Latin

• The history of latin shows how diff

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INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE FAMILY

• Indo-European Language Family

• Latin - the history of Latin shows how difficult the study of language is: languages constantly evolve as people move away from the languages' cultural hearths, because of contact with other languages or isolation from other languages

• Two thousand years ago, when the Roman Empire dominated what is now Europe, people in the empire spoke Latin. As the empire dissolved and transportation became more dangerous, trade declined and Latin speakers became geographically isolated from each other

• This led to distinct regional languages called Romance languages, many of which later disappeared, although some survived (Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, and Romansch)