Unit 3 and 4
Culture is the beliefs, values, practices, behaviors, and technologies shared by a society. Elements of a shared cultural practice, or cultural trait, fall into three categories.
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Artifacts are the visible objects and technologies a culture creates.
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Sociofacts are the structures and organizations that influence social behaviors.
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Mentifacts are the central, enduring elements of a culture that reflect its shared ideas, values, knowledge, and beliefs.
Different cultural aspects change and spread at different rates, depending on the degrees of technology and cultural attitudes involved.
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Popular culture reflects widespread behaviors, beliefs, and practices of a society at a given point in time.
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Traditional culture reflects long-established, shared experiences that are passed from generation to generation. There are two prominent cultural attitudes.
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Ethnocentrism is the tendency of ethnic groups to evaluate other groups according to preconceived ideas originating from their own culture.
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Cultural relativism is the evaluation of a culture by its own standards.
A cultural landscape is a natural landscape modified by humans, reflecting their cultural beliefs and values.
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Sequent occupance is the notion that successive societies leave behind a collection of evidence about human character and experiences within a geographic region, which shapes the cultural landscape.
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Large cities typically contain many ethnic neighborhoods, which are cultural landscapes within communities of people outside of their areas of origin.
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Traditional architecture and postmodern architecture are two building styles that reflect different cultures, religions, and places in cultural landscapes.
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Religion, a system of spiritual beliefs, greatly impacts cultural landscapes because it drives much of what is hidden beneath the observable surface of culture.
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Language, the carrier of human thoughts and cultural identities, is a distinct system of communication and usually has a literary tradition, or some written form.
Identity is how humans make sense of themselves and how they wish to be viewed by others. Landscape features, land and resource use, and attitudes toward gender shape the use of space in a cultural landscape. The subjective feelings people associate with a geographic location are known as sense of place. Placemaking is how people collaborate to create a place where they can live, work, play, and learn. Patterns of language, religion, ethnicity, unity, division, centripetal forces, and centrifugal forces contribute to a sense of place, enhance placemaking, and shape the global cultural landscape.
Cultural traits spread from one place to another over time through diffusion. Historically, diffusion occurred through imperialism, colonialism, and other ways like urbanization. Today, diffusion occurs through some of the same historical ways, but also through mass media and the internet.
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The spread of traits through the migration of people is called relocation diffusion.
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Expansion diffusion occurs when an idea or cultural trait spreads outward from its hearth through contact. There are three types of expansion diffusion: contagious diffusion, hierarchical diffusion, and stimulus diffusion.
Drivers of cultural change include colonialism and imperialism, military conquest, trade, migration, globalization, and urbanization.
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European countries spread their cultures around the world through imperialism in the 15th–16th centuries and colonialism during the 17th–19th centuries.
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Military conquest sometimes causes rapid cultural change, because the conquerors impose their way of life on the conquered.
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Trade brings together people from different places. Buying and selling goods and services requires interaction, which results in the spread of culture.
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Migration brings new languages, religion, fashion, music, and food to the places of destination.
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Contemporary cultural change is driven by processes such as globalization, urbanization, migration, and technological innovation.
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Cultural convergence is the process by which cultures begin to share traits and mimic one another.
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Cultural divergence is the process by which conflicting beliefs or other barriers cause two cultures to become less similar.
The effects of cultural change range from disagreement and conflict to greater understanding and sense of connection among individuals and groups.
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Acculturation is when people within one culture adopt some of the traits of another while still retaining their own distinct culture.
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Assimilation is a category of acculturation in which the interaction of two cultures results in one culture adopting almost all the customs, traditions, language, and other cultural traits of the other.
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In multiculturalism, which often occurs in large cities, people share some cultural traits with those around them while retaining some of their original cultural traits.
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Syncretism is the process by which traits from two or more cultures blend together to form a new custom, idea, value, or behavior.
Culture and language are linked and shape people’s identities. Studying language provides clues to the history of humans.
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To categorize languages, linguists study the similarities and differences among them.
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Languages are categorized according to family, branch, group, and dialect.
The distribution of world languages and world religions reflects their diffusion from a hearth, or place of origin, to other locations.
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Diffusion can take place by relocation (moving to a new area) and expansion (adoption by new groups).
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Languages show convergence (blending or mixing) and divergence (increasing differentiation).
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Practices and belief systems impact how widely a religion diffused.
Universalizing religions like Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Sikhism are open to membership by all. They spread through expansion and relocation diffusion.
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Christianity and Islam both began in Southwest Asia. Buddhism and Sikhism both began in South Asia.
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Christianity has the widest distribution and as of 2020 has more adherents than any other religion. Christianity has three major branches: Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox tradition, and Protestantism.
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Islam, the second-largest religion, is the dominant religion from North Africa to Southeast Asia. It has split into two major groups: the Shiites and the Sunnis.
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Buddhism spread from South Asia around the world, but the highest concentration of Buddhists is in East and Southeast Asia.
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Sikhism is concentrated in its hearth, the Punjab region of northwestern India.
Ethnic religions like Hinduism and Judaism are closely tied to a particular ethnic group living in a particular place. They are generally practiced near the hearth or spread through relocation diffusion.
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Hinduism, with about one billion adherents, is found mainly near its hearth in South Asia, but has also spread to other areas where adherents have relocated.
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Judaism has its largest communities in Israel (its hearth). and in the United States.
Territoriality is the connection of people, their culture, and their economic systems to the land.
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Territoriality is the basis for the power that peoples assert over the geographic areas they call their own and the political spaces they create.
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The concept of territoriality is the basis for sovereignty, the right of governments to control their territory and decide what happens inside their borders.
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Coastal waters are considered part of a maritime country’s territory, and control of them is an important aspect of this sovereignty.
Maps reflect the ways people organize their spaces into political entities.
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States, or countries, are independent political units created by people to organize and manage themselves.
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Nations are cultural entities comprising people who have a shared identity through traits in common, such as language, religion, ethnicity, and heritage.
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Nation-states are countries with political boundaries that match the cultural boundaries of a people who consider themselves a nation.
The contemporary world has been shaped by a variety of factors, including the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination, and attempts to form nation-states. Meanwhile, colonialism, imperialism, and independence movements have influenced political boundaries.
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The issue of sovereignty has been complicated by the interconnectedness of the modern world, as well as by imbalances in power in relationships between states.
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Self-determination is the right of people to choose their own political status. Some peoples have launched independence movements in the name of self-determination.
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Colonialism and imperialism have left a lasting mark on countries that have won independence from their colonial rulers.
Geographers define different types of boundaries that mark the world’s many political and cultural entities.
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Countries establish boundaries when they define, delimit, demarcate, and administer them.
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The types of boundaries include antecedent, subsequent, consequent, superimposed, and geometric boundaries.
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Sea, or maritime, boundaries allow countries access to offshore resources and to exercise their sovereignty over offshore territories.
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Cultural boundaries differ from political boundaries and run along lines that separate people of different ethnicities or cultural backgrounds.
State governments—which represent country governments, in this context—are organized based on how political power is divided. There are two main approaches to organizing state governments: a unitary state or a federal state.
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In a unitary system of government, power is concentrated in the central government, which decides how much power to distribute to its regional units.
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Advantages of a unitary state include efficient implementation of laws and services across the state, less potential for corruption of local government, and fewer government agencies.
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Disadvantages of a unitary state include disconnection between the central government and local regions, favoritism for the dominant political or cultural group, and slowness to respond to local issues.
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In a federal system of government, power is shared between the central government and its regional units.
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Advantages of a federal state include reduced regional conflict, political diversity, and attention to local issues.
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Disadvantages of a federal state include undue power given to localized special interests that sometimes block national issues and uneven distribution of costs and benefits of government policies.
Electoral geography is the study of the spatial organization of voting districts.
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The United States’ 435 congressional districts are reapportioned and redistricted every 10 years following the census.
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Changes due to reapportionment can result in shifts in political and electoral power.
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Gerrymandering is the process of drawing internal legislative districts to secure an advantage for one party or another by either “packing” or “cracking” the district.
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Gerrymandering can take place on the basis of partisanship or race, and therefore many see it as an unfair practice.
Devolution is the process by which a state destabilizes as a result of factors that divide groups. It occurs when states fragment into autonomous regions or subnational units, or when they disintegrate. Several different factors can lead to devolution of a state.
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Physical geography is a factor that leads to devolution, as distance and geographic features can make a state more difficult to govern.
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Ethnic differences lead to devolution. Disparity in treatment, identification with a neighboring state, and advances in technology are all contributors to ethnic separatism.
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Economic and social problems lead to devolution. Inconsistent productivity, development, or allocation of tax funds can cause dividing pressure on a state.
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States respond differently to devolutionary forces depending on their unique internal divisions. States may respond by sharing more power with subnational units.
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Devolutionary forces can lead to sovereignty of a region or to the disintegration of a state.
Supranationalism is an alliance of three or more states that come together in pursuit of common economic, political, military, or cultural goals.
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Examples of supranationalism in modern history include the League of Nations, the UN, the EU, NATO, ASEAN, and the African Union.
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A key benefit of supranationalism is that it creates a collective power that can benefit member states.
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A key drawback of supranationalism is that it challenges state sovereignty and can cause states to make compromises and lose independence.
Geographers study centripetal and centrifugal forces to understand how governments’ decisions affect their citizens.
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Centripetal forces are both temporary and long-standing forces that unify a state’s power across space. They can also transcend states and unify multiple states.
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Centrifugal forces challenge state sovereignty and divide a state’s power. They can lead to separatist and nationalist movements and even the breakup of a state.