Key Concepts:

• Space is the geometric surface of the Earth

  • Objects on the Earth’s spatial surface are defined by their location and are separated by some degree of distance from other things

  • Activity space is referred to as the area wherein activity occurs on a daily basis

• Place is an area of bounded space of some human importance

  • A place-name, or more technically a toponym is assigned to a location when human importance is recognized

  • Regions are a type of place, and there are other categories of places, such as urban places, places of work, resource locations, and transportation nodes

  • Attributes of a place change over time

    • The concept of sequent occupancy is considered over a long term: in other words, the succession of groups and cultural influences throughout a place’s history

    • There are several different historical layers that contribute to a place-specific culture, society, local politics, and economy

• Scale is the relationship of an object or place to the Earth as a whole

  • Map scale describes the ratio of distance on a map to distance in the real world in absolute terms

  • Relative scale, or scale of analysis refers to the level of aggregation, or in other words, the level at which you group things together for examination.

    • Scales can range from local to city and state, from regional to national to continental, or to the international and global scales

• Regions are categorized into three groups: formal, functional, and vernacular

• Formal regions are areas of bounded space that possess some homogeneous characteristic or uniformity

• A homogeneous characteristic can be a common language

• Regional boundaries differ based on the type of region.

  • Culture regions tend to have fuzzy borders

  • Political regions boundaries are finite and well-defined

  • Environmental region boundaries are transitional and measurable

• The environmental transition zone between two bioregions is known as an ecotone

• Functional regions or nodal regions, are areas that have a central place, or node, that is a focus or point of origin that expresses some practical purpose

• Market areas are a type of functional region

• Since outlet malls are often placed far apart, there will also be a larger area of influence for the mall that will have shoppers traveling from longer distances

  • An intervening opportunity is an attraction at a shorter distance that takes precedence over an attraction that is farther away.

• Vernacular regions are based upon the perception or collective mental map of the region’s residents

  • The overall concept can vary within the region due to personal or group variations

• Location is considered in both absolute and relative terms

  • Absolute location defines a point or place on the map using coordinates such as latitude and longitude.

    • The Prime Meridian is 0° longitude and runs through Great Britain because the means to accurately calculate longitude at sea was developed by the British Royal Navy.

    • The equator is 0° latitude. The North and South Poles are 90° latitude.

• Time Zones are divided up into 15-degree-wide longitudinal zones around the world with some exceptions. This is because 360° divided by 24 hours a day equals 15°.

• Relative location, by contrast, refers to the location of a place compared to a known place or geographic feature.

• Site and Situation are locational concepts that work together

  • Site refers to the physical characteristics of a place

  • Situation refers to the place’s interrelatedness with other places

• Distance is considered in absolute and relative terms

  • Linear absolute distance is the distance between two places as measured in linear units such as miles or kilometers

  • The concept of distance decay and Tobler’s Law is used to explain relative distance.

    • Distance decay (gravity) means that the farther away different places are from a place of origin, the less likely interaction will be with the original place

    • Tobler’s law states that all places are interrelated, but closer places are more related than farther ones.

    • Friction of distance is the length of distance that becomes a factor that inhibits the interaction between two points.

• Space-Time Compression is decreased time and relative distance between places

  • Technology like modes of transportation or the Internet can reduce the relative distance between places

• Human-Environmental Transportation is the effect that humans have on their environment, and vice versa

Spatial Interactions

• Central Places are any node of human activity and are most often the centers of economic exchange.

  • Central place theory was developed in the 1930s by the German geographer Walter Christaller

    • city location and the level of urban economic exchange could be analyzed using central places within hexagonal market areas, which overlapped at different scales

• Core and Periphery relationships are displayed by different regional, cultural, economic, political, and environmental phenomena and human activities

  • CBD (central business district) is the core of the urban landscape, a country’s capital is the core of its political landscape.

  • the core does not have to be exactly in the center of the peripheral region

Pattern

• A cluster is when things are grouped together on the Earth’s surface

• Agglomeration is when clustering occurs purposefully around a central point or a economic growth pole

• A random pattern is when there is no rhyme or reason to the distribution of a spatial phenomenon

• Objects that are normally ordered but appear dispersed are scattered

• If it is a straight line, the pattern is linear

• If it is a wavy line, the pattern is sinous

• Land survey patterns have an effect on the property lines and political boundaries of states and provinces.

  • Until the 1830s, land surveys used natural landscape features to divide land on a system of metes and bounds

  • A rectilinear township and range survey system based upon lines of latitude and longitude

  • Long-lot patterns have a narrow frontage along a road or waterway with a very long lot shape behind.

Density

• Arithmetic density is most often calculated as the number of things per square unit of distance.

• Physiologic density measures the number of people per square unit of arable land, meaning land that either is actively farmed or has the potential to be

• Agricultural density refers only to the number of farmers per square unit of arable land

Diffusion Patterns

• There are a number of different ways and patterns in which human phenomena diffuse spatially, or spread across the Earth’s surface.

• A hearth is the point of origin or place of innovation

• Expansion diffusion pattern originates in a central place and then expands outward in all directions to other locations.

• Hierarchical diffusion originates in a first-order location and then moves down to second-order locations and from each of these to subordinate locations at increasingly local scales

• Contagious diffusion begins at a point of origin and then moves outward to nearby locations, especially those on adjoining transportation lines

• A stimulus diffusion pattern is a general or underlying principle that diffuses and then stimulates the creation of new products or ideas

• Relocation diffusion pattern begins at a point of origin and then crosses a significant physical barrier, such as an ocean, a mountain range, or a desert, and then relocates on the other side

Geographic Tools

• Scientific maps are the results of spatial analysis—the mathematical analysis of one or more quantitative geographic patterns

Types of Maps

• Topographic maps show the contour lines of elevation, as well as the urban and vegetation surface with road, building, river, and other natural landscape features

• Thematic maps express a particular subject and does not show land forms for other features.

  • Choropleth maps is a thematic map that expresses the geographic variability of a particular theme using color variations.

  • Isoline maps calculate data values between points across a variable surface.

  • Dot density maps use dots to express the volume and density of a particular geographic feature.

  • Flow-line maps use lines of varying thickness to show the direction and volume of a particular geographic movement pattern.

  • Cartograms use simplified geometries to represent real-world places.

• Mental map: the cognitive image of landscape in the human mind

• Map scale is the “absolute” form of the scale concept.

  • Linear map scale expresses distance on the map surface.

  • The ratio scale of the map shows the mathematical relationship between the distance on the map compared to the real distance on the Earth’s surface.

  • A large-scale map is one with a ratio that is a comparatively large real number

  • A small-scale map is one with a ratio that is a comparatively very small real number

Projections

• Each given projection creates different levels of accuracy in terms of size and shape distortion for different parts of the Earth.

  • accuracy is based upon two concepts: area preservation and shape preservation

  • Equal-area projections attempt to maintain the relative spatial science and the areas on the map.

    • distortion of the actual shape of polygons

  • Conformal projections attempt to maintain the shape of polygons on the map.

    • distortion of the relative area from one part of the map to the other

• Robinson projection and the Goode’s homolosine projection balance area and form, sacrificing a bit of both to create a more visually practical representation of the Earth’s surface.

MODELS

• A model is an abstract generalization of real-world geographies that share a common pattern

  • Spatial models attempt to show the commonalities in pattern among similar landscapes

  • Urban models try to show how different cities have similar spatial relationships and economic or social structures**.**

  • Demographic transition models are non-spatial models that use population data to construct a general model of the dynamic growth in national scale populations without reference to space.

  • A gravity model is a mathematical model that is used in a number of different types of spatial analysis

    • used to calculate transportation flow between two points, determine the area of influence of a city’s businesses, and estimate the flow of migrants to a particular place

    • Location1 Population x Location2

Why Are Models Used?

• Models are a way to picture geographical patterns that are not normally visible to the human eye and answer theoretical questions

• The concentric zone model can be modified to create a graph showing the cost-to-distance relationship in urban real estate prices.

Geographic Technology

• Geographic Information Systems (GIS) became practical with the onset of the desktop computer in the 1970s.

  • incorporate one or more data layers in a computer program capable of spatial analysis and mapping.

• The Global Positioning System (GPS) utilizes a worldwide network of satellites, which emit a measurable radio signal

• Aerial photography and satellite-based remote sensing make up a large amount of the geographic and GIS data used today

  • Aerial photographs are images of the Earth from an aircraft, printed on film, but digital camera usage is on the increase

  • Remote-sensing satellites use a computerized scanner to record data from the Earth’s surface

Key Concepts:

Basic Population Statistics

• Population growth involves two main concepts: rate of natural increase (RNI) and the demographic equation.

  • The demographic equation uses uses birth rates, death rates, immigration, and emigration statistics to show population growth

• Birth rate, also known as natality, is the crude birth rate (CBR) and an annual statistic

  • High birth rates: rural agricultural Third-World countries

  • Low birth rates:  urbanized industrial and service-based economies

  • Ex: total number of infants born living is counted for one calendar year and then calculated

    • CBR: Number of Live Births/Total Population x 1,000

• Death rate, also known as the mortality rate, is the crude death rate (CDR) and an annual statistic calculated in the same way as the birth rate.

  • High death rates: a country that is experiencing war, disease, or famine, such as poor Third-World countries experiencing poverty, poor nutrition, epidemic disease, and a lack of medical care.

  • Green Revolution: (increased food and nutrition) and access to sanitation, education, and health care

    • CDR: Number of Deaths/Total Population x 1,000

• The rate of natural increase (RNI), or the natural increase rate (NIR) is the annual percentage of population growth of that country for that one-year period.

  • RNI: Birth Rate - Death Rate/10%

• Negative RNI means the population has shrunk

  • Happens in in highly urbanized First-World countries and where the traditional roles of women in the country of mother and housewife have deteriorated significantly

• Reduced fecundity: when the majority of women are heavily engaged in business, they are far less likely to have children

  • Double-income no-kid (DINK) households and single-parent–single-child homes are far more common; higher rates of divorce

• Natural increase does not account for immigration or emigration

  • Ex: a country with a high rate of natural increase can have an unexpectedly low long-term population prediction if there is a large amount of emigration

• Doubling Time: how long it would take for a country to double in size

  • Formula: 70Rate of Natural Increase

• To estimate the RNI for each year in the future by examining a country’s position: (Pop. × RNI1) + (Pop. × RNI2) + (Pop. × RNI3) + (Pop. × RNIn) = Future Population

• Net Migration Rate (NMR): the number of immigrants minus the number of emigrants for every thousand members of the population; can be negative

  • Formula: Number of Immigrants - Number of Emigrants/Population /1,000

• Population Growth Percentage Rate = (Birth Rate - Death Rate) + Net Migration Rate/10%

• Total fertility rate (TFR) is the estimated average number of children born to each female of birthing age (15 to 45)

  • Formula: Number of Children Born/Women Aged 15 to 45

• Replacement rate is a TFR of 2.1

  • A large population must have 2.1 children per female of birthing age.

• Dependency ratio provides the number of people too young or too old to work compared to the number of people in the work force

MODELS

• The demographic transition model (DTM) is a theory of how population changes over time and provides insights into issues of migration, fertility, economic development, industrialization, urbanization, labor, politics, and the role of women.

  • Newly industrialized countries (NICs) can also be placed on the model, but you have to change the dates as to when they reach the significant turning points in their history

• The epidemiological transition model (ETM) specifically accounts for development due to the increasing population growth rates caused by medical advances

  • The phase of development is directly followed by a stabilization of population growth as the procreation rates decline

  • Can predict how its population will change over time and speculate as to how much it can grow in size

    • Ex: we can estimate a population projection that the planet’s population has reached only about two-thirds of its potential

• The S-Curve of Population

  • Ex: an animal population that receives a vast amount of food or removes predators from their habitat will result rapid population growth followed by a plateau or decline due to a population reaching or exceeding the area’s carrying capacity

Stage-By-Stage

• Stage One:

  • Historically characterized by pre-agricultural societies engaged in subsistence farming and transhumance

  • Birth rates and death rates fluctuate due to climate, warfare, disease, and ecological factors, but overall, both rates are high

  • Child mortality and infant mortality were very high

  • Result: little population growth until the later part of stage one when death rates begin to decline; RNI is generally low or negative

  • Present-day Third-World countries engaged in long periods of warfare have late stage one characteristics

• Stage Two:

  • Typically agriculturally based economies

  • Birth rates remain high and life expectancy rises while death rates decline over time; RNI increases

  • Infant and child mortality is still an issue due to a lack of medical care and

  • Poor nutrition for expectant mothers and infants

  • The vast majority of populations in stage two countries live in rural regions as a result of agriculture’s economic prominence

• Stage Two 1/2:

  • NIC countries are characterized by economies that focus on manufacturing as the primary form of economic production and employment

  • Birth and death rates decline

  • Rapid population growth; high RNIs; rapidly increasing rate of urbanization

    • Migrants responding to the pull factor of employment opportunity rapidly fill the cities

• Stage Three:

  • Historically where most “industrialized” or manufacturing-based countries were found in the transition

  • Shifted their economies to a more service-based focus

  • Birth and death rates decline due to urbanization

  • The diffusion of fertility control due to access to health care and the availability of contraceptives as well as reducing the diffusion of disease due to medical advances

• Stage Four and Five

  • Birth and death rates converge to result in limited population growth and population decline

  • Service industries like finance, insurance, real estate, health care, and communications that drive the economy; manufacturing is dying

  • Ex: in the United States, services are 80 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) and manufacturing is only 20 percent

  • Both the final stages of the DTM and ETM occur when birth rates bottom out into the lower teens

  • Zero population growth (ZPG) (RNI of 0.0 percent): birth rates reach the same level as death rates

  • Elderly population means fewer people investing their money:

    • Causing less money to circulate through the society, which results in stagnation

    • Lower tax base to support the rest of the nation

    • Shortage of labor supply

• Countries that are near or below zero population growth levels offer incentives to citizens to have more children.

  • With so few children being born, fewer people enter the workforce over time

  • Become dependent upon foreign guest workers

• Many former Communist countries of Eastern Europe have stage four demographic characteristics

  • Economic restructuring has brought economic, political, and social hardship to many communities

• Malthusian Theory states that the global population would one day expand to the point where it could not produce enough food to feed everyone.

  • Malthus saw was that food production did grow over time but in a slow arithmetic manner, while human population grows exponentially

  • As new food products and methods were adopted, another large volume of food would be added to global production and supply

  • This meant that food production has continued to stay ahead of population growth.

• The science of genetics did not make any impact on global food production until the 1950s

• Neo-Malthusians warn that a Malthusian catastrophe could still occur.

1. Sustainability. If too many of the world’s current growing areas are damaged, can food production keep up with the increased demand?

2. Increasing Per Capita Demand. Can the planet provide enough food when all 10 billion of us eat like the First World does today?

3. Natural Resource Depletion**.** Can a world with 10 billion people have enough material to house everyone, enough fuel to heat all the houses, and enough food to feed everyone?

Population Pyramids

• Graphical way to visualize the population structure of a country or place as well as the gender and age distribution of the population

General Principles:

• Males are always on the left of the pyramid and females are on the right

• Each bar is an age cohort, generally made up of five-year sets

• The origin (0-value) of each bar graph is the center and increases in value as you move left or right outward from the center

• A gap in data for both males and females is likely a sign of past war inside that country, epidemic disease, or famine.

• The general shape of the pyramid is reveals the character of the country, state, province, or city that is being diagrammed.

• increased mortality from disease and old age causes significant declines in the elder population, causing the top to shrink

• Population density is calculated in two main ways.

  • Arithmetic density is the number of people per square unit of land

  • Physiologic density is the number of people per square unit of farmland

    • Important in understanding the geography of countries where the amount of arable land is limited

• The population center of a country is found by averaging the spatial weight of population across the country.

• Overpopulation is a major concern both in resource-poor regions and across the globe.

  • Nonrenewable energy sources will be depleted if conservation efforts and population control methods are not mandated by governments

    • Alleviating concerns over decreasing amounts of personal space

Migration

• Migrants are generally those who voluntarily move from location to location.

• Many countries experience internal migrations that significantly change the countries’ population distributions.

  • Interregional, or internal, migrants: those who move from one region of the country to another

  • Transnational migration: occurs when migrants move from one country to another.

  • Forced migration: people may be taken or coerced from their homes for forced labor through human trafficking or enslavement

  • Undocumented immigrants: people who come seeking refuge or employment opportunities but do not have government authorization

  • Amnesty programs: allow undocumented immigrants the opportunity to apply for official status or citizenship without facing arrest or deportation

  • Step migration: occurs when people move up in a hierarchy of locations, with each move to a more advantageous or economically prosperous place

  • Chain migration: occurs when a pioneering individual or group settles in a new place, establishing a new migrant foothold.

  • Life-course changes: when people move because of major changes in the course of their lives.

Push and Pull Factors

• Push factors are specific things about the rural agricultural landscape and livelihood that force people off the farm

  • (ex: armed conflict, environmental pollution, increased land costs)

• Pull factors are specific things about cities that draw people to the urban landscape

  • (ex: job opportunities, medical care, education, service access, entertainment)

Key Concepts:

• Culture: the shared experience, traits, and activities of a group of people who have a common heritage

  • Components of Culture:

    • Art

    • Architecture

    • Language

    • Music

    • Film and Television

    • Food

    • Clothing

    • Social Interaction

    • Religion

    • Folklore

    • Land Use

• Each component of culture is expressed in a multitude of ways that signify and symbolize cultural influences

• Cultural synthesis (syncretism): the blending together of two or more cultural influences

  • EX: Country music is often thought of as a product of American culture and is strongly tied to folk music traditions. However, the mixture of musical sounds, vocabulary, rhythms, and instruments from the Scots-Irish, the German, African immigrants, and enslaved people in the American South and Appalachia came together to form a new style of music.

• Combined, the many components come together to identify and define a single culture group, or nation

• Art is important as an identifier of groups and a source of local pride

Architecture

• Architectural forms that are the product of cultural influence are found within the built environment of the human landscape

• Modern and contemporary architecture: when new buildings are constructed using innovative designs

  • Modern means architecture developed during the 20th century that expresses geometric, ordered forms

    • (EX: the rectangular steel and glass skyscrapers built in the 1970s-1980s)

  • Contemporary architecture of the present is more organic, with the use of curvature

    • Incorporates green energy technologies, recycled materials, or nontraditional materials (EX: metal sheeting on the exterior)

  • Postmodern: a category within contemporary that means that the design abandons the use of blocky rectilinear shapes in favor of wavy, crystalline, or bending shapes in the form of the home or building

• Traditional architecture can express one of two patterns in building type:

1. New commercial buildings incorporate the efficiency and simplicity of modern architecture into a standard building design with squared walls and utilize traditional materials like stone, brick, steel, and glass

2. Housing based on folk house designs from different regions of the country

Housing Types:

• New England: small one-story pitched-roof Cape Cod style or the irregular roof Saltbox with one long pitched roof in front and a sort of low-angle roof in back

• Federalist or Georgian: refers to the housing styles of the late 1700s and early 1800s in Anglo-America.

  • Often two- or three-story urban townhomes connected to one another

  • Windows and rooflines featured classical Greek and Roman designs and stone carvings.

  • Symmetrical homes with central doorways and equal numbers of windows on each side of the house

• The I-house: a loose form of Federalist and Georgian influence on the average family home in the United States and Canada

  • Simple rectangular I-houses have a central door with one window on each side of the home’s front and three symmetrical windows on the second floor

  • Later I-houses moved the door to the side and added onto the back or side of the house

  • Fireplaces on each end of the house and an even- pitched roof

Religious Buildings and Places:

• Christian: traditional houses of worship tend to have a central steeple or two high bell towers in the front of the building

  • The steeple is typical of smaller churches, and bell towers are found in larger churches and cathedrals.

  • Symbolically, older churches, cathedrals, and basilicas feature a cross-shaped floor plan.

• Hindu: temples and shrines tend to have a rectangular-shaped main body and feature one or more short towers of carved stone

  • The towers often feature stepped sides and display carvings of the heads and faces of deities

• Buddhist: temples and shrines vary depending on which Buddhist tradition is followed in the region

  • In Nepal and Tibet, a temple can be a stupa, with a dome or tower featuring a pair of eyes

  • In East Asia, the tower-style pagoda has several levels, each of which features winged roofs extending outward

  • Temples and shrines in China and Japan feature one- or two-story buildings with large, curved, winged roof

  • Temples are often guarded by large lion statues

  • Temples in Southeast Asia tend to have several towers with thin pointed spires that point outward at an angle

• Islamic: mosques can take a variety of forms, though many have central domes

  • A mosque is one or more minarets, narrow towers that are pointed on top

  • Almost all mosques are built on an angle that places the main prayer area toward Mecca

• Judaic: there is not a common architectural design style to synagogues.

  • The most holy place in Judaism is the Wailing Wall, which have old foundation walls that feature large rectangular stone blocks where Jews pray and place written prayers in the cracks between the blocks

Language

• the United States federal government has not designated an official language

• Monolingual: knowing one language only

• other states accept that they have a large multilingual immigrant population and have made provisions to provide services

• Canada is bilingual because there are two official languages: English and French.

• Depending upon where you are in a larger linguistic region, the dialect of a common language is different

  • (EX: the English spoken by English people and Australian people sounds similar, there is a distinct “strain” of English spoken in Australia)

  • A variety of different word sounds and vocabulary

• Received pronunciation: King’s English or “posh” English

• Cockney English: the language of the working-class areas of the East London docklands and surrounding neighborhoods, which sounds distinctly not posh

• Cockney rhyming slang: an odd but humorous use of code phrases to describe everyday situations

• Pidgin languages are simplified forms of the language that use key vocabulary words and limited grammar

• French Creole is spoken, which incorporates continental French with African dialectal sounds and vocabulary

• French itself has long been a language used to bridge the linguistic gap between people of different national heritage

  • The term lingua franca was coined to describe its utility as a bridge language

• English is accepted as the global lingua franca as different forms of popular culture media, the Internet, and the business world are dominated by the English language

Major Language Families:

• There are a small number of major language families represented by the early or prehistoric language roots

  • Can be broken into language groups or even language subfamilies

• The Indo-European concept is derived from linguistic analysis and genetic evidence of prehistoric migrations from the Indian subcontinent into Europe

Largest members of language families:

• Indo-European (2.9 billion people)

• Sino-Tibetan (1.3 billion people)

• Niger-Congo (435 million people)

• Afro-Asiatic (375 million people)

• Austronesian (346 million people, from Southeastern

• Asia, Oceania, and Hawaii)

• Dravidian (230 million people, from on and around the

• Indian subcontinent)

• Altaic (165 million people, from Eastern Europe through

• Central and Eastern Asia)

• Japanese (123 million people)

• Tai-Kadai (81 million people)

• Two competing theories regarding the origins of European language:

  • Anatolian theory: a group of migrants from the Indian subcontinent, and their language, were for some time concentrated in the peninsula that makes up most of present-day Turkey. Then, a large migration crossed the Hellespont into continental Europe and spread outward into a relatively unpopulated region.

  • Kurgan theory: the same group of migrants from the Indian subcontinent instead made their way into Central Asia, and then migrated across the Eurasian stepped into Central and Western Europe, taking their language with them.

    • Genetic research shows that almost all Europeans are derived genetically from populations that inhabited the Indian subcontinent in prehistoric times

Music

• Music is a form of nonmaterial culture that has geographic roots and regional variation

• Folk music: music that is original to a specific culture

  • Often incorporate instruments unique to that region or have orchestrations that are specific to that culture

  • Folk song lyrics often incorporate cultural stories and religious tradition, which can be described as folklore

• Popular culture generates a global flow of pop music that often has the effect of drowning out local folk music traditions from radio and other media

  • The most popular folk music type in the region is bluegrass, which originated in Kentucky

    • Heavily influenced contemporary country music, and recently, rock and roll

• Recordings sold today as World Music are actually products of folk musicians from other culture groups

  • (EX: the band, Gypsy Kings, are from France, but their families had left Spain decades earlier due to persecution by the Franco-led fascist government of Romani in Europe)

Film and Television

• Different forms of film and television are important signs of a cultural imprint on the land

• Media forms are major conduits for cultural globalization

Food

• A material form of culture that varies regionally and is rooted in a number of geographic ways

• Continental cuisine: the formal food traditions that emerged from mainland Europe in the 1800s

  • Embodied in haute cuisine, where traditionally a main meat course is served with a flour-, cream-, or wine-based sauce and side dishes of vegetables and potatoes

• Nouvelle cuisine: the contemporary form of the continental styles mainly from France, Spain, and Italy

• Fusion cuisine: when more than one global tradition is incorporated in dishes

• All of these forms are based on original forms of folk food dishes

  • (EX: Sushi is a simple but artistic form of folk food from Japan)

Clothing

• Different clothing styles are other signs of a cultural imprint on the landscape

• The way people dress is an important sign of their ethnicity

Social Interaction

• Culturally constructed: traditions devised by a specific culture group

• Physical greetings are a basic example of culturally different social interaction:

  • A handshake is a common physical greeting in the West

  • The bow still holds as the primary formal greeting in Japan

  • Formal, non-touching cheek kissing is a greeting in many countries

• personal space also varies from country to country

  • (EX: it is considered rude not to sit in empty seat in Peru)

Religion

• Specific religions are drawn from a number of larger global groups and can be characterized by their expanse

• Universalizing religions: accept followers from all ethnicities worldwide

• Ethnic religions: confined to members of a specific culture group

• All organized religions have one or more books of scripture, said to be written of divine origin

• Formal doctrines: govern religious practice, worship, and ethical behavior in society.

• Compromising religions: have the ability to reform or integrate other beliefs into their doctrinal practices

• Fundamentalists: have little interest in compromising their beliefs or doctrines and strictly adhere to scriptural dictates

• Syncretic religions: synthesize the core beliefs from two or more other religions

  • (EX: Sikhs incorporate principles from both Islam and Hinduism)

• Three Major Traditions of Belief Systems:

• Animist Tradition: Various ethnic, tribal, and other forms of nature worship

  • These groups have common themes, worship practices, and morality tales, which define a right and ethical way to live

  • Share the common belief that items in nature can have spiritual being, including landforms, animals, and trees

• Hindu-Buddhist Tradition: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism

  • The oldest universalizing religions began with Hinduism 5,000 years ago

  • Polytheistic: believing in more than one spiritual god

  • Many levels of existence, the highest being nirvana, where someone achieves total consciousness or enlightenment

  • One’s soul is reincarnated over and over into different forms

  • Karma: the balance between good and evil deeds in life, determines the outcome of reincarnation

• Abrahamic Tradition: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

  • Similar scriptural descriptions of the Earth’s genesis and the story of Abraham as a morality tale of respect for the will of God or Allah

  • Monotheistic belief system with a singular supreme being

  • Sub-deities such as saints, angels, and archangels

  • Significance is placed upon prophecy that predicts the coming or return of a messianic figure that defeats the forces of a satanic evil for souls of followers

Caste System in India

• Hindu scriptures describe a cosmology (a belief in the structure of the universe) in which there are several levels of existence, from the lowest animal forms to human forms and then higher animal forms

• Sacred animals include elephants, horses, and cows, which are seen as aspects of Mother Goddess Earth and symbols of selflessness

• All souls undergo reincarnation multiple times, learning new things each time.

• Whether a person is elevated in each new life depends upon his or her karma, which is the balance between the good and bad deeds that he or she has committed in his or her previous life.

• Once a person is born into a caste, he or she remains there for the rest of his or her life, no matter the changes to his or her fortune.

• India’s government has initiated a number of efforts to eliminate the caste structure in Indian society; however, is still recognizable in rural areas

The Five Castes (from highest to lowest):

1. Brahmans

• Priestly caste

• Responsible for temples and leading religious worship

• Can be selected as high government officials

• May eschew all material possessions to live as monks, meditating hermits, or as ascetics who sit on sidewalks and perform prayers for those who provide their food donations
  2. Kshatriyas

• Aristocratic and warrior caste

• Hereditary princes and kings still bow to the Brahmans

• Many were landowners, government leaders, and wealthy businesspeople
  3. Vaishyas

• Merchant and professional caste

• Many were doctors, lawyers, accountants, and government bureaucrats
  4. Shudras

• Caste of farmers, laborers, and artisans

• Many were potters, jewelers, and glassworkers

• No leisure time and near-total illiteracy

• Forbidden from studying the Vedas
  5. Dalits

• “Untouchables,” a name derived from their low position in the system and considered unholy by higher castes

• Segregated from other Hindu housing areas and social networks

• Dalit sub-castes were divided among trades and duties in the community such as leather work (cattleare sacred, and only the lowest-caste humans could handle their flesh) and cleaning of train stations and sewers

Islamic States: Theocracy, Sharia, and Secular Governance

• Theocracies: religious leaders hold the senior positions of governance

  • (EX: Iran has a supreme religious council that serves as the head of state and can overrule the elected parliament and president)

• Not all Middle-Eastern states are republics or monarchies that abide by Sharia, or Islamic law, based on the Koran and Hadith

• Other states in the region are

  • Secular: not directly governed in a religious manner and, instead, often utilize French or British legal tradition and government structure

• Theocracy: Iran, formerly Afghanistan under the Taliban

• Sharia States: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen Secular States: Jordan, Turkey

Five Pillars of Islam

• The Koran emphasizes five pillars that guide followers with a moral system

  5. Five Daily Prayers

• The call to prayer is heard on loudspeakers in cities throughout the Muslim world at designated hours

• All work stops and prayer mats are unrolled

• Prayer is done facing Mecca

• Islamic astronomers and geographers have worked for centuries to determine the azimuth, the angle of direction, from Mecca to other parts of the Earth

  5. Islamic Creed

• The creed is a statement of monotheism

• Prior to Muhammad’s religious conversion of the Arabian peninsula, many of the peoples in the region believed in polytheistic Animist or tribal religions

• Believe in a number of prophets shared with the Judeo-Christian traditions, such as Moses, Isaac, Ishmael, and Jesus, but Muhammad is the supreme prophet

  5. Alms to the Poor

• Duty of all Muslims to care for and donate to the poor and sick within their communities

• Large charitable foundations in the Islamic world help alleviate poverty, extend health care, and educate children

  5. Have come under increased scrutiny by the U.S. government following 9/11, due to accusations that charities were being used to funnel money to terrorist groups

  6. Observance of Ramadan

• Ramadan is a period of spiritual cleansing and repentance for past sins

• There is fasting during daylight hours, with plain evening meals of sparing quantity

• Set on a lunar calendar and can fall during a wide range of months in our Gregorian calendar

  5. The Hajj

• Must make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca during his lifetime

• “Haji” is an honorific name for those who make the journey

• The most popular time for the Hajj is during Ramadan

Folklore

• Folklore: collected stories, spoken-word histories and writings that are specific to a culture and tell the societal histories and morality tales that define a culture’s ethical foundations

  • (EX: Aesop’s fables are an example of folklore from the classical Greeks. Each fable had a moral to the story, a lesson to be learned regarding proper behavior.)

• The intersection of a culture’s history and its folklore can often lead to distortions of reality in the lives of historical figures

  • (EX: In many parts of the Americas, a folklore has been built around the life and travels of Christopher Columbus. The myths and facts are intertwined and the folklore varies from country to country.)

Land Use

• How property is utilized, shared, or divided can say something about culture through its imprint on the landscape

• Farming can culturally specific and is heavily influenced by technology

• Range from swidden, or a “slash and burn” style of agriculture seen in forest regions, to the highly technological large-scale farming seen in the First World

Residential Patterns:

• The distribution of living space is also an important indicator of culture, especially in rural and tribal areas

• Cultural traditions impose rules on living space that depend on:

  • Singular clan relations

  • Extended family units with more than one clan

  • Whole tribal communities with multiple clans living in one shared residential area

Land Ownership:

• Landholdings became subdivided via partial land sales or by nationwide land reform efforts

• Land reform often divided properties into smaller polygons

• Long-lot patterns: a narrow frontage along a road or waterway with a very long lot shape behind

Nation and Ethnicity

• Nation: a population represented by a singular culture or a culture group

  • Not all nations have a representative state

• Ethnicity: a complex mix of genetic heritage and political allegiance

  • Ethnic groups often claim a single identifiable lineage or heritage, which all members tend to identify with as a common social bond

  • Can be modified in the process of migration

    • Can be evidence of acculturation by immigrants to their new home country

• State: a population represented by a single government

• Cultural identity: how people are identified and how they identify themselves

Race

• Race: the physical characteristics of a common genetic heritage.

  • Developed by physical anthropologists in the 1800s

  • Categorized racial groups based on a number of variables including skin color, bone structure, and the shape of the hair shafts

    • Crudely as the basis for racism within society and have led to oppression, suffering, and war throughout the world.

Three distinct racial groups emerged:

• Mongoloid or Asiatic: with a tan or yellowish skin tone, small body structure, and straight hair shaft

• Caucasoid or Indo-European: with light to dark skin tone, medium body type, and wavy hair shaft

• Negroid or African: with a dark skin tone, medium body shape, and a curly hair shaft

Four populations of physical anthropological groups were identified within the Pacific Islands:

• Melanesians: found in New Guinea, New Caledonia, and Fiji, named because of their dark skin coloration, have comparatively thin bodies and angular facial features, with a curly hair shaft

• Polynesians: living in Tonga, Samoa, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawaii, have a lighter brown skin color, heavyset body shape, and curly hair shafts

• Micronesians:  coming from the small island atolls of the Marshalls and Caroline Islands, have a light brown skin color, medium body shape, and curly hair shafts

• Aboriginals: in Australia, have light brown skin, a medium body type, and wavy hair shafts

Mixed Race Cultures

• Identities can be based on a single race or be defined by multiple mixed races

  • (EX: Mestizos are people who have cultural and genetic heritage from European and Native American backgrounds)

• Indigenous population: the people who originally settled in an area

Racism

• Environmental determinism: the former scientific ideology that states that a culture’s traits are defined by the physical geography of its native hearth or culture region

  • It was being used to reinforce the racist ideologies of the 1800s and early 1900s

• Possibilism: the revised concept proposed by Sauer and other like-minded geographers that stated cultures were to a partial degree shaped by their environment and the material resources available to them

  • Culture groups have the ability to adjust and modify the environment

• Lebensraum: the living space for each distinct nation was based upon the optimal physical geography of the culture group

  • The concepts of Nazism proposed by Hitler were in part based on Ratzel’s concept

• Neo-Nazism: based on violent racism against non-whites and immigrants or violet expression of xenophobia

• Ethnocentrism: the belief in the superiority of one’s nation or ethnic group, and in the inferiority of other nations or ethnic groups

  • Typically grows fiercest in the earliest and most dominant settlement group, whose characteristics strongly influence the initial social and cultural geography of an area

• Cultural relativism: the idea that an individual’s beliefs and activities can only be understood in the context of that person’s culture

Internal vs External Identity

• Internal identity: used by individuals to express their cultural heritage, ethnicity, or place of origin to people who share their heritage or place of origin

• External identity: used by individuals to express their cultural heritage, ethnicity, or place of origin to people who do not share a common cultural or geographic background

  • Use to compensate for the lack of cultural knowledge from one group to another

• Culture regions: an area of bounded space with a homogeneous characteristic that can be one or more components of culture

• Fuzzy borders: cultural regions tend to have this because it’s hard to tell where one cultural region ends and another begins

  • Cultural regions overlap in an irregular manner

  • (EX: where Dixie ends and the American Northeast or Midwest begins)

• Border states: where one part of the state is decidedly Southern and another part seems more Northeastern

Cultural Hearths

• Culture hearth: the idea that every culture has a localized area where it originated or has its main population center

• Contemporary culture hearths exist in today’s world

• (EX: the Mormon culture region of the American West shares the homogeneous characteristic that is the Latter-Day Saints (LDS) religion and is a region with a distinct core and a wider periphery; is botha formal and functional region)

• Ancient culture hearths: developed ideas and technologies that still exist today

  • (EX: the domestication of staple food crops)

Cultural Change

• Sequent occupance: for a single place or region, different dominant cultures replace each other over time

  • (EX: European architecture found in former colonial cities of Africa like Lagos, Nigeria)

  • The ethnic neighborhood shows how these groups make their way into the layers of sequent occupance at a much smaller scale

• Acculturation: the process of adapting to a new culture while still keeping some of one’s original culture

  • Both the original and the incoming culture group swapping cultural traits

• Assimilation: a complete change in the identity of a minority culture group as it becomes part of the majority culture group

  • (EX: the U.S. government forced the Native Americans to move to reservations and adopt the dress, manners, language, and ways of the dominant American culture)

Cultural Survival and Globalization

• Cultural survival: used to describe the efforts to research, understand, and promote the protection of indigenous cultures

• Indigenous culture: the original culture of that same region

  • The loss of indigenous culture has become a significant concern among citizens and a major policy issue among governments

• Cultures are in danger of extinction if something is not done to help protect and promote the preservation of cultural heritage

Depopulation of Native Americans

• William Denevan established that the pre-Columbian population of Native Americans in North and South America combined was approximately 54 million people

• The total native population had declined to around 5 million people by 1635

• Diseases of European origin were the main reason behind the decline,

• Cultural globalization: a number of influences such as literature, music, motion pictures, the Internet, and satellite and cable television, mainly from English-language sources, combined to diminish and potentially eliminate the media and culture of other linguistic groups

  • People who lose their connection to their heritage are also losing part of their personal connection to nature

  • By protecting national cultures from the negative effects of globalization, a nation can promote its own cultural economy and products from creative arts and media–draw for tourism

• Proselytic religions that actively seek converts also threaten many unique cultures around the world

• National governments around the world have instituted laws and regulations that lessen the impact of foreign influence on their home cultures

Cases of Cultural Diffusion

• Culture is transmitted through a number of different methods:

• Trade: interconnectedness increases along popular trade routes

• Colonialism: though the Mormon church that began in Utah, it spread itself around the world via mandatory missions conducted by its young members

• Conflict: or war, often sees soldiers and armies invading or even occupying foreign cultures

• Migration: immigrants carry their own culture to their new country and blend them with preexisting bits of culture

EX: Yugoslavia

• Ethnic cleansing: where people of one ethnic group are eliminated by another, often under threat of violence or death

  • Several political and military leaders have been charged with crimes against humanity for their war crimes

  • (EX: The former Yugoslavia was created as a state during the post–World War I Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

  • After the death of leader Joseph Tito, people and politicians began to revitalize their centuries-long ethnic and religious arguments.

  • In 1989, localized fighting broke out in northern Yugoslavia between Croats and Serbians)

• Genocide: a large-scale systematic killing of people of one ethnic group

  • (EX: the Holocaust of Jews at the hands of the Nazis in World War II when six million were killed)

Key Concepts:

• Culture: the shared experience, traits, and activities of a group of people who have a common heritage

  • Components of Culture:

    • Art

    • Architecture

    • Language

    • Music

    • Film and Television

    • Food

    • Clothing

    • Social Interaction

    • Religion

    • Folklore

    • Land Use

• Each component of culture is expressed in a multitude of ways that signify and symbolize cultural influences

• Cultural synthesis (syncretism): the blending together of two or more cultural influences

  • EX: Country music is often thought of as a product of American culture and is strongly tied to folk music traditions. However, the mixture of musical sounds, vocabulary, rhythms, and instruments from the Scots-Irish, the German, African immigrants, and enslaved people in the American South and Appalachia came together to form a new style of music.

• Combined, the many components come together to identify and define a single culture group, or nation

• Art is important as an identifier of groups and a source of local pride

Architecture

• Architectural forms that are the product of cultural influence are found within the built environment of the human landscape

• Modern and contemporary architecture: when new buildings are constructed using innovative designs

  • Modern means architecture developed during the 20th century that expresses geometric, ordered forms

    • (EX: the rectangular steel and glass skyscrapers built in the 1970s-1980s)

  • Contemporary architecture of the present is more organic, with the use of curvature

    • Incorporates green energy technologies, recycled materials, or nontraditional materials (EX: metal sheeting on the exterior)

  • Postmodern: a category within contemporary that means that the design abandons the use of blocky rectilinear shapes in favor of wavy, crystalline, or bending shapes in the form of the home or building

• Traditional architecture can express one of two patterns in building type:

1. New commercial buildings incorporate the efficiency and simplicity of modern architecture into a standard building design with squared walls and utilize traditional materials like stone, brick, steel, and glass

2. Housing based on folk house designs from different regions of the country

Housing Types:

• New England: small one-story pitched-roof Cape Cod style or the irregular roof Saltbox with one long pitched roof in front and a sort of low-angle roof in back

• Federalist or Georgian: refers to the housing styles of the late 1700s and early 1800s in Anglo-America.

  • Often two- or three-story urban townhomes connected to one another

  • Windows and rooflines featured classical Greek and Roman designs and stone carvings.

  • Symmetrical homes with central doorways and equal numbers of windows on each side of the house

• The I-house: a loose form of Federalist and Georgian influence on the average family home in the United States and Canada

  • Simple rectangular I-houses have a central door with one window on each side of the home’s front and three symmetrical windows on the second floor

  • Later I-houses moved the door to the side and added onto the back or side of the house

  • Fireplaces on each end of the house and an even- pitched roof

Religious Buildings and Places:

• Christian: traditional houses of worship tend to have a central steeple or two high bell towers in the front of the building

  • The steeple is typical of smaller churches, and bell towers are found in larger churches and cathedrals.

  • Symbolically, older churches, cathedrals, and basilicas feature a cross-shaped floor plan.

• Hindu: temples and shrines tend to have a rectangular-shaped main body and feature one or more short towers of carved stone

  • The towers often feature stepped sides and display carvings of the heads and faces of deities

• Buddhist: temples and shrines vary depending on which Buddhist tradition is followed in the region

  • In Nepal and Tibet, a temple can be a stupa, with a dome or tower featuring a pair of eyes

  • In East Asia, the tower-style pagoda has several levels, each of which features winged roofs extending outward

  • Temples and shrines in China and Japan feature one- or two-story buildings with large, curved, winged roof

  • Temples are often guarded by large lion statues

  • Temples in Southeast Asia tend to have several towers with thin pointed spires that point outward at an angle

• Islamic: mosques can take a variety of forms, though many have central domes

  • A mosque is one or more minarets, narrow towers that are pointed on top

  • Almost all mosques are built on an angle that places the main prayer area toward Mecca

• Judaic: there is not a common architectural design style to synagogues.

  • The most holy place in Judaism is the Wailing Wall, which have old foundation walls that feature large rectangular stone blocks where Jews pray and place written prayers in the cracks between the blocks

Language

• the United States federal government has not designated an official language

• Monolingual: knowing one language only

• other states accept that they have a large multilingual immigrant population and have made provisions to provide services

• Canada is bilingual because there are two official languages: English and French.

• Depending upon where you are in a larger linguistic region, the dialect of a common language is different

  • (EX: the English spoken by English people and Australian people sounds similar, there is a distinct “strain” of English spoken in Australia)

  • A variety of different word sounds and vocabulary

• Received pronunciation: King’s English or “posh” English

• Cockney English: the language of the working-class areas of the East London docklands and surrounding neighborhoods, which sounds distinctly not posh

• Cockney rhyming slang: an odd but humorous use of code phrases to describe everyday situations

• Pidgin languages are simplified forms of the language that use key vocabulary words and limited grammar

• French Creole is spoken, which incorporates continental French with African dialectal sounds and vocabulary

• French itself has long been a language used to bridge the linguistic gap between people of different national heritage

  • The term lingua franca was coined to describe its utility as a bridge language

• English is accepted as the global lingua franca as different forms of popular culture media, the Internet, and the business world are dominated by the English language

Major Language Families:

• There are a small number of major language families represented by the early or prehistoric language roots

  • Can be broken into language groups or even language subfamilies

• The Indo-European concept is derived from linguistic analysis and genetic evidence of prehistoric migrations from the Indian subcontinent into Europe

Largest members of language families:

• Indo-European (2.9 billion people)

• Sino-Tibetan (1.3 billion people)

• Niger-Congo (435 million people)

• Afro-Asiatic (375 million people)

• Austronesian (346 million people, from Southeastern

• Asia, Oceania, and Hawaii)

• Dravidian (230 million people, from on and around the

• Indian subcontinent)

• Altaic (165 million people, from Eastern Europe through

• Central and Eastern Asia)

• Japanese (123 million people)

• Tai-Kadai (81 million people)

• Two competing theories regarding the origins of European language:

  • Anatolian theory: a group of migrants from the Indian subcontinent, and their language, were for some time concentrated in the peninsula that makes up most of present-day Turkey. Then, a large migration crossed the Hellespont into continental Europe and spread outward into a relatively unpopulated region.

  • Kurgan theory: the same group of migrants from the Indian subcontinent instead made their way into Central Asia, and then migrated across the Eurasian stepped into Central and Western Europe, taking their language with them.

    • Genetic research shows that almost all Europeans are derived genetically from populations that inhabited the Indian subcontinent in prehistoric times

Music

• Music is a form of nonmaterial culture that has geographic roots and regional variation

• Folk music: music that is original to a specific culture

  • Often incorporate instruments unique to that region or have orchestrations that are specific to that culture

  • Folk song lyrics often incorporate cultural stories and religious tradition, which can be described as folklore

• Popular culture generates a global flow of pop music that often has the effect of drowning out local folk music traditions from radio and other media

  • The most popular folk music type in the region is bluegrass, which originated in Kentucky

    • Heavily influenced contemporary country music, and recently, rock and roll

• Recordings sold today as World Music are actually products of folk musicians from other culture groups

  • (EX: the band, Gypsy Kings, are from France, but their families had left Spain decades earlier due to persecution by the Franco-led fascist government of Romani in Europe)

Film and Television

• Different forms of film and television are important signs of a cultural imprint on the land

• Media forms are major conduits for cultural globalization

Food

• A material form of culture that varies regionally and is rooted in a number of geographic ways

• Continental cuisine: the formal food traditions that emerged from mainland Europe in the 1800s

  • Embodied in haute cuisine, where traditionally a main meat course is served with a flour-, cream-, or wine-based sauce and side dishes of vegetables and potatoes

• Nouvelle cuisine: the contemporary form of the continental styles mainly from France, Spain, and Italy

• Fusion cuisine: when more than one global tradition is incorporated in dishes

• All of these forms are based on original forms of folk food dishes

  • (EX: Sushi is a simple but artistic form of folk food from Japan)

Clothing

• Different clothing styles are other signs of a cultural imprint on the landscape

• The way people dress is an important sign of their ethnicity

Social Interaction

• Culturally constructed: traditions devised by a specific culture group

• Physical greetings are a basic example of culturally different social interaction:

  • A handshake is a common physical greeting in the West

  • The bow still holds as the primary formal greeting in Japan

  • Formal, non-touching cheek kissing is a greeting in many countries

• personal space also varies from country to country

  • (EX: it is considered rude not to sit in empty seat in Peru)

Religion

• Specific religions are drawn from a number of larger global groups and can be characterized by their expanse

• Universalizing religions: accept followers from all ethnicities worldwide

• Ethnic religions: confined to members of a specific culture group

• All organized religions have one or more books of scripture, said to be written of divine origin

• Formal doctrines: govern religious practice, worship, and ethical behavior in society.

• Compromising religions: have the ability to reform or integrate other beliefs into their doctrinal practices

• Fundamentalists: have little interest in compromising their beliefs or doctrines and strictly adhere to scriptural dictates

• Syncretic religions: synthesize the core beliefs from two or more other religions

  • (EX: Sikhs incorporate principles from both Islam and Hinduism)

• Three Major Traditions of Belief Systems:

• Animist Tradition: Various ethnic, tribal, and other forms of nature worship

  • These groups have common themes, worship practices, and morality tales, which define a right and ethical way to live

  • Share the common belief that items in nature can have spiritual being, including landforms, animals, and trees

• Hindu-Buddhist Tradition: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism

  • The oldest universalizing religions began with Hinduism 5,000 years ago

  • Polytheistic: believing in more than one spiritual god

  • Many levels of existence, the highest being nirvana, where someone achieves total consciousness or enlightenment

  • One’s soul is reincarnated over and over into different forms

  • Karma: the balance between good and evil deeds in life, determines the outcome of reincarnation

• Abrahamic Tradition: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

  • Similar scriptural descriptions of the Earth’s genesis and the story of Abraham as a morality tale of respect for the will of God or Allah

  • Monotheistic belief system with a singular supreme being

  • Sub-deities such as saints, angels, and archangels

  • Significance is placed upon prophecy that predicts the coming or return of a messianic figure that defeats the forces of a satanic evil for souls of followers

Caste System in India

• Hindu scriptures describe a cosmology (a belief in the structure of the universe) in which there are several levels of existence, from the lowest animal forms to human forms and then higher animal forms

• Sacred animals include elephants, horses, and cows, which are seen as aspects of Mother Goddess Earth and symbols of selflessness

• All souls undergo reincarnation multiple times, learning new things each time.

• Whether a person is elevated in each new life depends upon his or her karma, which is the balance between the good and bad deeds that he or she has committed in his or her previous life.

• Once a person is born into a caste, he or she remains there for the rest of his or her life, no matter the changes to his or her fortune.

• India’s government has initiated a number of efforts to eliminate the caste structure in Indian society; however, is still recognizable in rural areas

The Five Castes (from highest to lowest):

1. Brahmans

• Priestly caste

• Responsible for temples and leading religious worship

• Can be selected as high government officials

• May eschew all material possessions to live as monks, meditating hermits, or as ascetics who sit on sidewalks and perform prayers for those who provide their food donations
  2. Kshatriyas

• Aristocratic and warrior caste

• Hereditary princes and kings still bow to the Brahmans

• Many were landowners, government leaders, and wealthy businesspeople
  3. Vaishyas

• Merchant and professional caste

• Many were doctors, lawyers, accountants, and government bureaucrats
  4. Shudras

• Caste of farmers, laborers, and artisans

• Many were potters, jewelers, and glassworkers

• No leisure time and near-total illiteracy

• Forbidden from studying the Vedas
  5. Dalits

• “Untouchables,” a name derived from their low position in the system and considered unholy by higher castes

• Segregated from other Hindu housing areas and social networks

• Dalit sub-castes were divided among trades and duties in the community such as leather work (cattleare sacred, and only the lowest-caste humans could handle their flesh) and cleaning of train stations and sewers

Islamic States: Theocracy, Sharia, and Secular Governance

• Theocracies: religious leaders hold the senior positions of governance

  • (EX: Iran has a supreme religious council that serves as the head of state and can overrule the elected parliament and president)

• Not all Middle-Eastern states are republics or monarchies that abide by Sharia, or Islamic law, based on the Koran and Hadith

• Other states in the region are

  • Secular: not directly governed in a religious manner and, instead, often utilize French or British legal tradition and government structure

• Theocracy: Iran, formerly Afghanistan under the Taliban

• Sharia States: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen Secular States: Jordan, Turkey

Five Pillars of Islam

• The Koran emphasizes five pillars that guide followers with a moral system

  5. Five Daily Prayers

• The call to prayer is heard on loudspeakers in cities throughout the Muslim world at designated hours

• All work stops and prayer mats are unrolled

• Prayer is done facing Mecca

• Islamic astronomers and geographers have worked for centuries to determine the azimuth, the angle of direction, from Mecca to other parts of the Earth

  5. Islamic Creed

• The creed is a statement of monotheism

• Prior to Muhammad’s religious conversion of the Arabian peninsula, many of the peoples in the region believed in polytheistic Animist or tribal religions

• Believe in a number of prophets shared with the Judeo-Christian traditions, such as Moses, Isaac, Ishmael, and Jesus, but Muhammad is the supreme prophet

  5. Alms to the Poor

• Duty of all Muslims to care for and donate to the poor and sick within their communities

• Large charitable foundations in the Islamic world help alleviate poverty, extend health care, and educate children

  5. Have come under increased scrutiny by the U.S. government following 9/11, due to accusations that charities were being used to funnel money to terrorist groups

  6. Observance of Ramadan

• Ramadan is a period of spiritual cleansing and repentance for past sins

• There is fasting during daylight hours, with plain evening meals of sparing quantity

• Set on a lunar calendar and can fall during a wide range of months in our Gregorian calendar

  5. The Hajj

• Must make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca during his lifetime

• “Haji” is an honorific name for those who make the journey

• The most popular time for the Hajj is during Ramadan

Folklore

• Folklore: collected stories, spoken-word histories and writings that are specific to a culture and tell the societal histories and morality tales that define a culture’s ethical foundations

  • (EX: Aesop’s fables are an example of folklore from the classical Greeks. Each fable had a moral to the story, a lesson to be learned regarding proper behavior.)

• The intersection of a culture’s history and its folklore can often lead to distortions of reality in the lives of historical figures

  • (EX: In many parts of the Americas, a folklore has been built around the life and travels of Christopher Columbus. The myths and facts are intertwined and the folklore varies from country to country.)

Land Use

• How property is utilized, shared, or divided can say something about culture through its imprint on the landscape

• Farming can culturally specific and is heavily influenced by technology

• Range from swidden, or a “slash and burn” style of agriculture seen in forest regions, to the highly technological large-scale farming seen in the First World

Residential Patterns:

• The distribution of living space is also an important indicator of culture, especially in rural and tribal areas

• Cultural traditions impose rules on living space that depend on:

  • Singular clan relations

  • Extended family units with more than one clan

  • Whole tribal communities with multiple clans living in one shared residential area

Land Ownership:

• Landholdings became subdivided via partial land sales or by nationwide land reform efforts

• Land reform often divided properties into smaller polygons

• Long-lot patterns: a narrow frontage along a road or waterway with a very long lot shape behind

Nation and Ethnicity

• Nation: a population represented by a singular culture or a culture group

  • Not all nations have a representative state

• Ethnicity: a complex mix of genetic heritage and political allegiance

  • Ethnic groups often claim a single identifiable lineage or heritage, which all members tend to identify with as a common social bond

  • Can be modified in the process of migration

    • Can be evidence of acculturation by immigrants to their new home country

• State: a population represented by a single government

• Cultural identity: how people are identified and how they identify themselves

Race

• Race: the physical characteristics of a common genetic heritage.

  • Developed by physical anthropologists in the 1800s

  • Categorized racial groups based on a number of variables including skin color, bone structure, and the shape of the hair shafts

    • Crudely as the basis for racism within society and have led to oppression, suffering, and war throughout the world.

Three distinct racial groups emerged:

• Mongoloid or Asiatic: with a tan or yellowish skin tone, small body structure, and straight hair shaft

• Caucasoid or Indo-European: with light to dark skin tone, medium body type, and wavy hair shaft

• Negroid or African: with a dark skin tone, medium body shape, and a curly hair shaft

Four populations of physical anthropological groups were identified within the Pacific Islands:

• Melanesians: found in New Guinea, New Caledonia, and Fiji, named because of their dark skin coloration, have comparatively thin bodies and angular facial features, with a curly hair shaft

• Polynesians: living in Tonga, Samoa, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawaii, have a lighter brown skin color, heavyset body shape, and curly hair shafts

• Micronesians:  coming from the small island atolls of the Marshalls and Caroline Islands, have a light brown skin color, medium body shape, and curly hair shafts

• Aboriginals: in Australia, have light brown skin, a medium body type, and wavy hair shafts

Mixed Race Cultures

• Identities can be based on a single race or be defined by multiple mixed races

  • (EX: Mestizos are people who have cultural and genetic heritage from European and Native American backgrounds)

• Indigenous population: the people who originally settled in an area

Racism

• Environmental determinism: the former scientific ideology that states that a culture’s traits are defined by the physical geography of its native hearth or culture region

  • It was being used to reinforce the racist ideologies of the 1800s and early 1900s

• Possibilism: the revised concept proposed by Sauer and other like-minded geographers that stated cultures were to a partial degree shaped by their environment and the material resources available to them

  • Culture groups have the ability to adjust and modify the environment

• Lebensraum: the living space for each distinct nation was based upon the optimal physical geography of the culture group

  • The concepts of Nazism proposed by Hitler were in part based on Ratzel’s concept

• Neo-Nazism: based on violent racism against non-whites and immigrants or violet expression of xenophobia

• Ethnocentrism: the belief in the superiority of one’s nation or ethnic group, and in the inferiority of other nations or ethnic groups

  • Typically grows fiercest in the earliest and most dominant settlement group, whose characteristics strongly influence the initial social and cultural geography of an area

• Cultural relativism: the idea that an individual’s beliefs and activities can only be understood in the context of that person’s culture

Internal vs External Identity

• Internal identity: used by individuals to express their cultural heritage, ethnicity, or place of origin to people who share their heritage or place of origin

• External identity: used by individuals to express their cultural heritage, ethnicity, or place of origin to people who do not share a common cultural or geographic background

  • Use to compensate for the lack of cultural knowledge from one group to another

• Culture regions: an area of bounded space with a homogeneous characteristic that can be one or more components of culture

• Fuzzy borders: cultural regions tend to have this because it’s hard to tell where one cultural region ends and another begins

  • Cultural regions overlap in an irregular manner

  • (EX: where Dixie ends and the American Northeast or Midwest begins)

• Border states: where one part of the state is decidedly Southern and another part seems more Northeastern

Cultural Hearths

• Culture hearth: the idea that every culture has a localized area where it originated or has its main population center

• Contemporary culture hearths exist in today’s world

• (EX: the Mormon culture region of the American West shares the homogeneous characteristic that is the Latter-Day Saints (LDS) religion and is a region with a distinct core and a wider periphery; is botha formal and functional region)

• Ancient culture hearths: developed ideas and technologies that still exist today

  • (EX: the domestication of staple food crops)

Cultural Change

• Sequent occupance: for a single place or region, different dominant cultures replace each other over time

  • (EX: European architecture found in former colonial cities of Africa like Lagos, Nigeria)

  • The ethnic neighborhood shows how these groups make their way into the layers of sequent occupance at a much smaller scale

• Acculturation: the process of adapting to a new culture while still keeping some of one’s original culture

  • Both the original and the incoming culture group swapping cultural traits

• Assimilation: a complete change in the identity of a minority culture group as it becomes part of the majority culture group

  • (EX: the U.S. government forced the Native Americans to move to reservations and adopt the dress, manners, language, and ways of the dominant American culture)

Cultural Survival and Globalization

• Cultural survival: used to describe the efforts to research, understand, and promote the protection of indigenous cultures

• Indigenous culture: the original culture of that same region

  • The loss of indigenous culture has become a significant concern among citizens and a major policy issue among governments

• Cultures are in danger of extinction if something is not done to help protect and promote the preservation of cultural heritage

Depopulation of Native Americans

• William Denevan established that the pre-Columbian population of Native Americans in North and South America combined was approximately 54 million people

• The total native population had declined to around 5 million people by 1635

• Diseases of European origin were the main reason behind the decline,

• Cultural globalization: a number of influences such as literature, music, motion pictures, the Internet, and satellite and cable television, mainly from English-language sources, combined to diminish and potentially eliminate the media and culture of other linguistic groups

  • People who lose their connection to their heritage are also losing part of their personal connection to nature

  • By protecting national cultures from the negative effects of globalization, a nation can promote its own cultural economy and products from creative arts and media–draw for tourism

• Proselytic religions that actively seek converts also threaten many unique cultures around the world

• National governments around the world have instituted laws and regulations that lessen the impact of foreign influence on their home cultures

Cases of Cultural Diffusion

• Culture is transmitted through a number of different methods:

• Trade: interconnectedness increases along popular trade routes

• Colonialism: though the Mormon church that began in Utah, it spread itself around the world via mandatory missions conducted by its young members

• Conflict: or war, often sees soldiers and armies invading or even occupying foreign cultures

• Migration: immigrants carry their own culture to their new country and blend them with preexisting bits of culture

EX: Yugoslavia

• Ethnic cleansing: where people of one ethnic group are eliminated by another, often under threat of violence or death

  • Several political and military leaders have been charged with crimes against humanity for their war crimes

  • (EX: The former Yugoslavia was created as a state during the post–World War I Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

  • After the death of leader Joseph Tito, people and politicians began to revitalize their centuries-long ethnic and religious arguments.

  • In 1989, localized fighting broke out in northern Yugoslavia between Croats and Serbians)

• Genocide: a large-scale systematic killing of people of one ethnic group

  • (EX: the Holocaust of Jews at the hands of the Nazis in World War II when six million were killed)

Key Concepts:

• Culture: the shared experience, traits, and activities of a group of people who have a common heritage

  • Components of Culture:

    • Art

    • Architecture

    • Language

    • Music

    • Film and Television

    • Food

    • Clothing

    • Social Interaction

    • Religion

    • Folklore

    • Land Use

• Each component of culture is expressed in a multitude of ways that signify and symbolize cultural influences

• Cultural synthesis (syncretism): the blending together of two or more cultural influences

  • EX: Country music is often thought of as a product of American culture and is strongly tied to folk music traditions. However, the mixture of musical sounds, vocabulary, rhythms, and instruments from the Scots-Irish, the German, African immigrants, and enslaved people in the American South and Appalachia came together to form a new style of music.

• Combined, the many components come together to identify and define a single culture group, or nation

• Art is important as an identifier of groups and a source of local pride

Architecture

• Architectural forms that are the product of cultural influence are found within the built environment of the human landscape

• Modern and contemporary architecture: when new buildings are constructed using innovative designs

  • Modern means architecture developed during the 20th century that expresses geometric, ordered forms

    • (EX: the rectangular steel and glass skyscrapers built in the 1970s-1980s)

  • Contemporary architecture of the present is more organic, with the use of curvature

    • Incorporates green energy technologies, recycled materials, or nontraditional materials (EX: metal sheeting on the exterior)

  • Postmodern: a category within contemporary that means that the design abandons the use of blocky rectilinear shapes in favor of wavy, crystalline, or bending shapes in the form of the home or building

• Traditional architecture can express one of two patterns in building type:

1. New commercial buildings incorporate the efficiency and simplicity of modern architecture into a standard building design with squared walls and utilize traditional materials like stone, brick, steel, and glass

2. Housing based on folk house designs from different regions of the country

Housing Types:

• New England: small one-story pitched-roof Cape Cod style or the irregular roof Saltbox with one long pitched roof in front and a sort of low-angle roof in back

• Federalist or Georgian: refers to the housing styles of the late 1700s and early 1800s in Anglo-America.

  • Often two- or three-story urban townhomes connected to one another

  • Windows and rooflines featured classical Greek and Roman designs and stone carvings.

  • Symmetrical homes with central doorways and equal numbers of windows on each side of the house

• The I-house: a loose form of Federalist and Georgian influence on the average family home in the United States and Canada

  • Simple rectangular I-houses have a central door with one window on each side of the home’s front and three symmetrical windows on the second floor

  • Later I-houses moved the door to the side and added onto the back or side of the house

  • Fireplaces on each end of the house and an even- pitched roof

Religious Buildings and Places:

• Christian: traditional houses of worship tend to have a central steeple or two high bell towers in the front of the building

  • The steeple is typical of smaller churches, and bell towers are found in larger churches and cathedrals.

  • Symbolically, older churches, cathedrals, and basilicas feature a cross-shaped floor plan.

• Hindu: temples and shrines tend to have a rectangular-shaped main body and feature one or more short towers of carved stone

  • The towers often feature stepped sides and display carvings of the heads and faces of deities

• Buddhist: temples and shrines vary depending on which Buddhist tradition is followed in the region

  • In Nepal and Tibet, a temple can be a stupa, with a dome or tower featuring a pair of eyes

  • In East Asia, the tower-style pagoda has several levels, each of which features winged roofs extending outward

  • Temples and shrines in China and Japan feature one- or two-story buildings with large, curved, winged roof

  • Temples are often guarded by large lion statues

  • Temples in Southeast Asia tend to have several towers with thin pointed spires that point outward at an angle

• Islamic: mosques can take a variety of forms, though many have central domes

  • A mosque is one or more minarets, narrow towers that are pointed on top

  • Almost all mosques are built on an angle that places the main prayer area toward Mecca

• Judaic: there is not a common architectural design style to synagogues.

  • The most holy place in Judaism is the Wailing Wall, which have old foundation walls that feature large rectangular stone blocks where Jews pray and place written prayers in the cracks between the blocks

Language

• the United States federal government has not designated an official language

• Monolingual: knowing one language only

• other states accept that they have a large multilingual immigrant population and have made provisions to provide services

• Canada is bilingual because there are two official languages: English and French.

• Depending upon where you are in a larger linguistic region, the dialect of a common language is different

  • (EX: the English spoken by English people and Australian people sounds similar, there is a distinct “strain” of English spoken in Australia)

  • A variety of different word sounds and vocabulary

• Received pronunciation: King’s English or “posh” English

• Cockney English: the language of the working-class areas of the East London docklands and surrounding neighborhoods, which sounds distinctly not posh

• Cockney rhyming slang: an odd but humorous use of code phrases to describe everyday situations

• Pidgin languages are simplified forms of the language that use key vocabulary words and limited grammar

• French Creole is spoken, which incorporates continental French with African dialectal sounds and vocabulary

• French itself has long been a language used to bridge the linguistic gap between people of different national heritage

  • The term lingua franca was coined to describe its utility as a bridge language

• English is accepted as the global lingua franca as different forms of popular culture media, the Internet, and the business world are dominated by the English language

Major Language Families:

• There are a small number of major language families represented by the early or prehistoric language roots

  • Can be broken into language groups or even language subfamilies

• The Indo-European concept is derived from linguistic analysis and genetic evidence of prehistoric migrations from the Indian subcontinent into Europe

Largest members of language families:

• Indo-European (2.9 billion people)

• Sino-Tibetan (1.3 billion people)

• Niger-Congo (435 million people)

• Afro-Asiatic (375 million people)

• Austronesian (346 million people, from Southeastern

• Asia, Oceania, and Hawaii)

• Dravidian (230 million people, from on and around the

• Indian subcontinent)

• Altaic (165 million people, from Eastern Europe through

• Central and Eastern Asia)

• Japanese (123 million people)

• Tai-Kadai (81 million people)

• Two competing theories regarding the origins of European language:

  • Anatolian theory: a group of migrants from the Indian subcontinent, and their language, were for some time concentrated in the peninsula that makes up most of present-day Turkey. Then, a large migration crossed the Hellespont into continental Europe and spread outward into a relatively unpopulated region.

  • Kurgan theory: the same group of migrants from the Indian subcontinent instead made their way into Central Asia, and then migrated across the Eurasian stepped into Central and Western Europe, taking their language with them.

    • Genetic research shows that almost all Europeans are derived genetically from populations that inhabited the Indian subcontinent in prehistoric times

Music

• Music is a form of nonmaterial culture that has geographic roots and regional variation

• Folk music: music that is original to a specific culture

  • Often incorporate instruments unique to that region or have orchestrations that are specific to that culture

  • Folk song lyrics often incorporate cultural stories and religious tradition, which can be described as folklore

• Popular culture generates a global flow of pop music that often has the effect of drowning out local folk music traditions from radio and other media

  • The most popular folk music type in the region is bluegrass, which originated in Kentucky

    • Heavily influenced contemporary country music, and recently, rock and roll

• Recordings sold today as World Music are actually products of folk musicians from other culture groups

  • (EX: the band, Gypsy Kings, are from France, but their families had left Spain decades earlier due to persecution by the Franco-led fascist government of Romani in Europe)

Film and Television

• Different forms of film and television are important signs of a cultural imprint on the land

• Media forms are major conduits for cultural globalization

Food

• A material form of culture that varies regionally and is rooted in a number of geographic ways

• Continental cuisine: the formal food traditions that emerged from mainland Europe in the 1800s

  • Embodied in haute cuisine, where traditionally a main meat course is served with a flour-, cream-, or wine-based sauce and side dishes of vegetables and potatoes

• Nouvelle cuisine: the contemporary form of the continental styles mainly from France, Spain, and Italy

• Fusion cuisine: when more than one global tradition is incorporated in dishes

• All of these forms are based on original forms of folk food dishes

  • (EX: Sushi is a simple but artistic form of folk food from Japan)

Clothing

• Different clothing styles are other signs of a cultural imprint on the landscape

• The way people dress is an important sign of their ethnicity

Social Interaction

• Culturally constructed: traditions devised by a specific culture group

• Physical greetings are a basic example of culturally different social interaction:

  • A handshake is a common physical greeting in the West

  • The bow still holds as the primary formal greeting in Japan

  • Formal, non-touching cheek kissing is a greeting in many countries

• personal space also varies from country to country

  • (EX: it is considered rude not to sit in empty seat in Peru)

Religion

• Specific religions are drawn from a number of larger global groups and can be characterized by their expanse

• Universalizing religions: accept followers from all ethnicities worldwide

• Ethnic religions: confined to members of a specific culture group

• All organized religions have one or more books of scripture, said to be written of divine origin

• Formal doctrines: govern religious practice, worship, and ethical behavior in society.

• Compromising religions: have the ability to reform or integrate other beliefs into their doctrinal practices

• Fundamentalists: have little interest in compromising their beliefs or doctrines and strictly adhere to scriptural dictates

• Syncretic religions: synthesize the core beliefs from two or more other religions

  • (EX: Sikhs incorporate principles from both Islam and Hinduism)

• Three Major Traditions of Belief Systems:

• Animist Tradition: Various ethnic, tribal, and other forms of nature worship

  • These groups have common themes, worship practices, and morality tales, which define a right and ethical way to live

  • Share the common belief that items in nature can have spiritual being, including landforms, animals, and trees

• Hindu-Buddhist Tradition: Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism

  • The oldest universalizing religions began with Hinduism 5,000 years ago

  • Polytheistic: believing in more than one spiritual god

  • Many levels of existence, the highest being nirvana, where someone achieves total consciousness or enlightenment

  • One’s soul is reincarnated over and over into different forms

  • Karma: the balance between good and evil deeds in life, determines the outcome of reincarnation

• Abrahamic Tradition: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

  • Similar scriptural descriptions of the Earth’s genesis and the story of Abraham as a morality tale of respect for the will of God or Allah

  • Monotheistic belief system with a singular supreme being

  • Sub-deities such as saints, angels, and archangels

  • Significance is placed upon prophecy that predicts the coming or return of a messianic figure that defeats the forces of a satanic evil for souls of followers

Caste System in India

• Hindu scriptures describe a cosmology (a belief in the structure of the universe) in which there are several levels of existence, from the lowest animal forms to human forms and then higher animal forms

• Sacred animals include elephants, horses, and cows, which are seen as aspects of Mother Goddess Earth and symbols of selflessness

• All souls undergo reincarnation multiple times, learning new things each time.

• Whether a person is elevated in each new life depends upon his or her karma, which is the balance between the good and bad deeds that he or she has committed in his or her previous life.

• Once a person is born into a caste, he or she remains there for the rest of his or her life, no matter the changes to his or her fortune.

• India’s government has initiated a number of efforts to eliminate the caste structure in Indian society; however, is still recognizable in rural areas

The Five Castes (from highest to lowest):

1. Brahmans

• Priestly caste

• Responsible for temples and leading religious worship

• Can be selected as high government officials

• May eschew all material possessions to live as monks, meditating hermits, or as ascetics who sit on sidewalks and perform prayers for those who provide their food donations
  2. Kshatriyas

• Aristocratic and warrior caste

• Hereditary princes and kings still bow to the Brahmans

• Many were landowners, government leaders, and wealthy businesspeople
  3. Vaishyas

• Merchant and professional caste

• Many were doctors, lawyers, accountants, and government bureaucrats
  4. Shudras

• Caste of farmers, laborers, and artisans

• Many were potters, jewelers, and glassworkers

• No leisure time and near-total illiteracy

• Forbidden from studying the Vedas
  5. Dalits

• “Untouchables,” a name derived from their low position in the system and considered unholy by higher castes

• Segregated from other Hindu housing areas and social networks

• Dalit sub-castes were divided among trades and duties in the community such as leather work (cattleare sacred, and only the lowest-caste humans could handle their flesh) and cleaning of train stations and sewers

Islamic States: Theocracy, Sharia, and Secular Governance

• Theocracies: religious leaders hold the senior positions of governance

  • (EX: Iran has a supreme religious council that serves as the head of state and can overrule the elected parliament and president)

• Not all Middle-Eastern states are republics or monarchies that abide by Sharia, or Islamic law, based on the Koran and Hadith

• Other states in the region are

  • Secular: not directly governed in a religious manner and, instead, often utilize French or British legal tradition and government structure

• Theocracy: Iran, formerly Afghanistan under the Taliban

• Sharia States: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen Secular States: Jordan, Turkey

Five Pillars of Islam

• The Koran emphasizes five pillars that guide followers with a moral system

  5. Five Daily Prayers

• The call to prayer is heard on loudspeakers in cities throughout the Muslim world at designated hours

• All work stops and prayer mats are unrolled

• Prayer is done facing Mecca

• Islamic astronomers and geographers have worked for centuries to determine the azimuth, the angle of direction, from Mecca to other parts of the Earth

  5. Islamic Creed

• The creed is a statement of monotheism

• Prior to Muhammad’s religious conversion of the Arabian peninsula, many of the peoples in the region believed in polytheistic Animist or tribal religions

• Believe in a number of prophets shared with the Judeo-Christian traditions, such as Moses, Isaac, Ishmael, and Jesus, but Muhammad is the supreme prophet

  5. Alms to the Poor

• Duty of all Muslims to care for and donate to the poor and sick within their communities

• Large charitable foundations in the Islamic world help alleviate poverty, extend health care, and educate children

  5. Have come under increased scrutiny by the U.S. government following 9/11, due to accusations that charities were being used to funnel money to terrorist groups

  6. Observance of Ramadan

• Ramadan is a period of spiritual cleansing and repentance for past sins

• There is fasting during daylight hours, with plain evening meals of sparing quantity

• Set on a lunar calendar and can fall during a wide range of months in our Gregorian calendar

  5. The Hajj

• Must make at least one pilgrimage to Mecca during his lifetime

• “Haji” is an honorific name for those who make the journey

• The most popular time for the Hajj is during Ramadan

Folklore

• Folklore: collected stories, spoken-word histories and writings that are specific to a culture and tell the societal histories and morality tales that define a culture’s ethical foundations

  • (EX: Aesop’s fables are an example of folklore from the classical Greeks. Each fable had a moral to the story, a lesson to be learned regarding proper behavior.)

• The intersection of a culture’s history and its folklore can often lead to distortions of reality in the lives of historical figures

  • (EX: In many parts of the Americas, a folklore has been built around the life and travels of Christopher Columbus. The myths and facts are intertwined and the folklore varies from country to country.)

Land Use

• How property is utilized, shared, or divided can say something about culture through its imprint on the landscape

• Farming can culturally specific and is heavily influenced by technology

• Range from swidden, or a “slash and burn” style of agriculture seen in forest regions, to the highly technological large-scale farming seen in the First World

Residential Patterns:

• The distribution of living space is also an important indicator of culture, especially in rural and tribal areas

• Cultural traditions impose rules on living space that depend on:

  • Singular clan relations

  • Extended family units with more than one clan

  • Whole tribal communities with multiple clans living in one shared residential area

Land Ownership:

• Landholdings became subdivided via partial land sales or by nationwide land reform efforts

• Land reform often divided properties into smaller polygons

• Long-lot patterns: a narrow frontage along a road or waterway with a very long lot shape behind

Nation and Ethnicity

• Nation: a population represented by a singular culture or a culture group

  • Not all nations have a representative state

• Ethnicity: a complex mix of genetic heritage and political allegiance

  • Ethnic groups often claim a single identifiable lineage or heritage, which all members tend to identify with as a common social bond

  • Can be modified in the process of migration

    • Can be evidence of acculturation by immigrants to their new home country

• State: a population represented by a single government

• Cultural identity: how people are identified and how they identify themselves

Race

• Race: the physical characteristics of a common genetic heritage.

  • Developed by physical anthropologists in the 1800s

  • Categorized racial groups based on a number of variables including skin color, bone structure, and the shape of the hair shafts

    • Crudely as the basis for racism within society and have led to oppression, suffering, and war throughout the world.

Three distinct racial groups emerged:

• Mongoloid or Asiatic: with a tan or yellowish skin tone, small body structure, and straight hair shaft

• Caucasoid or Indo-European: with light to dark skin tone, medium body type, and wavy hair shaft

• Negroid or African: with a dark skin tone, medium body shape, and a curly hair shaft

Four populations of physical anthropological groups were identified within the Pacific Islands:

• Melanesians: found in New Guinea, New Caledonia, and Fiji, named because of their dark skin coloration, have comparatively thin bodies and angular facial features, with a curly hair shaft

• Polynesians: living in Tonga, Samoa, New Zealand, Tahiti, and Hawaii, have a lighter brown skin color, heavyset body shape, and curly hair shafts

• Micronesians:  coming from the small island atolls of the Marshalls and Caroline Islands, have a light brown skin color, medium body shape, and curly hair shafts

• Aboriginals: in Australia, have light brown skin, a medium body type, and wavy hair shafts

Mixed Race Cultures

• Identities can be based on a single race or be defined by multiple mixed races

  • (EX: Mestizos are people who have cultural and genetic heritage from European and Native American backgrounds)

• Indigenous population: the people who originally settled in an area

Racism

• Environmental determinism: the former scientific ideology that states that a culture’s traits are defined by the physical geography of its native hearth or culture region

  • It was being used to reinforce the racist ideologies of the 1800s and early 1900s

• Possibilism: the revised concept proposed by Sauer and other like-minded geographers that stated cultures were to a partial degree shaped by their environment and the material resources available to them

  • Culture groups have the ability to adjust and modify the environment

• Lebensraum: the living space for each distinct nation was based upon the optimal physical geography of the culture group

  • The concepts of Nazism proposed by Hitler were in part based on Ratzel’s concept

• Neo-Nazism: based on violent racism against non-whites and immigrants or violet expression of xenophobia

• Ethnocentrism: the belief in the superiority of one’s nation or ethnic group, and in the inferiority of other nations or ethnic groups

  • Typically grows fiercest in the earliest and most dominant settlement group, whose characteristics strongly influence the initial social and cultural geography of an area

• Cultural relativism: the idea that an individual’s beliefs and activities can only be understood in the context of that person’s culture

Internal vs External Identity

• Internal identity: used by individuals to express their cultural heritage, ethnicity, or place of origin to people who share their heritage or place of origin

• External identity: used by individuals to express their cultural heritage, ethnicity, or place of origin to people who do not share a common cultural or geographic background

  • Use to compensate for the lack of cultural knowledge from one group to another

• Culture regions: an area of bounded space with a homogeneous characteristic that can be one or more components of culture

• Fuzzy borders: cultural regions tend to have this because it’s hard to tell where one cultural region ends and another begins

  • Cultural regions overlap in an irregular manner

  • (EX: where Dixie ends and the American Northeast or Midwest begins)

• Border states: where one part of the state is decidedly Southern and another part seems more Northeastern

Cultural Hearths

• Culture hearth: the idea that every culture has a localized area where it originated or has its main population center

• Contemporary culture hearths exist in today’s world

• (EX: the Mormon culture region of the American West shares the homogeneous characteristic that is the Latter-Day Saints (LDS) religion and is a region with a distinct core and a wider periphery; is botha formal and functional region)

• Ancient culture hearths: developed ideas and technologies that still exist today

  • (EX: the domestication of staple food crops)

Cultural Change

• Sequent occupance: for a single place or region, different dominant cultures replace each other over time

  • (EX: European architecture found in former colonial cities of Africa like Lagos, Nigeria)

  • The ethnic neighborhood shows how these groups make their way into the layers of sequent occupance at a much smaller scale

• Acculturation: the process of adapting to a new culture while still keeping some of one’s original culture

  • Both the original and the incoming culture group swapping cultural traits

• Assimilation: a complete change in the identity of a minority culture group as it becomes part of the majority culture group

  • (EX: the U.S. government forced the Native Americans to move to reservations and adopt the dress, manners, language, and ways of the dominant American culture)

Cultural Survival and Globalization

• Cultural survival: used to describe the efforts to research, understand, and promote the protection of indigenous cultures

• Indigenous culture: the original culture of that same region

  • The loss of indigenous culture has become a significant concern among citizens and a major policy issue among governments

• Cultures are in danger of extinction if something is not done to help protect and promote the preservation of cultural heritage

Depopulation of Native Americans

• William Denevan established that the pre-Columbian population of Native Americans in North and South America combined was approximately 54 million people

• The total native population had declined to around 5 million people by 1635

• Diseases of European origin were the main reason behind the decline,

• Cultural globalization: a number of influences such as literature, music, motion pictures, the Internet, and satellite and cable television, mainly from English-language sources, combined to diminish and potentially eliminate the media and culture of other linguistic groups

  • People who lose their connection to their heritage are also losing part of their personal connection to nature

  • By protecting national cultures from the negative effects of globalization, a nation can promote its own cultural economy and products from creative arts and media–draw for tourism

• Proselytic religions that actively seek converts also threaten many unique cultures around the world

• National governments around the world have instituted laws and regulations that lessen the impact of foreign influence on their home cultures

Cases of Cultural Diffusion

• Culture is transmitted through a number of different methods:

• Trade: interconnectedness increases along popular trade routes

• Colonialism: though the Mormon church that began in Utah, it spread itself around the world via mandatory missions conducted by its young members

• Conflict: or war, often sees soldiers and armies invading or even occupying foreign cultures

• Migration: immigrants carry their own culture to their new country and blend them with preexisting bits of culture

EX: Yugoslavia

• Ethnic cleansing: where people of one ethnic group are eliminated by another, often under threat of violence or death

  • Several political and military leaders have been charged with crimes against humanity for their war crimes

  • (EX: The former Yugoslavia was created as a state during the post–World War I Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

  • After the death of leader Joseph Tito, people and politicians began to revitalize their centuries-long ethnic and religious arguments.

  • In 1989, localized fighting broke out in northern Yugoslavia between Croats and Serbians)

• Genocide: a large-scale systematic killing of people of one ethnic group

  • (EX: the Holocaust of Jews at the hands of the Nazis in World War II when six million were killed)

Key Concepts:

UNITS OF POLITICAL ORGANIZATION

• Country: an identifiable land area

• Nation: a population with a single culture

  • Same as a culture group

• State: a population under a single government

  • Implies there is a sovereign territory

• Nation-state: a single culture under a single government

  • Sometimes, one culture group is represented by a singular government

  • None are truly made up of only one cultural group

  • Also applied to multinational states where the state has come to represent a singular and contemporary culture, as opposed to the ancient cultures from which the population originates

• Sovereignty: means that a state is fully independent from outside control, holds territory, and that it has international recognition from other states or the United Nations.

• Multi-national states: made up of a number of different nations represented by the multitude of culture groups who have migrated and intermixed around the world

  • Sometimes called multiethnic states, are most common in the Americas, where there are no nation-states

  • Also applied to multinational states where the state has come to represent a singular and contemporary culture, as opposed to the ancient cultures from which the population originates

• Nationalism: can derive from an existing culture group that desires political representation or independence, or from a political state that bonds and unifies culture groups

  • Used by politicians as motivation to support the state and oppose foreign or other political influences

• Stateless nations: where a culture group is not included or allowed a share in the state political process

  • (EX: full independence of Kurdistan is limited geopolitically due to Turkish government resistance to their sovereignty, based upon Kurdish Marxist rebels, the PKK, who have been fighting in Turkey for several decades)

ORGANIZATIONS OF STATES

• Federal states & confederations: provides military protection, administers foreign diplomacy, and regulates trade as well as a number of internal administrative (executive branch), legislative, and judicial services across the country

  • Common approach to government

  • Have their own governments, legislatures, regulations, and services with divisions of responsibilities

  • (EX: federal government regulates interstate trade, whereas states can make rules about the sale of goods within each state)

• Unitary system: a single centralized government

  • Ultimate authority lies with the central government

  • (EX: People’s Republic of China)

• Microstates: sovereign states that despite their very small size still hold the same position as much larger states

  • Island states, ports, or city-states, or they sit landlocked with no access to the sea

  • (EX: Andorra is landlocked)

• Autonomous regions: certain parts of certain nations have been granted freedom from central authority, usually for historical, geographical, religious, or linguistic reasons

  • (EX: the Basque region of northeastern Spain has its own language, Euskara, which is thousands of years old and is unrelated to any of the Romance languages that surround it)

• Semi-autonomous regions: have the same freedom as autonomous regions, but to a lesser degree

Multi-State Organizations

• Supranationalism: the concept of two or more sovereign states aligned together for a common purpose

• Supranational organizations: organizations formed for the purposes of trade alliances, military cooperation, and diplomacy

  • EX: European Union (28 members)

• The EU serves 5 main purposes:

• Free-trade union: No taxes or tariffs are charged on goods and services that cross the internal borders of the EU.

• Open-border policy: Between EU member states, there are no longer any border-control stations for immigration or customs inspections.

• Monetary union: In 2000, the first EU members began converting to the Euro and phasing out their old forms of money. This eliminated the costs of currency exchange fees.

• Judicial union: The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg provides a legal venue for cases between litigants in separate EU member states. A European Court of Human Rights has been established to preserve civil rights regardless of their member states’ local laws.

• Legislative and regulatory bodies: The 751-seat EU Parliament was established to propose and approve laws within the union.

• EU governance has been successful in creating a singular economy through free trade, open borders, free movement of labor, free exchange of currency, and a level playing field for business and labor in terms of laws and regulations.

Issues:

• The cost of EU governance has significantly increased the cost of many items in Europe

• European courts have threatened the sovereignty of national and local courts and laws

• Open borders have made it difficult to control crime and terrorism

• Fortress Europe: describes the concept of sealing EU borders

• A European Union Constitution was proposed for ratification in 2004, but was poorly understood by the citizens and members of parliament who had to vote on the constitution. It was ultimately rejected.

SPATIAL CONCEPTS OF POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

• Territoriality: the expression of political control over space

  • Implies that the government controls land and the people who live there

• Citizenship: the legal identity of a person based on the state where he or she was born or where he or she was naturalized as an immigrant

  • When citizens go outside their state’s political borders, they retain their citizen status and thus become an extension of their state

Political Borders

• Political boundaries: as expressions of political control, must be definable and clear

• Finite lines: the borders between political states and political sub-unit areas (counties, parishes, parliamentary districts, and city limits)

• Physical geography, such as rivers or other water bodies, defines boundaries, and sometimes borderlines are measured surveys based on treaties or other agreements between states.

• Non-physical boundaries often reflect cultural divisions

  • Can be the result of aristocratic land holdings from Feudalistic eras

  • Can be the front lines at the cessation of armed conflict between states

• Expatriate populations: citizens living outside of their borders

• Countries have to provide consular services in large foreign cities

• It’s the government’s diplomats and military duty to get citizens who trapped in war zones or disasters in foreign countries them out

Enclave and Exclave

• Enclave: a minority culture group concentrated inside a country that is dominated by a different, larger culture group

  • (EX: enclaves were formally established within Bosnia to separate warring Serb, Croat, and Muslim communities)

• Exclave: a fragmented piece of sovereign territory separated by land from the main part of the state’s territory

  • Neighboring states occasionally attempt to claim exclaves in the name of cultural nationalism

  • (EX: Alaska is an exclave whose controlling state is the United States and is separated by Canada.)

Water Borders at Sea

• United Nations Conference on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS): proposal of standard oceanic boundaries for all UN member states that was fully ratified in 1994

  • Makes provisions for a UN arbitration board to settle disputes regarding boundaries at sea

  • Difficulty occurs when uninhabited small islets, exposed reefs, and sandbars above water are claimed by more than one country

    • (EX: The Spratly Islands and the Paracel Islands, are claimed by China, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei. They are areas of potential future armed conflict if arbitration fails.)

• UNCLOS border system is in two parts:

• Territorial sea: Sovereign territory that includes the area of sea from shore out to the 12-nautical-mile limit. Within 12 nautical miles, all the laws of a country apply.

• Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ): Exclusive economic rights from shore out to the 200-nautical-mile limit. Within 200 nautical miles of its shores, a state controls all aspects of natural resource exploration and extraction. This includes fisheries, oil and gas production, salvage operations, and permits for such activity.

• Territorial seas and EEZs create circular boundaries, especially around islands, which extends a country’s EEZ out another 200 nautical miles

• High seas are technically outside of the 12-mile limit

  • Past that line, cruise ships can open their casinos and ship captains gain the authority to marry couples or arrest thieves onboard their ships

• Admiralty law: a part of international law that dictates legal procedures on the high seas

• The 1986 International Whaling Commission: a moratorium on commercial whale hunts that banned whaling after centuries of hunting dangerously depleted populations

Boundary Origins

• Antecedent: Boundary lines that exist from prehistoric times

  • (EX: French-Spanish border along the Pyrenees Relic: Scotland-England border after The Act of Union in 1652)

• Relic: Former state boundaries that still have political or cultural meaning

• Subsequent: Lines resulting from conflict or cultural changes, such as war and migration

  • (EX: German-Polish border after 1945; Kaliningrad to the USSR in 1946)

• Superimposed: Lines laid down for political reasons over existing cultural boundaries

  • (EX: Sub-Saharan Africa after the Berlin Conference of 1884; Yugoslavia and Iraq after the 1919 Treaty of Versailles)

Boundary Process

• When borders are claimed, negotiated, or captured

• Delimitation process: when borders are put on the map

• Demarcation process: when markers are placed on the ground to show where borders lie

Boundary Types

• Physical border: natural boundaries such as rivers, lakes, oceans, mountains, or deserts

• Cultural border: estimated boundaries between nations, ethnic groups, or tribes

• Geometric border: boundaries surveyed mostly along lines of latitude and longitude

Border Disputes

• Definitional dispute: when border treaties are interpreted two different ways by states

  • (EX: Russian-Japanese Kuril Islands under Soviet control in 1945)

• Locational dispute: when the border moves, like a river changing course or a lake drying up

  • (EX: India-Bangladesh territory along the Ganges-Brahmaputra River Delta)

• Operational dispute: when borders are agreed on, but passage across the border is a problem

  • (EX: New passport requirements for entry into the United States after September 11, 2001)

• Allocational dispute: when a resource lies on two sides of a border

  • (EX: Mexico-United States river allocations for irrigation and drinking water on the Colorado River and Rio Grande)

• Frontier: open and undefined territory

  • The only remaining large land frontier is Antarctica, that has been set aside for scientific research and prohibits any military action and commercial mineral or energy extraction

Tyranny of the Map

• The Conference of Berlin (1884) was a diplomatic meeting between the European colonial powers to set the internal political boundaries in Africa.

• The main problem with the European-set boundaries in Africa is that they do not match the cultural boundaries.

• This superimposed boundary situation is what Africans refer to as the Tyranny of the Map.

Territorial Morphology

• State morphology: the shape of a country that also impacts its society and external relations with other countries

Territorial Change

• State territory can change shape through decolonization by reducing the area and number of territorial and colonial holdings

• Annexation: the addition of territory as a result of a land purchase or when a territorial claim is extended through incorporation

  • (EX: The United States originally purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867 for $7,000,000 in gold and it became a full state in 1948.)

Capitals

• States have a capital city as a seat of government where political power is centered

• Politicians need a place to have organized exchanges of power

• Federal states can have several scales of capitals

  • (EX: Washington, D.C. is the capital of the United States at a national and federal level.)

• Some countries have more than one national capital to share power across different regions of the country

• Countries occasionally change the location of their capital due to a shift in political power or congestion in the old capital

• Planned capital cities: cities located in places where cities did not previously exist

  • (EX: Sydney was the old capital of Australia. It’s new capital is Canberra.)

Electoral Politics and Internal Boundaries

• Suffrage in terms of age, race, and gender has varied historically from state to state.

  • In most countries, women gained voting rights in the 1900s.

  • In South Africa, racial segregation existed in almost all aspects of life and residents were denied the voting rights of non-white citizens.

• All democracies have some form of parliamentary system in which at least one lawmaking body or house has popular representation

• Each country has its own system regarding the number of seats and the size of voting districts

  • EX: In the U.S., presidential elections are decided through voting by the Electoral College.

  • Every ten years following the census, the United States reapportions the 435 seats of the House of Representatives.

• Gerrymandering: the irregularly shaped districts that are highly elongated and prorupt

  • In 1990 and 2000, a number of gerrymanders were attempted that tried to stack votes guaranteeing congressional support for one particular party.

POLITICAL ECONOMY

Feudalism

• Aristocracy: a peerage of lords, earls, marquis, barons, dukes, princes, kings, and queens

  • controlled vast majority of land and wealth in feudal political economies

• The majority of the population were peasants, commoners, serfs, or slaves who worked the land controlled by aristocrats

• Debt peonage: peasants paid rent and had their harvests taxed for the right to live on and work the land, keeping them in a cycle of debt

• Absolute monarchy: where the supreme aristocrat, a king, prince, or duke, was both

• Head of state and head of government, and therefore did not share power with anyone

• Revolutions and wars from the late 1700s to the 1900s forced many feudal states to accept some form of democracy

  • (EX: the French Revolution of 1789 inspired many monarchs to accept power-sharing with commoners to avoid losing control)

• Constitutional monarchy: where the supreme aristocrat remains head of state, but the leader of the elected parliament is the head of government, with integrated legislative and executive powers

  • The monarch retains the power to: dismiss parliament; appoints judges, ambassadors, and other officials; is commander and chief of the military; and retains significant land holdings and estates

  • Mostly diminished to a symbolic role

• Prime minister (premier): one who appoints senior members of parliament to be ministers or secretaries of executive-branch departments

  • EX: The current form of constitutional monarchy in Great Britain has been in place since the Magna Carta was signed in 1215.

    • Feudal rents to local aristocrats are still paid in a number of rural areas of the United Kingdom, (symbolic and small fees)

    • House of Lords: the upper house of parliament, which also serves as the supreme court

    • Since the late 1600s, the power of the House of Commons, the lower house of parliament, has steadily increased

    • The PM is the political leader of the party with the most MPs

    • Other senior MPs from this ruling party serve as ministers of the executive branch of government

• Commonwealth of Nations: independent former parts of the British Empire that retain the British monarch as their head of state

  • Have their own parliaments and prime ministers as head of government

  • Have a royally appointed governor-general as the crown representative in the country

  • Considered independent sovereign states

  • Have parliamentary governments, which integrate executive, legislative, and judicial powers

  • Provides special trade, education services, government funding, and preferred immigration status between member governments and citizens

    • India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, and Kenya are commonwealth members that do not claim the British monarch as head of state.

• Free-market democracies: countries with elected-representative parliamentary systems commonwealth countries, and other constitutional monarchies or republics

  • Relies upon balancing the relationship between the elected-representative government, its citizens, and business interests

  • There is a variable system of regulation and taxation by the state

• Government regulatory influence of the private lives of its citizens and practices of businesses is usually limited to areas concerning public safety and economic protections

• Republics: governments free of aristocracy or monarchical control and are fully under the control of the “common” people, as opposed to hereditary monarchy

  • Some are centrally governed from a single capital

  • Others are confederations that apportion some government power of legislation and administration to their component states or provinces

• Separation of powers: where the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government are held by separate groups of people that keep each other in check

  • Reduces the potential for corruption of the whole government

  • The other branches can act to correct problems or replace leadership if necessary

  • Written constitutions of these governments need to be flexible enough to allow governments to deal with political and other crises when they occur

  • Wealthy businesspeople and corporations have replaced the aristocracy in terms of the control of money, land, and resources

    • Their personal and corporate political influence overshadows that of many thousands of private citizens

    • Created uneven power relations in free-market democracies

  • A type of separation that is sometimes employed to blunt the power of the executive branch is to have separate presidents and prime ministers

  • Executive separation can be when the president is head of government and the prime minister is head of state, or vice versa

Marxist-Socialism

• Communism: Karl Marx’s political-economic theories attempted to right the wrongs of feudalism and inequalities of capitalism in free-market democracies

• Marxism: the goal to create a class-free society where there were no inequalities in terms of wealth or power

  • The state would own all land and industry, the government would direct economic productivity, and everyone would earn the same amount of money regardless of labor position

• Planned economy: an economy that does not rely on supply and demand like capitalism

  • The central government would calculate the economic needs of the state, its industries, and people

  • Set quotas for each individual operational unit of agricultural or manufacturing production to meet these needs

  • The productivity of the economy would result in a collective wealth that would be shared equally across the population

  • Communism in practice failed to reproduce Marx’s utopia

Example: The Soviet Union

• The first Communist country, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR or Soviet Union), was established in 1917 with the fall of the czar’s absolute monarchy in Russia

  • A number of unintended consequences to the Russian revolution, including a protracted and bloody civil war, human rights violations, murders on the part of the Communist government, and forced resettlement of over a million citizens result from Soviet Communism

• Five-Year Plans: comprehensive long-term economic plans that dictated all production in minute detail that were developed by the USSR

The Devolution of the Soviet System:

• Three classes of Soviet citizens emerged early in the Soviet Union who were mostly workers that Marx envisioned to be his proletariat

• Communist Party members made up about 6 percent of the USSR population and enjoyed many perks

• A military officer class emerged that had a similarly high quality of life in comparison to the regular working class

• Secret police and laws that made public protest punishable by hard labor in prison camps

• Creativity and economic productivity stagnated because of a lack of incentive in the system that would motivate people to have better lives

  • Resulted in a lack of surplus, leaving many stores with few items on the shelves and lines of people waiting to receive rations for food and clothing

Positives:

• Socialism meant that everyone had a right to health care, and hospitals, clinics, and rural travelling doctor programs were established.

• Infrastructure programs for public schools, free universities, drinking water, care for the elderly, and public transit were established to improve the efficiency and quality of life in communist society.

  • Have since been incorporated in Western free-market democracies

GEOPOLITICS

• Geopolitics: the global-scale relationships between sovereign states

• Centripetal forces: factors that hold together the social and political fabric of the state

  • Overabundance of centripetal force may lead to nationalistic movements and xenophobia

• Centrifugal forces: factors that tear apart the social and political fabric of the state

  • The survival of the state is at risk when the balance shifts to far and indicates the likelihood of armed conflict—in the form of an internal civil war, or the possibility of conflict spilling over into external cross-border war

• Number of forces at work that both reinforce and destabilize the state

• 
  EX: Josip Tito became a centripetal force representing the two largest ethnic groups in the country. A strong nationalist belief in Communism among Yugoslavians helped Tito build an economically strong and socially harmonious multiethnic society.

  • The lack of an effective multiethnic leader to replace him created a political power vacuum that opened the way for different nationalist leaders representing different ethnicities to attempt to seize power for themselves and their constituents.

  • Ripped apart the Yugoslav social and political fabric and, in combination with the fall of Communism in Europe, doomed the country to ethnic violence and dissolution

• Balkanization: a situation in which the political landscape goes from a larger state to several smaller states

• Europe has geopolitically gone from being dominated by large empire states to being dominated by several small nation-states

• Early cases of balkanization after World War I were due to a realignment of German borders and the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into six sovereign states

• Irredentism has two definitions:

  • When a minority ethnic group desires to break away from a multiethnic state and form its own nation-state

  • Or when break away and align itself with a culturally similar state.

• EX: Chechnya was granted limited local self-governance by the Russian Federation. After the fall of Communism, Chechens began to declare independence from Russia. A regional conflict ensued between Chencens and the Russian government due to fear of losing oil resources and other autonomous republics pushing for secession.

• Some nations or culture groups were torn apart as a result of war, but they reunified

• Neocolonialism: a contemporary form of colonialism based not on political control, but on economic pressure

  • (EX: While the United States possesses very few political territories, it has long waged economic control over nearly every nation in the Western Hemisphere, by granting favored-nation trade status to those neighbors who play by its rules.)

MODELS

• Heartland-Rimland model: designed to define the global geopolitical landscape and determine areas of potential future conflict

  • British geographer, Mackinder identified agricultural land as the primary commodity that states were interested in.

• Eastern European steppe: a very productive area of grain cultivation that was mostly controlled by the Russian Empire; Mackinder identified this as Heartland

  • States bordering Rimland, such as the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Romania might invade this area

• Primary commodity of conflict: the thing that countries are willing to fight over

• American geographer Saul Cohen proposed the Shatterbelt theory in 1950

  • He modified Mackinder’s Heartland into the Pivot Area, Rimland into the Inner Crescent and the rest of the world became the Outer Crescent

  • Land-based concept was that Cold War conflicts would likely occur within the Inner Crescent

• Buffer states: lands that would protect hostile countries by creating a surrounding buffer of sympathetic countries

• U.S. diplomat George Kennan proposed the strategic policy of containment to the American government in 1947

  • The proposal stated that the United States and its allies would attempt to build a containment wall around the core communist states

  • The U.S. and allied states had to contain these Soviet-supported satellite states to prevent Communism from spreading like a domino effect

  • Communism was limited to a large degree to the Pivot Area and a number of buffer states

  • The containment effort had a devastating effect on the economy of the Soviet Union

  • The United States arming Afghan Mujahideen rebels with arms was a centrifugal force that reverberated throughout the USSR, leading to its government failing

• Terrorism: planned violent attacks on people and places to provoke fear and cause a change in government policy

• State terrorism: when governments use violence and intimidation to control their own people