Unit 3: Cultural Patterns and Processes

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)

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• 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

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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

  1. 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

  2. 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

  3. 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

  • 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
  1. 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

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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)

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