quiz 3 Flashcards

1
Q

What is Cultural Geography?

A

What is Cultural Geography?

  • Emerged as a sub-discipline of geography in the early 20th century.
  • Challenged the notion of environmental determinism
    • Argued that people and societies were controlled by the environment they inhabit
  • Interested in cultural landscapes rather than pre-determined regions based upon environmental classifications.
  • Cultural geography was popularized by Carl O. Sauer.
  • Humans affect the environment and the environment affects us.
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2
Q

What is Cultural Landscape?

A
  • Landscapes that have cultural significance.
  • Landscapes that reflects the culture of the people who lived there.
  • Carl Sauer quote: “Cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result.”
    • What cultural geography is all about
  • Landscapes are changing, biological, physical, which in turns affects the way we live and any policies we end up passing.
  • Culture (humans) + Landscape (the environment) = Cultural landscape
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3
Q

Three Types of Cultural Landscapes

A
  • According to UNESCO:
    1. Clearly defined landscapes
    • Crafted and created intentionally by humans.
      • Taj Mahal
      • Eiffel Tower
  1. Organically evolved landscapes
    • Have evidence of human interaction with the land, but the land has changed and developed over time.
      • Machu Pichu
        • Indigenous Incas developed for their culture, but when the Spanish came, people started dying off
        • Was not as nicely put before, was overlain by trees
  2. Associative cultural lanscapes
    • Valued because of the artistic, cultural, or religious association of the natural element.
    • Indigenous connection to the land and spirituality
      • Rulu Rock
        • There are numerous types of cultural landscapes, not just famous ones. Golf courses, urban communities, natural habitats, etc.
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4
Q

What is Culture?

A
  • A set of beliefs, customs, traditions, and values which are learned, expressed, and shared among members of a social group
    • Animals are also social creatures
  • Passed down from generation to generation
  • Examples of Culture:
    • Language
    • Food
    • Clothing
  • Humans are superorganisms (according to scholars from the Berkeley School of the 1960s)
    • Societies are organized and function as a organic whole.
  • Cultures are:
    • Guided by their own internal laws and workings and beyond the control of any particular individual or social group; people are passive bearers of culture, not creators of culture.
    • Homogenous groupings; everyone belonging to a culture shares a common worldview, has a similar set of beliefs, and conforms to a singular set of traits.
    • Casual agents in their own right, working to make the world alongside social, political, and economic processes.
  • But culture has to come from somewhere, someone needs to create it.
  • People create cultures from different cultures and other people as well.
  • Does not have to be an ethnic group, can be similar value systems.
  • Homogenous but also have different sets.
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5
Q

Culture form a Cultural Geography perspective

A
  • How are different cultures the way they are.
  • For cultural geographers, culture is a social construction.
    • Social constructivism states that human development is socially situated and knowledge is constructed through interacting with other social actors.
    • Culture can be both a unifying and dividing concept.
  • Each culture has a set of social and political processes from which cultural representations (including power) emerge.
  • Cultural geography should be less concerned with studying cultures per se (that’s more sociology) and more concerned with the social construction of culture itself throughout space and time.

Eastern vs Western Cultures

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6
Q

Eastern cultures

A
  • Also known as Oriental culture
  • Eastern cultures comprise largely of societies living in East, Southeast, and South Asia, although the Middle East and parts of Africa were considered to be part of this culture.
  • Various religions (both monotheistic and polytheistic) found in region.
  • Collectivist in nature.
  • Africa does not fall in here because they weren’t studied as much.
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7
Q

Western cultures

A
  • Western culture is an amalgam of cultural inheritances, borrowings, and exchanges.
  • Its roots are traceable to
    • the Greco-Roman civilization
    • the Judeo-Christian tradition
  • It was influenced by
    • the Islamic enlightenment from the ninth century to the 13th century
    • the Chinese enlightenment from the 10th century to the 12th century
  • It was crafted by
    • during the European Renaissance (15th to 17th centuries)
    • Protestant Reformation (16th century)
    • European Enlightenment (17th century onwards)
  • Numbering system is Islamic
  • Chinese enlightenment in terms of trade
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8
Q

WERID Societies

A
  • Western
    Educated
    Industrialized
    Rich
    Democratic
  • WIERD characteristics in comparison to Eastern (and other) cultures around the world (Henrich, 2021)
    • Highly individualistic (vs. conformist values of the East)
    • Self-obsessed (vs. focus on group/kinship of the East
    • Guilt-ridden
    • Analytical (simplify through abstract categories)
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9
Q

Influence of European Medieval Church on Western Thinking and Society

A
  • Human-nature worldview:
    • Humans are separate and superior to nature
    • Nature only have value as its if useful to humans
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10
Q

European Church Roots: Human Disconnect from Nature

A
  • Judeo-Christian (as one of several religions with related views) notion of humans as the image of a transcendent supernatural God who is radically separate from nature
  • In other words, humans separate themselves from nature.
  • Religion plays a big role
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11
Q

Human Reason Could be Harnessed to Build a Utopia

A
  • Morality: Using human reason, human beings could arrive at a universal set of morals and ethics
  • Science: Using human reason, human beings could lay bare the truth about the processes that created the world.
  • Aesthetics: Using human reason, humans beings could arrive at a universal consensus as aesthetic value and beauty.
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12
Q

European Church Roots: Human Superiority

A
  • Humans have a soul where the rest of nature does not
  • Humans have power over nature and must multiply
  • Dominion thesis states that humans should control nature and use it how they wish.
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13
Q

European Church Roots: Gender Disparities and Hierarchies

A
  • Adam and Eve
    • rib
    • Eve was created by Adam, second class citizens.
  • Situated women as closer to nature
  • Women as “lower” than men
    • Bible story
    • Hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church
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14
Q

Western Culture and Power

A
  • Remember, culture is a social construction
  • The idea of Western culture is a powerful historical invention
  • Cultural geographers are interested in how the West seeks to represent, imagine, depict, and project its superiority.
  • Who invented the story that “West” is the best?
  • Who benefits from the narrative?
  • How does it survive and prosper over time?
  • Core is the Americans at global level
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15
Q

Relocation Diffusion

A
  • Individual items/ bodies change their physical locations
  • Migration
  • Trade of goods and ideas.
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16
Q

Hierarchical (Cascade) Diffusion

A
  • Order from top authority to carry mission in oter regions of the world
  • Colonial powers
  • Missionary works
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17
Q

Expansion (Contagious) Diffusion

A
  • A characteristic spreads, while the individual bodies/items keep their location
  • Characteristic types:
    • Hierarchical
    • Stimulus
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18
Q

Spatial Diffusion Over Time

A
  • Spatial diffusion of many phenomena (e.g., diseases, ideas, technologies) follows an S-curve of:
    • Slow build-up
    • Rapid spread
    • Levelling off
  • Beginning is very slow
  • Technologies or cultural marvel
  • Disease
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19
Q

Western Culture from Europe to North America

A
  • As European powers wanes, the United States became the next superpower
  • It also holds many US territories, most scattered throughout the Pacific Ocean
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20
Q

Samuel P. Huntington (1993): Clash of Civilizations

A

Not just west and east, can break it down further

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21
Q

What made Western Cultures the Least Sustainable Societies?

A
  • Industrialization
    • Low mortality → Population grows
      • More resources needed for higher populations
    • New technologies → Per capita energy use grows
    • New lifestyles → Per capita consumption and waste grows.
  • Judeo-Christian beliefs as argued by Historian Lynn White in 1967:
    • Assumption of human superiority, depicting all of nature as created for the use of humans
    • Anthropocentric perspective that humans are the only things that matter on Earth
    • Thus, they may use and consume everything else to their advantage without any injustice.
    • Humans are above nature
  • Continuum of other societies:
    • Cosmovisions → Diverse indigenous and traditional to world religions
    • Livelihood system → Individual subsistence to highly diversified labour
    • Geographic distribution → Dispersed pastoral, rural to high-density urban populations
22
Q

The Role of Media in Diffusing Culture

A
  • Consuming media (both news and social) is an especially important popular custom for two reasons:
    1. It is the most popular leisure activity worldwide
    2. Media is the most important mechanism by which knowledge of culture is rapidly diffused across the planet.
23
Q

Diffusing Culture in the Era of Social Media

A

Globalization is the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, population, and cultures, brought about by global trade and communication technologies.

24
Q

Challenging the Dominance of English

A
  • 50 most-streamed songs in Spotify between 2017-21
    • 47 in English
  • India, Indonesia, and South Korea with a strong muscial industry
    • 52% to 31%
  • Spain and Latin America
    • 25% to 14%
  • What challenges English (and Western) dominance?
    1. Economic growth
      1. Rising incomes = More money for consumers to spend
      2. Money goes to local musicians and filmmakers
      3. More money = more artists
    2. Internet
      1. World Wide Web = Opportunity to put out more content with little restriction
      2. Low cost for distribution
      3. Algorithms to highlight posts which can go viral from local to the global
25
Q

From Eastern to Western Cultures

A
  • As Western cultures influence Eastern cultures (e.g., Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia), societies adopt cultural traits.
    • Economic growth and consumerism
    • Social changes
    • Environmental degradation
26
Q

Challenging the Status Quo

A
  • Catholic Church
    • Humans are separate and superior to nature (Medieval times)
    • Humans must care for the environment to avoid environmental catastrophe (Modern times)
27
Q

What is Political Geography

A
  • Sub-discipline of geography that haws evolving relationships with other sub-disciplines in the field of
    • Cultural geography
    • Urban geography
    • Environmental geography
  • Largely concerned with the spatial outcomes of political processes and the ways in which political processes affect spatial structures
  • Spatial differences determined by
    • Administrative boundaries based on different values, goals, and policies
  • Looks at relationships at a three-scale structure
  • The way that nation-states are divided has various different attachments to them.
28
Q

Relationships at a Three-Scale Structure

A
  • Whatever is happening in the localities is small compared the state-level
  • Whatever happens at the IR scale will affect the state-level and the local; vice versa
  • Localities may have more power for action in local climate planning
  • These are all connected
29
Q

Aristotle and Political Theory

A
  • Politikos
    • Of, or relating to, the polis
  • Polis
    • City-state
    • Relatively small and cohesive units in which political, religious, and cultural concerns were intertwined
  • Several possible constitutional forms (adapted from Plato)
    • One ruler (Kingship or Tyranny)
    • Few rulers (Aristocracy or Oligarchy)
    • Many rulers (Democracy)
30
Q

What is a State?

A
  • Area organized into a political unit and ruled by an established government that has control over its domestic and foreign affairs
  • Occupies a defined territory
  • Contains a permanent population within the defined territory
  • A state has sovereignty which means independence from control o fits domestic affairs by other states
  • ‘Country’ and ‘nation’ and synonymous to ‘state’
31
Q

What is Sovereignty?

A
  • Exercise of state power
    • Over people and territory
    • Recognized by other states
    • Codified by international law
32
Q

Conflicts over State and Sovereignty

A
  • Disagreement about the actual number of sovereign states worldwide
    • Partially recognized
    • Unrecognized with/without de facto control over the territory
    • Under military occupation
  • 208 listed ‘states’ in the UN system
    • 193 UN member states… Generally sovereign/independent states
    • 2 UN observer states (The Holy See and Palestine)
    • 13 other states
33
Q

Emergence of the Concept of the State

A
  • A fairly recent concept
  • Prior to the 19th century, Earth’s surface was organized in other ways
  • The first states to evolve in the ancient world were city-states
    • A sovereign state that comprises a town and the surrounding countryside
  • Characteristics of a city-state
    • Outer walls for protection
    • Public space which included temples and government buildings
    • Majority of the population lived in the city due to it being the centre of culture, commerce, trade, and political activity
34
Q

City-States

A
  • Over 1,000 city-states (polis)
  • Each city-state were independent
  • Different greatly in governing philosophies and interests:
    • Sparta riled by two kings and a council of elders, and emphasized maintaining a strong military
    • Athens was a democracy where very man had the right to vote, valued arts and education, and maintained a strong navy
  • Physical (mountains and sea) and human geographies (aristocracy)
35
Q

State Development Over Time**

A
  • Carl Ritter (early 1800s)
    • States as living organisms
    • Cultures and states progress through life cycles over time
  • Friedrich Ratzel (1896)
    • Size of a state increase as its culture develops
    • State boundaries are peripheral organs that take part in all transformations of the organism of the state
    • States’ tendency to grow continually increases in intensity
36
Q

Empires

A
  • Following the slow demise of city-state came empires
  • An empire consists of a group of state (or countries) ruled by a single supreme authority such as an emperor or empress
  • Throughout history, there have been numerous empires
    • Roman Empire (27BC to 476AD)
    • Mongol Empire (1206 to 1368)—Largest contiguous empire in the world
    • Spanish and Portuguese Empires (Late 15th century to the 1900s)
    • British Empire (15th century to 1940s)
37
Q

States and Colonies

A
  • After the fall of the Roman and Mongol Empires, a handful of kings emerged as rulers over feudal societies by the 12th and 13th centuries, especially in Europe
  • The consolidation of neighbouring estates under the unified control of a king formed the basis for the development of such modern Western Europeans states such as Portugal, Spain, France, and England
  • But some remained as a colony, which is legally tied to a sovereign state rather than being completely independent
    • In some cases (such as Canada from 1867 to 1931), a sovereign state run’s a colony’s military and foreign policy.
    • In other cases (such as French Guiana), it also controls the conoly’s internal affairs
38
Q

Colonialism**

A
  • European states came to control much of the world through colonialism
  • Defined as the effort by one country to establish settlements and to impose and control its cultural, economic, and political principles on the territory’s original inhabitants.
  • European countries established colonies around the world for three reasons:
    1. Promote Christianity
    2. Exploit natural resources from overseas to fuel the economy of European states
    3. Symbol of relative power (more colonies = more power)
  • The colonial era began in the 15th century, when explorers were attempting to find Asia for spices; instead, they encountered the Americas
  • By 1830s, the Europeans powers lost most of the colonies established in the Americas
  • They then turned their attention to Africa (Scramble for Africa) and Asia
  • Imperialism
    • Control of territory already occupied and organized by another, ie., indigenous, society
  • Colonialism
    • Control of previously uninhabited or sparsely inhabited land.
  • As European powers waned, the US became the next superpower by exercising imperialism
  • Most of the territories are scattered throughout the Pacific Ocean, but notable territories include
    • American Samoa
    • Guam
    • Northern Mariana Islands
    • Puerto Rico
    • US Virgin Islands
39
Q

Boundaries

A
  • Infinitely thin, invisible, imaginary line that separates the territory of two state powers
  • Require mutual agreement between neighbouring territories
  • Result from a combination of natural features (e.g., rivers, deserts, mountains, etc) and cultural features (e.g., religious and linguistic)
40
Q

Natural Boundaries

A
  • Important physical features on the Earth’s surface can make good boundaries because they are easily seen—both on the map and pn the ground
  • Mountains
    • Effective boundaries if they are difficult to cross
    • Rather permanent and usually sparsely inhabited
  • Desert
    • Similar to mountains in that they are difficult to cross and usually sparsely inhabited
  • Water
    • Rivers, lakes, and oceans are the most commonly used boundaries
    • Readily visible on the map and relatively unchanging
41
Q

Social Boundaries

A
  • Cultural
    • Boundaries between some states coincide with differences in ethnicity, language, and religion
  • Geometric
    • Simple straight line drawn on a map
    • 49th parallel
  • Religious
    • Religion can be used to partition countries
    • India and Pakistan
42
Q

The Antarctic Treaty

A
  • Only large landmass that is NOT part of a state
  • Seven countries maintain territorial claims where three overlap (Argenitna, Chile, and the UK)

1956 Antarctica Treaty

43
Q

1992-1998 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctica Treaty

A
  • 50-year bam on mineral activities
  • Environmental impact assessment regulations
  • Liability for environmental damage
    • Remains very unclear
44
Q

1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea

A
  • Islands have gained new significance when it comes to economic activities (economic exclusive zone-EEZ)
    • Every island, no matter how small, has its own 200-nautical mile EEZ
  • Countries have a host new neighbours
  • EEZ lines result in overlapping claims
    • Continental and maritime borders
45
Q

Ethnicity, Nationality, and Race**

A
  • Ethnicity
    • Identity with a group of people who share cultural traditions of a particular homeland
  • Nationality
    • Identity with a group of people who share legal attachment and personal allegiance to a particular country
  • Similarity
    • Both are defined by shared value
  • Difference
    • Ethnicity → Derived for cultural valuees (food, clothing, language, religion)
    • Nationality → Derived from legal/political values (civic duties, passport right, voting)
  • Race
    • Identity with a group of people who share a biological ancestor
    • Racism → Based on biological classification assuming that genetic features are the primary determinant of human characteristics and capacities
  • Modern human geography applies ethnicity-, NOT race-based approaches to explain spatial interactions and regional features
46
Q

Ethnic Conflicts and Killings

A
  • Genocide
    • Deliberate killing os a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group
    • China (Uyghur vs Han)
    • Rwanda (Tutsi vs Hutu)
  • Holocaust
    • Genocide of European Jews during WWII
    • 6 million jews
  • Ethnic cleansing
    • Forced removal of ethnic, racial, or religious groups from a given area with the goal of making a region ethnically homogenous
47
Q

Catalunya

A
  • Had its own regional culture and identity
  • Economics was also important
    • Economic powerhouse of Spain
  • Referenda of Catalan Statute of Autonomy
    • 1931, 1979, 2006
  • Referendum of independence in 2017
    • Needs approval of the Spanish population
  • Implication on EU membership
    • Will have to go through the same EU process which can at times take decades
48
Q

Who wants to separate** Article

A
  • Catalonia, Spain
  • Basque Country, France and Spain
  • Flanders, Belgium
  • Bavaria, Germany
  • Venice, surrounding Veneta region, Italy
  • South Tyrol, Italy
  • Padania, Italy
  • Wales, UK
  • Northern Island, UK
  • Cornwall, England, UK
49
Q

Canadian Citizenship

A
  • 1867: Canada becomes a federal dominion (Union of British North American colonies)
  • 1931: Statute of Westminster grants British dominions complete autonomy
    • Given this autonomy, Canada was nation without citizens
    • ‘Canadians’ were simply British subjects living in Canada
  • 1947: Canadian Citizenship Act passed
  • ‘Canadians’ finally became Canadian citizens
  • Canada declared to be of equal status with the UK within the Commonwealth
50
Q

Federal and Provincial Jurisdictions

A
  • Canada
    • Banking
    • Citizenship
    • Criminal law
    • National defence
  • Provinces
    • Education
    • Healthcare
    • Highways
    • Social welfare
  • Both
    • Agriculture
    • Taxation
    • Natural resource jurisdiction
    • Old age pensions
    • If there is conflict, it may be settled through the justice system
    • Air transportation, internet, water pollution
51
Q

The Case of Quebec

A
  • Different culture from the rest of Canada
    • Cuisine, language, religion, etc.
  • Referendums of 1980 and 1995
    • 1995 (No, 50.58%; Yes, 49.42%)
  • 27 November 2006
    • Quebecois form a nation within a united Canada