quiz 3 Flashcards
What is Cultural Geography?
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.
What is Cultural Landscape?
- 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
Three Types of Cultural Landscapes
- According to UNESCO:
1. Clearly defined landscapes- Crafted and created intentionally by humans.
- Taj Mahal
- Eiffel Tower
- Crafted and created intentionally by humans.
- 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
- Machu Pichu
- Have evidence of human interaction with the land, but the land has changed and developed over time.
- 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.
- Rulu Rock
What is Culture?
- 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.
Culture form a Cultural Geography perspective
- 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
Eastern cultures
- 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.
Western cultures
- 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
WERID Societies
- 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)
Influence of European Medieval Church on Western Thinking and Society
- Human-nature worldview:
- Humans are separate and superior to nature
- Nature only have value as its if useful to humans
European Church Roots: Human Disconnect from Nature
- 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
Human Reason Could be Harnessed to Build a Utopia
- 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.
European Church Roots: Human Superiority
- 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.
European Church Roots: Gender Disparities and Hierarchies
- 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
Western Culture and Power
- 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
Relocation Diffusion
- Individual items/ bodies change their physical locations
- Migration
- Trade of goods and ideas.
Hierarchical (Cascade) Diffusion
- Order from top authority to carry mission in oter regions of the world
- Colonial powers
- Missionary works
Expansion (Contagious) Diffusion
- A characteristic spreads, while the individual bodies/items keep their location
- Characteristic types:
- Hierarchical
- Stimulus
Spatial Diffusion Over Time
- 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
Western Culture from Europe to North America
- As European powers wanes, the United States became the next superpower
- It also holds many US territories, most scattered throughout the Pacific Ocean
Samuel P. Huntington (1993): Clash of Civilizations
Not just west and east, can break it down further