Cultural Differences

10 Key excerpts on "Cultural Differences"

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  eBook - ePub

  The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Geography

  • Nuala C. Johnson, Richard H. Schein, Jamie Winders, Jamie Winders(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  It is hard to find a key word or topic in cultural geography these days that does not enjoy an interdisciplinary constituency. That is a good thing. The contemporary fascination with the “cultural” has generated an enormous body of work on which cultural geographers draw and to which they contribute. Cultural geography as a subdiscipline brings to the conversations a long tradition, most notably attention to space and place, to the spatiality of everyday life at multiple and fluid scales, to landscapes as the re-suturing of human and physical worlds, and to the politics and epistemological implications of these engagements. In the past decade, these traditional foci have remained intact, even as some have garnered renewed enthusiasm (such as nature–society questions), others have undergone increased conceptual scrutiny (such as the “cultural landscape” concept), and many have engaged new conceptual or theoretical possibilities (such as increased interest in affect and emotion or consideration of the “posthuman”). All of these developments are present in this volume, and this introductory chapter signposts some of these traditional, new, and renewed areas of interest in cultural geography and the ways these topics have shifted in the last decade. This chapter is not, however, meant as a comprehensive introduction to the subdiscipline of cultural geography. Instead, it is an invitation to examine the field’s ever-changing contours through the ensuing essays.

  Cultural geography has been a foundational building block of human geography since the discipline formally was established in the nineteenth century. Documenting spatial patterns in human interaction with, responses to, and transformations of the natural landscape, raising questions about how landscape itself was shaped by and shaped social dynamics, and problematizing the ideas of culture, landscape, and nature have been cultural geography’s contributions to the ways that human geographers have thought about the world around them, past and present. Today, the line between human geography as a discipline and cultural geography as a subdiscipline is blurred to the point that cultural geography is human geography in some corners of our field. Recent intellectual and scholarly developments within geography have drawn cultural geographers closer to the fold and to deeper engagements with colleagues and ideas once thought beyond cultural geography’s purview – political, economic, historical, or environmental geography, for example. These connections have been strengthened through cultural geography’s embrace of and relevance to the so-called cultural and spatial turns across the human sciences as well as its engagement with social theory and concepts of interest to a broad range of scholars within and beyond the discipline. In short, cultural geographers today study nearly every aspect of human geography and do so in ways that simultaneously reinforce the subdiscipline’s place in geography and question the logic and locations of its boundaries.

  Cultural geography is itself deeply geographic in terms of what places and spaces cultural geographers study and how cultural-geographic scholarship is conducted across institutional and national contexts. Although cultural geography developed historically and intellectually in relation to other areas of human geography, such as cultural ecology and social geography, it also has developed in relation to its practical and institutional contexts. Cultural geography means different things in different places and is enacted in different ways, especially between its North American and British variants (see, for example, Audrey Kobayashi’s discussion of this phenomenon in relation to geographic treatments of race in Chapter 9). Where

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  Geographies of Love

  The Cultural Spaces of Romance in Chick- and Ladlit

  • Christian Lenz(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • transcript Verlag

    (Publisher)

  Cultural Geographies Space is to place as eternity is to time. J OSEPH J OUBERT T HE W ORLD A CCORDING TO G EOGRAPHERS The relationship between people and their (created) surrounding(s) is looked at closely in geography and, more precisely, human geography which aims “to explain the spatial patterns and processes that enable and constrain the structures and actions of everyday life.” (Dear and Flusty 2002: 2) Human geography is one of the two great strands of geography, the other being physical geography, which includes for example geomorphology or biogeography (cf. Kirk 1963: 359, 361). In their Introductory Reader in Human Geography , William Moseley, David Lanegran and Kavita Pandit characterise human geography as focusing on “the patterns and dynamics of human activity on the landscape.” (2007a: 3) However, depending on the focus geographers want to apply, they would either narrow the focus on the human activity or stress the “human-environment dynamics (or the nature-society tradition).” (Ibid.) Whereas the latter deals with diverse topics such as political ecology or agricultural geography, the former aspect of human geography addresses issues such as urban geography, economic or political geography and cultural geo-graphy (cf. ibid.: 4). Especially cultural geography “concentrates upon the ways in which space, place and the environment participate in an unfolding dialogue of meaning. 1 ” (Shurmer-Smith 2002: 3) Cultural geography “includes thinking about how geographical phenomena are shaped, worked and apportioned according to ideology; how they are used when people form and express their relationships and ideas, including their sense of who they are.” (Shurmer-Smith 2002: 3) This con-firms what Peter Jackson anticipated in his famous Maps of Meaning twenty years 1 See also Knox and Marston: “Cultural geography focuses on the way in which space, place, and landscape shape culture at the same time that culture shapes space, place, and landscape.” (1998: 191)

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  Handbook of Cultural Geography

  • Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, Nigel Thrift, Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile, Nigel Thrift(Authors)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  For us, we can see that five particular themes are evident across this book – and cultural geography as a whole. No doubt these are not the only ones, but they make sense in terms of the intellectual frontiers this Handbook opens up. They are: • culture as distribution of things • culture as a way of life • culture as meaning • culture as doing • culture as power. Let us think further about the various strands of thought that have gone to make up cultural geography. We have noted that these strands are bound together in different ways, and you will find various aspects of the thinking described in each of the chapters – in sometimes more and less apparent ways. These strands are long standing and represent aspects of cultural geography as both a style of thought and a substantive arena of research and debate. We have decided to stabilize these threads on aspects of culture, as a convenient heuristic. A ROUGH GUIDE 3 Culture as distribution of things All groups of people produce cultural artefacts, from the everyday personal items we see around us like furniture and clothing, to the larger-scale and more public artefacts such as buildings and roads. But how exactly do we understand the relationships between the patterning of those artefacts and the values, livelihoods, beliefs and identities of the cultures who have produced them? What really can the pattern of mate-rial artefacts tell us about the social, economic and political dynamics of cultures? These concerns are central to cultural geography. In the first half of the twentieth century, cultural geographers concentrated on charting the movement and locations of material artefacts in the landscape. Some geographers of the Berkeley School of cultural geography spent considerable energy map-ping the locations of certain key, and primarily vernacular,artefacts within the United States in order to delineate cultural regions, that is, regions that expressed a defined cultural homogeneity.

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  Global Perspectives in the Geography Curriculum

  Reviewing the Moral Case for Geography

  • Alex Standish(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Unlike his predecessors, Sauer viewed humans as having a more active role in shaping the landscapes they inhabited, rather than being a product of them. The Berkeley school subsequently became a prominent home of cultural geography for Sauer and his colleagues until the 1980s. A broad definition was provided by two of its scholars identifying cultural geography as ‘the application of the idea of culture to geographic problems’ (Wagner and Mikesell 1962). More useful perhaps is to identify the three principal themes for cultural geography that were to emerge from this school: the diffusion of cultural traits, the identification of cultural regions and cultural ecology (focused on how the perception and use of the environment are culturally specific) (Johnston et al. 2000:46). The cultural approach to geography became popular in the 1950s and 1960s with the discrediting of racist and deterministic thought. For instance, Land and People: A World Geography had a chapter looking at ‘What makes humans special’ and another about how ‘People change the landscape’ (Danzer and Larson 1982). The cultural approach led authors to describe the spatial dispersion of Western civilization to other lands, using the concepts of industrial and democratic revolutions, of course from a Western perspective. With both revolutions emanating from Europe, the text presented eleven cultural regions shaped according to the reaction of the people to the spread of these ideas: ‘In some places the new ideas were eagerly adopted; in others they were resisted’ (James and Davis 1967:10). Similarly, in World Geography, all countries were discussed in terms of their progress on a path towards development that all will take, albeit at different rates. For instance, ‘India has taken several steps towards modernizing the lives of its people’ (Israel et al. 1976:293), which included universal voting rights

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  Economic and Social Geography

  • R. Knowles, J. Wareing(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Made Simple

    (Publisher)

  Culture is the totality of human experience but it is made up of many different types of culture. Urban-industrial cultures have a very different set of relationships with the environment from rural-agricultural cultures and each has produced distinctive landscapes which divide the world up into a wide range of regional units. The study of the cultural landscapes produced by these different cultures has been a major area of study in human geography. Cultural Landscapes Cultural landscapes are produced by the interaction of man and nature in an area and they reflect the social and economic aims, and the technical abilities of the people living there. The task of the geographer has been to describe and analyse these landscapes in order to understand the imprint of man on the earth, and a large number of regional studies have been produced to achieve this. Attention has also been given to the ways in which landscapes change through time, and to the role that man plays in this change. There are two aspects of the cultural landscape that must be considered. The first of these is the functional landscape which is produced by economic activity. The various economic activities of man have a distinctive imprint on the environment. Industrial activities produce quite different landscape forms from agricultural activities, and within agriculture itself the landscapes of Man and Environment 1 1 viticulture, or intensive rice cultivation, or extensive wheat farming are quite distinctive. However, man is not simply a functional creature. Although wheat farming in East Anglia is the same type of activity as wheat farming in the Paris Basin, there are considerable landscape differences that are not economically induced. The layout of settlement, house styles, field boundaries and so on are part of the aesthetic landscape shaped by man's preferences and prejudices during centuries of occupation.

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  Human Geography

  A History for the Twenty-First Century

  • Georges Benko, Ulf Strohmayer, Georges Benko, Ulf Strohmayer(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  2 Cultural geography: place and landscape between continuity and change Paul Claval and J. Nicholas Entrikin  

  Geography has a long history, but human geography was born only in the late nineteenth century, in Germany, with the publication in the 1880s of the first volume of Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie (1881–91). From the outset, culture was thought to be a significant aspect of human geography, but the cultural approach to the discipline was hampered by the dominant naturalist and positivist epistemologies.

  Geographers held different views of their field. For the majority of them, geography had to explain fundamentally the regional (and local) differentiation of the earth. With the growing influence of evolutionism, the relationship between man and milieu appeared as the most successful challenger of the earlier regional perspective. In order to avoid conflict between the two conceptions, the idea that geography was the science of landscapes began to flourish. It offered a major advantage: a specific field for geographic inquiry.

  These three conceptions were generally combined: geographers explored the diversity of the earth and prepared maps to show it; they had an interest in the diversity of landscapes, which introduced a large-scale, local component, to their approach; they often focused — either at the global, regional or local level — on man-milieu relationships. Their ambition was to present an objective description of the earth and develop a knowledge of the laws which explained its organization. Generally, they had no interest in the geographical views or interpretations developed by the people they studied. These conceptions evolved, but their epistemological basis remained remarkably stable until the mid-twentieth century.

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  Landscapes

  Ways of Imagining the World

  • Hilary P.M. Winchester(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Change in the landscape will equate with change in culture and vice versa. Landscape change can lag behind cultural change. A major transformation in the cultural look of the landscape is indicative of a major change in culture New tastes in cuisine and the entry of new cultures through migration will manifest spatially. Social disharmony and exclusion will manifest as segregation (see Figure 5.4 ) 2 Cultural landscape equality No specific landscape feature or cultural manifestation of a group is necessarily more or less important than another, better or worse The McDonald's Family Restaurant is as instructive to geographers as an artefact of culture; so is the Eiffel Tower 3 Everyday landscape of common things The ordinary landscape has been little researched. Researchers have been dismissive or disparaging of such common things. If studied with care and without elitism they can tell us a great deal about everyday culture The rapid spread of McDonald's Family Restaurants (see Figure 2.2 ) through Australia is reflective of the uptake of American popular culture, as ate the everyday shop fronts within malls 4 History and landscape To read a landscape properly a researcher needs to know something of the history of a place To interpret graffiti and murals in Belfast properly, one needs to know about sectarianism in Belfast, the Troubles and the historical development of Ireland, especially the north (see Figures 5.3 and 5.5 ) 5 Geographic context A landscape or landscape feature can only be understood with reference to the surrounding places and landscapes A reading of the city of Newcastle (see Figure 2.3 ) should bring an awareness of nearby coalfields and the nearby presence of a navigable port 6 Physical landscape The human landscape is related to the biophysical environment. Aspects such as terrain, climate and geology can be important The tiver, timber and the presence of coal deposits help explain the location and morphology of Newcastle (see Figure 2.3 ) 7 Landscape obscurity The landscape does not speak to us very clearly. Primary messages can be deceiving. Cultural geographers need to ask the right questions and look the right way

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  Interdisciplinary Relationships in the Social Sciences

  • Muzafer Sherif, Carolyn Wood Sherif(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The problem of communication between these two fields is unusually complex, for the concept of culture is implicit in all of human geography and explicit in the subfield of cultural geography. The position taken by Wagner and Mikesell (1962) that cultural geographers are identified by their preoccupation with four research themes–"culture area," "culture history," "cultural landscape," and "cultural ecology"–underscores the status of cultural geography as an interdisciplinary field, for each of these themes is shared with anthropology. As I have tried to show elsewhere (Mikesell, 1967), geographers probably have most to learn from anthropologists on social organization, the delimitation and classification of culture areas, and the processes that produce culture change. They may have most to offer in return on settlement patterns, land tenure and land use, and the more general issue of cultural ecology. Since no clear distinction can be made between these two general categories of interest, it is not surprising that substantive studies show a pattern of convergence and that philosophical or methodological writings show a pattern of parallel development.

  These two trends can be illustrated by reference to common work in cultural ecology. As already indicated, concern for the relations of nature and culture formed the first explicit rationale of American geography. Interest in this relationship waned as a result of the criticism of the environmentalist doctrines proclaimed in the twenties and thirties (Tatham, 1951). Since prescriptive rather than philosophical arguments were the main basis for this rejection–i.e., geography should not be defined in reference to a particular causal relationship–it is not an exaggeration to suggest that environmentalism was disapproved rather than disproved (Rostlund, 1962; Lewthwaite, 1966). The principal failing of the environmentalists was that they tried to describe nature and culture as separate entities or opposing forces. The philosophy developed in response to criticism of this effort represented a retreat from determinism to the relative security of "possibilism." Simultaneously, physical and human geographers were drifting apart, and the latter tended increasingly to minimize the influence of natural environment. For example, the comprehensive survey mentioned above includes chapters devoted to nature and chapters devoted to culture but none devoted to their relationship (James and Jones, 1954). Actually, geographers had not abandoned this inquiry but rather had placed emphasis on processes of environmental modification, such as deforestation and erosion (Thomas, 1956). Enriched by this experience, they have tried in recent years to develop a more sophisticated philosophy of man-land relations in which emphasis is placed on nature and culture as interlocking components of a system (Eyre and Jones, 1966; Wagner, 1960).

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  FTCE Social Science 6-12 (037) Book + Online

  • Cynthia Metcalf, Rhonda Atkinson(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Research & Education Association

    (Publisher)

  The study of culture and Earth interactions is called cultural ecology. Political ecology is a multi-disciplinary study of how social and environmental change occurs in the context of power relations, social structures, economic issues, and human–environment interactions. Humans depend on the environment to provide them with their basic needs: food, shelter, and clothing. Humans also modify that same environment in order to meet their needs. For instance, people build dams to change the way water flows, plow and irrigate fields to grow food, clear forests to build houses, and dig mines for minerals and natural resources that help sustain life. Humans adapt to their environment if they cannot change it. For instance, people put on warm coats and use heaters when they live in cold climates. How people adapt to their environment depends to a large extent on their ability to do so—and it reflects their economic and political circumstances and their technological abilities. Human–environment interaction has also shaped Earth’s physical systems and features. For example, building on oceanfronts may increase erosion and alter the landscape. Clearing forests to make room for agriculture or cities changes the appearance of the landscape. Building dams and canals changes the way water flows. Geographers approach the study of human–environment interaction in a variety of ways: Environmental determinism: This is the view that the environment can overpower people and determine their culture and the direction and extent of their development. This is widely considered a “not politically correct” belief in geography. The main train of thought in environmental determinism is that an area’s physical characteristics, like climate, impact how people develop over time

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  Key Concepts in Geography

  • Nicholas Clifford, Sarah Holloway, Stephen P Rice, Gill Valentine, Nicholas Clifford, Sarah Holloway, Stephen P Rice, Gill Valentine(Authors)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 for a discussion of geography and the humanities). This work ranges over many aspects of behaviour, including the micro-scale of the individual body, seeking to understand the meanings that underpin actions – many of which are never recorded during the processes of everyday life. The relationships between people and nature are also being reconsidered, breaking down the perceived artificial boundaries between these long-considered binary opposites (Whatmore, 2002). Here again, new approaches are being explored for the interrogation of actions, including places as their arena. Indeed, such is the geographical contribution to cultural studies that some identify a ‘spatial turn’ within the humanities (Anderson et al., 2002); other geographers continue to explore the interactions between humans and their environment in more ‘traditional’ ways (Turner, 2002).

  CONCLUSIONS: HUMAN GEOGRAPHY – SOCIAL SCIENCE AT LAST

  Geography came late to the social sciences, therefore, and by the time that human geographers sought to ally with them they found they were excluded. In response, while remaking their own discipline they also had to make strong claims that it was now clearly a social science. To do this, they initially emphasized a particular aspect of the social sciences, privileging economic over other forces as determinants of human behaviour, and emphasizing models of spatial behaviour – of organization and flows – in which those forces dominated. They achieved some success in this strategy. A stream of work was introduced which remains strong, although it has changed over the last four decades. Rigorous analysis of quantitative data remains at the core of what is known as the spatial analysis tradition (Johnston, 2003b; Fotheringham, 2006). Formal models based on idealized spatial patterns derived from oversimplified principles have largely been jettisoned, however, though interestingly they were taken up by a school of economists in the 1990s, in a ‘new economic geography’ which geographers (with some exceptions) claim they disowned 20 years ago (Clark et al., 2000); the two ‘strands’ are being brought together through a journal – Journal of Economic Geography

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