Cultural Hearths

8 Key excerpts on "Cultural Hearths"

• 

  eBook - PDF

  Encyclopedia of Geography Terms, Themes, and Concepts

  • Reuel R. Hanks(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Thus, non-Russians in many cases main- tained a competing identity that undermined, and eventually displaced, the state- sponsored identity. Many countries today face challenges in forming a centralizing, coalescent cultural identity that are similar to those experienced in the Soviet Union. Culture Hearth One of several locations where major cultural and technological advancements appeared in the early development of human civilization. These places emerged Culture Hearth 87 as centers of innovation and artistic and scientific achievement, with complex social orders and sophisticated political systems. Moreover, each hearth benefited from regularly cultivated and proficient agricultural systems, often based on exten- sive irrigation. The latter feature generally enabled the production of a surplus of food. Most of the hearths developed on the banks of major rivers, or at least in close proximity to streams, allowing for a regular supply of water, and also benefited from the rich alluvial soils laid down by flooding. Scholars generally recognize four major Cultural Hearths, and some include three secondary hearths as well. The four major hearths are the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley located in modern Iraq; the Nile River Valley in Egypt; the Indus River Valley situated in modern Pakistan; and China’s Huang Ho River Valley. The three secondary hearths are located in western Africa, especially Ghana and its environs; Central America, especially southern Mexico, Belize, and northern Guatemala; and the Gangetic Plain of northern India. Each of these locations wit- nessed the emergence of a common set of advancements, either entirely in isola- tion from the others or at least partially independent of external influences.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  European Settlement and Development in North America

  • James R. Gibson(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University of Toronto Press

    (Publisher)

  Implicit in the elaboration of such a system is a high degree of geographical isolation from external cultural influences, so that the core traits can be diffused in a non-competitive context. As Zelinsky has pointed out, such a condition is unusual in American expansion and he is correctly sceptical about the application of such a scheme to the eastern United States. 10 But he does not pursue the point further. The colonial culture hearths can be viewed as dynamic cultural regions with reasonably identifiable internal structures comprising 'cores' (Boston and adjacent eastern Massachusetts, Philadelphia and adjacent southeastern Pennsylvania, and the lower peninsula of tidewater Virginia) and adjacent 'domains' that undergo internal elaboration and change over time. 11 9 Donald W. Meinig, 'The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847-1964,' Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55 (1965): 191-220, and Imperial Texas: An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography (Austin 1969) 10 Cultural Geography, 114-16. In a later essay Meinig anticipates such criticism. 'Although folk colonization is always selective and uneven in area, in the East the general tide of settlement was relatively comprehensive and local nuclei and salients in the vanguard were soon engulfed and integrated into a generally continguous pattern.' 'American Wests: Preface to a Geographical Interpretation,' Annals of the Association of American Geographers 62 (1972): 160 11 It seems unreasonable to exclude emerging urban influences within hearth areas, as if they were not an expression of the 'folk' culture of the hearth area. The Pennsylvania hearth is generally depicted as excluding Philadelphia, although why this should be so has never been explained satisfactorily. See Wilbur Zelinsky, 'The Pennsylvania Town: An Overdue Geographical Account,' Geographical Review 67 (1977): 12747.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Visualizing Human Geography

  At Home in a Diverse World

  • Alyson L. Greiner(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Gardens like this aid meditation. Religion in Global Context 121 122 CHAPTER 5 Geographies of Religion 1. Distinguish between primary and secondary hearths. 2. Define diaspora. Religious Hearths and Diffusion LEARNING OBJECTIVES 3. Relate the spread of religion to different types of diffusion. Punjab Sarnath Mecca Medina Hejaz A F R I C A A S I A E U R O P E 0 500 1000 Kilometers 500 1000 Miles 0 Generalized Routes of Diffusion Buddhism Hinduism Christianity Islam Semitic Hearth core area Semitic Hearth Indic Hearth core area Indic Hearth Primary hearths • Figure 5.7 Judaism, Christianity, and Islam emerged in the Semitic hearth, whereas Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and another South Asian faith, Jainism, emerged in the Indic hearth. In both the Semitic and Indic hearths, these developments played out over many centuries. ▲ Why does the identification of religious hearths sometimes become a contested practice? E very religion emerges in a hearth. For many adherents to a specific religion, places or sites within the hearth often acquire sacred qualities because of their association with significant events in the growth and devel- opment of the religion. Geographers recognize two cat- egories of religious hearths: primary and secondary. Primary hearths are those places or regions where a wholly new religion develops. In contrast, secondary hearths are the places or regions where a religion fragments inter- nally to form a new branch. Remarkably, two primary hearths, the Semitic and the Indic, have generated more religions—and more enduring religions—than any other regions (Figure 5.7). Religions of the Semitic Hearth As the birthplace of a religion, the hearth usually represents its dominant symbolic center even though the hearth may or may not be home to many of that religion’s adherents. The region known historically as Palestine, and which today roughly coincides with Israel, constitutes the hearth of Judaism.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  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.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  Human Geography

  People, Place, and Culture

  • Erin H. Fouberg, Alexander B. Murphy(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  • Mental Maps • Generalization in Maps • Remote Sensing and GIS 1.4 Describe how culture influences patterns and processes in human geography. 2 CHAPTER 1 Introduction to Human Geography Geography is the study of the spaces and places people cre- ate on the ground and in their minds, and the ways in which people use and shape the environment. The field of human geography focuses on how we organize ourselves and our activities in space; how we are connected to one another and the environment; how we make places and how those places in turn shape our lives; and how we think about and organize ourselves locally and globally. Human geography includes the subdisciplines of political geography, economic geography, population geography, and urban geography. Human geography also includes cultural geography, which is both part of human geography and also its own approach to all aspects of human geography. Cultural geography looks at the ways culture, including religion, lan- guage, and ethnicity are distributed and affect human geog- raphy. Cultural geography also examines how culture affects our understanding of topics addressed in human geography. Cultural geography can be thought of both as a component of human geography and a perspective on human geography. How People Make Geography People have a bigger impact on the world now than at any point in history. In 1900, the world had 1 billion people. The fastest ways to travel were steamships, railroads, and horse and buggy. Now, nearly 8 billion people can cross the globe in a matter of days, with most having easy access to automobiles, high-speed railroads, airplanes, and ships. Traveling long distances in short times and communicat- ing instantly have globalized the world. An idea can spread across the world and connect people from different places within minutes. Globalization is a set of processes that are increasing interactions, deepening relationships, and accel- erating connectedness across country borders.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - PDF

  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)

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  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)

  new companion to cultural geography as a contribution to the ongoing conversation around this particular subdiscipline of human geography. It is emphatically a new volume, even as it follows almost ten years on the heels of the first companion (Duncan, Johnson, and Schein 2004). Some of the authors in this volume are the same; many are different. All of the essays are original and were commissioned specifically for this volume, with the intent of continuing to look forward and of looking at cultural geography from more than its center. As any review of the field makes clear, cultural geography has meant many things in many contexts; and that vibrancy must continue if it is to survive in the contemporary world of interdisciplinary study and challenges to intellectual orthodoxy, even those that fostered the subdiscipline in the first place.

  Defining cultural geography, indeed any discipline or subdiscipline, is tricky; and different, imbricated categorical criteria often are employed. For cultural geography, these criteria might include attention to tradition or genealogies (which themselves have a geography, see Tolia-Kelly 2010); to personalities or hagiographies of specific cultural geographers; to theoretical and conceptual paradigms and debates over their utility and appropriateness across time and space; to thematic focus on some aspect of the world; to disciplinary key words and ideas; to calls for particular research agendas. Each of these categories is represented in this volume’s essays; and together, they comprise a broad introduction to cultural geography, albeit an introduction located in the Anglophone world and largely stemming from British and US traditions.

  Those more generally interested in the definitional breadth of cultural geography per se also might look at other sources. This volume’s predecessor, for instance, presented three chapters which, at the time, proclaimed the fin-de-siècle revival of cultural geography as a field and attempted to trace traditions and a set of genealogies reflecting the differential nature of cultural geography across (part of) the Anglophone world (Schein 2004; Scott 2004; Barnett 2004). The fact that there were three chapters dedicated to “Introducing Cultural Geographies” explicitly recognized that disciplinary genealogies can be notoriously teleological and tend to present neat historical progressions that elide difference – including geographical difference – conflict, tension, and those who “lost” in the process. Designed to be read in stereo, one of those chapters told the perhaps “standard” genealogy of cultural geography from a US-based perspective (Schein 2004). This cultural geography, particularly in the United States, is sometimes referred to as traditional

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book
• 

  eBook - ePub

  Human Geography

  A History for the Twenty-First Century

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

    (Publisher)

  Whatever flower of culture each small region developed in its own garden plot was disseminated over the whole basin by the multitudinous paths of the sea. So varied were the local conditions of temperature, rainfall, soil, relief, area, coastline and vicinal grouping, that each district commanded some peculiar combination of natural advantages in the production of its distinctive contribution to the civilization as the whole. These cultural achievements in turn, transplanted to distant shores, took on new aspects in response to a changed environment or were remodeled by the genius of needs of new masters …

  (Semple 1931: 9–10)

  Diffusion research relied on a simple hypothesis: cultures were considered as sets of independent features. Each cultural feature was born in a specific place or culture area from which it had diffused. Thus the main objective of anthropology was to locate the places where cultural features were born and map the different phases of their diffusion. The interest in diffusion was strengthened by the neo-Lamarckian bent of many of the geographers who conceived human geography around 1900 (Roger 1979; Berdoulay and Soubeyran 1991; Soubeyran 1997).

  There was practically no discussion about the theoretical foundations of such a hypothesis: the idea that innovation could occur at the same time in different places was seldom considered, which impaired the value of the results. In spite of these inbuilt limitations, however, the diffusionist theory came to some interesting conclusions. In many cases, the hypothesis of a unique place of origin was coherent with observations, but something did not fit this general schema: the idea that cultural features were independent from each other. It soon became apparent that diffusion did not proceed at the same speed all the time and in all directions. In some areas, innovations were quickly adopted; in others, they were resisted. In the case of the diffusion of domesticated plants, for instance, crops which appeared as perfect substitutes for traditional ones were soon accepted: a new cereal was incorporated into the crop rotation system when it produced more abundant crops, provided the same food as the older ones and withstood more efficiently the local natural hazards. When the new crop involved new modes of consumption, the process was slower. In Europe, the standard diet was based on grain, not on roots: hence the long delay before the potato was integrated into crop systems, in spite of its high performance as a food crop.

  Sign up to read

  Learn more about book