Cultural Patterns

10 Key excerpts on "Cultural Patterns"

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  Applied Human Geography

  • Rodolfo B. Valdenarro(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Delve Publishing

    (Publisher)

  3.1. INTRODUCTION How can one understand the meaning of culture? There is no set definition. For that, one needs to understand that regions can have individual condi-tions and histories. These give rise to mutual meanings and practices which are known as culture. There are many ways in which culture of a group of people overlaps with their political beliefs and social structure. This is why geographers and anthropologists define culture as a set of different mean -ings and practices common to a group of people. Past decade has cast attention over the field of cultural geography. This has resulted in a variety of perspectives in which culture can be studied. In 1978 Cosgrove predicted a successful collaboration between a humanist cultural geography and Marxist social geography ‘in a joint exploration of the world of man (sic) and the geographies of the mind.’ In 1979, Blaut took help of socialism and Third World politics to provide his own radical analysis of cultural geography. Sometime during the next year 1980, it was Jackson who suggested that cultural and social geography could only exist in accord with each other. He was influenced with the ideology of social anthropology. The main focus of cultural geography is place. Places are crossings of culture and context. Place should be considered as an ongoing composition of traces. Cultural life leaves its mark behind in either a tangible or intangible form. These residues are known as traces. Traces are mostly tangible or material in nature. They are things that we can touch and may range from buildings, statues, pillars, and places of worship to writings on walls/caves, Culture and Its Stages in Human Geography 53 graffiti. These are visible marks on our surroundings. Some of the traces are also intangible. They are things which cannot be touched. These may include emotions like happy, anger, sad or events like performances, functions, activities, etc.

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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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  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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  Culture and Space

  Conceiving a New Cultural Geography

  • Joel Bonnemaison(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  14 Rather than the function, the sign itself is impor-tant. Cultural groups mould their landscapes – not in order to produce more optimally but to express their faith and values. Every culture creates the geosymbols that sustain its identity. Invisible cultural traits often exert a strong influence over the modalities of spatial occupancy, such as taboos (cf. sacred woods in Africa and mountains in Asia) or food preferences and proscrip-tions (cf. the absence of pigs in Muslim lands). Geosymbols and cultural traits, either visible or invisible, are cor-related with each other. They merge into cultural ensembles , rooting themselves into a territory from which they can spread out. The goal of cultural geography is to understand their diffusion and spa-tial patterns. Cultural geographers favour field monographs. The study of a geo-graphic territory allows for a cultural synthesis based on the investigation of genres de vie , material features, beliefs, identity, the history of various groups, and other factors along the lines of the culture/landscape binomial. The Berkeley school carried out most of its masterful research in Latin America, investigating tribes or cultural groups in the manner of anthropologists. Researchers in other disciplines admired these magnificent syntheses that led to 34 CULTURE AND SPACE the concept of culture area. Carl Sauer trained an entire generation of geographers in what, in contrast with economic landscape stud-ies, has been called cultural landscape studies . The Sauerian approach defines culture areas , which are coherent and autonomous aggregates related to a certain type of landscape and separated by cultural boundaries. Metaphorically speaking, cul-ture areas look like islands while the world resembles an archipelago of cultures. For example, Latin America is divided into four culture areas: Andean, circum-Caribbean, tropical forest and marginal.

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  Regional Dynamics Burgundian Landscapes in Historical Perspective

  • Carole Crumley(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Theoretical Issues in the Analysis of Spatial Patterning WILLIAM H. MARQUARDT AND CAROLE L. CRUMLEY Societies form and are formed by their natural and constructed environments. People make their territories, houses, living spaces, and work spaces their own by consciously modifying them in terms of their effects on the senses, their utility, and their economic value. For houses and other buildings, such efforts are invariably conditioned both consciously and unconsciously by the nature of the building materials already in use and potentially available, by the site, and by the technological capacity, imagination, and cultural sensibilities of the indi-viduals who construct them. Similarly, how a group adjusts to a geographic area reflects much of the group's history, organization, and values, and in turn such adjustments influence that group's perception of the physical and the con-structed environment. The landscape is the spatial manifestation of the relations between humans and their environment. Included in the study of landscapes are population agglomerations of all sizes, from isolated farmsteads to metro-poleis, as well as the roads that link them. Also included are unoccupied or infrequently occupied places, such as religious shrines, resource extraction sites, river fords, passes through mountains, and other topographical features that societies use and imbue with meaning. Infrequently occupied places pose particular problems in the study of past landscapes. How can an archaeologist identify and assemble the components of a landscape when many features of importance show little or no trace of use or Regional Dynamics: Burgundian Landscapes in Historical Perspective 1 Copyright © 1987 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. 1 2 W I L L I A M H . M A R Q U A R D T A N D C A R O L E L .

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  From Foraging to Farming in the Andes

  New Perspectives on Food Production and Social Organization

  • Tom D. Dillehay(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER TWELVE Settlement and Landscape Patterns Tom D. Dillehay A persistent topic in hunter-gatherer archaeological research has been evaluating the influence of environmental changes on past economies, technologies, and social organizations. Archaeologists have frequently employed cultural ecology as a conceptual perspective, interpreting cul- tural patterns in terms of adaptations to external environmental stimuli, or assuming that environmental patterns reflect the optimal patterns of hunter-gatherers within functionalist cultural systems in which social vari- ables and cultural agents are minimized (e.g., Balter 2007; Kennett and Winterhalder 2006; Richerson and Boyd 2000). To situate social factors in relations between people rather than between people and environment, individual groups must be identifiable in the archaeological record. Burials and households usually offer the most scope for this, but excavated evi- dence needs to be more highly resolved in space and time for burial patterns than is the case for the Preceramic records of the Za ˜ na and Jequetepeque valleys. The household data for the 8,000 year time span under study are reasonably good for inferring some social patterns. Nevertheless, many of the phenomena (e.g., technological innovations and economic deci- sions) and situations (e.g., culture contact and migration) that are most identifiable in the archaeological record are those related to human and environmental interaction. Taking this interaction into consideration, I describe in this chapter the settlement data for the project area from the perspective of environmental conditions, resource structures and changing strategies, and when appli- cable, social relations.

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  Cultural Landscapes of Post-Socialist Cities

  Representation of Powers and Needs

  • Mariusz Czepczynski(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  New cultural geography can then be defined as the study of geographical aspects of human culture as processes and practices of meanings; all possible aspects of different spatial and thematic levels. Based on new and more vibrant and interactive understanding of culture grew humanistic geography or the geography of representations, as a newer aspect of cultural geography, where cultural space is wrought on the basis of representation. On this context cultural space is a space of belief in common values structures by ideas or ideologies (see Mitchell 2001, Marcus 2000, Crang 2004). Cosgrove and Jackson’s (1987) concept of new cultural geography was raised from criticism of the Berkeley school based on its narrow focus on physical artefacts, as well as a unitary view of culture rather than a constantly negotiated and constituted plurality of cultures. They also argued for a more complex concept of landscape, recognizing it as a cultural construction, a ‘particular way of composing, structuring and giving meaning to an external world whose history has to be understood in relation to the material appropriation of land’ (Cosgrove and Jackson 1987, 96). Landscape has been seen as a social and physical construction, where symbolic and represented landscapes produced and sustained social meanings, visualized in physical forms. In the pursuit of such analyses of landscapes, they highlighted the usefulness of two metaphors: landscape as text and landscape as theatre (see Cosgrove 1998, Cosgrove and Daniels 2004, Kong 2007). Cosgrove and Jackson’s (1987) vision for contemporary cultural geography is multi-level and holistic. It would, moreover, assert the centrality of culture in human affairs

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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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  Sacred Worlds

  An Introduction to Geography and Religion

  • Chris Park(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Spatial patterns of religion

  Nothing is so fatal to religion as indifference, which is, at least, half infidelity.

  Edmund Burke, Letter to William Smith, 29 January 1795

  INTRODUCTION

  Spatial patterns have traditionally captured the geographical imagination, and the study of the distribution of religion at different scales is doubtless what most other disciplines expect geographers to be engaged in. It is the most logical link between geography and religion, lends itself most readily to geographical analysis and interpretation, and is an area largely neglected by other disciplines. Moreover, it is a long-established focus within geography. Recall (from Chapter 1, pp. ) the great interest during the ‘golden era’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the distributions of different religions. It has continued to inspire geographical research and writing during the twentieth century. Many of the early publications on geography and religion, especially between about 1900 and I960 and particularly from the European schools, were largely descriptive and most of them laid great emphasis on describing distributions of religions. Classics include Fleure’s (1951) paper on The geographical distribution of the major religions’, Le Bras’s (1945) paper on religious geography, and Deffontaine’s (1948) Geographie et religions.

  The field has evolved greatly since this descriptive phase, and it now encompasses detailed empirical studies of how religions spread and take root in new areas, how religions survive in different places, and how religion can exert powerful influences on the character of culture regions. We shall examine these topics further in the next two chapters. It is important, however, first to review what sort of work has been done on spatial patterns of religion, because—as well as being interesting in their own right—present-day distributions can give valuable clues about historical evolution and contemporary change. Analysis of patterns might also suggest factors that help to explain those patterns. It is also useful to have a geographical framework established, because patterns of religion doubtless influence other aspects of human geography, including landscape (see Chapter 7 ) and pilgrimage (see Chapter 8

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  Designing Spatial Culture

  • Roderick Adams(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  2020 , 153–154), where these opposing professional work styles are deeply embedded into nationalistic traits, societal behaviours, and cultural attitudes. Whilst these two styles of working cultures are opposite and readily identifiable, they often overlap and mix in high-density urban environments, as diverse populations cohere, creating new styles of working cultures which impact society, merging communities and diversifying spatial cultures further.

  Cultural ecology

  Cultural ecology is part of environmental social science that examines the way people interact and adapt to their environment through biological and cultural means. This was defined by Stewart (1972, 3) to explain the multilinear process of cultural evolution and process. He explores the conceptual positioning and challenges of cultural change suggesting, “Descriptive ethnography has produced a vast body of data concerning the customs of different groups of mankind, and archaeology together with history has reconstituted the temporal as well as the spatial occurrences of these customs” (ibid.). He also explores the need to explain what culture is and its evolution by proposing three positions for cultural development. Firstly, there is unilinear evolution which suggests all societies similarly develop a culture, but at different speeds. In contrast, the second position sees cultural development as completely divergent, meaning each society develops in completely different ways that are unconnected and unrelated to anything else. The third position is multilinear evolution which constitutes a more specific methodological position that basic types of culture may develop in similar ways under similar circumstances, however a few aspects of culture develop either irregularly or at different speeds relative to everything else. He concludes, examining the Cultural Patterns and causal interrelations in different parts of the world, constituting cross-cultural relationships. In a more general sense, the production and consumption of culture are often defined as a series of “looped” structures and diagrams where the foundations of cultural analysis are formed and repeated cyclically. These have had various incarnations, including “the domains of design culture” identified in Julier (2013 , 15). The original approach was to use five separate representations/models that were interconnected and could be applied to different objects, spaces and environmental contexts. This is set out in an interpretive illustration in Figure 1.3.

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