Geography
Cultural Traits
Cultural traits refer to the specific customs, traditions, and behaviors that are characteristic of a particular society or group. These traits can include language, religion, food, clothing, and social practices, and they are passed down from generation to generation. In the context of geography, cultural traits play a significant role in shaping the unique identity and characteristics of different regions around the world.
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10 Key excerpts on "Cultural Traits"
eBook - PDF- 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.
eBook - PDF- Barney Warf(Author)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
Whereas genetics controls people from within, culture controls people from without. Traditionally defined, then, cultural geography describes the spatial patterns of culture but not the cultural patterns of individuals within a culture. Culture as an agent—not individuals within a culture—is of primary interest to geographers. They examine cultural landscapes as if culture is the agent and nature is the medium that is geographically shaped, patterned, ordered, and transformed by it. Thus, the spatial organization of cultural patterns is the result of the collective internalization of cultural values by individuals who are characterized as passive recipients of information. Individuals and their cul-tural habits, beliefs, and traditions are simply repre-sentatives of cultural regions that express a certain character. Many prominent proponents of the super-organic view of culture often stereotype a region (and the individuals within it) as having a certain heart, soul, character, psyche, and/or personality. For example, stereotypical expressions such as “the soul of Germany lies in its love of discipline” and “the core element of the American psyche is its strong sense of individualism” were characteristic of regional character types described by traditional cultural geographers. The new cultural geography that instigated the cultural turn focused its critique on the limitations of superorganicism as it was promoted and popularized by the Berkeley School under Carl Sauer. Beginning in the late 1970s, two strands of critique of this lim-ited concept of culture emerged. First, cultural geog-raphers have increasingly moved away from the superorganic concept of culture and replaced it with one that takes into account the active role of humans as agents of cultural change.
eBook - PDFCulture 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.
eBook - PDF- 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.
eBook - PDF- Edward Sapir, Judith T. Irvine(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
They are remade in each culture, ac-cording to its mythology and its rationalizations. [As our discussion of culture elements illustrates, we] serve two masters, psychology and history — the meaning and the how come sides of anthropology. [From a cultural point of view,] the main purpose of studying traits is to give the necessary preliminary stock-taking of the culture; but the historical background [of culture] is not necessarily congruent with the situation today. Things mean what we think they mean, [not where they have come from.] Trait ethnology is really ar-chaeology, [just] not of things dug from the ground. It is not cultural anthropology. 4. The Geography of Culture The study of the diffusion of culture traits [has made much of] the logic of [their] spatial distribution. From the [geographical] extent of a trait, [one speculates as to whether the trait's occurrence is due to] old heritage or to secondary factors of distribution, [with most occurrences] probably due to distribution, in the last analysis.
Chapter 2 will show, landscapes have been defined by geographers as the product of interactions between sets of natural conditions – weather, terrain, soil type, resources, etc. – and sets of cultural practices – agricultural practices, religious or spiritual beliefs, shared values and behavioural norms, the organisation of society vis-à-vis gender roles, property ownership and so on. Nature plus culture equals landscape in this account. What we witness when we examine landscape is a process of continual interaction in which nature and culture both shape and are shaped by each other.Thus we arrive at the notion that distinctive national, regional or local landscapes are expressions of human responses to and modifications of natural environments over long periods – the sort of understanding of culture, difference and locality we might encounter in school geography or, to take a different example, in guidebooks for tourists. Countries like the UK and USA become patchworks or mosaics according to this understanding of culture–nature relationships: the Peak District and Lake District landscapes, the Deep South, the Appalachians, the Home Counties, the Midwest, the Highlands and Islands, the Norfolk Broads and so on, each of these being distinct physical environments that influence but also reflect the influence of distinct human cultures.Since the 1970s, many cultural geographers have devoted much of their energies to critiquing and differently conceptualising this traditional account of culture–nature relations, and thence of landscape. For example, as might already be evident, the traditional distinction made between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ as two wholly separable realms of existence in many ways merely rephrases the error of dividing landscapes up into two fields, into objective facts and layers of subjective meaning.Thinking of nature and culture – of natural processes and human cultural practices and values – as distinct and independent realms is, cultural geographers have argued, extremely problematic in both theory and practice. The issue of where one draws the line between the two becomes fraught with political, moral and ethical dilemmas. Were humans once part of nature? If so, how and when did they separate themselves off from it? If so, does this mean that some human cultures are more ‘natural’ than others? Is nature then fixed and given and culture dynamic and pliable? Or are cultural practices simply responses to natural environmental conditions? At times in the past geographers have
eBook - ePubCultural Landscapes of Post-Socialist Cities
Representation of Powers and Needs
- Mariusz Czepczynski(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
The broad definition of ‘culture’ meets post-modern demand for an elastic meta-idiom, used more and more often by journalists, writers and researchers. Like ‘landscape’, ‘culture’ is a notoriously elastic concept and often defined as a signifying system through which ‘a social order is communicated, reproduced, experienced and explored’ (Williams 1982, 13). It involves the conscious and unconscious processes through which people live in – and make – places and landscapes, by giving meaning to their lives and communicating that meaning to themselves, each other and the world beyond (Cosgrove 1993, Graham 1998). Cultural studies has as its initial empirical focus the ordinary, the banal, and the everyday, hardly considered relevant research topics before. These are used as entry points to discussions of social relations, exposing relations of domination and cultural oppression. Cultural geography positions human beings at the centre of geographical knowledge – human beings with their beliefs, their passions, and their life experiences. Today, since ‘everything is cultural’, there is a fashion about culture, sometimes turned into a kind of fetish, when the adjective ‘cultural’ becomes something fashionable and posh. Cultural geographers of the 20 th century had, ironically, little interest in culture, and turned their attention almost exclusively to the artefacts (Duncan 1990). While traditionally landscapes have been recognized as reflections of the culture within which they were built or as a kind of artificial spoor yielding clues to events of the past, only rarely were they recognized as constituent elements in socio-political processes of cultural production and change
- Nuala C. Johnson, Richard H. Schein, Jamie Winders, Jamie Winders(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
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 cultural geography is performed, and where cultural-geographic research is produced, then, shapes what cultural-geographic scholarship looks like as much as does the widening array of spaces and places that cultural geographers now study. In all these ways, cultural geography, as a body of work, is as unruly as ever in its wanderings into other subdisciplines and disciplines, is as spatial as ever in the different strands of theories and writings that coexist as cultural geography in different places, and is as foundational as ever to the field of human geography in its interrogation of the relationship between the spatial and the social, landscape and cultural processes, past and present. The chapters commissioned for this new companion to cultural geography take up the difficult task of sorting through the unruliness, spatiality, and continuing centrality of contemporary cultural geography. The chapters are written by scholars who self-identify as cultural geographers and by geographers who write about cultural themes from the perspective of other subdisciplines. Thus, this companion reflects on the field of cultural geography from within and from without. While this approach might problematize the notion of a coherent subdiscipline, it also makes a claim about the continuity and relevance of cultural geography as a way of looking at the world, from the past to the future. That claim is especially salient today
eBook - PDFHuman Geography
People, Place, and Culture
- Erin H. Fouberg, Alexander B. Nash, Alexander B. Murphy, Harm J. de Blij(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
Geographers such as Don Mitchell went so far as to argue that there is no such thing as culture. Geographers who accept the view that there is a discern- ible thing called “culture” that can be studied have traditionally described cultures as fitting along a continuum from local to popular. Local cultures are groups of people associated with par- ticular locations, places, or regions who understand that they share experiences, customs, and traits, and who work to pre- serve those traits and customs in order to claim uniqueness and to distinguish themselves from others. Local cultures often have to work hard to preserve their culture and avoid its commodifi- cation and appropriation. In contrast, popular culture is domi- nant and ubiquitous and often changes rapidly. This is particularly so now given the activities of the media and market- ers who seek not only to manufacture hearths but also to direct and control cultural diffusion. Given that cultures can be subject to appropriation and rapid change, questions are raised about the authenticity of certain places and practices and the potential to “freeze” certain groups in both place and time. Geographers can trace the diffusion of culture or particular Cultural Traits, such as language, from their hearths to all corners of the globe. Popular culture, particularly from the Global North, can diffuse rapidly around the world, and in some cases raise concerns about the preservation of local cultures. On the other hand, some traditional cultures in the Global North express con- cern about the apparent loss of their cultural values; in some places, we see the rise of religious fundamentalism and more stringent immigration policies in response. ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ON-LINE About the Hutterites: www.hutterites.org National Geographic’s Enduring Voices Project: http://travel.
eBook - PDFGeographies of Love
The Cultural Spaces of Romance in Chick- and Ladlit
- Christian Lenz(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- transcript Verlag(Publisher)
62 | G EOGRAPHIES OF L OVE earlier: “Emerging from its antiquarian phase, cultural geography has begun to as-sume a more central position in the current rethinking of human geography.” (1992: 1) Proving Jackson’s assumption correct and maybe even surpassing it, “some writers assert that the recent developments in cultural geography imply that it will soon encompass all of human geography” (Lanegran 2007: 181). This statement suggests that cultural geography already incorporates many topics which (previ-ously) belong(ed) to human geography, albeit the broadly defined variety. It has affected human geography in such a significant way that ignoring the influence of the cultural turn on human geography means creating “sterile accounts of what [are] rich and complex human landscapes.” (Hubbard et al. 2002: 59) Raymond Williams identified culture as “one of the two or three most compli-cated words in the English language.” (2008: 16) In his 1983 essay, he goes on to trace the term culture and identifies various means such as culture being a reference to “ material production” or a reference to “ signifying or symbolic systems.” (Ibid.: 19, original emphases) Culture “has become a general term for the practices, symbols, and meanings that different groups refer to in claiming rights of recog-nition.” (Oakes and Price 2008a: 4) William Sewell Jr. ventures even further when he argues that culture [...] should be understood as a dialectic of system and practice, as a dimension of social life autonomous from other such dimension both in its logic and in its spatial con-figuration, and as a system of symbols possessing a real but thin coherence that is continually put at risk in practice and therefore subject to transformation.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
