Definition of Culture

9 Key excerpts on "Definition of Culture"

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  Cultural 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

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  Culture and Space

  Conceiving a New Cultural Geography

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

    (Publisher)

  Such duality is artificial since the two aspects co-exist in human beings. ON CONCEPTS OF CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION 57 Culture and social science In the pragmatic view of American geographers, all features that are not connected with nature are related to culture. It is the global human experience – what French geographers call ‘human geo-graphy’, albeit with a more restricted meaning. On a map, American geographers identify what is ‘natural’ (soil, hydrology, vegetation, relief, etc.) and what is ‘cultural’ (houses, paths, fields, crops, etc.). In other words, a geocultural feature represents what human beings have created. As such, it is a visible feature that can modify an environment. This type of feature is anthropic: 1 it delineates the humanized landscape. Culture is at the very heart of the discipline of ethnology. Each eth-nic group is identified by a specific culture, a highly complex pattern that must be understood as a whole. Any individual born in a society participates in a culture. Culture is collective and always refers to a community, be it a clan, a society, or the like. Herodotus said, ‘Custom is the king of all things’. To understand the custom that brings individuals together is to understand these individuals. 2 Basic needs are innate and universal, but the method to fulfil those needs may vary: there are many ways to feed oneself, sleep, be sheltered, or work. A culture meets universal needs through its own original creation, which is an arrangement of acquired and learned behaviours and attitudes. In this respect the ‘cultural breaking-in’ of children links back to the Greek Definition of Culture. This arrangement of behaviours and mental attitudes makes up a system wherein all elements uphold each other, like an organic structure. Ethnologists often describe cultures as holistic systems according to which each aspect can only be understood in relation to the whole.

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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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  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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  Human Geography

  People, Place, and Culture

  • Erin H. Fouberg, Alexander B. Nash, Alexander B. Murphy, Harm J. de Blij(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  Human geography is not simply about document- ing the differences between places; it is also about understanding Global-local continuum The notion that what happens at the global scale has a direct effect on what happens at the local scale, and vice versa. This idea posits that the world comprises an interconnected series of relationships that extend across space. the processes unfolding at dif- ferent scales that produce those differences. What happens in an individual place is the product of interaction across scales. People in a local place mediate and alter regional, national, and global processes, in a process called “glocalization” (described in Chapter 2). The character of place ultimately arises from a mul- titude of dynamic interactions between local distinctiveness and events and influences on a wider scale. Geographers have approached the study of culture in differ- ent ways. The work of Carl Sauer and the Berkeley School domi- nated cultural geographical enquiry until the 1960s. This intellectual approach saw culture as a unified active agent in cre- ating or determining a cultural landscape that was in a constant SUMMARY Cultural geographers study how culture—a set of shared belief systems, norms, and values practised by a particular group of people—is reflected in landscapes and the built environment. Some geographers regard culture as a “way of life” that becomes visible in building styles, music, food, fashion, and language. FIGURE 8.34 Venice in Italy, Las Vegas, and Macao. (a) Venice, Italy, is an internationally renowned tourist destination. (b) The Venetian Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas is an attempt to create an “authentic” Venetian experience at a casino. (c) The Venetian Macao Resort is another example of cultural borrowing as the global city becomes a local attraction.

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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)

  A Rough Guide Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift GEOGRAPHY’S CULTURE This is a Handbook of Cultural Geography . It is, therefore, reasonable to expect some working definition of what cultural geography is , or (really) was, and how it got here. Even working definitions can end up being tombstones … Figure 1 Here Lies Cultural Geography, Born 1925, Died 2002. In Loving Memory HANDBOOK OF CULTURAL GEOGRAPHY 2 In this introduction, we are not going to provide a history – or life story – of cultural geography, as if it was a character in an academic drama. Partly, our reluctance to do this has to do with a refusal to institute a canon of work that is identifiably cultural geography. Partly, this reluctance is about installing (or not) certain figures as foundational to the discipline, but it is also about seeing cultural geography as being motivated differently in different places. We see cultural geography, therefore, as a contested terrain of debate – in fact, a far-flung set of debates. We do not wish, that is, to stitch these different debates together into a seamless story: birth, life … and ultimately death. Cultural geography is a living tradition of disagreements, passions, commitments and enthusiasms. It is something of this that we wish to evoke in this book. For the purposes of this book, cultural geography is better thought of as a series of intellectual – and, at core, politicized – engagements with the world. It is a style of thought, fixed in neither time nor space. It is nevertheless possible to pull out certain strands that go to make up this style of thought. So, we would like to begin this introduction by setting out some of these strands in a little depth. These strands are multiform, and they are far from dis-crete, being instead knotted together in ways that bind various kinds of geographies in variable geometries and patterns.

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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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  Cultural Anthropology

  An Applied Perspective

  • Gary Ferraro, Susan Andreatta(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Miva Stock/DanitaDelimont /Alamy FIGURE 2.2 Ferenc Szelepcsenyi/Shutterstock.com Copyright 2018 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. WCN 02-300 The Concept of Culture ■ 27 and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” ([1871] 1958: 1). In the early twentieth century, the soldier and independent scholar FitzRoy Richard Somerset (1885–1964), the 4th Baron Raglan, is reputed to have defined culture as “roughly everything we do and monkeys don’t.” Although this was a clever and catchy definition for its time, it has become much less relevant today because we now know that monkeys and other nonhuman primates engage in some cultural or quasi-cultural behavior unknown to Somerset and his contemporaries. Since then, culture has been defined as “a mental map which guides us in our relations to our surroundings and to other people” (Downs 1971: 35) and perhaps most succinctly as “the way of life of a people” (Hatch 1985: 178). Adding to the already sizable number of definitions, we will define the concept of culture as “everything that people have, think, and do as members of a society.” This definition can be instructive because the three verbs (have, think, and do) correspond to the three major components of culture. That is, everything that people have refers to material possessions; everything that people think refers to the things they carry around in their heads, such as ideas, values, and attitudes; and everything that people do refers to behavior patterns. Thus, all cultures are composed of material objects; ideas, values, and attitudes; and patterned ways of behaving (see Figure 2.3). Although we compartmentalize these compo-nents of culture, we should not conclude that they are unrelated. In fact, the components are so inti-mately connected that it is frequently hard to sepa-rate them in real life.

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