Introduction to Cultural Geography
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Created by:
jghortenstine on February 13, 2011
Subjects:
1s test cultural geography intro
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33 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 What is Cultural geography? | studies the relationships between space, place, environment, and culture. It examines how culture is expressed and symbolized in the landscapes we see around us, including homes, commercial buildings, roads, and agricultural patterns. |
| Cultural Variation | is sometimes explained by the physical environment. Cultural geography offers a spatial perspective as well as an ecological one. |
| Five themes of cultural geography? | Region, diffusion, cultural ecology, cultural interaction, cultural landscape. |
| Functional Cultural Region | An area that has been organized to function politically, socially, or economically as a unit. |
| What are nodes? | Central points. Ex: Dallas, New York. |
| Vernacular Culture Regions | Perceived to exist in the minds of the inhabitants, generally lack sharp borders. Ex: Horn frog country. |
| Pierce Lewis: axioms for "reading" landscape | Landscapes as clue to culture: Landscapes change slowly and reflect culture change. If a region looks different the culture of that area is different. Cultural unity and landscape equality: Everything that you see says something about culture. Most things are as important as others and If something is really unique it may not say much about the culture. |
| Landscape obscurity | may be difficult to read landscape unless you know something about the culture. Some messages are not obvious. |
| Environmental control | cultural landscapes are related to physical environment. |
| Geographers recognize three types of regions? | Formal, Functional, and vernacular |
| Formal Region | is an area inhabited by people who have one or more traits in common, such as language, religion, or a system of livelihood. |
| Diffusion | is defined as the movement of people, ideas or things from one location outward toward other locations where these items are not initially found. |
| Relocation Diffusion | occurs when individuals or groups with a particular idea or practice migrate from one location to another, thereby bringing the idea or practice to their new homeland. |
| Expansion Diffusion | ideas or practices spread throughout a population, form area to area in a snowballing process, so that the total number of knowers or users and the areas of occurrence increase. |
| Hierarchical Diffusion | ideas leapfrog from one important person to another or from one urban center to another, temporarily bypassing other persons or rural territories. |
| Contagious diffusion | It involves the wavelike spread of ideas in the manner of a contagious disease, moving throughout space without regard to hierarchies. |
| Stimulus Diffusion | it is when a specific trait is rejected but the underlying idea is accepted. |
| Absorbing Barriers | Completely halt diffusion, allowing no further progress. |
| Globalization | the binding together of all the lands and people of the world into an integrated system driven by capitalistic free markets, in which cultural diffusion is rapid, independent states are weakened, and cultural homogenization is encouraged. |
| Nature-Culture | it focuses our attention literally on how people inhabit the Earth, their relationships to the physical environment. |
| Cultural Ecology | Deals with the study of the interaction between culture and physical environments. |
| Possibilism | it claims that any physical environment offers a number of possible ways for a culture to develop. |
| Environmental perception | The belief that culture depends more on what people perceive the environment to be than on the actual character of the environment; perception in turn is colored by the teachings of culture. |
| Natural hazards | An inherent danger present in a given habitat, such as flooding, hurricanes, volcanic eruption, or earthquakes; often perceived differently by different peoples. |
| Cultural Landscape | is comprised of all the built forms that cultural groups create in inhabiting the Earth-roads, agricultural fields, cities, houses, parks, gardens, commercial buildings and so on. |
| Symbolic Landscape | Landscape that express the values, beliefs, and meanings of a particular culture. |
| Settlement forms | The spatial arrangement of buildings, roads, towns and other features that people construct while inhabiting an area. |
| Nucleation | a term that refers to the relative density of landscape elements |
| dispersed | A type of settlement form in which people live relatively distant from each other. |
| The three axioms for "reading" the landscape? | History, Environmental control, landscape obscurity. |
| Axioms Historic | the past persists as (functional) relic features that still exist. Historic lumpiness: big changes occur in leaps (post war, depressions etc.) |
| Axioms Environmental Control | cultural landscapes are related to physical environment. |
| Axioms Landscape obscurity | may be difficult to read landscape unless you know something about the culture. Some messages are not obvious. |
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