GEOG 101b Introduction to Human Geography
Lecture 19 Week 12
CULTURAL LANDSCAPESCULTURAL LANDSCAPESCultural systems and identitiesCultural systems and identities
Contents:
1. Cultural Geography
2. The construction of cultural landscapes
3. Culture and diffusion
4. Geography and language
1. Cultural GeographyWhat is culture?
• …human-made part of the environment (Melville Jean Herskovitz)
• …the learned patterns of thought and behaviour characteristic of a population or society (D.R. Harris)
• Cultural trait
• Cultural region
• Cultural system– collective identity– ethnicity
Culture and the environment
Environmental determinism:
• Social Darwinism- “Man is a product of earths surface” (Ellen Semple 1863-1932)
Challenge of Darwin's concept of 'natural selection– Nature as a dynamic whole that includes humans and that is always
changing (Peter Kropotkin 1842-1921)
Main schools in Cultural Geography
• The Berkeley School (Landscape Geography)– (Carl Sauer, 1889-1975)
• The ‘New’ Cultural Geography – (after the 1970s)
The Berkeley School
• Culture is the agent.
• Culture uses nature to make meaning.
• Cultural Landscape is the local outcome.
• Cultural Region is the larger result.
‘New’ Cultural Geography
• Studies the inequality of groups and landscapes.
• Studies symbolic (imaginary) and material landscapes.
??????
• Do Canadians and Americans share the same culture?
• Is there a North American culture or are there two cultures: Canadian and American?
2. The construction of cultural landscapes
… "the cultural landscape constitutes 'the forms superimposed on the physical landscape by the activities of men”
(Carl Sauer).
- Imprints on:- rural landscapes- recreational natural landscapes- urban landscapes
3. Culture and diffusion
• Cultural hearths– Focal points for innovation and invention
– Region from which innovations originate and diffuse
• Cultural diffusion (Hagerstrand 1953)– Expansion diffusion
• Hierarchical diffusion
• Contagious diffusion
• Stimulus diffusion
– Relocation diffusion
Folk and popular culture
• Folk culture– emphasizes
tradition, oral transmission of songs, local history;
– integration of nature and culture;
– often expressed through ritual.
Norton, W. 2000
Popular culture
– The way of life of ‘the people’ and the cultural products they consume.
– Form of culture, which is adopted by a large mass of people (mass consumption).
– Ordinary peoples’ culture (not the elite).
Stuart Hall 1981
4. Geography and language
• Language: place-marking and place-making
• Origin of our languages: proto-Indo-European (?)
• Language classification– Language family = a group of languages
descendent from a single, earlier tongue– Sub-families, branches, groups
Language classification
• Indo-European language families– Germanic group– Romance group– Indo-Iranian– Baltic-Slavic
• Uralic-Altaic language family– Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, etc.– Turkish group
• Dravidian (Tamil etc.)• Afro-Asiatic• Japanese • Korean• Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian
• Other languages– e.g. Euskara (Basque)
• pre-Neolithic ?
Language diffusion
• Tracing back language diffusion– Sound shifts:– E.g.: vater - vader - father = represents a long
period of westward divergence
• Diffusion through:- colonisation- conquest- religious conversion
• Physical barriers
• Language divergence: language differentiation over time and space
• Language replacement: loss of traditional and native languages
Diffusion of Indo-European into the Americas
• Greenbergs (1987) theory of 3 language families before European contact:– Amerindian– Na-Dene– Eskimo-Aleut
Modern languages
• Language and regional identity (dialects)• Language as political instrument (e.g. the
media shaping our vocabulary)• Multilingual states
– Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, etc.
• Minority languages• Toponomy: systematic study of place names
The Top Twelve Languages (> 100 million)
• If you knew all 12 of these, you could probably communicate with more than 2/3 of the world!
• 1st/2nd:◦Mandarin Chinese (Putonghua) -- 1 billion◦English -- 1 billion (the world's most popular second language)
• 3rd: Hindu-Urdu (two dialects, each with a different alphabet) -- 900 million.
• 4th: Spanish -- 450 million.
• 5th: Russian -- 320 million.
• 6th/7th (tie):Arabic -- 250 million.◦Bengali -- 250 million.
• 8th: Portuguese -- 200 million.
• 9th: Malay-Indonesian (two dialects) -- 160 million.• 10th: Japanese -- 130 million.
• 11th/12th (tie):◦French -- 125 million◦German -- 125 million
Source:http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/genpsyintrolang.html