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What is Culture?. An Introduction to Cultural Geography. Defining Culture. A shared set of meanings that are lived through the material and symbolic practices of everyday life. Culture combines three things: values, political institutions, and material artifacts.
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What is Culture? An Introduction to Cultural Geography
Defining Culture • A shared set of meanings that are lived through the material and symbolic practices of everyday life. • Culture combines three things: values, political institutions, and material artifacts. • The specialized behavioral patterns, understandings, adaptations, and social systems that summarize a group of people’s learned way of life. • A group of belief systems, norms, and values practiced by a people.
What is Culture • The languages we speak. • Language: • Communicating ideas or feelings by a system of signs, gestures, marks, or articulate vocal sounds. • Languages are quite possibly the core element of culture; nearly all other elements of culture are transmitted via language.
What is Culture? • The foods we eat. • Oftentimes, culture dictates what a group of people might eat. • Certain peoples have foods that are used for sacred days – gefilte fish for Passover. • Some peoples have foods that are forbidden – pork in Judaism and Islam; beef in Hinduism.
What is Culture? • The Clothes we wear. • Clothing indicates the value a culture places on humility, the area in which the culture originated in, and even the types of work done in those cultures. • Clothes also play a role in religious ceremonies.
What is Culture? • The God(s) we worship. • Religion is a key element of culture, and the transmission of cultural beliefs, values and norms. • Religion oftentimes is shaped by the region in which it originates, and the environment its adherents live in. • Religion can also lead people to alter their environment.
What is Culture? • The houses we live in. • Different cultures value different housing styles for family structures, religious purposes, protection. • Environmental factors determine house styles. • Different styles are valued for different reasons in different cultures: • Material wealth, social status, functionality
What is Culture? • The jobs we do. • Some cultures value particular jobs over others: • Farmers are highly valued in certain African nations, and pastoralists – herders – are valued in various parts of Central Asia and Mongolia. • The jobs available in some cultures are the result of the environment in which the group lives.
Culture is Everything • Everything that we do is largely based on our culture. • The values we hold, the material goods that we covet are the result of what our culture tells us. • Your culture tells you that education is important, and so you are in this classroom. • Most of you come here because of the religious culture in which you were raised. • Some of you are here because you live in a culture that places a high value on athletics.
What types of Cultures are there? • Cultures can arise anywhere, and around any collection of culture traits. • Urban culture, rural culture, tribal culture, folk culture, Catholic culture, material culture, military culture, sports culture, pastoral culture, Muslim culture, farming culture, LBGT culture. • What cultures do you observe regularly?
Foundations and Components of Culture • Culture traits – smallest component of culture; units of learned behavior ranging from the language spoken, to the tools used or games played. • Culture complex – comprised of functionally interrelated culture traits. • Cultural systems – broader generalization than culture complex; refers to a collection of interacting culture traits and complexes that are shared by a group within a particular territory.
Foundations and Components of Culture • Culture region – a portion of the earth’s surface occupied by populations sharing recognizable and distinctive cultural characteristics. • Culture realm – a set of culture regions showing related culture complexes and landscapes; a large segment of the earth’s surface having an assumed fundamental uniformity in its cultural characteristics, and showing significant differences from adjacent realms.
The Cultural Landscape • Coined by geographer Carl Sauer, cultural landscape refers to the fashioning of a natural landscape by the cultural group living in it.. • Sauer argued that all geography was cultural geography • Most geographers are concerned with how place and space shape culture and, conversely, how culture affects space and place. • Geographers recognize that culture is dynamic, and it is contested and altered within larger contexts.
Human-Environment Interaction • The interplay between humans and their environment shapes culture. • Environmental determinism discredited. The environment does place limitations, but does not exclusively shape human life. • Possibilism – people, not environments, are the dynamic forces of cultural development.
Environment as Control • We know that the environments of the earth do control human activity: • The vast majority of the earth’s population lives on less than half of the world’s land surface. • Why? • Humans cannot live where the environment does not provide the basic necessities of life. • Environments that do not provide these goods give no inducement for humans to live there.
Human Impacts • People modify their environments. • Part of the way we do this is through the material objects we place in it: • Cities, roads, farms, etc . . . • The form these objects take is the product of the kind of culture group that makes them. • Indicators of the use that humans make of the land: • House types, cemeteries, parks, transportation networks, settlement types and distribution
Human Impacts (cont.) • Human actions have greatly modified the natural environments of the earth. • Entire species have been hunted to extinction • Formerly fertile areas have been rendered useless • Entire civilizations have died out due to modifications to the environment: • Chaco Canyon, Easter Island, Angor Wat, the Mayans
The Masai • The Masai of Kenya and Tanzania are prime examples of the components of culture. • Keeping cattle was a culture trait of the Masai. • Creating a culture complex from this basic trait included the number of cattle owned as a measure of personal wealth; a diet containing milk and the blood of cattle; a disdain for any labor unrelated to herding.
The Masai • The environments of Kenya and Tanzania have many similarities, but they also have enough differences – Tanzania has a significant amount of marshland and the Great Rift Valley, Kenya has mainly highlands and savannah – that there are some differences in the Masai culture between the two countries. • These various Masai cultures form a culture system. • The two countries form a Masai culture region.
The Masai • The Masai were primarily a migratory people, following their herds. • As urbanization and globalization has spread, the Masai have become more sedentary. • Some Masai are now moving into cities, while others are establishing large fenced-in farms. • Other evidence of globalization includes cell phone use, widespread use of electricity, radio, and even internet where available.
Folk and Popular Cultures • Folk Culture – traditionally practiced by small homogeneous groups living in isolated, rural areas. • The Amish, Aborigines, Hmong • Popular Culture – found in large heterogeneous societies that share certain habits despite differences in other personal characteristics. • Wearing jeans, listening to rap, following football • Read Rubenstein chapter 4
Diffusion of Culture • Culture is not static, it is not tied to one place. • The movement of culture from one area to another is known as diffusion. There are numerous types of diffusion. Some common types: • Expansion Diffusion – spread of an item or idea from one place to another; frequently intensified in area of origin. • Relocation Diffusion – idea is physically carried to new areas by migrating peoples. • Contagious Diffusion – uniform affectation of all persons and areas outward from source region. • Hierarchical Diffusion – spread of ideas from larger places and important people to smaller places and less important people. • Stimulus Diffusion – a fundamental idea stimulates imitative behavior.
Diffusion of Culture (and sport) • Jujitsu is believed to have originated in India over 2000 years ago. • Jujitsu spread to Japan over 1000 years ago along trade routes and with religious monks. • The samurai warrior class of Japan adopted jujitsu as their unarmed fighting style should they lose their swords.
Jujitsu • As the samurai class declined in the 19th century, jujitsu was used more and more by the lower classes and eventually criminals. • A jujitsu student, Jigoro Kano, became dismayed with the use of jujitsu’s more violent techniques by ruffians and determined to change it. • Kano realized that jujitsu provided physical and mental benefits, and determined to remove the dangerous aspects. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmD1B_2ga4Y
Judo • Kano created judo. • Ju means gentle • Jitsu means art or technique • Do means path • Judo was know as the gentle path, and was intended for physical fitness and spiritual development. • Judo dispensed with the dangerous techniques of jujitsu, and relied primarily on throws. • Kano’s greatest student was Mitsuo Maeda, a former jujitsu master. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=be-BoM-WokY
Judo comes to Brazil • Maeda was sent as a diplomatic representative to Brazil in hopes of establishing a Japanese colony there. • Maeda was befriended by a local dignitary named Gastao Gracie. • Maeda offered to teach Gracie’s sons judo in return for Gracie’s help in securing the colony. • The colony failed, but Gracie’s son Helio developed the judo moves he learned into the art of Brazilian jiujitsu • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk5ri8KNmLQ
Mixed Martial Arts • In order to spread jiujitsu, Helio began challenging all comers to no-holds-barred matches to prove jiujitsu was better. • Ultimately, Helio’s son Rorion came to America and sought to spread jiujitsu there. • Rorion created the Ultimate Fighting Championship to test jiujitsu against other arts. • The success of the UFC has led to the spread of Brazilian jiujitsu around the world, and the evolution of mixed martial arts
Cultural Remnants • In Brazilian jiujitsu today, we still use a mixture of Japanese and Portuguese names for all of the techniques. • The gi – the traditional jiujitsu uniform worn during jiujitsu matches – descends from that worn by the samurai. • The samurai wore the gi under their armor as a funeral garb; if they were to die in battle, they would be prepared for the afterlife. • Most gis today are made by Atama, a Brazilian company with a Japanese name, and a Japanese kanji character as its symbol.
