Chapter 2: ROOTS AND MEANING OF CULTURE

Objectives for Chapter 2
After reading and studying this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Define culture, culture trait, culture complex, culture region, and culture realm and give examples of each.
2. Identify the three subsystems of a culture and classify culture traits as being technological, sociological, or ideological.
3. Compare and contrast environmental determinism and possibilism.
4. Explain what is meant by the "cultural landscape."
5. Describe the significant changes in human culture that occurred during the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic periods of history.
6. Identify major world culture hearths and the chief centers of plant and animal domestications.
7. Differentiate between expansion and relocation diffusion and provide examples of each.
8. Outline factors that can promote, slow, or completely halt the diffusion of cultural traits.
9. Explain what is meant by "acculturation."

Overview

  1. As used in geography, culture means the specialized behavioral patterns and social systems that summarize the learned way of life of a group of people. It includes both tangible and intangible characteristics that differentiate people and their occupied landscapes.
  2. Recognition of culture traits, culture complexes, and culture regions helps summarize conceptually and spatially the infinite complexity of human societies. Culture realms are broad segments of the earth's surface that have presumed fundamental similarity in a number of salient cultural complexes and characteristics. The presumed homogenization of world culture as an expression of the globalization of social, political, and economic traits across earth space has cast doubt on the enduring validity of culture realm distinctions.
  3. The physical environment does not shape human thought or actions; environmental determinism is a now-rejected concept. Possibilism is the viewpoint that humans are the active agents in shaping culture, selecting from the environment the opportunities their cultural needs and technological levels make evident and attractive.
  4. Humans, in their utilization of the natural environment, create cultural landscapes, altering—perhaps destroying—the natural landscape and erecting upon it a built environment that, in modern societies, dominates everyday life and activity patterns.
  5. Earlier cultural stages were in closer contact with the physical landscape. Paleolithicpopulations were hunter–gatherers, gradually improving their tools, extending their areas of occupancy, and engaging in inter-group contact and trade. The Mesolithic period was marked by increasing cultural divergence as populations passed from food gathering to food production and developed differing ways of life and economy. The Neolithic era designates a stage of cultural development in which new tools, technologies, and social structures were developed among sedentary populations.
  6. Culture hearths were centers of innovation and invention, showing many traits in common as a result of multilinear evolution and independent invention. Diffusions of cultural traits and complexes from hearth regions dispersed local innovations over wider areas. Common cultural characteristics that are independently developed or spread through diffusion encourage cultural convergence, particularly as transportation, communication, and human mobility improve or increase.
  7. For analytical purposes it is convenient to recognize subsystems of culture and their identifying components: the ideological, technological, and sociological subsystems are associated with respective sets of mentifacts, artifacts, and sociofacts. The subsystems do not stand alone; they are united into coherent integrated cultural wholes. Cultural integration implies the interlocking nature of all aspects of a culture.
  8. Innovation is cultural change initiated within the social group itself. Resistance to useful innovation is termed cultural lag.Spatial diffusion is the process by which ideas or innovations are transmitted between groups across space. Such spread may take the form of relocation or expansion diffusion. The latter type may further be subdivided into distinctive forms of contagious andhierarchical diffusion. Stimulus diffusion implies imitative response to a new idea by a receptive population not able to fully adopt the specific trait itself. Acculturation is exhibited when a culture group adopts characteristics of another, dominant group.

Diffusion can be accelerated and facilitated by improvements in transportation and communication and by the intermixing of peoples and cultures. It can be limited and inhibited by diffusion barriers that may be physical or cultural in nature. The existence of similar behaviors and ideas in numerous societies despite diffusion barriers creates the possibility of multilinear evolution.

Expanded Key Words List

absorbing barrier

acculturation

artifact

Carl Sauer

carrying capacity

civilization

contagious diffusion

cultural convergence

cultural divergence

cultural ecology

cultural integration

cultural convergence cultural lag

cultural landscape

culture

culture complex

culture hearth

culture realm

culture region

culture trait

diffusion

diffusion barrier

diffusionism

distance decay

domestication

environmental

determinism

environmental stress

expansion diffusion

friction of distance

glaciation

globalization

hierarchical diffusion

hunter-gatherer

ideological subsystem

independent invention

Industrial Revolution

innovation

cultural divergenceinterrupting barrier

invention

Jared Diamond

mentifact

Mesolithic

multilinear evolution

Neolithic

Paleolithic

parallel invention

permeable barrier

Pleistocene overkill

possibilism

radio carbon dating

relocation diffusion

reverse hierarchal diffusion

savanna

sociofact

sociological subsystem

space time compression

steppe

stimulus diffusion

syncretism

technological subsystem

transculturation

tundra

Lecture and Discussion Topics

  1. Review and illustrate the definition, content, and means of transmittal of culture. Develop a chalkboard table detailing the subsystems of culture and their respective interconnected traits.
  1. Using the ideas developed with the class in Topic #1, direct attention to the map of culture realms in the text, select two or three widely contrasting “cultures,” and develop a chalkboard table of similarities and differences. Discuss the interlocking nature of the separate cultural composites revealed by the table.
  1. Extract through class discussion and expand on the assemblage of cultural elements and developments characteristic of “civilization.” Link the characteristics of civilization with the changes brought about by the domestication of agriculture (i.e. surpluses require distribution networks, trade, protection, irrigation, and allow people to do things other than farming). Draw lecture examples from such culture hearths as Egypt, Mesopotamia, North China, Central America, or others of particular interest to the instructor or class.
  1. Examine with the class in greater detail the concepts of culture hearth, multilinear evolution, independent invention, and cultural convergence. Develop with the group examples of the way those concepts apply to contemporary cultural differentiation on the world scene and how, in the opinion of the class, the concept and evidence of cultural globalization impinges on their views of “contemporary cultural differentiation.” Use current trade or travel patterns to discuss possible/projected diffusion in the future from these interacting cultures.
  1. Through class discussion and chalkboard notation, develop an awareness of the extent to which students’ everyday lives are affected by diffusions of innovation and by syncretism. Ethnic fast foods, calypso music, British musical groups, architectural styles, and oriental religions are likely suggestions.
  1. Many students will not fully understand the differences among artifacts, sociofacts, and mentifacts. To help them, use examples from their culture. Walk through and list items from each of the three culture subsystems in detail. Do not use only examples from far-away cultures, because most students will have had almost no exposure to distant cultures.