GEOG 101b Introduction to Human Geography

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GEOG 101b Introduction to Human Geography
Lecture 19 Week 12 CULTURAL LANDSCAPES Cultural
systems and identities
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Contents

• Cultural Geography
• The construction of cultural landscapes
• Culture and diffusion
• Geography and language

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1. Cultural Geography

• What 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)

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• Cultural trait
• Cultural region
• Cultural system
• collective identity
• ethnicity

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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)

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Main schools in Cultural Geography

• The Berkeley School (Landscape Geography)
• (Carl Sauer, 1889-1975)
• The New Cultural Geography
• (after the 1970s)

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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.

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New Cultural Geography

• Studies the inequality of groups and landscapes.
• Studies symbolic (imaginary) and material
  landscapes.

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??????

• Do Canadians and Americans share the same
  culture?
• Is there a North American culture or are there
  two cultures Canadian and American?

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Language classification

• Indo-European language families
• Germanic group
• Romance group
• Indo-Iranian
• Baltic-Slavic

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• 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 ?

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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

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• Physical barriers
• Language divergence language differentiation
  over time and space
• Language replacement loss of traditional and
  native languages

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Diffusion of Indo-European into the Americas

• Greenbergs (1987) theory of 3 language families
  before European contact
• Amerindian
• Na-Dene
• Eskimo-Aleut

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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

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The Top Twelve Languages (gt 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