Topic 2:

Cultural Geography

Introduction | Goals | Notes on Readings | Outline Notes | Links to Other Resources

Introduction	Discussion of culture in the context of a globalizing world. Definitions of culture: mentifacts, sociofacts, artifacts; institutions, beliefs, technology, language. Collectivist vs. individualist cultures: distribution, characteristics. Using these definitions of culture to explain world culture patterns, including variations in gender roles. Culture change: independent invention and diffusion. Diffusion of culture traits. Acculturation, assimilation, syncretism. Cultural convergence and interdependence with improved global communication and transportation networks. Culture regions: local to global scale. Ways cultural convergence is influencing life in the core and periphery of the world system.
Goals	The goals for this section of the course are: to define culture in a variety of ways and be able to describe how culture varies spatially to explain how culture is linked to groups' world view and how this is expressed geographically to define the term cultural landscape and describe the material world as a cultural interpretation to describe how cultures develop through general and specific processes to describe how cultures change, processes of diffusion, and the factors that affect diffusion to begin to develop a sense of how the world can be divided into culture complexes, systems, regions, and realms to analyze the impact of globalization on patterns and processes of culture at a range of scales, local to global, in both the core and periphery.
Notes on Readings	Chapter 4 pp142-152 focuses on how humans have generally developed cultures over time, from the paleolithic to the present. Chapter 5 pp 173-182 lays out fundamental ideas related to culture as geographers view it. Note especially the key concepts like trait, complex, and cultural region. Between pp 190-209 the chapter continues the discussion on general concepts and focuses on culture and identity, both religious and sexual. The key relationship between globalization and cultural change is in this section as well. Chapter 6 looks at landscape, space, and ways humans construct landscapes to reflect their cultures. This chapter connects to the amplifying term of perception.
Outline Notes	The notes for this section of the course appear on this Word doc. Please remember, they are the barest outline of material covered in class. They are simply a reference, not a substitute for attending class and taking notes from the lecture. Feel free to format them, fill them in to include class comments, etc.
Links to Other Resources	The Virtual Tourist The National Geographic Society Here is a story from the New York Times which gives some interesting insight into how different cultures view nature and the environment. It is an example of a mentifact (ideological subsystem) very different from our own. Here is a story related to discoveries regarding human occupation of this hemisphere.