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Cultural Geography

Chapter 5 review

Key Questions

How does culture shape space and place?

How do cultural practices come into contact across distances?

What effects does cultural contact have, both historically and in the contemporary world?

Plan of Today’s Lecture

What’s cultural geography?

Cultural Systems: Religion and Language

Cultural nationalism and cultural imperialism

Hybrid global cultures

I. What’s Cultural Geography?

CULTURE:

Is a shared set of meanings lived through the material and symbolic practices of everyday life.

Is entwined with politics, economics, and history

CULTURE:

Is not just high culture, but also folk culture and popular culture

What do cultural geographers study?

Cultural landscapes: Landscapes

transformed by human activity

Genres de vie The way a

particular group lives in its environment

The possibilities and constraints that a given environment offers for a way of life.

What do cultural geographers study?

Cultural complexes The combination

of traits characteristic of a group.

Cultural systems Wider than a

complex Includes

history, territorial affiliations, politics, economics, etc.

II. Cultural Systems

A cultural system is the complete way of life of a people.

Cultural systems are not bounded---different people within a cultural system may live differently.

(It’s a fuzzy concept)

Cultural Systems: Religion

Religion is an interesting cultural system, because it spreads spatially.

Religions start in a hearth area, and then (in some cases) go through diffusion.

Much of the diffusion of religion happens because of diaspora, which is when a previously homogeneous group is spatially dispersed.

Religious diffusion leads to spatialized religious difference

Branches of Christianity

Orthodoxy vs. Catholicism

Protestantism

Mormonism

Religious syncretism in Africa

Cultural Systems: Language

Language is..

Fundamental to cultural identity

Often the only real dividing line among closely associated groups

Organized into families, branches, and groups of related languages

Language trees

Languages are grouped in families, branches and groups because the way they change is spatial.

When a group of speakers goes into diaspora, languages diffuse across space.

Groups of speakers spatially isolated from each other transform the language differently, creating dialects which can become new languages. Parisian French vs. Quebecois Polish vs. Slovak

Language conversion

More than 470 languages out of the world’s 6000, considered “endangered” Most are small,

indigenous languages. More than 200 languages

lost in the last three generations

Some endangered languages *Circassian *Hawaiian

Provencal

If languages tend to fission through diaspora and diffusion, why are languages dying?Official

LanguagesWorld Languages

Official languages

Languages authorized by the nation-state.

These become lingua francas inside a country.MandarinRussian

World Languages

World Languages..

Have a large number of speakers

Have many non-native speakers

Have an official status in a powerful country

Create a linguistic community not defined by ethnicity.

Top Five World Languages

MandarinSpanishEnglishHindi/UrduArabic

World Languages

World languages are often spread by colonialism and empire

III. Cultural Nationalism and Cultural Imperialism

Cultural nationalism is the effort to protect regional and national cultures from the impact of globalization

Example: Academie Francaise

Cultural Imperialism

Domination of one culture by another, especially through exported products and ideas

Means Global brands Television and movies Global personalities Exported technologies

(eg, iPhone)

Is global culture becoming homogeneous?

Hybridization and postmodernity create new global mashups.

Products of American culture are transformed into new, localized cultural products. Bollywood World Music

Many times transformed cultural products are re-imported to the US!

Key Questions

How does culture shape space and place? Specific places provide specific opportunities and

constraints

How do cultural practices come into contact across distances? Diffusion, diaspora, colonialism, empire, cultural

imperialism

What effects does cultural contact have, both historically and in the contemporary world? Creation of new hybrid cultural products Global circulation of cultural mashups