Transcript Place & Movement

Place & Movement
IREL 204
World Geography
The Tradition of Place
• The study of PLACE in geography looks at the
associations among phenomena IN an area
– So, where location looks at the association of phenomena
across areas, and regions look at the association of
phenomena between areas, PLACE looks at the
association of phenomena WITHIN an area
• The two main characteristics we study in order to
determine the nature of “place” are:
– Physical characteristics
– Human characteristics
• Physical characteristics:
– Include natural features like physical location, mountains,
rivers, valleys, coastlines, flora and fauna, but also climate
and soil, among others
• Human characteristics:
– Include human features like language, beliefs & values, and
overall culture and its material manifestations:
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Art
Architecture
Political institutions (laws, welfare, etc)
Dress
Food
Music
• Place is a synthesis of physical and human attributes – where
these attributes come together, enjoin, fuse – the end result
is “place”.
• By now you should be able to see that the nature of “place” is
profoundly social – especially since the human characteristics
of a place center on culture, and we should take a moment to
look at how culture is understood in the geographical idiom:
• The American Heritage English Dictionary defines culture as,
"The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts,
beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work
and thought."
Thinking About Culture:
Substantive & Functional Definitions
• A precise definition of culture is difficult to arrive at – because there is
much debate as to what it actually is. Further debate centers on what it
does, precisely.
• So it would be helpful to be mindful of the substantive and functional
definitions of culture:
– SUBSTANTIVE: (What it is):
• The total collection of human thought, values, beliefs and their material
manifestations – like the arts, social, political, economic institutions – which we
learn and which we transmit from one generation to the next
• Because it is learned and because it is transmitted, CULTURE represents the
cumulative human knowledge, skills, abilities through time – every new thing we
learn, skill we develop, builds upon a previous ‘database’.
– FUNCTIONAL: (What it does):
• Culture acts as a template – a guide for human behavior because it SHAPES human
behavior and human consciousness within society
• CULTURE is an adaptive mechanism:
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Consider the ways in which the invention of efficient hunting skills, use of fire, clothing, warm
housing, agriculture, and commerce all contributed to our survival as a species. In many ways,
culture has given us a great selective advantage to survive, and so can be considered an adaptive
mechanism – the means through which we adapt to our environment over time
• Since it is something we learn and transmit to others CULTURE requires a community to experience it – and
because it requires a COMMUNITY of people to SHARE it –
it FORMS Identity – it is central to identity formation.
– whether we replicate, alter, modify, or completely dismiss
some elements of culture over time, culture at large is ALWAYS
an outgrowth and a representation of a COMMUNITY (i.e.,
society).
– So for example, to ascribe to a Greek culture is learning
behaviors and enacting those behaviors in a way that gives you
a shared sense of identity among other Greeks, and includes,
among other things:
• To possess a sense of continuous history & heritage
• To speak the Greek language
• To be Greek Orthodox
• To celebrate major annual festivities that may have political or
religious nature (March 25th, Easter, the 15th of August, etc)
• A distinct musical tradition
• A distinct culinary tradition
• Now in geography, CULTURE is broken down into
component parts that can be studied; from the smallest to
the largest components, these are:
• Cultural trait: the smallest unit of culture.
• Cultural complex: cluster of related traits seen as a single
unit
• Cultural system: grouping of cultural complexes
• Culture region – the area within which a particular culture
system prevails
• Cultural realm: an assemblage of culture regions; the
most highly generalized regionalization of culture and
geography
• cultural trait—a single attribute of a culture— such as
using particular utensils to eat, wearing particular headdress, etc.
– A single element of learned behavior
• cultural complex—a discrete combination of traits exhibited
by a particular culture—
– A related set of culture traits descriptive of one aspect of a
society's behavior or activity (may be associated with religious
beliefs or business practices.)
• culture system—culture complexes with traits in common
that can be grouped together— ethnicity, language,
religion, etc.
• cultural region – formal or functional region within which a
particular culture system prevails— bears all the
characteristics of a culture.
Put in Perspective…
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For example, a Cultural REGION is a portion of the world that is characterized
by common cultural elements where a particular cultural ‘system’ prevails.
Since we are “grouping” parts of the world – as in regional geography – in
terms of “like” characteristics – these groupings are “arbitrary” – they are
conceptual, and exist to help us make more clear sense of the information at
hand.
Think back to the exercises on Typhoons Ketsana and Parma… South-East Asia
is a good example of the diversity of a cultural region, and why it is difficult to
“map” out the physical dimensions of this “place”.
– Think of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Indonesia… where the
typhoons hit. Think of the trajectory of the storms moving to the South
China Sea, and moving up to Japan.
• Each of these countries have their own language or languages, social
organization, traditions, histories, customs.
– Yet we can view them as a cultural region because they share features like
» Patriarchal organization
» Confucian values
» Collectivist orientation
» Buddhism
» Family-centered
• However, when we think of the location of culture – a “place” – we
may try to express this on a map, but we must be careful to
remember that cultures tend to spread over vast regions where
common features or attributes are readily observable - and as such
they do not cohere to a strict delineation or taxonomy of space.
– A good example would be the cultural region of Islam:
• It covers the East and North Africa as well as parts of Asia – each
are very distinct geographical regions, with many distinct
countries, languages, histories, and social, political and economic
institutions that separate them – not to mention physical
differences in the natural terrain, the climate, and the number of
resources available to the different peoples that inhabit these
spaces.
– And yet these diverse countries constitute the terrain of an Islamic
cultural region – where Islam as a religion is practiced, and where the
cultural complexes associated with Islam are similar throughout the
‘cultural’ region.
» Example: common beliefs, common architecture, common
festivals, common practices (like removing ones shoes when
entering a house of prayer).
• Cultural traits describe/exhibit the wealth of
values, beliefs, ideas, norms, and practices of
a particular group of people;
• And cultural complexes can be as small-scale
as “greeting someone” or “smiling” or
“drinking tea”, and as macro – or large-scale
as “industrialization” or “agriculture” or
“baptism” and “marriage”.
• To put this into perspective, smiling, eye contact, and shaking hands
– these constitute cultural traits that we all recognize –
• Taken together – all three, discrete (separate) traits form the
cultural complex of “greeting” much as we do when we greet
someone for the first time
– Already from the description you can see that the ways in which traits
are perceived and expressed is culturally relative – it varies from place
to place, and is influenced by the values, beliefs, notions of gender,
and orientation of the culture at large in which they originate.
• Smiling, eye contact, shaking hands – these are very “western”
cultural traits
• In eastern cultures however, – a slight bow and the nod of the
head would be the cultural traits that would constitute the
complex of “greeting” someone, because it reflects the commonheld values and beliefs that characterize eastern peoples –
primarily the notions of respect, non-physicality, distance
– In many parts of Southeast Asia, the cultural complex of “greeting”
constitutes a gesture like prayer – the Thai, for example, put their
hands together and bow their head slightly; the more they elevate
their hands, the greater respect they are expressing.
Final word on “sense of place”:
• Any discussion of a culture – the total sum of beliefs,
knowledge, skills, values, patterns of behavior and their
material expressions – (like art, music, language, etc) that
are learned and socially transmitted over time – require
PEOPLE
• If culture is this total sum of learned patterns of behavior
that are transmitted over time – then society is WHERE this
takes place; society is the communal organization of people
in which culture can develop.
• They are similar, but not the same. Society does not need
culture to exist – but naturally allows it to occur; culture on
the other hand, requires that a community is in place, a
group of people who will share – or hold in common – the
cultural traits that define them.
• Since “place” as we’ve studied so far – is the synthesis of
those physical characteristics of the natural environment –
and the human characteristics – most notably CULTURE
(occurring in, and arising from society) – we get the idea
that “Place” is a profoundly “social” space – it is a word
with great emotive content – because we don’t just
interface with “place” through our senses – we don’t just
see, hear, touch, taste, smell a “place” – we cognitively
and emotionally “experience” a place.
• We as human beings engage locations, areas, regions, we
‘experience’ them fully and synthesize the sum of our
experiences to crystallize them in an emotionally
understood “sense” of place…
• Sense of place is:
• Hard to quantify: Place is often hard to grasp because it is abstract;
it is hard to pinpoint it geographically (physically).
– Sometimes definitions of “place” don’t always transfer across political
borders…
• Synthesis of natural landscape, patterns of human behavior, and
social features — how people connect between themselves largely
characterizes the ‘feeling’ of a place.
• Best expressed by local knowledge — sometimes as outsiders we
can describe a place in general terms, but the intimate knowledge
of a local (native) always expresses the deeper identity of a place
• Captured in the mythology, folklore, or local histories — the way
people “experience” place can rarely be found in official documents
like a land registry or a census bureau or even the founding charter
of a town; the real sense of place lies in the myths, old wives tales,
folklore, traditional songs, and other forms of ‘local’ history that
convey the way people have ‘experienced’ the place over time.
Movement
• Movement studies the interconnections of
phenomena between areas
• Movement studies the mobility of phenomena
whether these are people, goods, or ideas as that
movement originates in one location and progresses
to another.
• In specific, the tradition of MOVEMENT looks to see
what interconnections exist between two or more
particular points in the world, a region, or even a
given area.
• The world is in constant motion around us, and we are
in constant motion within it;
• Think of the world you live in
– we all move to get to and from school, work, and home
– We all use a variety of transportation means and cover
varying distances;
– We all consume
– The things we consume whether food, clothing, electronics,
music all travels and covers varying distances to get from a
point of production to a point of consumption
– We all use communication technologies that “reduce” the
distances in time and space and make the world come
“closer”
• The movement of people, the import & export of goods, and the ability
to communicate have all transformed the world we live in – as well as
the content and direction of our cultures and societies.
• Now more so than any other time, we see that we live in a ‘global village’
while we participate in a global economy.
• The tradition of movement considers the basic elements of human
mobility (which in my opinion is the key element to movement – since if
we study the mobility of goods or ideas – we are essentially studying
them as outputs or outgrowths or end-results of HUMAN ACTIVITY)
• This human mobility occurs upon the surface of the earth, largely shaped
by the forces of the physical environment, even as our mobility adapts to
those constraints and in turn – as we recently studied – modifies the
physical terrain to facilitate greater mobility opportunities.
Understanding mobility – the influence of human movement:
• Culture Hearths – source point of civilization from which an
idea, innovation, or culture originates (e.g. Mesopotamia, Nile
River Valley, Indus Valley, et. al.,)
• Culture Hearth—Heartland, source area, innovation center, place
of origin of a major culture.
– Culture —The totality of socially transmitted behavior
patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of
human work and thought, shared and transmitted by the
members of a society.
• Cultural diffusion – spread of an innovation, or idea from its
source point to another culture. Culture diffuses – is spread,
in several ways
– Primarily through:
• Expansion Diffusion
• Relocation Diffusion
Cultural Diffusion
• Expansion Diffusion: how an innovation, idea, development
spreads (diffuses) through a population in a given area
– contagious diffusion: the spread of an idea, innovation, or other item
through a local population by contact from person to person.
– hierarchical diffusion: the spread of an idea, innovation or other item
by “trickling down” from larger to smaller adoption units.
• Innovations often “leapfrog” over wide areas, with geographic distance a
less important influence. The early spread of the Internet is a good
example
– stimulus diffusion, the spread of an idea, innovation or other item
from one culture that is not itself adopted by another population but
which stimulates local experimentation and eventually leads to
genuine invention within the local community
• Example: Sequoyah invented the Cherokee writing system in 1821 after
seeing an English example
• The different forms of expansion diffusion take place through populations
that are stable.
• It is the innovation or idea that does the moving – NOT the people.
Examples
• Contagious diffusion – nearly all adjacent people are
affected (ex: spread of Christianity, Islam; use of
telephone, spread of disease)
– Think of the waves you get when you drop a rock in water;
contagious diffusion spreads out like the ripples of water
spread out from where you’ve dropped the stone
– Contagious diffusion is based on proximity (closeness) and
contact. It experiences distance decay
• Its intensity attenuates (gradual weakness) the further you get
from the point of origin.
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"The spread of cultural innovation through person to person contact, moving wave-like
through an area and population without regard to social status.“ (Jordan, Domosh, Rowntree,
1994:4 The Human Mosaic)
• Hierarchical diffusion –
– “In hierarchical diffusion, ideas leapfrog from one important person to
another, or from one urban center to another, temporarily bypassing other
persons or rural territory. . . By contrast, contagious diffusion involves the
wave-like spread of ideas, without regard to hierarchies, in the manner of
contagious disease." (Jordan, Domosh, & Rowntree 1994:16, The Human
Mosaic)
• Think of the development of the radio … from the first major centers of
radio broadcasting (cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, etc) in the 1920s radio
diffused hierarchically from big urban centers to even the smallest towns
(trickling down)
• Think of fashion, starting out in the major fashion capitals of the world,
then hierarchically diffusing to every outlet mall around the world
• Think of music – like Grunge, originally starting in Seattle, hierarchically
diffusing first through those who ascribed to that genre and then to the
fore of the music scene across the US and the world…
• Relocation diffusion:
– An innovation, idea or other cultural item is already adopted by a
group, and when that group MIGRATES – (moves) the idea moves
WITH them and is disseminated to the new physical location the group
relocates to
• Example: Mexican food originally entered US mainstream by Mexicans who
emigrated to the US, bringing with them their cultural cuisine
• Sometimes Relocation diffusion is FOLLOWED by some type of Expansion
diffusion; in the example of Mexican food, it first entered US mainstream by a
group that carried WITH it the idea/innovation/cooking style, and then as the
concept of Mexican food SPREAD to the new population, it morphed and
adapted into variants like “Tex Mex”, etc…
– Migrant diffusion – when an innovation originates somewhere and
enjoys strong-but brief-adoption, loses strength at origin by the time it
reaches another area (ex: mild pandemic)
What happens when cultures interact with
other cultures?
– Acculturation – when a culture is substantially changed
through interaction with another culture
• A culture is modified somehow by intercultural borrowing
– HOWEVER: This does not mean a brand new “culture” or cultural “traits”
develop that replace the old, indigenous (local) ones. Usually the result of
acculturation is a syncretism , or a mixture of traditional and new
elements.
– The new elements (traits) are worked into the local ones in a way that
make them more readily acceptable
– Think for example of how Catholicism entered traditional Haitian values
and beliefs to create Santeria (Catholicism meets Voodoo)
– Transculturation – the cultural exchange that takes place
when different cultures that are roughly similar in
complexity and technological capacity interact
• The mixture of Hellenic culture and Roman culture with Christian
ideals produced the wholly distinctive Byzantine culture
• The current Mexican culture is the result of the cultural exchange
between the earlier Amerindian culture and the European culture
of Spanish colonists
Movement Barriers: Problems in Diffusion
• Time-distance decay – the longer and farther an
idea, innovation, concept, person, good has to
travel, the less likely it will get there
– The phenomenon will be stronger closer to the
original point of origin
• Example: remember the stone-in-the-pond ripple effect
• Cultural barriers – prevailing attitudes or taboos
that characterize a particular culture may be
hostile to the influence of external cultural traits
– Obstacles can be natural, like mountains, rivers,
oceans; or cultural, like beliefs, values, and norms