Synthesis of Fundamentals of the Human Mosaic, Cultural Geography: Chapter 1
This work very briefly discusses key concepts in Geography presented by the text. It is not intended or recommended to
replace the text by Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov et. al, which delves more deeply onto each concept. It reinforces the
concepts you have read, and emphasizes concepts for re-reading. Please treat it as a summary of what to look for when
reading, and later as a reminder of what you have read. Please use it as another perspective to assist you in overcoming the
learning decay curve. If you are only going to do one thing, please outline the text yourself.
Cultural geography is the study of groups of humans, what they do, believe, and have in common, using a spatial
perspective. Rather than study all people and places individually, a clearly impossible task, we define formal regions
using sets of cultural characteristics. Just as my comments are of necessity simplifications of Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov’s
illuminating book, cultural geography strives to encompass a vast and diverse cultural landscape using several geographic
perspectives. Note the definition of culture on Page 2. I use an abbreviated definition, grounded in anthropology, with
simple terms. Culture is the beliefs, actions, and things representative of a group.
In addition to formal regions, we also use vernacular regions, whose range is defined by the people who think of
themselves as belonging in it, e.g. ‘I am a southerner and this is the South.’ We also look at functional regions within
which some aspect of a culture functions. All three regions are found at different scales, such as the customer area of a
store, the surrounding area served by a city, political boundaries, and global economic interdependencies. We thus find
three different useful ways of grouping together similar spaces, and these function at different scales. This ties to our
sense of place and space, the places we attach values to, and the spaces we aggregate as cognitively similar regions.
As geographers, we address issues of place and space, site and situation. A place has a physical location, but we often
have attachments to places, and / or attach values to them. Space evokes the concept of an area, but our conceptions of
spaces include our perceptions, values and attachments. In contrast, a site has attributes, the physical and cultural
conditions associated with a location. Situation involves the relative location of places, and may also include how one can
transition from site to site. In its basic form, situation involves distances, but routes, and barriers (physical and cultural)
are also important considerations. We may have a cognitive sense of space and place, list and quantify site attributes and
map situations. These are foundations of facts and perceptions we may rely on to ask more interesting questions.
Like most disciplines, we apply the basic queries; who, who, what, where, when, how, and why, but the inquiries are often
spatial. What makes a site more important? What will that space be used for, and why? How do physical and cultural site
characteristics modify the economic or cultural value of places? For example, what physical and cultural site and situation
characteristics supported Chicago’s growth more than that of Green Bay, or Alameda’s ports more than San Francisco’s?
An innate sense of curiosity will help you learn and retain information. You live in this world, transition through its
spaces, and make spatial decisions daily. Ideally, Geography should help you understand the world you life in more, make
it more interesting, and help you enjoy it more fully. Also, you may make better decisions when traveling through spaces
and interacting with the environments, both cultural and physical, that you encounter.
Like all other disciplines, geographers use several broad cultural themes; cultural region, cultural diffusion, cultural
ecology, cultural interaction, and cultural landscape. These provide different perspectives to the study of the world’s
perspectives, and each chapter of Fundamentals of the Human Mosaic includes applications of each cultural theme. Think
of them as different filters we use when catching snapshots of cultures, or different ways of mapping cultures. There is no
one best way of looking at culture in a geographic context, and different perspectives illuminate different cultural aspects.
The physical environment, including terrain, vegetation, animals, geology, soils, climate, and weather, affects human
decisions, both individual and aggregate (cultural), and these decisions then affect the physical environment. However, we
cannot study everything every place or all the time. So, we aggregate similar nearby places into regions, based on their
similarities. However, cultures may use similar regions for different purposes based on their priorities and norms. I
recommend looking at environmental constraints as possibilistic instead of deterministic conditions.
The cultural environment is quite varied, but we often attempt to quantify it. One example of this is the Human
Development Index, or HDI. The HDI uses 4 metrics, life expectancy, literacy, years of education, and per capita GDP.
These are used by the United Nations other institutions, and researchers as a common method to assess the relative level
of development of countries. It helps us grasp the overall (average) well-being, social and economic potential of the
citizens. It is often graphed to provide a map of formal regions for comparison and spatial analysis.
Cultural regions are a good way of looking at the present state of various cultural attributes. We may make a map using a
formal attribute definition, such as the most commonly spoken language or most common religious belief. We may study
the boundaries between vernacular regions and their shift over time. We may also look at economic and cultural effects
of globalization on core and peripheral regions (such as uneven development), or how transitional countries such as China
and India are developing into new socioeconomic cores, serving their own peripheries. If the boundaries are interesting,
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we may focus on the changing border zones, which may have economic, political, or other cultural attributes. Maquiladora
plants and drug gangs are active on the Mexican side of the political border between the US and Mexico. Linguistic,
cultural and occasionally military conflicts occur more readily in countries with many languages and their attendant
barriers.
Cultures may also be studied in terms of functional regions, Services are often delivered from nodes, and each has a
distribution range, beyond which the service is provided by another node, or is not provided at all. This is distance decay.
Some services, such as radio and TV fade out with distance from the receiver. Others, such as businesses, become too far
away for regular use. Some functional regions are defined by political institutions. States, counties, cities, school districts,
water, and other public services, have regions defined administratively. Regions change when the formal, functional, or
vernacular attributes that describes those regions diffuse. Any cultural aspect can diffuse.
Cultural diffusion occurs when people relocate, or when any cultural aspect or innovation expands, spreading through a
population. Several modes of expansion may be found. Some cultural attributes spread contagiously, diffusing as they
contact new hosts. Others spread through a hierarchy of preferred individuals, usually through major cities first. In some
cases, an idea is a stimulus for re-design, causing a change similar to but not the same as the first idea, activity, or artifact.
All three methods could combine, as some stimulus of change spreads as a new form, expanding through a hierarchy of
friends and relatives on e-mail lists , and then going viral over the web, such as on U-Tube.
Time-distance decay describes the slowing of diffusion with distance, and the decay of the popularity of the attribute over
time. The first part distance decay, addresses the effects of travel costs on interaction, while the second part addresses the
reduction in popularity of an attribute over time. Time decay can occur faster in cores, where other popular attributes may
replace the old attributes faster.
Barriers slow down or stop diffusion. Permeable barriers slow down spread, but the cultural attribute(s) eventually pass
through after a delay. Absorbing barriers are impermeable, stopping diffusion through the barrier.
Globalization distributes cultural attributes through services provided for financial gain. In globalization, diffusion is
rapid, Because of globalization, political independence is reduced, and cultural homogenization increases. Globalization
of trade is one contributor to uneven development. The text discusses uneven development in terms of the inequitable
distribution of resources. The periphery exchanges many resources for cash, which is used to buy a small fraction of the
goods and services provided by the core and this is one major contributing factor to uneven development. The book also
uses the concept to describe the flight of tax abase in lack of funding for urban cores. (This is a less common usage. The
grinding socioeconomic cycle of poverty uses this as one of the many driving factors for the cycle of inter-generational
poverty in ghettos. More later.)
Development is quantified using measures such as the Human Development Index, or HDI. It uses four factors, life
expectancy, per capita GDP, literacy rates, and years of education, to estimate the level of development of a country.
How long you live and how much you make are good measures of socioeconomic development, while intellectual
development is important in itself and a measure of a person’s future development potential. In aggregate, it helps us
estimate a country’s overall development.
Cultural ecology is the study of the interaction of culture and ecosystems, which modify each other. Humans tend to
prefer comfortable regions with sufficient water and good soils. Diseases are more common in tropics, which have more
transmission vectors, and human aggregation can also bring both humans and animals in close proximity, increasing the
chance of both disease transmission and evolution. Human populations increase near productive ocean regions, and often
over-fish them. Humans tend to move to or visit perceived beautiful places when possible. Increasing population densities
and activities morph the land through extraction, agriculture, manufacturing, residential, and recreational activities. Waste
streams produce pollution, which may be defined as more of any byproduct than an ecosystem can process (or
accommodate without degradation). Both huge populations and huge or high intensity extraction endeavors can produce
phenomenal environmental degradation, making land less able to sustain life and less useful to humans. This degradation
can be localized, regional, or diffused globally.
Environmental perception precedes action, so we should consider how we perceive the world we live in.
Environmental determinism focuses on cultural responses determined by the environment. Accepting this belief reduces
the number of adaptive strategies one will use, and reduces the situation to one of stimulus-response, with no cognition
and one type of adaptation. Possibilism recognizes that the environment constrains options, but that humans have the
ability to modify their approaches to the environment and / or modify the environment to better satisfy their desires in
many possible ways. Perception, cognition, education, and technology now enter the picture, as well as the possibility to
develop more robust, more viable adaptive strategies.
Environmental perception is clearly an issue in regions prone to natural hazards. Natural disasters are the confluence of
human activities in regions with natural hazards. In such regions, how and where we develop can become crucial. Natural
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disasters are expectable, some are predictable, and the consequences are often expectable. Yet we continue to live and
develop in regions which have natural benefits and natural hazards. Poor risk perceptions and responses often produce
mal-adaptive strategies, which in the long term increase human suffering and economic loss.
Cultural interaction includes the interaction of different aspects of cultures, subcultures within cultures, and different
cultures with each other. We also have different ways of perceiving culture, broadly described as social science and
humanist perspectives. Subsequent chapters will focus on cultural interaction focusing on one topic, such as population or
political systems, as the focus. Each chapter provides yet another part of the integrated weave of cultural aspects that
combine to hold cultures together.
Broadly described, social scientists focus on varied models of space, trying to understand overall patterns in order to
provide diagnostic and prognostic value. Broadly described, humanists tend to focus on the unique characteristics of
places, focusing on concepts such as topophilia, the love of place. In radical cases, social scientists and humanists conflict,
but I see the world as a combination of a spatial continuum of environmental and cultural aspects, which produce an
unlimited set of unique places. Denying either perspective or its contributions reduces our ability to understand the world.
Cultural landscape focuses on the impact of cultural activity on the physical world. As such, it includes the artifacts and
byproducts of our aggregate actions. In landscape perception, we may focus on symbolic landscapes which, when
observed, initiate a sense of meaning, value, or belief in people. Fields of rice and wheat initiate common feelings of food
production, but people whose foods focus on rice will have a deeper affinity on average to rice producing regions. In
Japan, rice has traditionally been a measure of payment, and the character for rice is a basis for the words breakfast, lunch,
and supper (literally, morning rice, noon rice, and evening rice). This concept repeats itself in different cultures and
different agricultural regions. Specific cultural features are imbued by peoples with cultural values, encompassing one or
more core beliefs. The Statue of Liberty, the Buddha at Kamakura, and the British Parliament are each attached to various
cultural beliefs, with responses ranging from pride to reverence in all three cases.
The overall landscape has patterns that can increase our understanding of underlying cultural activities. Overall patterns,
such as nucleated or dispersed settlements, nucleated or dispersed housing within settlements, and land division patterns,
hint at underlying dominant cultural concerns and values, as well as individual and aggregate responses to these concerns
and values. Defensive concerns may drive clustering of communities and/or housing within communities. Economic
forces such as trade or service delivery may drive linear housing along roads, while dispersed settlements may be driven
by individual desires to be closer to the fields they work. A central commons may be driven by religious, political,
economic and/or other cultural desires and concerns. Single causes are likely to be less common. Consider all of the issues
you might consider in selecting housing as a student, a single worker, a couple, a family, and in old age. The concerns and
their weightings vary over time, and across individuals.
Cultural norms change the methods of land division, fundamental to the production of food. Long-lot systems tend to
occur when one or more needed resources, such as access to roads, water, upland forest, and productive floodplains, is
linear, and resource access is shared equally using long lot divisions. These patterns are found in some cultures along
floodplains, such as New Mexico and Quebec. In the Western US, land division is parceled in squares, and squares are cut
up into smaller squares. This is easier to measure, and a good solution for acres of land with little or no permanent
marking, or with no previous claims. You will see this pattern predominate in the Western U.S.
When looking at sites and situations, at places and spaces, you may want to apply multiple perspectives to see things more
clearly. The text does a fine job of introducing and using five ways of looking at cultures, cultural regions, cultural
diffusion, cultural ecology, cultural interaction, and cultural landscape, to see our societies through several geographic
perspectives. Remember that Geography also looks at the world through spatial perspectives, applying the concepts of
many other disciplines in a spatial context. I ask you to explore the world through these multiple disciplines and
perspectives, and to look at the space you live in with new knowledge and deeper wisdom.
Bibliography:
Jordan-Bychkov, Terry G., Mona Domosh, Roderick P. Neumann, Patricia L. Price. 2012. Fundamentals of the Human
Mosaic. W. H. Freeman and Company, NY, NY. 357 pp.
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