Culture

Culture is the sum total of knowledge, attitudes, and behavioral patterns shared and passed on
by members of society. A person’s culture is not something that is passed through genetics. It’s
not a hereditary trait; it is something that must be learned. Culture consists of many different
cultural components such as religion, language, architecture, medicine, sports, law, values, and
etiquette.

Culture is important to geography for many reasons. First of all, man has one of the biggest
impacts on the Earth. We shape the Earth through our actions, whether they are intentional or
not. Some examples of intentional change would be things like building roads and the exhaustion
of natural resources.

Imprinting is the acquisition of information through speech and behavior. Imprinting is how we
transfer our culture to others, especially our children. Imprinting starts when children are born.
Children learn by watching other people, especially their parents, and then using the behavior
that they see as a model for their own. Imprinting can occur remarkably fast for children.
Acquiring a new language can occur in a matter of months for children of a certain age.

Mentifacts are the ideas, values, and beliefs of a culture. Both religion and language are
examples of a mentifact. Religion has had an impact on culture more than any other trait. Also,
language is very important to a culture as well. Some languages may be more specific to a
certain culture, while many different cultures will all share a common language.

Sociofacts represent the social structures of a culture and dictate social behavior. Some of the
best examples of sociofacts are families and tribes. Family means different things depending on
the culture you are a part of. For some cultures, they only consider their immediate family as
their “family.” Decisions are based only on the mom, dad, sons, and daughters. Other cultures
would include more distant relatives such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Artifacts are the objects, the hardware, and the technologies that a culture creates. They provide
entertainment, shelter and most of the things that make life easier for people. Computers,
machines, and the buildings of religious centers can be seen as examples of artifacts. A few other
examples might be religious masks or musical instruments. These objects tell us all kinds of
things about a specific civilization.

A cultural trait is a single element that makes up the whole cultural trait complex. A cultural
trait can range from the use of eating utensils (such as chopsticks in China), to the attitudes of
certain acts (such as the detestation of incest in our culture). Countless cultural traits all blend
together to form a cultural trait complex, and thus defines a group of people for who they are,
and what they do.

Ethnocentrism
Ethnocentrism is the tendency to look at the outside world only from the perspective of one’s
own world or culture. It often entails the belief that one’s own race or ethnic group is the most
important or more superior to other groups and cultures.

A cultural bag may be seen as providing appropriate responses based on one's culture. A
cultural bag helps us make decisions and influences how we will react to certain situations. It
determines what someone eats, how they dress, and how they speak. Our cultural bag helps us
perform our everyday activities of life without having to really think about them. This is
important because it lets us concentrate on the more important things in life rather than the
simpler ones. For example, people simply know when it is or is not appropriate to dress up; you
don't have to think about it you just know.

Cultural baggage may be seen as a cultural bag that "weighs us" down with preconceived ideas
and notions. Our cultural baggage can interfere with our ability to interact with those from
different cultural backgrounds and affects how we view other cultures. For example, our society
deems female circumcision as a terrible practice, but male circumcision is widely accepted. We
always view other cultures by comparing them with our own.

Spatial Aspects of Culture

Cultural landscape consists of material aspects of culture that characterize Earth’s surface.
Some of these aspects include buildings, sports facilities, college campuses, and gardens or
parks. Because cultures changes over time most of Earth’s cultural landscape is a blend of both
new and old buildings. An example of this would be Peru’s cultural landscape which includes
architectural artifacts from the Inca period, ornate cathedrals that date form the Spanish colonial
times, and a multitude of modern structures.

A cultural hearth is a “heartland”, a foundation of a major culture. There are seven main culture
hearths which include the Nile Valley Indus Valley, Wei-Huang Valley, Ganges Valley,
Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, West Africa, and Andean America. Many of the ideas and
improvements that start up in these hearths spread to other parts of the world. Modern cultural
hearths include cities such as London and Tokyo. Other things such as major religions and many
inventions have come from the Middle East such as the wheel, plow, sail, and our alphabet.

A cultural region is a part of Earth’s surface that has common cultural elements. Although
culture regions may identify a dominant characteristic that does not mean everyone in that region
shares that same trait. A cultural region is broken into four broad components; the Core, Domain,
Sphere, and Outliers. The Core or “the heart” is the area of the cultural region where the traits of
a given culture are most strongly expressed. The Domain surrounds the Core and the Sphere
surrounds the Domain. The Outliers mark the edge of a cultural region. A good example of this
would be the Mormon religion. The Core of the Mormon religion is primarily in Salt Lake City,
Utah. The Domain of the Mormon culture is spread out to other parts of Utah and other
surrounding states. The cultural religion extends further to parts of the Sphere and then reaches
its boundary at the Outliers. Even though the Mormon culture appears in these areas, it isn’t as
prevalent as it is in the Core region.
Cultural Diffusion
Cultural diffusion concerns the spread of culture and the factors that account for it such as
migration, communication, and trade. Diffusion of culture occurs when large groups of people
move from one place to another. Many factors account for the spread of cultural diffusion.
Cultural diffusion is a mechanism for cultural change.

Although there are many ways for culture to spread, three major methods of cultural diffusion
can be identified. The first method is direct diffusion. This is when two cultures are very close to
each other, which can create things such as intermarriage and warfare. An example of direct
diffusion would be the sport of hockey between the United States and Canada. Many people on
the border of these two areas play this sport, which originally started in Canada. The second
method is forced diffusion. This method occurs when one culture defeats another culture and
forces its own customs on the conquered people. An example of this would be the conquistadors
that took over the indigenous populations and made them practice Christianity. The third method
is indirect diffusion. This happens when traits are passed from one culture through a middleman
to another culture, without direct contact between the first and final cultures. Indirect diffusion is
very common in today’s world because of the mass media and the invention of the Internet.

Cultural imperialism is the practice of promoting the culture or language of one nation in
another. Cultural imperialism is much different from other cultural influences due to the use of
force, such as military or economic force. Although this is usually how cultural imperialism
takes place, a foreign culture can also voluntarily embrace others ideas. This can create some
problems when discussing cultural imperialism. An example of this would be the rise in
popularity of Yoga from India in western nations, which has never relied on any kind of force.