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HUMAN GOGRAPHY & CULTURAL SPACE
Robert N. St. Clair & Wei Song
INTRODUCTION
One of the most important aspects of humanity that differentiates people
and shapes the way people live and the places they create is called “culture.” It
affects a people's way of life, their behavior, and their shared understandings
about themselves and the world. Culture serves as a guide for how people act and
interpret the world around us. Culture is transmitted within a society to
succeeding generations by imitation, instruction, and example. A culture, that is,
despite overall generalized and identifying characteristics and even an outward
appearance of uniformity, displays a social structure - a framework of roles and
interrelationships of individuals and established groups. The world we live in
today is one of the tremendous diversity – but it is also one of increasing
interaction between cultures. Rather than defining culture as a superorganic entity
as done by earlier anthropologists, it is argued in this investigation of cultural
space that culture is socially constructed. It is a unique complex of social systems
and traits that constitute the socially-constructed culture of a region.
Within the field of cultural geography, a culture may be defined through
the four major themes of knowledge, techniques, belief and space (Bonnemaison,
2005). First and foremost, a culture is a learning patrimony, that is to say, a
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knowing of the world. Forms of knowledge are linked with various techniques
and tools, which may include building methods, production methods, modes of
production, the arts of hunting or fishing, and so forth. All these techniques that
are induced from traditional knowledge are the signs of a culture (ontological
markers in physical space), and their spatial distribution is specific. They play a
role in the delineating of cultural areas. Cultures, from an epistemological
perspective, are largely based on beliefs, religions and specific worldviews. This
upper level of culture also represents the very foundation of culture - its roots, i.e.
that which holds the whole.
Cultures have a geographical dwelling, or a space. They have ontological
structures. Furthermore, they are united to a geographical environment, and
respond to it. The human environment and the natural environment can never be
separated. Human beings leave their ontological markers on their environment.
Their reciprocal relation creates geographical milieu and cultural milieu. These
interactions between human beings and their geography is responsible for the
creation of many societal types (Lenske,Lenski, and Nolan, 1999). There are
cultures of the sea (maritime cultures), cultures of the river (hydrological cultures)
where the role of great rivers in the construction of cultural identity is essential,
e.g. the Nile, Euphrates, Ganges, Yellow River, Danube, etc ), mountain, delta, or
forest cultures, and so forth. The natural setting always challenges a society to
surpass itself. A society's response to environmental challenges is an
important force in creating its culture.
Knowledge, techniques, belief and space are the four pillars of a cultural
system. Each culture has its own way of combining these factors and each ethnic
group has its own culture. Meanwhile, cultures can also be defined through its
internal organization, whereby material and spiritual elements become integrated
at various levels and scales, from the local to the global.
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COMPONENTS OF CULTURE
Culture is a complex phenomenon with its various interconnected
parts. Culture traits are the smallest distinctive items of culture and fundamental
cultural variables that give structure and spatial order to societies. As the
simplest cultural element that can be discerned, cultural traits can be
expressed materially, spiritually, or artistically. A trait may be an object, a
technique, a belief, or an attitude. A particular cultural trait, such as the Christian
religion, perhaps, or the Spanish language, may be part of more than one culture.
For example, the wearing of a turban can be a culture trait of certain Muslim
societies; for centuries, it was obligatory for Muslim men to wear this
headgear. Although it is no longer required everywhere, the turban
continues to be a distinctive trait of many Muslim cultures. The use of
simple tools also constitutes a culture trait, and eating with certain utensils
(knife and fork or chopsticks) is also a culture trait. The traditional Japanese
values of dedication to education and hard work, devotion to higher
authorities such as one’s employer, and a sense of social cohesion, or the
typical German predisposition towards all things technical and complex are
cultural traits used to explain the success of their respective national
economic models (Gertler, 1997). Traits are the most elementary expression of
culture, the building blocks of the complex behavioral patterns of distinctive
groups of peoples.
Culture traits are not necessarily confined to a single culture. More
than one culture may exhibit a particular culture trait, but each will consist
of a discrete combination of traits. The same trait - the Christian religion,
perhaps, or the Spanish language - may be part of more than one culture.
Individual cultural traits that are functionally interrelated or combined comprise a
culture complex. A cultural complex bundles together various cultural traits
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that are set toward the same purposes. Keeping cattle was a culture trait of the
Masai of Kenya and Tanzania. Related traits included the measurement of
personal wealth by the number of cattle owned, consuming blood and milk as
important ingredients of a unique diet, and disdain for labor unrelated to
herding. Cattle occupy a central place in Masai existence. They are the
essence of survival, security, and prestige. The assemblage of these and other
related traits yielded a unique cattle-keeping culture complex of Masai society.
No other cattle-keeping culture complex exhibits exactly the same
combination of traits. For instance, cattle are milked and daily products,
such as butter, yogurt, and cheese, are consumed in Europe as part of a diet
very different from that of the Masai.
In the United States, for example, a culture complex exists around the
automobile (Fellmann, Getis and Getis, 2008). “Americans on the wheel” has
been a trademark and a crucial constituent of American culture. Americans often
buy car brands and models to reflect their demographic, economic, or social
status, while cinema, television, and sports often fashion automobiles at their
heart. The mass popularity of NASCAR races is a familiar example.
Culture blends various cultural complexes. Culture traits and complexes
may be the shared property of otherwise distinctive but spatially associated
people. When enough commonalities exist, a culture system may be recognized
as a larger spatial reality and generalization. Multiethnic societies, which could be
further subdivided by differences in linguistics, food preferences, and a host of
other internal differentiations, may nonetheless share enough joint characteristics
to be recognizably distinctive cultural entities to themselves and others. Citizens
of "melting pot" United States who may be distinctive ethnic background would
identify themselves as Americans, together constituting a unique culture system
on the world scene. China's culture system consists of a number of quite
distinct culture complexes, united by strong cultural bonds. Northern
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Chinese people may eat wheat and those in the south may eat rice as their
staple, and the Chinese language as spoken in the north may not be quite
the same as that spoken in the south, but history, philosophy, environmental
adaptation and modification, and numerous cultural traditions and attitudes
give coherence to the Chinese culture system.
In St. Clair (2002), it was demonstrated how cultural metaphors can
be combined to create a cultural profile for a cultural system.
It was
argued, for examples, that the following metaphors constitute a cultural
system of western thinking.
The Metaphor of Growth
The Game Metaphor
Language as a Metaphor of Form and Structure
The Dramaturgical Metaphor of the Stage
The Machine Metaphor
The Metaphor of Linear Time and Euclidian Space.
The Metaphor of the Journey can be found in the subculture of the United
States. It was a favorite metaphor of the counter-culture movement in the
1960s. However it is not listed as a cardinal metaphor. It is not part of the
salient cultural profile of the country under discussion. It exists but it does
not have the same prime status as the others do. However, if one were
discussing Asian cultures, the Metaphor of the Journey would definitely be
one of the defining features of those cultures. This is evident in the concept
of the Four-Fold Path and other journey metaphors associated with Asia.
SPACE OF CULTURE
Cultures organize themselves spatially. Whatever their size, cultures are
always localized. Cultures are united to a geographical environment, they respond
to it. When a specific culture and a territory are linked, one speaks of cultural
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space. This cultural space, however, is organized into sedimented strata (St.
Clair and Williams, 2008). Similar connections can occur between various
levels of the cultural construction and various spatial components.
Culture traits, complexes, and systems have areal extent. When they are
plotted on maps, the regional character of the components of culture is revealed.
Consequently, they possess ontological status.
In studying how cultural
characteristics of place come to be, researchers, geographers in particularly, often
focus on a region, or an area with common characteristics. Region is a concept
that is used to identify and organize areas of the world. It is a form of
classification as well as a basic building block of spatial analysis. A region is
quite simply an area characterized by similarity or a cohesiveness that sets it apart
from other regions. The similarity can take the form of a common characteristic
such as geographic proximity, a dominant crop, the prevailing livelihood, or a
common history. A culture region is thus a portion of the earth's surface
occupied by populations
sharing
recognizable and distinctive
cultural
characteristics. A key component of a culture region is that the inhabitants are
aware to some degree of a common cultural heritage and differences from
other territorial groups. Consequently, this cultural region constitutes a large
cultural space. It has a consciousness of belonging that is characteristically
associated with a group united in a common territory is regional identity.
Regions have meaning to their inhabitants and form part of residents' cultural
identity. A culture region can represent an entire culture system. West
Africa, Polynesia, and Central America are sometimes designated as culture
regions, each consisting of a combination of culture complexes of
considerable diversity but still substantial uniformity. A culture region, then,
both shapes and is shaped by people's behaviors in their unique geographic
setting. It represents an integration of environmental, spiritual, and cultural practices in a region. People incorporate this organic construction of space through the
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long co-evolution of lifestyles and landscapes into their regional identity and
attachment to place. In fact, culture and culture regions are continually
constructed by people as they shape their world and express their identity.
Figure 1. Generalized U.S. Culture Regions (Source: Fellmann, Getis and Getis, 2008)
There are several reasons why these regions exist. Many of them have to do with
migration patterns. The Country South, for example, is an area that was by passed as people
move westward. It is an area that ranges from Pennsylvania to the Appalachian Ozarks in
Arkansas. This area is known for its musical contributions. It is the home of country music,
bluegrass, the blue, rock and roll, and the rhythm and blues. It has a distinct cultural space. It
is an area that was rather isolated until the 1930s when road building into the area provided
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avenues for new settlements.
The Southwest also demonstrates a different pattern of
migration. It is a region that ranges from Houston (Texas) to Phoenix (Arizona). It has a
different cultural space. It is a land in which one finds many indigenous cultures such as the
Navajo, Apaches, and the Hopi. It is also an area that is heavily settled by people from
Mexico. This part of the country was originally Mexican and it was and continues to be
heavily traversed by migrants who live along the Mexican Border. The South is known as
the Bible-Belt of the United States. It is a region that includes a mixture or hybridization of
British and African cultures. However, the area was originally settled by the French. This
area was, at one time, the most rural part of the country with the exception of New Orleans. It
has its own musical traditions that include the Jazz, zydeco (call and ressponse music), and
the blues. The Megalopolis is another interesting cultural region. It extends from New
Hampshire to Virginia and contains 20 percent of the population of the United States. One
associates this area with skyscrapers, subways, expressways, apartments and department
stores. This is a region that is also associated with power. The major media networks (ABC,
NBC, and CBS) and the major financial institutions (The World Trade Center) of the country
are housed in this area. The Pentagon (military power) and the White House (civic power)
are also found in this megalopolis. The second megalopolis in the country can be found in
cultural region known as the Coast. It is here that one finds the Hollywood (the film and
music industry) and Las Vegas (the gambling and entertainment industry). The Midwest also
grew because of migration patterns. German immigrants from Europe settled in this area and
made this region famous for its beer industry (Schlitz, Miller Brewing Company, and
Anheuser Busch). However, this area also became the heart of the automobile industry
because it its proximity to the materials (coal, iron, and steel) needed for the manufacture of
these products. It is an area that was also well situated by a network of railways that
connected it to other parts of the country thus providing it with an excellent distribution
system for its products. It is the heart of industrial America. The Rustic Northeast is, for
many, an area known as a summer retreat and recreation sites. It is where one finds beautiful
landscapes (the Catskills, Lake Placid, and the Adirondacks). Tropical Florida also has its
migration patterns. Many residents from New York City have relocated to Florida and
established retirement homes here. The American Super Rich have also located in Florida.
The Cubans also form another group that has chosen Florida as its home. When Castro
overthrew the Bautista Regime in Cuba, many of its wealthy citizens relocated in Florida. In
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the process, they have established Florida as the home of international business in dealing
with South American countries. The NASA space program has one of its major centers in
Florida at Cape Canaveral. Florida is also known for its tourist industry; it is the home of
Disney World and Epcott Center. The Praire is an area that is known as the food belt of the
United States. It is known for its wheat, barley, and corn whereas the other food belt
(California) is known for wine, oranges, lettuce, and tomatoes. This part of the country was
settled by immigrants from Germany.
The Northwest also has its migration patterns.
Russians from Alaska settled in the area and so did many immigrants from Finland and
Sweden. After the dustbowl era in Oklahoma and Kansas, many land farmers relocated in
central Washington and Oregon. They constitute the more conservative populations of the
region. The Mountains are discussed under later in this chapter.
Figure 2. Cultural Regions of Subsaharan Africa (Source: de Blij and Murphy, 2003)
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A set of culture regions showing related culture complexes and landscapes
may be grouped to form a culture realm. Figure 3 depicts major world cultural
realms, which is just one of the many possible subdivisions of the world into
multifactor cultural regions. The term recognizes a large segment of the earth's
surface having an assumed fundamental uniformity in its cultural characteristics
and showing a significant difference in them from adjacent realms. Culture realms
are, in a sense, culture regions at the broadest scale of recognition. Together, for
example, the culture regions of West, East, Equatorial, and Southern Africa,
or in much detailed level those many indigenous cultural regions, can be
thought of as collectively constituting the Subsaharan African culture
realm. In fact, the scale is so broad and the diversity within the recognized realms
could be great.
Figure 3. World Cultural Realms (Source: Fellmann, Getis and Getis, 2008)
Due to the complexities of multiple subcultures in any given place,
determining boundaries around cultural regions with any degree of precision
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could be difficult to achieve. As a result, instead of one fixed boundary between
cultural regions, gradations between them could be conceptualized (Meinig,
1965). Three spatial extents that express the decreasing influence of a culture with
increasing distance from the center of the culture region can be outlined. The core
is the centralized zone of concentration, or the "most pure" area that possesses all
of the culture traits used to define the region. The core represents the heart and
soul of a culture region, its vital center and focus of circulation. The domain is
the area in which the particular culture is dominant but less intense. The sphere is
then the zone of outer influence where people with the culture traits in question
can even be a minority within another culture region. Figure 4 shows core,
domain and sphere of the Mormon cultural region in the United States outlined by
Meinig (1965).
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Figure 4. Core, Domain and Sphere of the Mormon Cultural Region
(Source: Meinig, 1965)
One culture's core can lie within another culture's sphere. For instance, the
core of Tibetan Buddhist culture, the Tibetan plateau, is also part of the Chinese
cultural sphere. Meanwhile, the transitions between core, domain, and sphere can
be gradual or abrupt. Barriers to movement have historically created abrupt transitions. Political barriers such as the Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China
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sharply separated the capitalist West from the communist East and Chinese
Confucians from Mongolian invaders. On the other hand, in Southeast Asia, a
very gradual transition occurs over a thousand miles between the curry-based
flavors of Indian cuisine to the soy-based flavors of Chinese cuisine, with Thai
cuisine half way between featuring major influences of both (Kuby, Harner, and
Gober, 2007).
At present, mass media can be transported across cultural regions and
cultural realms.
Cultural artifacts and commercial products can also be
transported across these regions. They can readily move from a core region in
one culture to a core, domain, or sphere of another culture where they can greatly
influence the other cultures. These ideas can be taken as foreign and therefore
treated as something from another culture, or they could be incorporated into a
new cultural framework as something different, or as something native. Some
cultures have mechanisms for marking these differences.
In Japanese
orthography, for example, one finds a whole system dedicated to native words
(ひらがな, hiragana), another to loan words (カタカナ, katakana), one for
Chinese (漢字, kanji). In English orthography, when words are borrowed they
retain their unique spelling features and this allows those who write in English to
differentiate words as coming from Greek (philosophy, sophistry, syntagma),
from Latin (alumnus, rex, regal), Hebrew (cherub, cherubim), German (strength,
length, fight, light, might), and so on.
Although linguistic information is easier to discriminate native words
from foreign intrusions, such is not the case in the realm of mass media. Foreign
products, for example, are localized. Foreign products are mistaken for locally
produced ones. Foreign ideas are not differentiated for local ones. The edges
between cultures from different cores are blurred and often they are conflated. To
add to the difficulty of maintaining cultural differences, there may be several
cultural spaces that co-exist within the same physical space.
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MAJOR WORLD CULTURAL REALMS
North America North America is constituted by two of the world’s
most highly advanced countries, United States and Canada. The realm is
centered on a vast central lowland that includes the Canadian Shield, the
Interior Lowlands, and the Great Plains. To be east of the central lowland
are the Appalachian Mountains which descend gradually to the GulfAtlantic Coastal Plain. To the west of the central lowland are three distinct
topographical regions: mountains and valleys of the Pacific coastal ranges;
an intermontane set of basins, plateaus, and small ranges; and finally the
great Rocky Mountain range.
It is a culturally diverse and resource-rich region, which is shaped by
modern technology, innovative financial and information services, and by a
popular culture that dominates both the realm itself and the world beyond.
The cultural glue that holds the realm together involves a common process
of colonization, a heritage of Anglo dominance, and a shared set of civil
beliefs in representative democracy and individual freedom.
Bicultural Canada is shaped by both its French and English
antecedents, and major political tensions are associated with the geographic
concentration of its French-speaking citizens in Quebec. Adding to
Canada’s cultural variety is a diverse mix of other European, African, and
Asian immigrants arriving in the country after 1900.
In the United States, a wide spectrum of immigrants has shaped and
continues to shape a rich and varied cultural complex. The country’s early
and enduring English and African contributions were later supplemented by
other European, Latin American, and Asian influences. A hybrid culture
built on a set of powerful values and beliefs: (1) love of newness; (2) desire
to be near nature; (3) freedom to move; (4) individualism; (5) societal
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acceptance; (6) aggressive pursuit of goals; and (7) a firm sense of destiny
(de Blij and Muller, 2004).
From those traditional roots, particularly in the United States,
consumer culture blossomed after 1920. The United States shapes the
popular cultural landscape of almost every corner of the world. North
American foods and popular culture are diffusing globally. McDonald
restaurants open in virtually all major cities on the planet. North American
music, cinema, and fashion have also spread around the world.
Latin America
Latin America is characterized by pronounced
differences in elevation and topography. Low-lying plains drained by the
Orinoco, Amazon, and Parana-Paraguay river systems dominate the north
Latin America’s regional coherence is largely based on its shared colonial
history. More than 500 years ago, the Iberian countries of Spain and
Portugal began their conquest of the Americas. The Iberian colonial
experience imposed a political and cultural coherence on Latin America,
making it distinguishable as a world cultural realm. Iberian heritages are
visible throughout the realm. Two-third of the population speaks Spanish,
while the rest speak Portuguese. Iberian architecture and town design
represent a unique colonial landscape of the realm. The vast majority of the
population nominally practices Catholicism. These European cultural traits
blended with those of different American peoples. Often a syncretic process
took place in which European and Indian traditions blended as indigenous
groups were subsumed into either the Spanish or the Portuguese empires.
The Indian presence remains strong in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala
and southern Mexico, where large and diverse indigenous people maintain
their native languages, dress, and traditions. Other cultures arriving through
immigrants, later added to the region’s cultural mixture.
The population of Latin America is a composite of ancestries, ethnic
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groups and races, making the region one of the most diverse in the world. The
specific composition varies from country to country: Some have a predominance
of a mixed population, in others people of Amerindian origin are a majority, some
are dominated by inhabitants of European ancestry and some populations are
primarily of African descent. Most or all Latin American countries have Asian
minorities. Europeans and groups with part-European ancestry combine for
approximately 80% of the population.
Traits of Latin American culture, such as tango, soccer, Mexican foods,
have been absorbed into a globalizing world culture. The region boasts five Nobel
Prize winners: in addition to the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez (1982), also
the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral (1945), the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel
Asturias (1967), the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (1971), and the Mexican poet and
essayist Octavio Paz (1990). Through music and dance, literature, film, and
cuisine, Latino culture is being transmitted to a worldwide audience.
Europe
Europe is one of the most diverse cultural realms in the
world, consisting of a large array of people and places. The realm’s
remarkable cultural diversity generates a geographic mosaic of various
languages, religions, and landscapes. Cultural landscapes also vary widely,
with diverse house types, settlement forms, and field patterns characterizing
the everyday scene. Much of Europe’s regional cohesion and identity comes
from a shared history that has unfolded in close geographic proximity. The
European realm is home to people of numerous cultural-linguistic traits,
including not only Latins, Germanics, and Slavs but also minorities such as
Finns, Hungarians, Basques, and Celts. The diversity of ancestries
continues to be an asset as well as a liability. It has led to not only
interaction and exchange, but also conflict and war.
The culture of Europe might better be described as a series of overlapping
cultures. Whether it is a question of West as opposed to East; Christianity as
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opposed to Islam; many have claimed to identify cultural fault lines across the
continent. There are many cultural innovations and movements, often at odds with
each other, such as Christian proselytism or Humanism. Thus the question of
"common culture" or "common values" is far more complex than it seems to be.
Christianity has been the dominant feature in shaping up European culture
for at least the last 1700 years. However, strong cultural borders in the Balkans
and eastern Europe are drawn based on the eleventh-century split into
Christianity’s eastern and western churches. In Northern Ireland, tension resulted
from the seventeenth-century division into Catholicism and Protestantism can still
be felt. Much of the ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia comes from the
historical struggle between Christianity and Islam. Currently, considerable tension
has emerged related to the large Muslim migrants in England, France and
Germany.
Using the political map of the mid-1980s, T.G. Jordan (1988)
defined the Europe on the basis of 12 traits measured for each country
(Figure 5); (1) majority of population speak an Indo-European language; (2)
majority of population have a Christian heritage; (3) majority of population
are Caucasian; (4) more than 96 percent of population are literate; (5) an
infant mortality rate (IMR) of less than 15; (6) a rate of natural increase
(RNI) of 0.5 percent or less; (7) per capita income of US $7,500 or more;
(8) 70 percent or more population are urban; (9) 15 percent or less are
employed in agriculture and forestry; (10) 100 km (62 mi) of railway plus
highway for 100 km2 (30 mi2); (11) 200 or more kg (441 lbs) of fertilizer
are applied annually per ha of cropland; and (12) free elections are
permitted.
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Figure 5. Europe Defined (Source: Jordan, 1988)
Europe has been a cradle for many cultural innovations and movements
that have consequently been spread across the globe. European cultures have
played leading roles in globalization. The Renaissance of classical ideas
influenced the development of art and literature far beyond the confines of the
continent. Through European colonialism and imperialism, European languages,
religion, economies and values have transformed the whole world.
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Europe is currently caught up in a period of profound cultural change.
Though European cultures have many varied origins, Europe has been in recent
times undergoing a purposeful move towards a unified economy and political
system, mainly through NATO and the European Union. The idea of a unified
Europe and the loss of local uniqueness have resulted in backlash, with the
European constitution rejected in France and the Netherlands. While newspapers
celebrate the “New Europe” of integration and unification, other may refer to a
more tension-filled New Europe of foreign migrants and guest workers haunted
by ethnic discrimination and racism.
Slavic Cultural Realm
This realm is in fact the Russian domain which
stretches across the vast northern half of Eurasia and includes not only Russia, but
also such countries as Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, and Armenia.
For hundred of years, Slavic people speaking the Russian language
expanded their influence from an early homeland in central European Russia.
Eventually, this Slavic culture imprint spread north to the Arctic Sea, south to the
Black Sea and Caucasus, west to the shores of the Baltic, and east to the Pacific
Ocean. In this process of expansion, Russian cultural patterns and social
institutions diffused widely. Slavic languages dominate the realm. Russian,
Belarusian, and Ukrainian are closely related languages. Most Russians,
Belarusians and Ukrainians share a religious heritage of Eastern Orthodox
Christianity. For hundred of years, Eastern Orthodoxy served as a central cultural
presence within the Slavic cultural realm. Other forms of Western Christianity are
also present in the realm. For instance, the people of western Ukraine, who
experienced several hundred years of Polish rule, joined the Catholic Church.
Eastern Ukraine remained fully within Orthodox framework. Non-Christianity
religions also exist in the realm. Islam is the largest non-Christian religion and has
20 to 25 million adherents. They include people in the north Caucasus, the Volga
Tatars, and Central Asian people near Kazakhstan border.
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Much of the realm’s political legacy is rooted in the Russian Empire, a
land-based system of colonial expansion that greatly enlarged Russian influence.
This was then reasserted in some different forms during the Soviet period in
which attempts were made to use the idea of Slavic unity for political purposes,
and post-war Soviet often made use of Pan-Slavic ideology as a propaganda tool.
Since countries in the realm were multiethnic for long periods of history, their
current populations are mixed with people of various ethnic backgrounds. Thus
the thousand years of independent development have led to the creation of various
separate national identities, while history has created traditional divides, and
conflicting interests. The Muslim Chechens’ demand for an immediate cessation
from Russian military activity in their homeland and the withdrawal of all Russian
forces from the republic of Chechnya is a recent example of the ethnic and
cultural tensions within the realm.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan Africa, the portion of the African
continent lying south of the Sahara Desert, is a commonly accepted world cultural
realm. Physiologically, Sub-Saharan Africa is a plateau continent without a linear
mountain backbone, with a set of lakes, variable rainfall, generally low-fertility
soils, and mainly savanna and steppe vegetation. Dozens of nations, hundreds of
ethnic groups, and many smaller entities make Sub-Saharan Africa’s culturally
rich and varied population. It is historically referred to as "Black Africa" because
of the skin color of its indigenous inhabitants. However, the coherence of this
region has less to do with skin color than with similar livelihood systems and a
shared colonial experience. No common religion, language, philosophy, or
political system ever united the area. Instead, diffuse cultural bonds developed
from a variety of lifestyles and idea systems that evolved here. The impact of
outsiders, such as slave traders from Europe and long-time European colonial
powers, also helped to determine the region's identity. European languages,
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religions, educational systems, and political ideologies were adopted and
modified.
Traditional African religions, however, were largely limited to local areas,
and the religions that did become widespread, Islam and Christianity, are
primarily associated with other world regions. Certainly a few indigenous
religious ideas and practices were shared over large expanses of Sub-Saharan
Africa, but no institutionalized form of religion ever came close to unifying the
realm. Sub-Saharan Africa also lacks a history of widespread political union or
even of an indigenous system of political relations. An African identity south of
the Sahara was forged through a common history of slavery and colonialism as
well as struggles for independence and development. More telling, the people of
the region often define themselves as African, especially to the outside world.
In most Sub-Saharan countries, as in other former colonies, the persistence
of multiple languages reflects the layers of ethnic, colonial, and national identity
Indigenous languages, many from the Bantu subfamily, are often localized to
relatively small rural areas. More widely spoken African trade languages, such as
Swahili or Hausa, serve as a lingua franca over broader areas. Overlaying
indigenous languages are Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic ones (French and
English; Arabic and Somali).
Indigenous African religions are generally classified as animist. Both
Christianity and Islam actually entered the region early in their histories, but they
advanced slowly for many centuries. Since the beginning of the twentieth century,
both religions have spread rapidly. Islam is concentrated in the northern regions,
the Horn, and the coastal corridors of Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique.
Christianity is widely practiced in the central and southern sections of Africa.
Religious traditions in Sub-Saharan Africa often tend to blend, producing mixed
or syncretistic beliefs and rituals. Tens of millions of Africans still follow animist
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beliefs, and many others combine animist practices and ideas with their
observances of Christianity and Islam.
Sun-Saharan Africa’s boundary framework is a colonial legacy. Many
boundaries were drawn without adequate knowledge of or regard for the human
and physical geography that divided. Thus, ethnic identities often do not conform
to the political divisions, sometimes resulting in bloody ethnic warfare, as
witnessed in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
Most Sub-Saharan Africans still engage in subsistence and cash-crop
agriculture. Generally, it is the poorest realm in the world, suffering from the
effects of colonialism, economic mismanagement, local corruption, and interethnic conflict. The realm contains many of the least developed countries in the
world.
Islamic Realm (Southwest Asia and North Africa)
Also including
several central Asian countries and Afghanistan and Pakistan, geographically this
cultural realm largely coincides with Southwest Asia and North Africa. Climate,
culture, and oil all help define the complex realm of Southwest Asia and North
Africa. The realm sprawls across thousands of miles of parched deserts, rugged
plateaus, and oasis-like river valleys. Generally, its arid climates make it a part of
the dry world. Drought and unreliable precipitation dominate natural
environments in this realm. Population generally clusters where water supply is
available. Culturally, diverse languages, religions, and ethnic identities have
molded land and life within the region for centuries, strongly wedding people and
place in ways that have had profound social and political implications. This realm
is also often referred to as the Arab World, the World of Islam, and the Middle
East. This realm has functioned as a crossroads for Europe, Asia and Africa,
enabling an exchange of goods and ideas throughout the history. It has also been
where contrasting cultures meet and often clash.
22
Southwest Asia and North Africa was the scene of several of the world’s
great ancient civilizations, based in its river valleys and basins. Two of the
world’s earliest cultural hearths, Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations,
emerged in the basins of the Tigris and Euphrates of modern-day Turkey, Syria
and Iraq, and the Nile River of Egypt. A cluster of communities grew into larger
societies and world’s earliest states. They domesticated cereals, vegetables, fruits,
and many animals. They also advanced the study of the calendar, mathematics,
astronomy, government, engineering, metallurgy, and a host of other skills and
technologies. Today, the world still benefit from the accomplishment of the
ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptians.
While Southwest Asia and North Africa clearly define the heart of the
Islamic and Arab worlds, a surprising degree of cultural diversity characterizes
the region. The Arabs are indeed the largest single ethnic group in the realm,
accounting for more than half of the population. Grouped politically into the Arab
League, speaking a common Semitic language, and possessing a shared history
and culture, the Arabs certainly are a readily identifiable group. Many other ethnic
groups are also active in the realm. While the Arabs occupy the central location of
the realm and Arabic languages form an important cultural core historically, the
major non-Arab minorities of Turks, Persians, Kurds, Berbers, and Nilo-Hamitic
groups are found in more peripheral locations. These varied geographies of ethnic
groups and languages offer insights into regional patterns of ethnic identity,
potential cultural conflicts that exist at linguistic borders, and the instability that
often characterizes geopolitical relationships within and between states.
Southwest Asia and North Africa is the source of three world religions:
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Religion permeates the lives of most people
within the realm. Today, Muslims form the majority population in all of the
countries of the realm except Israel, where Judaism is the dominant religion, and
Cyprus, where Greek Orthodox outnumbers Turkish Muslims. Divisions within
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Islam have created key cultural differences within the realm and at the root of the
conflict between secular and fundamentalist forces. While most (73 percent) of
the realm is dominated by Sunni Muslims, the Shiites (23 percent) remain an
important element in the contemporary cultural mix. Particularly strong in Iran,
southern Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan and Bahrain, the Shiites also form a major
religious minority in many other countries. Strongly associated with the recent
flowering of Islamic fundamentalism, the Shiites have benefited from rapid
growth.
The Middle East lies in the heart of this realm, where Jewish, Christian,
and Islamic peoples have yet to resolve long-standing cultural tensions and
political differences, particularly as they relate to the state of Israel and the pivotal
Palestinian issue. In addition, Southwest Asia and North Africa's extraordinary
petroleum resources place the area in the global economic spotlight. The strategic
value of oil has combined with ongoing ethnic and religious conflicts to produce
one of the world’s least-stable political settings, one prone to geopolitical
conflicts both within and between the countries of the realm. More recently;
Islamic fundamentalism has advocated a return to more traditional practices
within the religion and has challenged the encroachment of global popular culture.
Fundamentalists have also advocated merging civil and religious authority and
rejecting many characteristics of modern, Western-style consumer culture.
Southwest Asian and North African peoples increasingly find themselves
intertwined with cultural complexities and conflicts external to the region. Islam
links the realm with a globally dispersed population. In addition, European and
American cultural influences have multiplied greatly across the region since the
mid-nineteenth century Colonialism, the boom in petroleum investment, and the
growing presence of Western-style popular culture have had enduring impacts on
the complex regional mosaic that stretches from the Atlas Mountains to the Indian
Ocean.
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East Asia East Asia, primarily composed of China, Japan, South Korea,
North Korea, is the most populous realm of the world, with China alone being
inhabited by more than 1.2 billion persons. Although East Asia is historically
unified by cultural features, in the second half of the twentieth century it was
divided ideologically and politically, with the capitalist economies of Japan,
South Korea, as well as the former British colony of Hong Kong, separated from
the communist bloc of China and North Korea. A thousand years ago, East Asia
was not only the most populous but also the most economically advanced part of
the world. In the 1800s, however, its fortunes declined precipitously. China
suffered repeated famines and revolutions and was exploited by European
imperial powers. Today East Asia must be recognized as one of the core areas of
the world economy, being the hub of the evolving regional phenomenon called
the Pacific Rim.
East Asia is encircled by snowcapped mountains, vast deserts, cold
climates, and Pacific water. A great deal of East Asia consists of juxtaposed
plateaus, basins and plains separated by narrow, sharply demarcated mountain
chains. This broad physiography contains a great diversity of ecosystems, which
in turn have evoked a variety of human responses and adaptations. Many of the
landscapes of East Asia have been heavily modified by humankind. The principal
human transformation has been through the clearing of land for farming. Over the
millennia, as the population grew and pre-modern civilizations flourished, much
of the humid and sub-humid East Asia has been cleared of its forest cover.
East Asia is, in certain respects, one of the world's more unified cultural
realms. Although different East Asian countries, as well as the regions within
them, have their own unique cultural features, the entire realm shares certain
historically rooted ways of life and systems of ideas. Most of these East Asian
commonalties can be traced back to ancient Chinese civilization. Chinese
civilization stretches back some 4,000 years, and most of its present cultural traits
25
and economic attributes are of ancient origin. The durability of Chinese-centered
culture in East Asia is explained, in part, by its geographic isolation throughout
history from other centers of global change. As a result, East Asian civilization
developed along several unique lines. Before 1800, the entire region remained
somewhat self-contained, with only secondary cultural and economic connections
extending to the rest of Eurasia. The most prominent intellectual traditions of the
region regarded China not only as the Middle Kingdom, or center of the world,
but also as the world's only significant civilization. Such an inward focus was
characteristic of other civilizations, but not to the same extent as in East Asia.
Compared to the rest of the non-Western world, East Asia was spatially marginal
to the process of European-based colonialism. Change in the realm has generally
been gradual and linked strongly to past beliefs and practices.
The most important unifying cultural characteristics of East Asia are
related to religious and philosophical beliefs. Throughout the region, Buddhism
and especially Confucianism have shaped not only individual beliefs, but also social and political structures. Although the role of traditional belief systems has
been seriously challenged in recent decades, especially in China, historically
grounded cultural patterns never disappear overnight. Even something as basic as
written communication reveals a distinctly East Asian cultural background. Just
as the use of a common writing system helped forge cultural linkages throughout
East Asia, so too the idea system of Confucianism came to occupy a significant
position in all of the societies of the realm. So strong is the heritage of Confucius
that East Asia is sometimes referred to as the Confucian World. While
Confucianism is often considered a religion, its essence is to a large extent on
how to lead a correct life and organize a proper society. Confucianism stresses
deference to the properly constituted authority figures, but also the responsibility
of the authority to act in a benevolent manner. The most basic level of the
traditional Confucian moral order is the family unit, considered the bedrock of the
26
society. Confucian philosophy also stresses the need for a well-rounded and
broadly humanistic education. The philosophy of Confucius constituted an ethical
system that has endured in East Asia even to the present. Some argue that
Confucianism’s respect for education and the social stability that it generates give
East Asia a tremendous advantage in international competition (Rowntree et al.,
2003).
Certain explicitly religious beliefs have worked alongside Confucianism to
cement the East Asian region. The most important culturally unifying beliefs are
associated with Mahayana Buddhism. Buddhism, originated in India, reached
China by the second century A.D., and within a few hundred years it had spread
throughout East Asia. Small number of adherents of virtually all world religions
can be found in East Asia. Millions of peoples in the realm belong to Christian
churches. China also contains a large Muslim community, with a number of tens
of millions.
Written languages have helped unify East Asia and even though Korea
and Japan are not Chinese speaking regions, their languages have been heavily
influenced by Chinese. Even though their writing systems have changed over time
(with limited use of Chinese characters in Korea), Chinese is still found in the
historical roots of many borrowed words, especially technical terms.
Until the mid-1800s, all East Asian countries attempted to insulate
themselves from Western cultural influences. Japan subsequently opened its
doors, but remained highly ambivalent about foreign ideas. Only after its defeat in
1945 did Japan really opt for a globalist orientation. It was followed in this regard
by South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (then a British colony). China has
adopted an “open door” policy since the late 1970s, and the transition toward
market economies has intensified. In China, economic and cultural globalization
is swiftly becoming both the cause and effect of striking changes in longestablished patterns of production, trade and culture. Today, East Asia is one of
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the most dynamic and most rapidly growing of all world regions. But it still
encompasses a rich mosaic of traditional landscapes and ways of life. As China is
increasing become integrated into the dynamics of global economic and cultural
change, the pace of social and political changes is likely to increase, adding new
elements and creating new regional patterns.
Indic Realm (South Asia) This realm is often referred to as the Indian
Subcontinent because of the territorial dominance of India. On India’s periphery
are the smaller nations of Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. South Asia
is a land of deep historical and cultural commonalities. However, religious
divisions still prevail. India is primarily a Hindu country (with a large Muslim
minority), while neighboring Bangladesh are both predominantly Muslim. Even
within India, cultural and political tensions, inflamed by the rise of Hindu
nationalism, jeopardize the future of this huge federal state. Historically, South
Asia is a well-defined cultural realm. A thousand years ago, virtually the entire
area was united by ideas and social institutions associated with Hinduism. The
subsequent arrival of Islam added a new religious dimension without
fundamentally undercutting its cultural unity. British imperialism subsequently
grafted a number of cultural features over the entire region, from the widespread
use of English to a common passion for cricket.
The roots of South Asia culture extend back to the Indus valley
civilization, which was an urban-oriented society and flourished 5,000 years ago.
By 800 B.C., a new urban focus had emerged in the middle Ganges River Valley.
The social, religious, and intellectual norms associated with this civilization
eventually spread throughout the lowlands of South Asia. The religion of the early
South Asia civilization was Hinduism, a complicated faith that incorporates
diverse forms of worships and that lacks orthodox creed. One of the hallmark of
Hinduism is a belief in the transmigration of souls from being to being through
reincarnation; the nature of one’s acts in the physical world would influence the
28
course of the future lives. Integral to Hinduism is the caste system, wherein
individuals are believed to be preordained at birth to remain throughout their lives
as members of one of the four major socioeconomic groupings, called jati. In
Hindu belief, just as each individual possesses a duty to the larger society, so too
do entire jati and the hundreds of sub-jati. Only when individuals fulfill their own
duty within their jati will an idealized Hindu would function harmoniously. In a
general sense, the caste system institutionalized both social status and economic
function within the larger society.
Through Hinduism largely dominates the realm, many different cultural
threads have evolved into a variety of religious patterns, as a result of which
South Asia’s culture landscapes are quite complex. The two most important
religions are Hinduism and Islam. Hinduism is the leading religion in Nepal
(about 90 percent of the population are Hindu) and India (about 80 percent). Islam
is dominant in Bangladesh (more than 80 percent). Buddhism is the predominant
religion in Bhutan and Sri Lanka. Jains are another distinctive religious group
whose origins are in South Asia. Sikhs, whose religion was founded in the
sixteenth century, A.D., are concentrated in the Punjab, which straddles the IndusPakistan border. The Hindu traditions are equally complex within India, where the
complexity is compounded by the existence of a sizable minority population who
adhere to other religions. For instance, more than 112 million Muslims reside in
India today, and there are also almost 20 million Christians in India.
South Asia's linguistic diversity matches its religious diversity. One of the
world's most important linguistic boundaries runs directly across India. North of
the line, languages belong to the Indo-European family, the world's largest
linguistic family. The languages of southern India, on the other hand, belong to
the Dravidian family, a linguistic group that is unique to South Asia. But within
these broad divisions there are many different languages, each associated with a
distinct culture. In many parts of South Asia, several languages are spoken within
29
the same region or even city, and multilingualism is common everywhere. The
multilingual countries, such as Sri Lanka and India, are troubled by linguistic
conflicts. Such problems are most complex in India, simply because India is so
large and has so many different languages. India's linguistic environment is
changing in complicated ways. Indian nationalists have long dreamed of a
national language, one that could help forge the disparate communities of the
country into a more unified nation. But this linguistic nationalism, or the linking
of a specific language with nationalistic goals, meets the stiff resistance of
provincial loyalty, which itself is intertwined with local languages. Only English,
an "associate official language" of contemporary India and the language of
administration across the subcontinent during the colonial period, serves as the
main integrating language of India.
Geopolitical tensions, both between countries and within them, remain
worrisome. Because the realm’s complex cultural geography shaped by people
speaking different languages and following different religions, and inflamed by
several centuries of British colonial control, cultural differences are often
translated into geopolitical animosity. With only 3 percent of the world’s land
area but 22 percent of the population, more than half of it engaged in subsistence
farming, South Asia has a long way to achieve economic prosperity. It is actually
at a critical juncture in its development in the background of economic and
cultural globalization.
Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia is a realm of large and small peninsulas
and islands. While the realm label might give the impression that it is “what is left
over” from East Asia and South Asia, it is indeed a distinct realm deserving to
stand apart from its large neighbors. Unlike China and India, which culturally are
relatively homogeneous, Southeast Asia is a fragmented transition zone, or shatter
belt, in both the physical and cultural sense. The thousands of mountains, basins,
30
and islands that comprise the realm have produced a politically and culturally
complex mosaic.
Southeast Asia's involvement with the larger world is not new. The realm
has long been heavily influenced by external forces. Chinese and especially
Indian influences date back many centuries. Later, commercial ties with the
Middle East opened the doors to Islam, and today Indonesia ranks as the most
populous Muslim country in the world. More recently came the heavy-handed
imprint of Western colonialism, as Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the
United States administered large Southeast Asian colonies. During this period,
national territories were rearranged, populations relocated, and new cities built to
serve trade and military needs. As colonial powers withdrew and were replaced
by newly independent countries, Southeast Asia became a battleground for world
powers and their global ideologies. In Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, communist
forces, tacitly supported by China and the Soviet Union, waged a fierce and
determined struggle for control of local territory and people. Resisting this were
the United States and several of its allies, equally determined to defeat
communism out of fear that it would rapidly spread to the whole of Southeast
Asia. Today with the end of the Cold War, competing ideologies have taken a
back seat to other problems vexing Southeast Asia. Accompanying the recent
economic turmoil has been an increase in ethnic and social tensions within many
countries.
Unlike many other world regions, Southeast Asia lacks the historical
dominance of a single civilization. Instead, the region has been a meeting ground
for cultural diffusion from South Asia, China, the Middle East, Europe, and even
North America. Abundant natural resources, along with the region's strategic
location on oceanic highways connecting major continents, have long made
Southeast Asia attractive to outsiders. As a result, the contemporary cultural
geography of this diverse region is in part a product of borrowing and amalga31
mation from external influences. In Southeast Asia contemporary cultural
diversity is embedded in the historical influences connected to the major religions
of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity.
With migrants from South Asia in the history, came Hinduism and
Buddhism to Southeast Asia. While Hinduism faded away in most locations,
virtually all of the people in lowland Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia
converted to Buddhism. Vietnam was heavily influenced by Chinese culture.
Traditional religious and philosophical beliefs of Vietnam are centered around
Buddhism and Confucianism. East Asian cultural influences in many other parts
of the realm are directly linked to more recent immigration of southern Chinese.
In Malaysia, the Chinese minority accounts for about one-third of the population,
while in Singapore some three-quarters of its people are of Chinese ancestry. In
many places, relationships between the Chinese minority and the indigenous
majority are strained.
Muslim came to the realm from South and Southwest Asia. More than a
thousand years ago, and by the 1200s the religion began to spread. Today, the
world’s most populous Muslim country is Indonesia, where about 87 percent of
the nation’s population follows Islam. Christian missions spread throughout
Southeast Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when European
colonial powers conquered the region. Christianity is the religion of 85 percent of
the Philippines population as a legacy of Spanish colonialism. A large number of
hill tribes in Southeast Asia’s highland area were also converted to Christianity,
where notable Christian concentrations are found today.
As with religion, language in Southeast Asia expresses the long history of
external cultural influences and migration. The linguistic geography of the region
is extremely complicated-far too complicated, in fact, to be adequately conveyed
in a single linguistic map. The several hundred distinct languages of the region
can, however, all be placed into five major linguistic families. These are Austrone32
sian, which covers most of the islands from the Philippines to Indonesia along
with the Malay Peninsula; Tibeta-Burman, which includes the languages of Burma;
Tai-Kadai, centered on Thailand and Laos; Man-Khmer encompassing most of the
languages of Vietnam and Cambodia; and Papuan, found in eastern Indonesia.
Some national boundaries do enclose relatively coherent cultural and language
groups. Thailand (Thai), Burma (Burmese), Vietnam (Vietnamese), Cambodia
(Khmer), Laos (Lao) and Malaysia (Malay) all have language majority
populations that speak the same language and share cultural and religious
traditions.
The imposition of European colonial rule ushered in a new era of
globalization to Southeast Asia, bringing with it European languages,
Christianity, and novel governmental, economic, and educational systems. Other
Southeast Asian countries, however, have been receptive to foreign cultural
influences. This is particularly true in the case of the Philippines, where American
colonialism may have predisposed the country to many of the more popular forms
of Western culture. English, as the global language, also causes ambivalence in
many countries. On one hand, it is the language of questionable popular culture,
yet on the other, citizens need proficiency in English if they are to participate in
global business and politics. In many ways, the diversity within Southeast Asia is
pronounced, from the array of different cultural traditions to persistent disparities
in economic and social development. This realm has gained an unusual degree of
solidarity in recent years through the regional forum of the Association of
Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which helped nurture regional identity. Thus,
the historical and cultural unity that Southeast Asia has lacked may be forced
upon it by 21st century globalization.
Austral Realm
The Austral realm is geographically unique. It’s the only
geographic and cultural realm that lies entirely in the Southern Hemisphere. It is
the only realm that has no land link of any kind to a neighboring realm and is thus
33
completely surrounded by ocean and sea. It is second only to the Insular Oceanic
as the world’s least populous realm. Its name refers to its location (Austral means
south), a location far from the sources of its dominant cultural heritage but close
to its new found economic partners on the western Pacific Rim. Two countries,
Australia and New Zealand, constitute the Austral realm by virtue of territorial
dimension, relatively location, and dominant cultural landscape. Australia in
every way is the dominant one in the realm. Despite their inclusion in the same
realm, the two countries differ physiographically. Australia has vast, dry, lowrelief interior while New Zealand is mountainous. Both countries are marked by
peripheral development, Australia because of its aridity and New Zealand because
of its topography.
While the area was settled by indigenous peoples long ago, more recent
European and North American colonization began the process of globalization
that now characterizes the region. From the perspective of its European
colonizers, the region was enlivened by its mythical character: exotic and
otherworldly, its "lost islands" and "bush" were populated by strange plants and
animals as well as by peoples free from the conventional cultural mores of
European society From the perspective of its indigenous inhabitants, the region
was a world rich in natural and cultural complexity, a way of life rudely
interrupted and changed forever by the arrival of European peoples. The realm
reveals a fascinating set of responses between indigenous peoples and varied
European cultures. It a vast laboratory of cultural adaptations, assimilation, and
conflicts, that displays the unpredictable outcomes when one culture comes in
contact with another.
While Australia is still dominated by its colonial European roots, the
country’s multicultural character is becoming increasingly visible as native
inhabitants assert their cultural identity and as varied immigrant populations play
larger roles in society, particularly within major metropolitan areas. For thousands
34
of years, Australia’s Aborigines dominated the cultural geography of the
continent. Radical cultural and geographical changes occurred upon the arrival of
Europeans, and Aboriginal population was decimated in the process. Aboriginal
settlements were relegated to the sparsely settled interior, particularly in northern
and central Australia. Today, indigenous people account for only 2 percent of
Australia’s population. They have suffered from poverty, disease, inadequate
education, and even malnutrition. Today, an effort is underway to revive the
aboriginal culture and the way of life through a homelands movement.
Australia is land of immigrants, with more than 70 percent of its
population continuing to reflect a British or Irish heritage. These groups
dominated many of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century migration into the
country, and the close cultural ties to the British Isles remain fundamental. Recent
migration trends, however, have reversed this historical bias and more diverse
inflows are adding to the country’s multicultural character. A growing number of
families have come from China, India, Malaysia, and the Philippines. As a result,
Australian society, while enduringly Anglo, has been changed forever. For
example, although the country is still largely Christian, some of the nation’s
fastest growing religions are Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Similarly, while
English is Australia’s national language, more than 2.5 million residents now
speak another language. Economic ties with Japan and China are also reshaping
the country’s cultural landscape.
New Zealand's cultural geography broadly reflects the patterns seen in
Australia, although the precise cultural mix differs slightly. Native Maori
population is more numerically important and culturally visible in New Zealand
than their Aboriginal counterparts in Australia. While British colonization clearly
mandated the dominance of Anglo cultural traditions by the late nineteenth
century, Maori population survived, although they lost most of their land in the
process. After declining with initial European contacts and conflicts, native
35
populations began rebounding in the twentieth century, and today the Maori
account for more than 15 percent of the country's 3.9 million residents.
While many New Zealanders still identify with their largely British
heritage, the country's twentieth century's cultural identity matured with an
increasing sense of separateness from its British roots, helping forge New
Zealand's special cultural character. Diversity also continues to shape the cultural
setting. The nation’s unique Polynesian roots impart a special regional character:
in addition to its Maori population, more than 5 percent of its people are Pacific
Islanders. Adding further complexity to the cultural mix are growing numbers of
Asians who now make up another 5 percent of New Zealand’s residents and who
are making their own dynamic contribution to the country's culture and economy,
particularly in its larger urban centers. The end result is a national character truly
forged at a Pacific crossroads, an accumulation of varied and vastly different
cultural influences that have been amalgamated into a uniquely New Zealand
identity that resists easy definition.
Insular Oceanic (Pacific) Realm Between the Americas to the east and
the western Pacific Rim to the west lies the vast Pacific Ocean, in which lies tens
of thousands of islands, some large, most small. This vast realm, land and water,
covers nearly an entire hemisphere of the world, the one commonly called the Sea
Hemisphere. The islands of the Pacific form a distinctive realm in the minds of
most of the world. It is a tropical paradise where local people fish, collect
coconuts, and make crafts while tourists relax on beautiful beaches and swim in
peaceful lagoons fringed with coral reefs. The colonial powers since the
nineteenth century have restructured the economies and people of the Pacific
islands in ways that left enduring legacies. Before the European invasion and
colonization, Australia would have been included in this realm because of its
Aborigines and New Zealand because of its Maori population’s Polynesian
affinities. But the Europeanization of the twp countries has engulfed black
36
Australians and Maori New Zealanders. Thus culturally Australia and New
Zealand today are decidedly not Pacific.
Punctuated with isolated chains of islands, the waters of the tropical
Pacific dominate much of the realm. Three major regions of the realm each
contain a surprising variety of human settlements and political, cultural entities.
Farthest west, Melanesia (meaning "dark islands") contains the culturally
complex, generally darker-skinned peoples of New Guinea, the Solomon Islands,
Vanuatu, and Fiji. The largest of these countries, Papua New Guinea, includes the
eastern half of the island of New Guinea (the western half is part of Indonesia), as
well as nearby portions of the northern Solomon Islands. Its population of 5
million people is slightly higher than that of New Zealand. To the east, the small
island groups, or archipelagos, of the central South Pacific are Polynesia
(meaning "many islands"), and this linguistically unified region includes Frenchcontrolled Tahiti in the Society Islands, the Hawaiian Islands, and smaller political states such as Tonga, Tuvalu, and Samoa. Finally, the more culturally diverse
region of Micronesia (meaning "small islands") is north of Melanesia and west of
Polynesia and includes microstates such as Nauru and the Marshall Islands, as
well as the U.S. territory of Guam.
The Pacific islands have an enormous number and variety of languages. It
is believed that almost 20 percent of all living languages are spoken on the island
of New Guinea and that most are not understood by even their neighbors. Papua
New Guinea has had 817 distinct languages and a wide spread of trade of
language (lingua franca), which combines local and English into pidgin. Some
island groups also have a large number of languages. For example, Vanuatu has
109 living languages and the Solomon Island have 66 different languages, many
spoken by 500 people or more. Linguistic diversity generally decreases toward
the eastern Pacific. The missionaries were successful in converting most of the
Pacific islanders to Christianity, with a range of Protestant denominations and
37
Catholicism prevalent in French Polynesia. Hinduism is an important religion in
Fiji among the Asian Indian population.
It is nearly impossible to generalize about the cultures of the Pacific
islands, which are as varied as the many languages. Native and exotic cultural
influences produce a varied mosaic across the islands of the realm. In more
isolated locales, especially in Papua New Guinea, traditional cultures maintain
their integrity largely insulated from outside influences. For example, Melanesia
is associated with a set of religious movements that have been called cargo cults,
where the dawn of a coming new age was associated with the arrival of goods
brought by spiritual beings or foreigners. In most cases, however, modern life in
the islands revolves around an intricate cultural and economic interplay of local
and Western influences. Contemporary cultures on the Pacific islands reflect the
tensions between the maintenance and revival of traditional cultures, their
selective construction for the tourist industry, and the widespread penetration of
global culture, especially formal education, television, and processed foods. One
thing is certain: the relative cultural insularity of the past is gone forever, and in
its place is a Pacific realm rapidly adjusting to powerful forces of colonization,
global capitalism, and popular culture. While traditional culture worlds persist in
some settings, most Pacific islands have witnessed tremendous cultural
transformations in the past 150 years. Outsiders from Europe, the United States,
and Asia brought new settlers, values, and technological innovations that have
forever changed Oceania's cultural geography and its place in the larger world.
The result is a modern setting where Pidgin English has broadly supplanted native
languages, Hinduism is practiced on remote Pacific Islands, and traditional
fishing peoples now work at resort hotels and golf course complexes.
CULTURAL LANDSCAPE
Cultural regions and cultural realms essentially tend to be descriptive
38
rather than explanatory. Research into cultural space needs consider in more
detail how regions of distinctive landscape arise, by looking at the cultural
variations over space and, more importantly, the ability of culture in
affecting and creating landscapes.
The cultures that occupy or influence an area leave their imprint on
the landscape. The cultural landscape is the visible, material landscape that
cultural groups create in inhabiting the earth. The cultural landscape reflects
different attitudes about how people modify the earth and contains valuable
evidence about the origin, spread, and development of cultures, because it usually
preserves various types of archaic forms. Cultures use, alter, and manipulate
landscapes to express their identity. A region has a unique expression that one
may perceive, recognize, touch, love, or hate. It is a sensory space made of
colors, smells and images (Beguin 1995). Often, a single scene, a photograph
or picture, can reveal the cultural locale in which it was made. The
architecture, the means of transportation, and perhaps the goods being carried
all reveal a distinctive cultural environment. The people of any particular
culture transform their living space by building structures on it, creating lines
of contact and communication, tilling the land, and channeling the water.
This kind of cultural transformation manifests itself much more noticeably in
an urbanized environment. It needs to be pointed out that a cultural landscape
consists of buildings and roads and fields and more, but it also has an
intangible quality, an "atmosphere," which is often so easy to perceive and
yet so difficult to define. A landscape can tell much about the civilization
that has created it. Landscapes are historical archives and a rich treasure of
information and clues for researchers to read and interpreting various
environments.
Landscape has always been closely connected with culture. Cultures
shape their own landscapes out of the natural habitat. Every inhabited area has a
39
cultural landscape, fashioned from the natural landscape, and each uniquely
reflects the culture that created it. Landscape can be regarded as a heritage
belonging to a society’s collective memory. Landscape is intimately linked
with a way of seeing the world as a rationally ordered, designed and
harmonious creation whose structure and mechanism are accessible to the
human mind as well as to eye, and act as guides to humans in their
alternation and improvement of the environment (Cosgrove, 1989). All
cultural landscapes are products of the human appropriation and
transformation of the environment. Landscapes offer signs that allow human
groups to situate themselves in time and space and to identify with a given culture
and society. Such is the case of ethnic areas (e.g. Chinatowns). What would China
be without Beijing and its Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square?
Cultural landscapes are symbolic. Any place, site, space, itinerary,
natural feature, spring, or human construction that gives meaning to landscape
and thereby expresses and nurtures the identity of populations or ethnic
groups can be considered carrying symbolic meanings. No identity exists
without a space that sustains it, or without a territory marked by geosymbols
(Bonnemaison, 2005). The symbolism of landscape expresses a common set
of values, and serves the purpose of reproducing cultural norms and
establishing the values of dominant groups across all of a society. The
dominant culture is that of a group with power over others. The power is
not only limited to a particular executive or governing body. Instead, it
refers to a group or class whose dominance over others is grounded in
control of the means of life: land, capital, raw materials and labor power.
Their power is sustained and reproduced to a considerable extent by their
ability to project and communicate, across all other social levels and
divisions, an image of the world consonant with their own experience, and
to have that image accepted as a true reflection of everyone’s reality
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(Cosgrove, 1989). For instance, through the Declaration of Independence
and the Constitution, the founding fathers of the United States had declared
their vision of a new and perfect society and democracy. It was their
cultural ideals that were celebrated in the designed landscape of
Washington, DC. The French architect L’Enfant composed the plan of two
basic geometrical elements: the orthogonal radiating design traditionally
favored by European monarchs exercising an absolute power, and the
infinitely repeatable grid pattern which had become the basis for every
colonial town, a democratic form that gives no single location a privileged
status. Symbolic landscapes are not merely static. The cultural values they
convey are to be actively reproduced if they are to continue to carry
meanings. For example, this can be achieved in daily life by the simple
recognition of buildings, place names. The values inscribed in the landscape
can also be reinforced by public rituals during major or minor ceremonies.
Researchers pay attention to the metaphorical and ideological qualities of
landscape. The physical component of the cultural landscape is varied and
complex. As a result, some principal aspects of the landscape have become the
focus of many studies. For instance, settlement forms, land-division patterns, and
architecture (Jordan-Bychkov and Domosh, 2003). In the study of settlement
forms, the spatial arrangements of buildings, roads and other features that people
create in an area are described and explained. Land-division patterns reveal the
way people have divided the land for economic, social, and political purposes.
Comparatively, the most readily visible aspect of the cultural landscape is the
architectural style of a culture. The architecture provides a vivid record of the
resident culture of an area. Sitwell and Bilash (1986) specified the processes that
create humanized landscapes. They proposed that three figurative expressions of
human worth, three cardinal virtues, are height, durability, and central location.
Appling these three virtues to architecture, then it follows that centrally located,
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tall structures built of steel, brick, or stone are the worthiest and most important to
the particular culture in question. For instance, in medieval Europe, cathedrals
and churches best exemplified the three virtues, because they were built of stone
on the central square and towered above other structures. A visitor from a
different place would make no mistake in concluding that the church dominated
and defined medieval culture. Indeed, cultural dominance, or the attempt of one
group to dominate another, often appears as a major component of the landscape.
Every cultural landscape is an accumulation of human artifacts, some old
and some new, some archaic and some modern. The concept of cultural
landscape takes on a practical aspect when an area has been inhabited and
transformed by a succession of dominant culture groups, each of which
leaves a lasting imprint. As successive occupiers arrive, they bring their
own technological and cultural traditions and transform the landscape
accordingly. Yet successive occupiers can also be influenced by what they
find when they arrive and leave some of it in place. Landscapes, urban
landscapes in particular, represent a pattern of various layers where recent
configurations do not necessarily obliterate more ancient features. The term
sequent occupance refers to such cultural succession and its lasting
imprint (de Blij and Murphy, 2003). For instance, many cities in the world
have experienced several stages of cultural dominance prior to and after the
European colonial rule, and each stage of the sequence remains imprinted in
the cultural landscape. The cultural landscape can be seen as a kind of text
offering clues into the cultural practices and priorities of its various
occupiers. Cultural influences from outside often complicate the local
landscape. Nonetheless, it is still useful to think about dominant influences
at particular times as emphasized in the “sequent occupance” concept, for
these often have the most visible impact on an area.
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THE ARRANGEMENT OF CULTURAL STRUCTURES IN SPACE
It has been said many times in this chapter that epistemological
concepts are transformed and situated onto ontological space. The best way
to understand this interaction is by first looking at the social construction of
culture. Berger and Luckmann (Berger and Luckmann, 1966) have taken
the model of culture proposed by Emile Durkheim (1915) and expanded it
into a model in which concepts are externalized into a public sphere where
they are further objectified. Ideas are made into things. The objects also
influence social perception and understanding when they are internalized.
What has been added to their model is the concept of personal self and social
self. This dichotomy explains the dynamics of learning as the ideas obtained
by the social self are integrated into the personal or psychological self (St.
Clair, 2006).
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What is implied in this model of culture is the fact that it connects
knowledge about culture (cultural epistemology) with its artifacts (cultural
ontology).
The process by which concepts are externalized is called structural
epistemology because ideas are ineffable unless they take some kind of
structure or form (St. Clair, 2006).
The process by which they are
internalized is called structural hermeneutics because forms must be
interpreted and organized systematically within a knowledge system (St.
Clair, 2006). The knowledge system is not limited to either epistemology
(knowledge forms) or ontology (practical knowledge) but involves both.
These are connected and bound together by means of reality-loops (activity
theory). Hence, cultural systems include both concepts that are externalized
(structural epistemology) and cultural practices and artifacts that are
internalized and interpreted (structural epistemology). This interaction is
referred to as social and cultural practices.
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The dynamics that accounts for the interface between epistemology
and ontology is known as activity theory (Leontiev, 1978). When there is a
cognitive loop between cultural knowledge and their social practices, the
result is a socially constructed reality. Hence, there are two kinds of culture
that. One has to do with ideas and concepts and an epistemological model
of culture. The other has to do with how these ideas and concepts take form
in material culture and form an ontological model of culture.
Once a
concept is externalized it takes on a form of being-in-the-world. It obtains
ontological status.
Too many models have only focused on culture as
epistemology (Dirven and Verspoor, 1998). Very few deal with culture as
ontology (Bourdieu, 1990; Mehan and Wood, 1975; St. Clair, ThoméWilliams and Su, 2005).
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Cultures organize themselves spatially. The Earth has become a cultural
mosaic characterized by the prodigiously swift diffusion of cultural processes.
This diffusion is such that cultural processes tend to make the world uniform. This
intensification of cultural processes leads to a certain Westernization of the world.
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There is Westernization of the world into a basic culture, at once technical,
aesthetic and ethical, along with a way of life and a way of thinking. It has been
suggested that the result of that globalization and Westernization would mean a
homogenization of cultures as economies are integrated and uniform consumer
demands are satisfied by standardized commodities produced by international
corporations.
Today the world indeed tends to be more unified as vast regions come
into being (Bonnemaison, 2005). Joint organizations are being built on a
political and economic basis - at least on the surface. Major geo-cultural spaces
are being delineated: Europe (European Union), North American (NAFTA) and
APEC, which gathers eighteen states situated in the Pacific Ocean and along its
rim. Although hidden and rarely put forward, the cultural dimension is
nevertheless essential. Europe has emerged as a geocultural and geopolitical
union. As for the Pacific world, it appears to be primarily an economic union with
some political dimensions and no cultural dimensions. In order to succeed in
becoming the second axis of the world, APEC must also achieve cultural unity.
Despite growing globalization in all facets of life and economy and these
emerging new great world cultural spaces, the world is still far from homogenized.
Globalization, particularly Westernization, also brings about a re-emergence of
ethnic groups and territories as well as a revival of the local and traditional
cultures. Both effects herald the revolt of the local against the global
(Bonnemaison, 2005). Those multiple regional cultural mixes are often defiantly
distinctive and separatist as recurring incidents of ethnic conflict, civil war, and
strident regionalism attest. Rather than leveling and removing regional contrasts,
as some people predicted, globalization continues to be countered by powerful
forces of regionalism, place identity, and ethnicity.
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