In anthropology and geography, a cultural area, cultural region, cultural sphere, or culture area refers to a geography with one relatively homogeneous human activity or complex of activities (culture). Such activities are often associated with an ethnolinguistics and with the territory it inhabits. Specific cultures often do not limit their geographic coverage to the borders of a nation state, or to smaller subdivisions of a state.
History of concept
A culture area is a concept in cultural anthropology in which a geographic region and time sequence (age area) is characterized by shared elements of environment and culture.
[; Webarchive of http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/15.]
A precursor to the concept of culture areas originated with museum curators and ethnologists during the late 1800s as means of arranging exhibits, combined with the work of taxonomy. The American anthropologists Clark Wissler and Alfred Kroeber further developed this version of the concept on the premise that cultural areas represent longstanding cultural divisions.[Wissler, Clark (ed.) (1975) Societies of the Plains Indians AMS Press, New York, , Reprint of v. 11 of Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History, published in 13 parts from 1912 to 1916.][Kroeber, Alfred L. (1939) Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.][Kroeber, Alfred L. "The Cultural Area and Age Area Concepts of Clark Wissler" In Rice, Stuart A. (ed.) (1931) Methods in Social Science pp. 248–265. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.] This iteration of the concept is sometimes criticized as arbitrary, but the organization of human communities into cultural areas remains a common practice throughout the .
Cultural geography also utilizes the concept of culture areas. Cultural geography originated within the Berkeley School, and is primarily associated with Carl O. Sauer and his colleagues. Sauer viewed culture as "an agent within a natural area that was a medium to be cultivated to produce the cultural landscape."
The definition of culture areas is enjoying a resurgence of practical and theoretical interest as social scientists conduct more research on processes of cultural globalization.[Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson (1997). Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.]
Types
Allen Noble gave a summary of the concept development of cultural regions using terms such as:
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"Cultural hearth" (no origin of this term given),
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"Cultural core" by Donald W. Meinig for Mormon culture published in 1970,
[Meinig, D. W., "The Mormon Culture Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847–1964" Annals of the Association of American Geographers 60 no. 3 1970 428–46.] and
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"Source area" by Fred Kniffen (1965) and later Henry Glassie (1968) for house and barn types.
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Outside a core area, Glassie used Meinig's use of the terms "domain" (a dominant area) and "sphere" (area influenced but not dominant).
[Noble, Allen George, and M. Margaret Geib. Wood, brick, and stone: the North American settlement landscape. Volume 1: Houses, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984. 7.]
Cultural "spheres of influence" may also overlap or form concentric structures of macrocultures encompassing smaller local cultures. Different boundaries may also be drawn depending on the particular aspect of interest, such as religion and folklore vs dress, or architecture vs language.
Another version of cultural area typology divides cultural areas into three forms:
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Formal cultural regions, which are "characterized by cultural homogeneity in a given contiguous geographical area."
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Functional cultural regions, which share political, social, and/or cultural functions.
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Perceptual, or vernacular, cultural regions, which are based in spatial perception. One example is Braj region of India, which is seen as a spatial whole due to common religious and cultural associations with the specific area.
Cultural boundary
A cultural boundary (also cultural border) in ethnology is a geographical boundary between two identifiable ethnic or ethnolinguistic cultures. A
language border is necessarily also a cultural border, as language is a significant part of a society's culture, but it can also divide subgroups of the same ethnolinguistic group along more subtle criteria, such as the Brünig-Napf-Reuss line in German-speaking Switzerland,
the Weißwurstäquator in Germany,
or the
Grote rivieren boundary between Dutch and
Flanders culture.
The following major cultural boundaries are found in the history of Europe:
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in Western Europe: between Latin Europe, where the legacy of the Roman Empire remained dominant, and Germanic Europe, where it was significantly syncretized with Germanic peoples culture
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in the Balkans: the Jireček Line, dividing the area of dominant Latin (Western Roman Empire) from that of dominant Greek (Byzantine Empire) influence.
Macro-cultures on a continental scale are also referred to as "worlds", "spheres", or "civilizations", such as the Islamic world.
Specialized terms
Cultural bloc
The term
cultural bloc is used by
to describe culturally and linguistically similar groups (or nations) of Aboriginal peoples of Australia.
It may have been coined first by
Ronald Berndt in 1959 to describe the Western Desert cultural bloc, a group of peoples in central Australia whose languages comprise around 40 dialects.
Other groups described as a cultural bloc include the
Noongar people of south-western Australia;
the Bundjalung people of northern New South Wales and southern
Queensland;
[ the Kuninjku/Bininj Kunwok bloc and the Yolngu people in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory.]
Examples of cultural areas
Broad dichotomies
Geographic areas
Language families
Cultures
Religious beliefs
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Buddhism by country
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Christendom (Christian world),
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Hinduism by country
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Muslim world
Music
A music area is a cultural area defined according to musical activity. It may or may not conflict with the cultural areas assigned to a given region. The world may be divided into three large music areas, each containing a "cultivated" or classical musics "that are obviously its most complex musical forms", with, nearby, folk music styles which interact with the cultivated, and, on the perimeter, primitive styles.[Nettl, Bruno (1956). Music in Primitive Culture, p.142-143. Harvard University Press.]
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Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa
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North Africa, Southwest Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, Indonesia and parts of Southern Europe.
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American Indian, East Asia, Horn of Africa, Inuit music, and Finno-Ugric music
See also
Footnotes
Further reading
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Philip V. Bohlman, Marcello Sorce Keller, and Loris Azzaroni (eds.), Musical Anthropology of the Mediterranean: Interpretation, Performance, Identity, Bologna, Edizioni Clueb – Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice, 2009.
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Marcello Sorce Keller, "Gebiete, Schichten und Klanglandschaften in den Alpen. Zum Gebrauch einiger historischer Begriffe aus der Musikethnologie", in T. Nussbaumer (ed.), Volksmusik in den Alpen: Interkulturelle Horizonte und Crossovers, Zalzburg, Verlag Mueller-Speiser, 2006, pp. 9–18
External links
