From top, clockwise: Africa, Circum-Mediterranean, East Eurasia, South America, North America and Insular-Pacific cultural areas in theStandard cross-cultural sample
Inanthropology andgeography, acultural area,cultural region,cultural sphere, orculture area refers to a geography with one relatively homogeneous human activity or complex of activities (culture). Such activities are often associated with anethnolinguistic group and with the territory it inhabits. Specific cultures often do not limit their geographic coverage to the borders of anation state, or to smaller subdivisions of a state.[1][2]
A culture area is a concept incultural anthropology in which a geographic region and time sequence (age area) is characterized by shared elements of environment and culture.[3]
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 oftaxonomy. The American anthropologistsClark Wissler andAlfred Kroeber further developed this version of the concept on the premise that cultural areas represent longstanding cultural divisions.[4][5][6] This iteration of the concept is sometimes criticized as arbitrary, but the organization of human communities into cultural areas remains a common practice throughout thesocial sciences.[3]
Cultural geography also utilizes the concept of culture areas. Cultural geography originated within the Berkeley School, and is primarily associated withCarl 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."[7] Sauer's concept was later criticized asdeterministic, and geographerYi-Fu Tuan and others proposed versions that enabled scholars to account for phenomenological experience as well. This revision became known as humanistic geography. The period within which humanistic geography is now known as the "cultural turn."[7][8]
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.[9]
"Source area" by Fred Kniffen (1965) and later Henry Glassie (1968) for house and barn types.
Outside a core area, Glassie used Meinig's use of the terms "domain" (a dominant area) and "sphere" (area influenced but not dominant).[11]
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 folklorevs dress, or architecturevs language.
Another version of cultural area typology divides cultural areas into three forms:[2]
Formal cultural regions, which are "characterized by cultural homogeneity in a given contiguous geographical area."
Functional cultural regions, which share political, social, and/or cultural functions.
Perceptual, or vernacular, cultural regions, which are based in spatial perception. One example isBraj region of India, which is seen as a spatial whole due to common religious and cultural associations with the specific area.
A cultural boundary (also cultural border) in ethnology is a geographical boundary between two identifiable ethnic or ethnolinguistic cultures. Alanguage 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 theBrünig-Napf-Reuss line in German-speaking Switzerland,[12] theWeißwurstäquator in Germany,[13] or theGrote rivieren boundary between Dutch andFlemish culture.[14]
Amusic 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" orclassical musics "that are obviously its most complex musical forms", with, nearby,folk styles which interact with the cultivated, and, on the perimeter,primitive styles.[24][a]
^However, Nettl adds that "the world-wide development of music must have been a unified process in which all peoples participated" and that one finds similar tunes and traits in puzzlingly isolated or separated locations throughout the world.
^Wissler, Clark (ed.) (1975)Societies of the Plains Indians AMS Press, New York,ISBN0-404-11918-2 , Reprint of v. 11 ofAnthropological 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.
^Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson (1997).Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
^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.
^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.
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.
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
Media related toCultural regions at Wikimedia Commons
