Unit 4 Cultural Geography – OurSpatialBrains.com

MCCC SS060401, Page 5, has an excellent set of definitions of culture. For example:

“Culture is a set of shared values that manifest themselves in the behavior and artifacts of a given group.”
“Culture is the thoughts, behaviors, customs, and things we produce and the methods we use to produce them.”

We will focus on the idea of culture as a shared set of mental rules about how to behave in a particular place (and time). This definition allows us to ask a very important geographic question about culture – “Are these particular cultural ideas appropriate in this environment?”

We will examine this first by looking at several examples of cultural adaptation to specific environmental conditions. These are just models – teachers should feel free to substitute other places they might know well, or videos and readings they think might work better in their classes, or even guest presentations and internet swaps.

Then we will look at what happens when people enter an environment where their cultural ideas do not work well. Part 4B examines the flip side of that idea – how a cultural invention can make some places more desirable and reduce the value of other places, which in turn can cause economic booms, recession, human migration, and even conflict.

Finally, we will look at several kinds of cultural change – spreading into different environments, changing to adapt to new conditions, and following leaders who propose specific kinds of change.