Cultural Regions - 1 | Geography Optional for UPSC (Notes) PDF Download

Introduction

Culturally, the world is incredibly diverse. Different cultural groups, small and large, inhabit different parts of the earth’s surface. These groups have produced distinctively observable imprints in their respective areas. Human geography is concerned to provide description of these diverse cultures as they are manifested on the earth’s surface as well as to trace their origins, formation, persistence and spread. You have already studied peopling and racial elements, religion and beliefs and languages in the previous units of this Block. In this unit you will study the meaning and types of culture, culture and civilization, cultural regions and major cultural regions of the world, and globalisation and culture. You will also study the meaning, origin, formation and persistence of cultural regions and also discuss about the problems of delimitation of major cultural regions of the world.

Culture: Meanings and Types

It is not easy to precisely define the term culture. Anthropologists and sociologists have defined the term in various ways - ‘the total way of life of people’; ‘a learnt and shared behaviour’ or ‘the people’s design for living’.

They divide culture into two groups - non-material and material, that are not mutually exclusive. Non-material culture refers to learnt human behaviour. Human behaviour includes humans’ thoughts and emotions as well as their external actions. However, behaviour of a particular individual cannot be considered as culture. It becomes a part of culture when majority members of the society share it. Thus, the process of learning and developing culture goes on simultaneously with social interaction. Nonmaterial culture comprises mentifacts and sociofacts. Mentifacts include attitudinal elements or values, such as language and religion. Sociofacts, on the other hand, refer to norms involved in group formation such as rules about family structure.

Material culture comprises all the elements related to people’s livelihood, known as artifacts. Artifact literally means human creations. Whatever objects humans have created since their origin on this earth are cultural objects. These include tools, technology, instruments, the method of hunting, agriculture, house building, cloth making, etc. Cultural objects are material, objective and concrete.

Human geography deals with elements of both material and non-material cultures from a geographical perspective. As a student of human geography you will study the characteristics of material as well as nonmaterial culture in relation to geographical environment. You will also study how culture of a society has gradually evolved from pre-historic times to the present time in relation to geographical environment. As you know, culture is intimately related to geographical environment. For example, in terms of traditional food habit of people, ethnic dresses and houses, desert regions are different from mountainous or coastal regions. In the process of adapting themselves to the geographical environment or establishing harmony with it or establishing hegemony over it, various human groups and communities develop their own cultures.

Human geography is also concerned with the diffusion of both material and non-material culture across space and time. The specific elements of culture develop in a particular place and from there expand toward other places. For example, the belief system of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam originated in specific places and then diffused to other places. Similarly, Bhojpuri dialect and culture originated in Bihar are now spoken and practiced in far off countries such as Mauritius, Fiji, Surinam and Trinidad and Tobago. The study of the diffusions of innovations in the fields of agriculture, fashion, industry, etc. are important themes of cultural geography.

Aspects of Culture

A well known anthropologist Edward B. Taylor proposed a definition of culture while considering primitive culture. According to him culture is ‘that complex whole, which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of the society.’ Till date, this definition is widely accepted. From this definition, the following three aspects of culture can be identified: 

1. Material or physical aspects: These include all the humans’ concrete creations - tools/instruments, methods of house building, clothes and shoes making, etc. These are called ‘cultural objects’. They include whatever human beings have created since the primitive times. 
2. Hidden aspects: These include the means of communication and symbols that man has learnt as a member of the society. Language, dialects, alphabets, myths, religious signs such as swastika, the cross, or crescent or the moon and sun, tree or rock are symbols. There are hidden meanings in them. Culture could be understood in terms of their meanings. 
3. Acquired aspect: These are those habits and capabilities, which are learnt by man as members of society. These include norms, values, knowledge, art, morality, belief and law.

Culture and Civilization

You have already understood the meaning of culture and its elements. The origin of the concept civilization is highly controversial. It is often used in contrast to non-civilized group. During the colonial era the so-called

civilized Europeans looked down upon certain other people with profound contempt as culturally non-civilized, uncivilized, or barbaric. However, there is no inherent distinction between the culture of a so-called non-civilized groups and civilized groups except that there may be more numerous cultural complexes among the latter.

The term civilization is derived from a Latin root civis, meaning citizen. The term lacks one clear and unambiguous definition. According to renowned sociologists R. M. Maclver and Charles H. Page (1961: 408),civilization refers to ‘the whole mechanism and organisation, which man has devised in his endeavour to control the conditions of his life. It would include not only our systems of social organisation but also our techniques and our material instruments.’ Generally, the term is used to imply a particular type of culture that is characterised by a relative degree of sophistication of economy, polity and social structure. V. Gordon Childe (1951) has identified the following five primary characteristics of civilization related to aspects of human organisation:

• city settlement 
• labour specialisation 
• concentration of surpluses 
• class structure 
• state organisation 

Further, he has also identified the following five secondary characteristics of civilization related to aspects of material cultures: 

• monumental public works 
• long distance trade 
• standard monumental art work 
• writing 
• arithmetic, geometry and astronomy 

How is civilization different from culture? The distinction between culture and civilization is subjective and, therefore, not very clear. Nevertheless, scholars consider civilization as possessing certain attributes, which are greater than those characterising the so-called simple culture. Maclver and Page (1961) have identified many distinctions between the two. The most fundamental distinction is that while culture is directed to human’s control over nature; civilization, on the other hand, is ‘the techniques directed to the regulation of the behavior of human beings’. Some other distinctions between these two terms have been identified by Maclver and Page (1961: 408) as follows:

• Civilization has a precise standard of measurement, but not culture.
• Civilization is always advancing, but not culture.
• Civilization has passed on without effort, but not culture
• Civilization is borrowed without change or loss but not culture.

Hierarchy of Culture

The physical environment of the earth is an important factor in the study of culture. Human attitudes toward physical environment shape patterns of cultural traits and cultural complexes on the earth’s surface. A cultural trait is the method of handling a single concept or artifact, for example, how people plant seeds. However, cultures are not series of unrelated traits. Rather they are complex whole. They are integrated units in which all parts fit together causally. Thus, a cultural complex refers to a group of traits employed together in a more general activity, such as agricultural production. It is a complicated activity as it involves a number of cultural traits causally integrated into a cultural complex.

It is not possible to understand the distribution of one facet of culture without understanding the spatial variations of other facets of that culture in order to see how they are interrelated and integrated with one another.

Religious belief has potential to influence a group’s dressing and dietary behaviour as well as its house types. For example, Islam forbids consumption of liquor, pork and smoking, thereby influencing both the dietary and shopping patterns of its members.

The distributions of cultural traits and complexes on the earth’s surface are clearly visible in their diverse regional configurations at various geographical scales. Such regional configurations are expressed as cultural region, cultural area, cultural realm and cultural hearth.

A cultural region is a region occupied by people who have one or more cultural traits in common (i.e., formal cultural region); or a spatial unit that functions politically, socially or economically as a distinct entity (i.e., functional cultural region); or a region perceived to exist by its inhabitants (i.e., vernacular cultural region).

A cultural area is a composite formal cultural region. Cultural area is delimited on the basis of whole cultures or totality of traits displayed by a culture. Each culture area is divided into formal sub-cultures and has a nucleus, where it first took place. Because of the greater complexity of traits involved, cultural areas are characteristically even more arbitrarily delimited than are formal cultural regions based on fewer characteristics.

They are often based more on the geographers’ intuition, derived from intimate knowledge of an area, than on carefully marshaled facts. Example of a cultural area would be Awadh, Bundelkhand, Braj, Bhojpuri, Maithili and Magadhi.

A cultural realm is an area in which numerous artifacts or cultural complexes are adhered to by most of the population. The term cultural realm signifies a large area that has fundamental unity in the composition, arrangement, and integration of significant traits, which distinguishes it from other cultural realms. Cultural realms are in fact macro-regions, which are defined on the basis of the most dominant cultural traits.

A cultural hearth is a source area where a culture complex has become so well established and advanced that its attributes are passed to future generations within and outside the immediate hearth area. Historically, cultural hearths were repositories of human traditions, where cultural traditions became stabilised and in which the humans way of living defined the standard of what human living ought to be. Out of these hearths, rules of living, technologies, traditions, and human systems spread to other territories. Examples of major historically important cultural hearths are the Mesopotamia (Tigris-Euphrates rivers) in Iraq, the Nile Valley in Egypt, the Indus Valley in South Asia, the Hwang Ho (Yellow River) Valley in China. Examples of secondary cultural hearth are the Mayan civilization (northern Central America and Southern Mexico), the Aztec (Central Mexico), the Inca (developed during 1500 B. C. in the middle Andean Mountain areas in Peru and Bolivia) and the Bantu developed in West Africa.

Cultural Region: Meaning, Types, Origin, Formation and Persistence

A cultural region is an area occupied by people who share one or more cultural traits in common (language, religion, idea, material culture); or a spatial unit that functions politically, socially, technologically or economically as a distinct entity, or an area perceived by its inhabitants to be culturally distinct from its surrounding areas.

From above definition, three types of cultural regions can be identified - formal, functional and vernacular. A formal cultural region is a region inhabited by people who have one or more cultural traits in common (e.g. linguistic region). Formal cultural regions are characterised by cultural homogeneity in a given contiguous geographical area. Cultural geographers delimit formal cultural region by grouping people with similar cultural traits in a defined area. Cultural regionalisation is a tool cultural geographers use to describe spatial differences/variations in cultural traits. For example, an Oriya-language cultural region can be drawn on a map of India showing the distribution of speakers of different languages, and it would include the area where Oriya is spoken. An example of coconut farming region would describe the parts of India where coconut is a major crop. Nirmal Kumar 

Bose (1956), the famous anthropo-geographer based various material cultural traits to divide India into 18 cultural zones in India. These cultural regions are simplest levels of cultural regions based on single cultural trait. Cultural regions can be delimited on the bases of multiple related cultural traits or complex as well.

Functional cultural region, on the other hand, is a region that functions politically, socially, or culturally as a unit (e.g. district headquarters, zone of influence of a city, a temple, a factory). Functional cultural regions are based on nodes and their linkages with surroundings.

The vernacular or perceptual cultural region is a region perceived to exist by its inhabitants (based in the collective spatial perception/feelings of the population at large), as evidenced by the widespread acceptance and use of a regional names and nicknames. Examples of vernacular cultural region are Shekhawati region in Rajasthan and Braj region in Western Uttar Pradesh.

To understand the origin, formation and persistence of cultural region, we need to consider three characteristics traits of human beings, i.e., biological, ecological and social. Humans’ biological traits (i.e., sensory organs - eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin) fulfill his requirements of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching. Historically, these organs together influenced behaviours and habits of human beings and their methods of interaction with the environment.

Ecological environment also influences people’s culture. In the process of adapting themselves to the natural environment and establishing harmony or hegemony with it, human beings develop cultural traits. It should be noted that human's biological traits have remained more or less unchanged for a long time. In contrast, culture has always been evolving. It could be attributed to abilities of human beings to innovate new things in order to adjust themselves to the changing ecological environments of the earth.

As a social animal, human beings possess social and intellectual traits.

They interact with fellow human beings. Living in social group, they develop distinct language, literature, art, beliefs, style, ideologies and symbols.

Human beings have capacity to leam and invent new things to meet the needs and requirements of individuals and groups. Human beings have remarkable abilities to form splendid ideas out of their experiences and then act on the basis of these ideas. They can change not only physical environments; but they can knowingly change them in directions suggested by their experiences. It is primarily due to their social and intellectual abilities that human beings have reached present stage of cultural evolution by passing through the gathering, hunting and agricultural stages.

Cultural regions originate due to interaction of people (living in specific area) with specific social and intellectual traits with their surroundings.

When people with particular social and intellectual traits inhabit a geographically distinct region for a long time, they develop their own distinct cultural traits and complexes. A new trait, such as irrigated 

agriculture or plough, might be invented by people living in an area, and this could lead to increase crop yield and permanent settlement.

When particular cultural traits or cultural complexes are distributed consistently over a well defined part of the earth’s surface, they take the form of a cultural region. Cultural region is also formed around a functional node or centre, such as a city or a temple. A cultural region may also come into existence when people living in a contiguous area feel that they are culturally different from their surrounding areas. It should be noted that the distinctiveness of that cultural region comes from geographical environment or social and intellectual traits of the people or combination of both.

As mentioned above, cultural regions originate in specific geographical environments due to interaction between physical environment and people. River valleys have provided fertile grounds for the development of cultural hearth. For example, cities first originated in river valleys of the world, such as in Indus river valley (South Asia), Huang Ho valley (China), Nile river valley (Egypt) and Tigris and Euphrates river valleys (Mesopotamia). Other geographical regions, such as mountain valleys, plateau and island, have also witnessed development of cultural hearths. For example, the first farming villages were on the hill side above the river flood plain. Similarly, early civilizations blossomed in mountains and plateau as well, such as in Meso America (Mayan civilization), Mexico (Aztec civilization) and Peru and Bolivia (Inca civilization).

Cultural regions are not permanent. Their regional boundaries keep on either expanding or contracting. But some cultural regions may persist for long while others only for short time. A cultural region persists due to long period of persistent isolation or relative isolation. The isolation is created due to geographical or political barriers. Today, many minority and ethnic groups are struggling to preserve their established ways of life due to globalisation.

Problems of Delimitation of Cultural Regions of the World

According to Broek and Webb (1967), any division of the earth, including the division of the earth into cultural regions, involves following decisions: 

• Criteria - what criterion or criteria to be employed for defining cultural regions? 
• Dateline - because cultural regions are dynamic, what date is to be used for delimiting cultural regions?
• Scale - what spatial scale is to be employed for delimiting a cultural region? 
• Regional boundary - where are the boundary lines or zones to be placed?

Cultural geographers divide the earth into cultural regions. They select what seems to them the universally significant cultural traits or complexes and note their spatial variations to identify their spatial configuration. However, there is problem in identifying cultural traits and complexes, which are universally significant. Moreover, the traits and complexes that may be good indicator for one culture may be quite different from those characterising another. Therefore, cultural geographers study a cultural region in its totality - as a historically evolved individual entity.

Cultures are always in a state of flux. Territorial limits of cultural regions keep on expanding and contracting. Therefore, selecting a date line of preparing a map of cultural region is an issue to be decided by the geographers. A map of cultural region is like a still from a movie, an image true only for a specific cross-section of time.

The geographical scale of investigation of a culture is an important issue. If one is studying patterns of cultures of a part of the earth, such as the South East Asia, West Asia or Central Asia, one can make fine distinctions based on cultural traits and produce a map showing many cultural areas. On the other hand, when one is dealing with the cultural configurations of the entire world, then inevitably one must avoid details and ignore exceptions. It must give a generalised overview of patterns of cultures.

Elements of cultures are dynamic and fluid. Therefore, cultural boundaries are rarely sharp. One cultural region grades one into another in a continuum. Though a clear cultural divide may be visible on a map, but closer investigation reveals a transition zone where elements from two or more cultural regions mingle. For this reason, cultural geographers speak on cultural border zones rather than lines. Such border zones may vary in their width as no two traits display the same spatial distribution. Cultural geographers are interested in cores of cultural regions where the defining traits are strongest. Away from those cores, the defining traits gradually weaken and disappear and merge into another cultural region. Therefore, effort to precisely locate cultural boundaries may not always be a meaningful exercise.

Cultural geographers aim to identify and precisely locate cultural borders. Because cultures are fluid, such boundaries are rarely sharp, even if even a single cultural trait is being mapped. Most formal cultural regions have a core where the defining traits are strongest. Away from the core, the defining traits gradually weaken and disappear. Sharply defined formal cultural borders exist, they usually correspond to physical barriers or closed political boundaries that separate different cultural groups. But in most cases, culture blend gradually into one another through boundary zones. Cultural borders, whether zones or lines, often survive long after the forces that created them have vanished. Such lines are known as truce lines.

Despite several ambiguities in the concept of cultural region, it is a useful device to understand world cultural patterns. It provides a spatially generalised outline of patterns of cultures, which otherwise look messy.