Attending or watching sporting events on television is a major part of popular culture. The biggest sports spectacle in the United States is unquestionably the Super Bowl, the annual championship game of the National Football League, the country’s premier professional (American) football association. The Super Bowl is so broadly popular across the country that it functions as an unofficial national holiday (Figure 2.13). Only on Thanksgiving is more food consumed on a single day in the United States. Television broadcasts of the game commonly record the largest viewership of the year for any single event or program. Many observers have come to view the sport as a symbol of American national culture.

When we think of college sports, chances are football comes to mind first. Successful college football programs tend to define universities and draw national publicity unmatched by that earned from other sports or academic achievements. Universities, however, compete with one another in dozens of other sports. Most of these sports do not have the broad national appeal of football. Rather, the vast majority of sports sponsored by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) have distinctive regional associations. Frequently, these regional associations can be traced back in time to folk traditions emerging in specific places.

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Let’s look at just three of the dozens of sports that the NCAA sponsors for men in its Division I category: ice hockey, lacrosse, and volleyball. For each of these sports, a geographic pattern soon emerges: a clustering of universities that offer them.

Ice Hockey Beginning with ice hockey, there is a clear concentration of teams in the northern states east of the Rocky Mountains (Figure 2.14). Michigan counts 7 of the 59 college teams, while only one team, the University of Alabama-Huntsville, is located in the South. Only three teams may be found in the western United States, all of which are clustered around Denver, Colorado.

A clearly defined collegiate ice-hockey region thus exists in the northern United States. Furthermore, the number of ice hockey teams in the region—and the absence of the sport in other regions—are closely associated with the geographic origins and development of the sport. Modern ice hockey emerged in eastern Canada in the nineteenth century. Its invention appears to be rooted in the stick and ball games of the indigenous peoples of the region as well as winter folk traditions imported from Europe. Student enthusiasts formed the first ice hockey club with formal rules at Canada’s McGill University in 1877. The sport spread from there, restricted almost exclusively to areas that experienced winters long and cold enough to form outdoor ice hockey rinks. Neighborhood kids organized games whenever and wherever it was cold enough for a local pond or creek to freeze over (Figure 2.15). By the time technology made indoor ice rinks feasible anywhere, the regional cultural preferences had been already established.

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Lacrosse The NCAA’s 63 college lacrosse teams also exhibit a distinctive regional clustering, with the heaviest concentration found in the Northeast (Figure 2.16). As with ice hockey, lacrosse has flourished close to its point of geographic origin. It is derived from a game played by the indigenous peoples of eastern Canada. European Canadians created the formal rules for modern lacrosse in 1867 and intercollegiate competition followed soon thereafter. The Ivy League universities and private liberal arts colleges of the northeast United States established the first teams, followed by a few large public universities, such as the University of Michigan (Figure 2.17). At the college level, lacrosse is virtually unknown west of the Rocky Mountains.

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Volleyball Our final example, volleyball, has a history and regional pattern different from those of lacrosse and ice hockey. There are far fewer Division I college volleyball teams—only 33—and they are concentrated in three separate regions: the West Coast, the Midwest, and the Northeast (Figure 2.18). The game itself was invented by an educator/physician working for the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Massachusetts in 1896 as part of an adult health and fitness program.

Although the game has since spread throughout the United States and beyond, college-level competition developed a separate and unanticipated geographic pattern. Volleyball was increasingly associated with a particular environment and culture far from its Massachusetts origin and with a particular set of regional cultural values very different from those of the nineteenth-century YMCA. By the 1960s, volleyball, like surfing, had become symbolically associated with Southern California’s beach culture (Figure 2.19). As with hockey on winter days in the North, kids in Southern California spent their summer days playing pickup volleyball on the beach or at neighborhood outdoor sand courts. Today, there is a strong concentration of college teams in California, where 9 of the 33 Division I teams are located. While three separate regional concentrations exist, California universities dominate the sport. In 43 years of Division I championships, California teams have won all but eight championships and all but one of those teams is located in the southern half of the state. College sports are clearly useful for thinking about and identifying regional cultural patterns.

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Indigenous peoples generally live in areas with few roads or modern communications systems, such as mountainous areas, vast arid and semiarid regions, or large expanses of forest or wetlands. These concentrations of people constitute indigenous culture regions. Worldwide, large concentrations of indigenous populations exist outside of the strong influence of national cultures and the control of governments located in faraway capital cities. Control of indigenous regions by a central government is often weakened by the minimal infrastructure, rough topography, or harsh environmental conditions of the region. In many cases, indigenous peoples either fled or were forcibly removed by central governments to environmentally marginal regions, such as arid lands.

In the United States and Canada, for example, this geographic pattern of marginalization is particularly evident. In the United States, the central government has had a complex and often contradictory relationship with indigenous peoples, sometimes treating them as independent nations and at other times as second-class citizens. The way in which indigenous peoples are distributed in the United States reflects both the history of the east-to-west movement of European settlers and nineteenth-century government policies (Figure 2.20). For example, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was intended to make way for European settlers by relocating eastern Native American tribes west of the Mississippi River, many to Oklahoma. Western Native American tribes were also eventually forced onto government-created reservations, generally on the most unproductive and arid lands. Some of the larger reservation complexes in the arid West constitute an indigenous culture region (Figure 2.21).

The so-called Hill Tribes of South Asia are another good example of the regional marginalization of indigenous peoples. Mountain ranges, including the Chittagong Hills, the Assam Hills, and the Himalayas, surround the fertile valleys and deltas around which the ancient South Asian Hindu and Islamic civilizations were centered. Various indigenous peoples occupy these highland regions, which are remote from the lowland centers of authority and culturally distinct from them (Figure 2.22). A series of indigenous culture regions ringing the valleys of South Asia thus exists, occupied by what the British colonial authorities referred to as Hill Tribes. Most of these peoples practice some version of swidden agriculture, which involves multiyear cycles of forest clearing, planting, and fallowing (see Chapter 8). Most hold Christian or animist beliefs (see Chapter 7) and speak languages distinct from those spoken in the lowlands. A similar pattern of highland indigenous culture regions can also be identified in the countries of Southeast Asia, such as Myanmar and Thailand, where indigenous peoples such as the Shan and Karen have populations in the millions.

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Indigenous culture regions also exist in Central and South America. There is a distinct Mayan culture region that encompasses parts of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras (Figure 2.23). Concentrations of Mayan speakers are especially common in rugged highlands and tropical forests. In South America, another concentration of indigenous peoples exists in sections of the Andes Mountains. This area constituted the geographic core of the Inca civilization, which thrived between 1300 and 1533 C.E. and incorporated several major linguistic groups under its rule. Today, up to 55 percent of the national populations of Andean countries, such as Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, are indigenous. On the slopes and in the high valleys of the Andes, Quechua and Aymara speakers constitute an overwhelming majority, signifying an indigenous culture region (Figure 2.24).

Sexuality, as with all aspects of human culture, is expressed geographically. One of the most dynamic developments in cultural geography over the past two decades has been the emergence of a new field of study on sexuality and space, referred to as queer geography (or sometimes gay geography). The emergence of queer geography as a field of study reflects and is reflected in the increasing acceptance of lesbian, bisexual, gay, and transgendered (LBGT) identities in popular culture.

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