Many geographers are interested in the economic, social, and cultural practices of a people, and in the spatial patterns these factors create. Cultural geography focuses on culture as a complex of important distinguishing characteristics of human societies. Culture comprises everything people use to live that is not directly part of biological inheritance. Culture is represented by the ideas, materials, methods, and social arrangements that people have invented and passed on to subsequent generations, such as methods of producing food and shelter. Culture includes language, music, tools and technology, clothing, gender roles, belief systems, and moral codes, such as those prescribed in Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity.

A group of people who share a location, a set of beliefs, a way of life, a technology, and usually a common ancestry and sense of common history form an ethnic group. The term culture group is often used interchangeably with ethnic group. Both of the concepts of culture and ethnicity are imprecise, especially as they are popularly used. For instance, as part of the modern globalization process, migrating people often move well beyond their customary cultural or ethnic boundaries to cities or even distant countries. In these new places they take on many new ways of life and beliefs—their culture actually changes, yet they still may identify with their cultural or ethnic origins.

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The Kurds in Southwest Asia are an example of the tenacity of this ethnic or cultural group identity. Long before the U.S. war in Iraq, the Kurds were asserting their right to create their own country in the territory where they have lived as nomadic herders since before the founding of Islam. Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey now claim parts of the traditional Kurdish area. Many Kurds are now educated urban dwellers, living and working in modern settings in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, or even London and New York, yet they actively support the cause of establishing a Kurdish homeland. Although urban Kurds think of themselves as ethnic Kurds and are so regarded in the larger society, they do not follow the traditional Kurdish way of life. We could argue that these urban Kurds have a new identity within the Kurdish culture or ethnic group. Or they may be in a transcultural position, moving from one culture to another.

Another problem with the imprecision of the concept of culture is that it is often applied to a very large group that shares only the most general of characteristics. For example, one often hears the terms American culture, African American culture, or Asian culture. In each case, the group referred to is far too large to share more than a few broad characteristics.

It might fairly be said, for example, that U.S. culture is characterized by beliefs that promote individual rights, autonomy, and individual responsibility. But when we look at specifics, just what constitutes the rights and responsibilities of the individual are quite debatable. In fact, American culture encompasses many subcultures that share some of the core set of beliefs but disagree over parts of the core and over a host of other matters. The same is true, in varying degrees, for all other regions of the world. When many culture groups live in close association, the society may be called multicultural.

Occasionally you will hear someone say, “After all is said and done, people are all alike,” or “People ultimately all want the same thing.” It is a heartwarming sentiment, but an oversimplification. True, we all want food, shelter, health, love, and acceptance; but culturally, people are not all alike, and that is one of the qualities that makes the study of geography interesting. We would be wise not to expect or even to want other people to be like us. Cultural diversity has helped humans to be successful and adaptable animals. The various cultures serve as a bank of possible strategies for responding to the social and physical challenges faced by the human species. The reasons for differences in behavior from one culture to the next are usually complex, but they are often related to differences in values. Consider the following vignette that contrasts the values and norms (accepted patterns of behavior based on values) held by modern and urban individualistic cultures with those held by rural, community-oriented cultures.

If culture groups have different sets of values and standards, does that mean that there are no overarching human values or standards? This question increasingly worries geographers, who try to be sensitive both to the particularities of place and to larger issues of human rights. Those who lean too far toward appreciating difference could end up tacitly accepting inhumane behavior, such as the oppression of minorities or violence against women. Acceptance of difference does not preclude judgments of extreme customs or points of view. Nonetheless, although it is important to take a stand against cruelty of all sorts, deciding when and where to take that stand is rarely easy.

The religions of the world are formal and informal institutions that embody value systems. Most have roots deep in history, and many include a spiritual belief in a higher power (such as God, Yahweh, or Allah) as the underpinning for their value systems. Today, religions often focus on reinterpreting age-old values for the modern world. Some formal religious institutions—such as Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity—proselytize; that is, they try to extend their influence by converting others. Others, such as Judaism and Hinduism, accept converts only reluctantly. Informal religions, often called belief systems, have no formal central doctrine and no firm policy on who may or may not be a practitioner. The fact that many people across the world combine informal religious beliefs with their more formal religious practices, of whatever persuasion, accounts for the very rich array of personal beliefs found in the world today.

Religious beliefs are often reflected in the landscape. For example, settlement patterns often demonstrate the central role of religion in community life: village buildings may be grouped around a mosque, a temple, a synagogue, or a church, and the same can be said for urban neighborhoods. In some places, religious rivalry is a major feature of the landscape. Certain spaces may be clearly delineated for the use of one group or another, as in Northern Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods.

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Religion has often been used to wield power. For example, during the era of European colonization, religion (Christianity) was used as a way to impose a change of attitude on conquered people.

Figure 1.30 shows the distribution of the major religious traditions on Earth today; it demonstrates some of the religious consequences of colonization. Note, for instance, the distribution of Roman Catholicism in the parts of the Americas, Africa, and Southeast Asia, all places colonized by European Catholic countries.

Religion can also spread through trade contacts. In the seventh and eighth centuries, Islamic people used a combination of trade and political power (and less often, actual conquest) to extend their influence across North Africa, throughout Central Asia, and eventually into South and Southeast Asia (see the Figure 6.15 map).

Language is one of the most important criteria used in delineating cultural regions. The modern global pattern of languages reflects the complexities of human interaction and isolation over several hundred thousand years. Between 2500 and 3500 languages are spoken on Earth today, some by only a few dozen people in isolated places. Many languages have several dialects—regional variations in grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary.

The geographic pattern of languages has continually shifted over time as people have interacted through trade and migration. The pattern changed most dramatically around 1500, when the languages of European colonists began to replace the languages of the people they conquered. For this reason, English, Spanish, Portuguese, or French are spoken in large patches of the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Today, with increasing trade and instantaneous global communication, a few languages have become dominant. English is now the most important language of international trade, but Arabic, Spanish, Chinese, Hindi, and French are also widely used (Figure 1.31). At the same time, other languages are becoming extinct because children no longer learn them within families.

Like ideas about gender roles, ideas about race affect human relationships everywhere on Earth. However, while race is of enormous social significance across the world, biologists tell us that from a scientific standpoint, race is a meaningless concept! The characteristics we popularly identify as race markers—skin color, hair texture, and face and body shape—have no significance as biological categories. All people now alive in the world are members of one species, Homo sapiens sapiens. For any supposed racial trait, such as skin color or hair texture or facial features, there are wide variations within human groups. Meanwhile, many invisible biological characteristics, such as blood type and DNA patterns, cut across skin color distributions and other so-called racial attributes and are shared across what are commonly viewed as different races. In fact, over the last several thousand years there has been such massive gene flow among moving human populations that no modern group presents a discrete set of biological characteristics. Although any two of us may look quite different, from the biological point of view we are all simply Homo sapiens sapiens and are closely related.

Some of the easily visible features of particular human groups evolved to help them adapt to environmental conditions. For example, biologists have shown that people with darker skin (containing a high proportion of protective melanin pigment) evolved in regions close to the equator, where sunlight is most intense (Figure 1.32). All humans need the nutrient vitamin D, and sunlight striking the skin helps the body absorb vitamin D. Too much of the vitamin, however, can result in improper kidney functioning. Dark skin absorbs less vitamin D than light skin and thus would be a protective adaptation in equatorial zones. In higher latitudes, where the sun’s rays are more dispersed, light skin facilitates the sufficient absorption of vitamin D; darker-skinned people at these higher latitudes may need to supplement vitamin D to be sure they get enough, since D deficiencies can result in several health risks. Meanwhile, light-skinned people with little protective melanin in their skin—if they live in equatorial or high-intensity sunlit zones (parts of Australia, for example)—will need to protect against too much vitamin D, serious sunburn, and skin cancer. Similar correlations have been observed between skin color, sunlight, and another essential vitamin, folate, which if deficient can result in birth defects.

Over time, race has acquired enormous social and political significance as humans from different parts of the world have encountered each other in situations of unequal power. Racism—the belief that genetic factors, usually visually apparent ones such as skin color, are a primary determinant of human abilities and even cultural traits—has often been invoked to justify the enslavement of particular groups, or confiscation of their land and resources. Race and its implications in North America will be covered in Chapter 2, and the topic will be discussed in several other world regions as well (see also a TED—Technology, Entertainment, and Design—talk by anthropologist Nina Jablonski, at http://tinyurl.com/l7wg7m).

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