APHG: Chapter 4 Vocabulary

Culture

The sum total of the knowledge, attitudes, and habitual behaivioral patterns shared and transmitted by the members of a society. This is anthropologist Ralph Linton's definition: hundreds of others exist.

Folk Culture

Cultural traits such as dress modes, dwellings, traditions, and institutions of usually small, traditional communities.

Popular Culture

Cultural traits such as dress, diet, and music that identify and are part of today's changeable, urban-based, media-influenced western societies.

Local Culture

Group of people in a particular place who see themselves as a collective or a community, who share experiences, customs, and traits, and who work to preserve those traits and customs in order to claim uniqueness and to distinguish themselves from others.

Material Culture

The art, housing, clothing, sports, dances, foods, and other similar items constructed or created by a group of people.

Nonmaterial Culture

The beliefs, practices, aesthetics, and values of a group of people.

Hierarchial Diffusion

A form of diffusion in which an idea or innovation spreads by passing first among the most connected places or peoples. An urban hierarchial is usually involved, encouraging the leapfrogging of innovations over wide areas, with geographic distance a less

Hearth

The area where an idea or cultural trait originates.

Assimilate

The process through which people lose originally differentiating traits, such as dress, speech particularities or mannerisms, when they come into contact with another society or culture. Often used to describe immigrant adaptation to new places of residen

Custom

Practice routinely followed by a group of people.

Cultural Appropriation

The process by which cultures adopt customs and knowledge from other cultures and use them for thier own benefit.

Neolocalism

The seeking out of the regional culture and reinvigoration of it in response to the uncertainty of the modern world.

Ethnic Neighborhood

Neighborhood, typically situated in a larger metropolitan city and constructed by or comprised of a local culture, in which a local culture can practice its customs.

Commodification

The process through which something is given monetary value; occurs when a good or idea that previously was not regarded as an object to be bought and sold is turned into something that has a particular price and that can be traded in a market economy.

Authenticity

In the context of local cultures or customs, the accuracy with which a single stereotypical or typecast image or experience conveys an otherwise dynamic and complex local culture or its customs

Distance Decay

The effects of distance on interaction, generally the greater the distance the less interaction.

Time-Space Compression

A term associated with the work of David Harvey that refers to the social and psychological effects of living in a world in which time-space convergance has rapidly reached a high level of intensity.

Reterritorialization

With respect to popular culture, when people within a place start to produce an aspect of popular culture themselves, doing so in the context of their local culture and making it their own.

Cultural Landscape

The visible imprint of human activity and culture on the landscape. The layers of buildings, forms, and artifacts sequentially imprinted on the landscape by the activities of various human occupants.

Placelessness

Defined by the geographer Edward Relph as the loss of uniqueness of place in the cultural landscape so that one place looks like the next.

Global-Local Continuum

The notion that what happens at the global scale has a direct effect on what happens at the local scale, and vise versa. This ideal posits that the world is comprised of an interconnected series of relationships that extend across space.

Glocalization

The process by which people in a local place mediate and alter regional, national, and global processes

Folk-Housing Regions

A region in which the housing stock predominately reflects styles of building that are particular to the culture of the people who have long inhabited the area.

Diffusion Routes

The spatial trajectory through which cultural traits or other phenomena spread.