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Concept
Cultural area
Summary
In anthropology and geography, a cultural area, cultural region, cultural sphere, or culture area refers to a geography with one relatively homogeneous human activity or complex of activities (culture). Such activities are often associated with an ethnolinguistic group and with the territory it inhabits. Specific cultures often do not limit their geographic coverage to the borders of a nation state, or to smaller subdivisions of a state.
A culture area is a concept in cultural anthropology in which a geographic region and time sequence (age area) is characterized by shared elements of environment and culture.
A precursor to the concept of culture areas originated with museum curators and ethnologists during the late 1800s as means of arranging exhibits, combined with the work of taxonomy. The American anthropologists Clark Wissler and Alfred Kroeber further developed this version of the concept on the premise that cultural areas represent longstanding cultural divisions. This iteration of the concept is sometimes criticized as arbitrary, but the organization of human communities into cultural areas remains a common practice throughout the social sciences.
Cultural geography also utilizes the concept of culture areas. Cultural geography originated within the Berkeley School, and it is primarily associated with Carl O. Sauer and his colleagues. Sauer viewed culture as "an agent within a natural area that was a medium to be cultivated to produce the cultural landscape." Sauer's concept was later criticized as deterministic, and geographer Yi-Fu Tuan and others proposed versions that enabled scholars to account for phenomenological experience as well. This revision became known as humanistic geography. The period within which humanistic geography is now known as the "cultural turn."
The definition of culture areas is enjoying a resurgence of practical and theoretical interest as social scientists conduct more research on processes of cultural globalization.
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