Innovation |  A culture area is a region of the world in which people share similar cultural
traits. Researchers may define a culture area by plotting the distribution of
a single cultural trait, such as maize agriculture, and uniting all the communities
that share this trait into a single cultural area. Alternatively, researchers
sometimes choose to group communities into a culture area because the communities
share several distinctive cultural traits, known as having a common cultural
complex. Culture area analysis has been used widely in both anthropology and
cultural geography because it facilitates comparisons between regions, assists
in the historical reconstruction of cultural development, and lends itself to
questions about the impact of the natural environment on the form of human cultures.
Although distinctions between regions based on culture are as old as mankind,
the roots of the culture area concept can be traced to Europe, where the work
of the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) inspired the development
of the Kulturkreise (cultural circles) school. Kulturkreise, which
attempted to reconstruct the diffusion, or spread, of cultural traits from a
few dominant cultural clusters, was associated with the German anthropologists
Leo Frobenius (1873-1938) and Fritz Graebner (1877-1934). In the early 19th
century, French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918) developed a
related concept, genre de vie (way of life), which he defined as the
pattern of living characteristic of certain cultures or livelihoods.
It was not in Europe, however, but in the United States that the concept of
culture area gained real social scientific cohesion. One impetus for this development
was the need to make sense of the growing body of ethnographic data produced
by early anthropological expeditions in the American West. In 1917 Clark Wissler
(1870-1947), an anthropologist with the American Museum of Natural History,
used the culture area concept to integrate what was known about Native American
communities. Wissler gathered together ethnographic data from a variety of sources
and used these data to group Native American tribes based on similarities and
differences in their subsistence systems, modes of transport, textiles, artwork
and religious practice. As a result of this effort, he discerned a distinct
geographic pattern, with groups living in proximity, or in similar natural environments,
sharing many cultural traits. Wissler eventually defined nine distinct Native
American culture areas, grouping tribes that shared significant traits. He authored
several maps [see illustration] showing the geographic dispersal of particular
Native American cultural traits. His work laid the foundation for subsequent
research on Native American cultural ecology.
In the mid-20th century, geographer Carl Sauer (1889-1975) reinvigorated the
culture area concept within the field of geography by synthesizing the ideas
of the European Kulturkreise school with the anthropological approaches
to culture area introduced to him by his colleagues at the University of California,
Berkeley, anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Robert Lowie. Sauer argued that
the diffusion of ideas from a few "cultural hearths," or cultural
centers, had been the driving force in human history (Sauer 1952). His work
inspired further research on the origin and spread of cultures within human
geography (Meinig 1965).
The classification of human groups into culture areas has been critiqued on
the grounds that the basis for these classifications, such as similar farming
systems or pottery styles, are always arbitrary. Despite this limitation, the
organization of human communities into cultural areas remains a common practice
throughout the social sciences. Today, the definition of culture areas is enjoying
a resurgence of practical and theoretical interest as social scientists conduct
research on processes of cultural globalization (Gupta and Ferguson 1997).
Image: Tlingit House with Painting and Totem Pole, Deserted
Cape Fox Village, Alaska, (1899) by Curtis S. Edwards. Courtesy of the University
of Washington Libraries. |
Related Works | Gupta, Akhil and James Ferguson. Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997). Kroeber, Alfred L. "The Cultural Area and Age Area Concepts of Clark Wissler." In Methods in Social Science. Pp. 248-265. Stuart A. Rice, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931). Meinig, D.W. "The Mormon Cultural Region: Strategies and Patterns in the Geography of the American West, 1847-1964." Annals of the Association of American Geographers 55 (2): 191-21 (1965). Sauer, Carl O. Agricultural Origins and Dispersals. (New York: American Geographical Society, 1952). |
The
map, which is designed to highlight similarities in food gathering
techniques, lists seven culture areas: the woodsmen of the eastern
forests, the hunters of the plains, the Navaho shepherds, the Pueblo
farmers, the desert dwellers, the seed gatherers and the northern
fishermen. A detail from the map is shown at right.