Culture: Meaning, Types, Aspects, and Hierarchy

• Culture is the learned, shared and transmitted way of life of a group: its ideas, institutions and material creations. It is the main force through which people transform the earth’s surface into cultural landscapes.
• The world shows immense cultural diversity. Groups large and small occupy distinct areas and leave observable imprints on them: settlement forms, house types, field patterns, language, worship and economic behaviour.
• Cultural geography studies these imprints spatially. It describes cultures as they appear on the ground and traces their origin, formation, persistence and diffusion.
  • It builds on the geography of population, race, religion and language. It leads on to cultural regions, world culture realms and the effects of globalisation on culture.

Culture: Meaning and Nature

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Meaning of Culture

• Etymology: the English word comes from the Latin cultura, from colere, “to till or cultivate”. The idea is the cultivation and refinement of human life, as a field is cultivated.
  • The Sanskrit equivalent sanskriti carries the same sense of refinement.
• There is no single agreed definition. Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952) reviewed 164 definitions. Three short descriptions recur:
  • “the total way of life of a people”;
  • “learned and shared behaviour“;
  • “a people’s design for living“.
• Edward Burnett Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1871) gave the classic definition: culture is the complex whole of knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and every other capability and habit acquired by people as members of society.
• Carl O. Sauer (The Morphology of Landscape, 1925) gave the geographer’s view: “Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape the result.”
  • A group works on its natural area over time. Fields, villages, roads and shrines are the forms its culture leaves behind.
• Melville J. Herskovits called culture the man-made part of the environment.
• In short, culture covers all learned behaviour, values, beliefs, norms and material creations shared by a society and passed on across generations.

Characteristics of Culture

• Learned, not inherited: acquired through socialisation, not carried in genes.
• Shared: a single person’s habit becomes culture only when most members of a group share it.
• Symbolic: it rests on language and symbols, which let ideas be stored and passed on.
• Transmitted across generations, so it accumulates.
• Adaptive: it lets groups adjust to their environment, from the snow house of the Inuit to the stilt houses of Assam’s flood plains.
• Integrated: its parts are interlinked, so a change in one part affects the others.
• Dynamic: it changes through invention, contact and diffusion and globalisation.

Types of Culture

Material and Non-material Culture

• Culture is commonly divided into two overlapping and interdependent categories.
• Non-material culture covers the intangible side of life: learned behaviour and mental constructs.
  • It includes thoughts, beliefs, values, attitudes and emotions, and also social norms, traditions and institutions.
  • It is built up through continuous learning and social interaction.
• Material culture covers the tangible creations of people, collectively called artefacts (literally “things made by human skill”).
  • It includes tools and technology, farm practices and implements, houses and settlements, clothing and crafts, and industrial systems.
  • It is visible, concrete and measurable. It reflects the technological and economic level of a society and forms most of the visible cultural landscape.
• Julian Huxley (1955) divided culture into three subsystems, which refine this two-way split:
  • Mentifacts: the ideas and values at the core of a culture: language, religion, beliefs, ideologies, myths, art and music.
  • Sociofacts: institutions and social organisation, with their norms and group behaviour: family, kinship, marriage systems, caste, the village community, the state.
  • Artefacts: material objects made to meet material needs.
• Mentifacts change slowest; artefacts change fastest. People adopt a new tractor long before they change their kinship rules.

• Other common distinctions:
  • Folk culture belongs to small, rural, homogeneous groups. Popular culture belongs to large, urban, heterogeneous societies and spreads through mass media. Their contrast is a globalisation theme.
  • A subculture is a group within a larger culture with distinct traits of its own, such as a tribal community or an occupational caste.

Culture and the Geographical Environment

• Geography studies material and non-material culture from a spatial perspective. It asks how culture interacts with its physical setting.
• Culture is closely tied to the environment, because societies continually adapt to their surroundings:
  • Food habits follow climate and crops: rice and fish in Bengal and Keralam (Kerala), wheat in Punjab, millets in the dry Deccan.
  • Clothing differs between deserts, mountains and coasts: loose cotton in the plains, wool in Ladakh.
  • House types respond to rainfall, temperature and terrain: steep sloping roofs in Keralam and the North-East, flat mud roofs in Rajasthan and Ladakh, round bhunga huts in Kutch.
• Cultural evolution proceeds through adaptation to the environment, through living in harmony with nature, and at times through domination of it.
• The environment sets possibilities, not commands: groups in similar settings often develop different cultures. This is the debate over determinism and possibilism.
• Distinct cultural systems therefore grow out of distinct geographical settings, which produces regional cultural diversity.

Aspects of Culture

• Tylor’s definition is still widely used because it joins the material and non-material sides of culture. It points to three aspects.

Material or Physical Aspects

• These are the concrete, tangible creations of people, the visible expressions of culture in space.
  • Tools and instruments; methods of house building and settlement forms; clothing, footwear and devices; techniques of production and livelihood.
• They are called cultural objects, the material evidence of human creativity and adaptation.
• They include everything people have made from the earliest times to the present, and so record the evolution of technology and economy.

Hidden or Symbolic Aspects

• These are the intangible means of communication and symbolic expression that a person learns as a member of society.
  • Language, dialects and scripts; alphabets and other codes; myths, folklore and beliefs.
  • Religious symbols: the swastika, the cross, the crescent, the khanda.
  • Natural symbols: the sun, moon, sacred trees (the peepal), rivers and rocks.
• Symbols carry deep shared meanings of identity, belief and worldview. Culture must be read through these hidden meanings as well as through visible objects.

Acquired Aspects

• These are the learned behaviours, habits and capabilities acquired as members of society.
  • Norms and values; knowledge and education; art, morality and belief; law and institutional practice.
• They show that culture is acquired socially, not biologically, which makes it dynamic.

Culture and Civilisation

Meaning of Civilisation

• Culture and civilisation are closely related, but the origin and meaning of civilisation as a concept remain much debated.
• The word comes from the Latin civis, “citizen”, and points to an organised, urban, state-based social life.
• Robert M. MacIver and Charles H. Page (Society, 1949) defined civilisation as the whole mechanism and organisation that people have devised to control the conditions of their life.
  • It includes systems of social organisation, techniques and the material instruments used to shape life.
• Civilisation is usually seen as a more complex stage of cultural development, with an advanced economy, organised polity and structured society.
• Colonial bias: during the colonial period Europeans often labelled other societies “uncivilised” or “barbaric”. Modern scholarship rejects this ranking.
  • There is no inherent difference in worth between “civilised” and other cultures. Some only show greater complexity of organisation.

Characteristics of Civilisation

• V. Gordon Childe (The Urban Revolution, 1950) listed ten criteria of the first civilisations, drawn from Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Indus. They are often grouped into two sets.
• Primary (economic and social organisation):
  • Cities of large size and density.
  • Full-time specialists: craftsmen, merchants, priests, officials.
  • Concentration of surplus, collected as tax or tribute.
  • A ruling class and class structure.
  • State organisation based on residence rather than kinship.
• Secondary (achievements):
  • Monumental public buildings.
  • Long-distance trade.
  • Standardised art and architecture.
  • Writing.
  • Exact sciences: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and the calendar.
• The Harappan civilisation (mature phase c. 2600–1900 BCE) meets most of them: planned cities, a granary-and-citadel order, standard weights and bricks, an undeciphered script and trade with Mesopotamia.

Difference between Culture and Civilisation

• The distinction is not absolute, and the two terms overlap. MacIver summed it up: culture is what we are, civilisation is what we have.
• The most basic contrast: culture relates to human control over nature and the expression of values; civilisation refers to the techniques and systems that regulate behaviour and organise society.

Hierarchy of Culture

Cultural Trait, Complex and System

• The physical environment and human response to it produce cultural traits and complexes across space.
• Cultural trait: the smallest unit of culture, a single item of behaviour or a single object.
  • Examples: the method of sowing seed or transplanting paddy, a particular food habit, wearing a turban, a harvest song, a particular plough.
• Culture is not a heap of isolated traits. Traits are interrelated and function together.
• Cultural complex: a group of related traits that function together around one activity.
  • Example: the wet-rice complex of monsoon Asia combines nursery beds, transplanting, bunded fields, the buffalo, the monsoon calendar and harvest festivals such as Pongal, Bihu and Nabanna.
• Cultural system: a set of interlocking complexes that share a common base and give a group its overall identity.
  • Example: the agrarian culture system of the Kaveri delta joins the wet-rice complex, temple-centred village life, the Tamil language and its kinship rules.
• No element can be understood alone. Cultural parts are interdependent and spatially linked.
  • Religious belief, for instance, shapes diet (the taboo on beef or pork, the prohibition of alcohol, vegetarianism among Jains), dress, house plans and settlement morphology, such as temple- or mosque-centred villages.

Spatial Expression of Culture

• The spread of traits and complexes over the earth produces regional patterns at several scales.
• Cultural region: an area whose people share common cultural traits.
  • Formal region: marked by measurable uniformity of one or more traits, such as language or religion.
  • Functional region: organised by interaction around a node, such as a city’s market area or a pilgrimage centre’s field, and often expressed in economic or political organisation.
  • Vernacular region: based on people’s perception and sense of identity, such as “North India”, “South India” or the Braj country.
  • Regions form, persist and blur at their edges over time, which makes cultural regions hard to delimit.
• Cultural area: a broader, composite formal region defined by the totality of cultural traits, not by one trait.
  • It has a core or nucleus where the culture first matured, and contains sub-cultural regions.
  • Its boundaries are less precise and more subjective. Delimiting it depends on field understanding as much as on statistics.
  • Indian examples are the Awadh, Bundelkhand, Braj, Bhojpuri, Mithila (Maithili) and Magadh culture areas of the Ganga plain.
• Cultural realm: the largest unit, a macro-region in which several culture complexes are shared by most of the population.
  • It is a broad zone of cultural unity, set apart by the composition, arrangement and integration of its traits.
  • It is defined by dominant characteristics such as a major religion or language family. The Occidental, Islamic, Indic and East Asian culture realms are examples.
• Cultural hearth: the source area where a culture first developed and from which it spread outward.
  • Hearths are centres of innovation and diffusion and long-lived repositories of tradition.
  • Primary hearths: Mesopotamia (Tigris–Euphrates, Iraq), the Nile valley (Egypt), the Indus valley (South Asia) and the Huang He (Yellow River) valley (China).
  • Secondary hearths include the Maya (Central America), Aztec (Mexico) and Inca (Andes) civilisations, and the Bantu hearth of West–Central Africa.

The Ladder of Culture

• The hierarchy is a nested structure, rising in scale and generality: trait → complex → system → region → area → realm.
• The hearth stands apart from this ladder. It is the point of origin from which a culture spreads, not its highest level.
• The ladder links micro-level practices (traits), their integration into complexes and systems, and their spatial expression in regions, areas and realms.

Diffusion of Culture

Hearth and Diffusion

• Cultural elements usually originate in a hearth and spread through migration, trade, conquest, missions and communication. Diffusion is a central process of cultural change.
• Religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam began in small hearths and later spread across continents.
  • Buddhism arose in the middle Ganga plain. Today most Buddhists live outside India, in East and Southeast Asia.
• Bhojpuri language and culture, from western Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, travelled with indentured labourers from the 1830s to Mauritius, Fiji, Suriname, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.
• Diffusion also spreads farming practices, fashions and industrial and technological innovations.
• Torsten Hägerstrand (Innovationsförloppet ur korologisk synpunkt, 1953; English translation Innovation Diffusion as a Spatial Process, 1967) turned the study of diffusion into a measurable spatial science.

Types of Diffusion

• Relocation diffusion: people carry a trait as they migrate. The trait appears in a new, often distant place, while it may weaken at the source.
  • Examples: Bhojpuri culture in Mauritius and Fiji; Sikh gurdwaras in Canada and the UK; Parsi culture brought from Persia to Gujarat.
• Expansion diffusion: the trait spreads outward through a population, and the number of adopters grows while the trait stays strong in the hearth. It takes three forms:
  • Contagious diffusion: spread from person to person and place to place, like an epidemic. Distance is the controlling factor.
    • Examples: the spread of a new crop variety from village to village, or of a rumour or a folk song.
  • Hierarchical diffusion: spread down a hierarchy of places or people, from large cities to smaller towns, or from elites to the masses. It skips the countryside in between.
    • Examples: mobile phones and the internet, fashion trends, and earlier the spread of English education through the colonial port cities.
    • Reverse hierarchical diffusion runs upward, as when a folk music style or a rural festival becomes urban fashion.
  • Stimulus diffusion: the underlying idea spreads, but the trait itself is reworked by the receiving culture. Alfred L. Kroeber (1940) named the process.
    • Examples: Sequoyah’s Cherokee syllabary (about 1821), inspired by English writing but built on new principles; the vegetarian menus of global fast-food chains in India.

Hägerstrand’s Model of Spatial Diffusion

• Hägerstrand studied the spread of farm innovations such as pasture subsidies and tuberculosis control of cattle in central Sweden. He showed that adoption follows regular spatial rules.
• Neighbourhood effect: people adopt an innovation after face-to-face contact with earlier adopters, so adoption clusters near the first adopters.
• Distance decay: the chance of adoption falls with distance from the innovation centre.
• Four stages of an innovation wave:
  • Primary stage: adoption begins in a few centres, with sharp contrasts between them and remote areas.
  • Diffusion stage: new centres appear and the innovation spreads rapidly from them.
  • Condensing stage: adoption becomes similar everywhere, as gaps fill.
  • Saturation stage: growth slows and stops at a ceiling.
• Over time, cumulative adoption traces an S-shaped (logistic) curve: slow start, rapid middle, flattening top.
• Barriers slow or stop diffusion:
  • Absorbing barriers stop it completely.
  • Permeable barriers let part of it through.
  • Reflecting barriers deflect it elsewhere.
  • Barriers may be physical (mountains, deserts, seas), cultural (language, religion, taboos), economic (cost) or political (borders, bans).
• Indian example: the high-yielding wheat and rice varieties of the Green Revolution (from 1966). They spread first in irrigated, well-connected districts of Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. Their spread to rain-fed eastern and central India was slow, because of economic and environmental barriers: smallholdings, poor irrigation and weak credit.

Factors Affecting Innovation Diffusion

• Distance from the hearth, and the cost and time of overcoming it.
• Position in the settlement hierarchy: large, well-connected places adopt first.
• Information networks: personal contacts, extension workers, media and the internet.
• Receptivity of the receiving culture: its values, literacy, risk-taking and the fit between the innovation and existing practice.
• Economic capacity: the ability to pay for and use the innovation.
• Barriers: physical, linguistic, religious, political and legal.
• The innovation itself: its relative advantage, simplicity and visibility.
• Today digital networks compress distance. Many innovations, such as UPI payments in India, spread hierarchically and contagiously at once, from metros to small towns within a few years.
• Diffusion is only one route of cultural change. Acculturation, assimilation, syncretism and revival follow when cultures meet, and globalisation now speeds up all of them.