Chapter 4 Vocabulary Culture

  1. Artifact: Any item, made by humans, that represents a material aspect of culture
  2. Built environment: The man-made surroundings that provide the setting for human activity, ranging in scale from personal shelter to neighborhoods to the large-scale civic surroundings.
  3. Core-domain-sphere model: The place where concentration of culture traits that characterizes a region is greatest.
  4. Cultural complex: The group of traits that define a particular culture.
  5. Cultural convergence: The contact and interaction of one culture to another.
  6. Cultural hearth: Locations on earth’s surface where specific cultures first arose.
  7. Cultural landscape: Modifications to the environment by humans, including the built environment and agricultural systems, that reflect aspects if their culture
  8. Cultural realm: The entire region throughout which a culture prevails. Criteria that may be chosen to define culture realms include religion, language, diet, customs, or economic development.
  9. Cultural region: a region defined by similar culture traits and cultural landscape features.
  10. Cultural trait: The specific customs that are part of the everyday life of a particular culture, such as language, religion, ethnicity, social institutions, and aspects of popular culture.
  11. Cultural/environmental perception: The concept that people of different culture will definitely observe and interpret their environment and make different decision about its nature, potentiality and use.
  12. Custom: Practices followed by the people of a particular cultural group.
  13. Environmental determinism: A doctrine that claims that cultural traits are formed and controlled by environmental conditions.
  14. Expansion diffusion: the spread of an innovation or an idea through a population in an area
  15. Folk culture (folkways): Culture traditionally practiced by a small, homogeneous, rural group living in relative isolation from other groups.
  16. Food attraction: Reasons certain culture/region eat certain types of food.
  17. Habit: a repetitive act that a particular individual performs.
  18. Material culture: The physical manifestations of human activities; includes tools ,campsites, art, and structures. The most durable aspects of culture
  19. Mentifact: The central, enduring elements of a culture expressing its values and beliefs, including language, religion, folklore, and etc.
  20. Popular culture: Dynamic culture based in large, heterogeneous societies permitting considerable individualism, innovation, and change; having a money-based economy, division of labor into professions, secular institutions of control, and weak interpersonal ties; and producing and consuming machine-made goods.
  21. Possibilism: The theory that the physical may set limits on human actions, but people have the ability to adjust to the physical environment and choose a course of action from many alternatives.
  22. Relocation diffusion: sequential diffusion process in which the items being diffused are transmitted by their carrier agents as they evacuate the old areas and relocate the new ones
  23. Sociofact: The institutions and links between individuals and groups that unite a culture, including family structure and political, educational and religious institutions.
  24. Taboo: a restriction on a behavior imposed by a social custom.
  25. Uniform Landscape: the spatial expression of a popular custom in one location that will be similar to another.
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