 You are clear for launch. And with that, shut down your visors, O2 on, and prepare for ignition to O2. You can copy that and um... Hey, Mr. Roochoff here. So this is our first lesson in our unit on the fundamentals of human geography. Now remember from our introduction to geography lesson, that human geography is the study of the human characteristics to the Earth and how spatial relationships define them. And when we talk about human characteristics, what we'll learn is that the human characteristics are best described when we start looking at its culture. And that is the focus of this lesson. So what is culture? Well, culture is the total knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors learned and passed by members of a group. In other words, culture addresses all we know, all what we think, and all of what we do. Within the culture it includes what we eat, where we sleep, who we worship, how we interact with our family, how we speak, how we organize ourselves and our existence within groups, and how we write, paint, or draw and so much more. Culture includes everything we are and everything we do. Now there are some terms we need to know when we talk about culture. The first is society. Now there are several different definitions for this, but I think the best is that this is the aggregate of people, which means all the people who are living together in a more or less ordered community. So when we talk about a society, we're talking about a group of people that have come together and they've organized themselves. And they've organized themselves maybe through laws or maybe a family code or a set of rules. Now within a society, there can be ethnic groups. An ethnic group is a group that shares common customs or common heritage. And what is interesting is ethnicity is a cultural construct. It is not biological. In fact, studies of DNA have revealed that there are more differences within people of an ethnic group than there are between different ethnic groups. Ethnicity is cultural. An ethnic group really is a group of people who share the same values and well culture. But as we begin learning about cultures different than our own, we need to defend ourselves against something called ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is the idea that your group, your own culture is better than the others. There is probably nothing that is more separated the people of the world and is created as much conflict as ethnocentrism. Now the problem is it's so easy to be ethnocentric. What if I told you that some people in South Korea will not write the names of other people in red if they're still alive? Does that sound odd? Okay, then what about the people in Karnataka, India where Hindus and Muslims would toss babies off of a 30 foot high balcony into the blankets held by villagers below in order to bring the children good health and good luck? Still on face? Okay, I got one for you. Let's talk about the people of the Yanomani tribe that is in the Amazon rainforest between Venezuela and Brazil. When adults die, they will wrap their body in their leaves and let insects basically eat at the flush. After a month or so, what they will do is they'll gather the bones, they'll grind up the bones, they'll mix it into a banana soup, and everyone in the village will consume it. Now, how easy is it to pass judgment into these cultural practices thinking that maybe your own culture is even better? Pretty easy, but that is ethnocentrism and this is the reason why the Spaniards judged the Aztecs when they found out that they were sacrificing humans or the Romans looked down at a group of Jews and Judea who professed of a man who came back from the dead and would celebrate him by drinking and eating his blood in his body of God. So as we continue in this course, I'm going to ask you to be on the guard against ethnocentrism. You don't have to agree with the practices of another culture but be wary of judging another culture as not being quite as good as your own. But there are five things we should know about culture. First of all, it is all-encompassing, it is learned, it's shared, it's dynamic, and it is symbolic. Now, from the definition of culture, we have already touched on that culture is all-encompassing. It is the total knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs of a group. You cannot get away from culture. Culture envelopes each and every one of us and touches every aspect thereof lies, everything we are and everything we do is shaped by culture. But we should also understand that culture is learned necessarily that culture is something we learned in school. For example, your first language, whether it was English or Spanish, wasn't learned at school. It was learned from your friends and family around you from the time you were a baby. This process is called enculturization, which is the process of socialization that helps a person learn their culture. So we learn our culture from the time we were babies but culture is also shared between societies. Let me give you an example. Is this a Korean wedding? Or is this a Korean wedding? Well, they both are. But this one is a traditional wedding with a brightened room wearing what is known as Hanbok. When I lived in Korea, a good friend of mine married a Korean woman and I participated in his wedding, which is kind of like this. To honor her family, Roy agreed to a traditional Korean wedding and I had a small part. I got to carry the wedding ducks in and stand next to my friend Roy during the ceremony. Now, the ceremony was in a big park in Busan, which is a city in the southeast portion of the peninsula. So there was Roy, a kid from Iowa standing there in full Hanbok standing next to his beautiful bride in her Hanbok. Now across the park, I could see another couple getting married and unlike Roy, who was an American, they were full Korean. However, the groom was in a very elegant tuxedo and the bride was in a flowing white dress. Both of these were Korean weddings but the modern wedding that the other couple were celebrating was due to the sharing of the Western culture that had been shared with the Koreans starting after about the Korean War. When a society accepts aspects of another culture as their own, this is called a culturalization. A culturalization occurs as different societies interact with each other and culture spreads. The spreading of ideas, inventions and patterns is called diffusion and is part of the movement theme of geography. And the place from which a culture originates and moves from is called a cultural hearth. For example, jazz is a type of music that originated in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1895. Today jazz however is celebrated around the world. In this case, the New Orleans is the cultural hearth of jazz. Now there are many different cultural hearths and we'll be focusing on four in this course. They are the ancient river civilizations such as Mesopotamia, ancient Egypt, and the Harappan and the Yangtze river civilizations. Each have been cultural hearths not only to their regions of Europe, Asia and Africa, but to the entire world. Now as societies have more contact with each other, their cultures come together and this is called cultural convergence. Now just as plague convergence is declining of tectonic plates, cultural convergence is declining of cultures. What we find with cultural convergence is as cultures come together, they become more similar. This is the reason why you can now go to Korea and see a wedding and it's probably going to be very similar to what you're going to see in the United States. Now the introduction of the airplane, television, telephone and internet creates the rate of convergence around the world and what is known as globalization. Essentially globalization is cultural convergence on a worldwide scale and the culture that is becoming more and more dominant is that of the United States. This is largely through American multinational corporations such as McDonald's. This is why you can eat McDonald's in 118 countries in the world today. But just as cultures can come together through cultural convergence, societies can be separated from each other either through distance, physical geography or on their own choice. When this happens, the cultures of the societies will become more different. We call this cultural divergence. For example, between Spain and France, there is a mountain range called the Pyrenees which separate their people. On one side of the Pyrenees, people will speak French now. On the other side, people will speak Spanish. Now distance can also create cultural divergence. The further way two sets of people are, the less interaction there will be. We call this phenomenon distance decay, but it also creates cultural divergence. Now cultural divergence may also be intentional. Take the amateur group of people who live in states such as Pennsylvania and Indiana. They've made a choice to live in their own communities. They don't accept modern technology and they have a volatile culture that is different from the rest of the United States. This is called intentional cultural divergence. Now let's quickly review some of the terms we've learned so far. Ecculturization is how people or individuals learn their culture. Ecculturization is how societies adopt elements of culture as their own. Diffusion is how cultures spread. Cultural convergence is how cultures come together and become more similar. Cultural divergence is when societies are separated by distance physical geography or intentional actions and the cultures become more different. Then we see that culture is dynamic and dynamic means it is constantly changing. That's what we find in culture. For example, here are three pictures. Can you identify which picture shows the American culture? Well actually they all do, but there are two major reasons why culture changes. We've already talked about the first one, which is ecculturization. As a society is introduced to different cultures they will begin to adopt aspects of these cultures. It might be food, language, music, really anything in a society might want to be able to take from one culture and make their own. The other major factor that makes cultures be dynamic and always changing is technology. And what is technology? Well let's see if you already know the answer. Let's take a look at these three pictures. And if you answered all three, you're absolutely right. Technology is the application of knowledge for a practical ends. It is mankind's constantly looking to solve problems. And whatever mankind develops to solve these problems is technology. Now a closely related term is innovation. In fact innovation is often used interchangeably with the word invention. But innovation is when someone takes an existing technology and solves a different problem with it or uses that technology differently. The process of innovation usually inspires new invention and the process in the cycle continues. And because this process of identifying problems developing technology and then innovation is continuous, so is the change in culture. A great example of technology changing your culture is your cell phone. When I went to high school we didn't have cell phones. They didn't exist yet. Yet now cell phones have changed how we communicate with each other, how we're able to gather information and even how we are able to take pictures. Technology is always changing so culture is always changing. We also find that culture is symbolic. His symbol is something verbal or non-verbal that stands for something else. Cultures are based upon a shared set of symbols and meanings. In a Christian culture the cross has a specific meaning as does the crescent moon and star in a Muslim culture. Our flags are designed with symbolic meaning to express the elements of each nation's culture. Many times a culture's symbols can be natural. The bald eagle has a symbolic meaning as does the lion through the English. People express their culture in symbols. Among the most important symbols of a culture is it language. A language is a method of human communication either spoken or written consisting of words and a structure in a conventional way. There are over 7000 languages spoken in the world. Each language is a mirror of the culture that uses it. After all it is through a language that you learn your culture. But language not only shapes the culture, it is shaped by that culture. Language is just as any other aspect of cultural change, subject to cultural convergence and divergence. We can see cultural divergence at work when we look at language families. A language family is a group of languages characterized by their similarities and their evolution. This is pretty much like tracing your family tree to tree ancestors. For example, most European languages come from the Indo-European language family. But because people didn't live all in the same place in Europe this family is split into six different groups including the Germanic and Italian languages of Germany and Italy. The English language actually came out of the split of Germanic languages and Latin came out of Italy. When the Roman Empire began to conquer Europe Roman soldiers brought with them the spoken version of Latin. This vulgar Latin would become the base for Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and several other languages of which we call Romantic languages. But we don't call them the Romantic languages because they are the language of love and they were all derived from the Romans. Even within the same language there are differences. Take English. Even while we can still understand each other how we speak English in the United States is different from how it's spoken in England. For example, a metal that many airplanes are made out of is called aluminum in the United States but aluminium in England. In England you might use the loo in America you use the toilet. In England when you're going on a trip you might be putting the luggage in the boot of your car in the states you're going to put your suitcase in the trunk. The last letter of the alphabet is still this one. And while we call this letter Z in England they call it the letter Z. This is an example of a dialect. Now a dialect is a change in speech patterns of the same language related to class, religion, or cultural changes. And they occur in every language. In fact dialects can occur within a dialect itself. Even within the American language there is dialects. In Texas if you're calling to a group of people you might say y'all. However, since I grew up in Kansas I would say you guys. If you wanted to carbonate a drink with sugar in Texas you might call for a soda or a Coke. As a kid in Kansas I asked for a pop. Now you might call the top part of a house a roof in Texas. I grew up pronouncing a roof. These are all examples of dialects called by cultural divergence as people move away from each other. Now with so many languages in the world and each language having its own dialect you can imagine the difficulties as you start to travel and trade around the world. There's something called a lingua franca comes in. A lingua franca is a language that is adopted as the common language to be used between people who have different native languages. English is a perfect lingua franca. If you're an airline pilot and the senate pilot's description maintains 6000. Regardless of where you're from when you call either the airport control tower or you're talking to under an airplane you're going to speak English. If you call yourself to an airline travel will be able to understand you. This is because the international community has decided upon English to be the lingua franca of international air travel. Alright, so you now should understand what culture is. We'll continue to be looking at human geography and further lessons but until then, keep on learning.