GEOG 217 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Cultural Geography, Environmental Determinism, Industrial Revolution
18 May 2018
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Lecture 9 – February 5th
The Making of Cultural Landscapes
Nature and Culture
• Why do we mean by culture?
o A shared set of meanings that is lived through the material and symbolic
practices of everyday life
o Values, beliefs, practices, ideas about religion, language, family, gender,
sexuality
o Culture is transmitted
o Cultural geography
▪ Cultural: about the production of shared meanings
▪ Geography: the spatial context of that production (from body to
planet)
• City, country, house
o A shared set of meanings
▪ An identity – being a Canadian
▪ Material practices – religion (if you belong to a certain religion you
practice it in a certain way), language (the way you write),
identity/citizenship (voting)
▪ Symbolic practices – religion (one god), language (some objects have
pronouns in certain languages), identity (your local hockey team)
▪ Blurred boundaries and overlapping domains – can speak and write in
German but you are Canadian
• Can hold two different nationalities
• What is nature?
o The phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals,
the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to
humans or human creations Oxford Dictionary
▪ Nature as not humans, anything that is not humans
o What constitutes nature is a matter of perception
▪ Humans tend to designate as resources what they have the knowledge
and technology to use, and as nature, the rest…
▪ Both perception and ability to use vary between social groups
o Useful stuff vs. useless stuff
o Paradise
▪ All things are good, luxurious garden, mild climate all year, ripe fruit
on every tree, no thorns or stinging insects
▪ No aggressive animals, no want or danger
▪ Humans live in harmony – an ideal state
o Wilderness
▪ Dangerous, beyond control, terrifying and hostile, evil and
supernatural
▪ Civilization was long about taming the wilderness
• Fire, domestication of animals, cultivation
o Romanticism
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