Cultural Complexes, Areas and Region – UGC NET Geography – Notes

Cultural Complex

• According to Hoebel, “Cultural complexes are nothing but larger clusters of traits organized about some nuclear point of reference”. Cultural traits, as we know, do not usually appear singly or independently. They are customarily associated with other restated traits to from cultural complex.
• The importance of a single trait is indicated when it first go in to a cluster of traits, each one of which performs a significant role in the total complex.
• Thus, kneeling before the idol, sprinkling sacred water over it, putting some food in its mouth, folding hands, taking ‘prashad’ from the priest and singing ‘arati’ form a religious complex.
• These culture complexes are formed according to the various needs of life. In this way culture complex concerning food habits, the different occupations, etc., can be seen in different cultures. Examples of culture complexes found in Indian culture are in the form of the caste system, joint family system, the principle of karma, etc.
• Metallic utensils are indicative of the culture complex concerning food habits in Indian culture. Among these culture complexes some develop more than the others and become more influential and affective. But in any one culture, these culture complexes exhibit a high degree of concurrence among themselves. Cultural patterns, which are representative of the unique nature of any culture, are formed by them.

Culture Area

• Culture area, also called cultural area, culture province, or ethno-geographic area, in anthropology, geography, and other social sciences, a contiguous geographic area within which most societies share many traits in common.
• Delineated at the turn of the 20th century, it remains one of the most widely used frameworks for the description and analysis of cultures. Well-known examples of culture areas and their traditional residents are found on every continent except Antarctica and include Scandinavia, homeland of the Vikings; the North American Plains, home of the Plains Indians; and Africa’s Al-Sudd, the seasonal wetland that is home to the Nuer, Dinka, and other cattle pastoralists. Australia, home of the Australian Aborigines, is often treated as a single culture area despite its considerable cultural and geographic diversity.
• Culture areas are geographical territories in which characteristic culture patterns are recognizable through repeated associations of specific traits and, usually, through one or more modes of subsistence that are related to the particular environment.
• As one formulation within the general school of historical particularism that has developed in anthropology in the United States, the concept of culture area reflects the theoretical position that each culture, on whatever level it may be analyzed, must be examined with regard to its own history and also with regard to the general principles of independent invention, culture borrowing, and cultural integration.
• Although many factors at the base of any recognizable culture area are ecological in nature, the culture-area concept is one that conforms to the doctrine of limited possibilities rather than to a simple geographic determinism.
• Viewed in this light and assessed according to the size and character of the geographic units and the degree of complexity of cultural similarities within, and differences beween, the units, the culture-area concept takes shape as a classificatory device of marked utility in describing the cultural regions of the world. Since “culture” and “area” are both generalized terms, their use in combination gives no real clue as to precise meaning, which must be specified. When contrasting one culture area with another, the level of abstraction must be the same.
• In its original formulation the culture-area concept applied primarily to the ethnographic present and occupied an important niche in the natural-history phase of anthropology that was concerned with the orderly description of the cultures of the world.
• The geographic distribution of culture traits within such areas served as indirect evidence for the reconstruction of cultural histories. The formulations for each of the major continents were used for convenience in the ordering of ethnographic descriptions but were otherwise ignored or discarded as being too limited in time, too static in concept, and too generally conceived to be of much use to the developing trends of concern with inter-personal and social dynamics.
• The steady expansion of archeological research, which furnishes direct evidence for the construction of the historical chronicle in local terms, reduced the role of indirect evidence furnished by contemporary data in the reconstruction of culture history.
• Although the culture-area concept went into temporary eclipse as a tool for theoretical research, it was still retained for the arrangement of museum collections, for which it was originally devised, and for the presentation of descriptive data on the classroom level (e.g., Herskovits 1955; Keesing 1958).
• It should, however, be noted that efforts to sketch a culture-area map of Asia persisted into the 1950s, as a move to complete the world picture. The organization of data in culture-area terms persists in standard anthropological works of the present day (e.g., Gibbs 1965; Murdock 1959).
• The utility of the concept with regard to cultural dynamics and other current interests appears in Service’s discussion of differences in acculturation in colonial Latin America that were conditioned by the aboriginal culture-area patterns (1955) and in such studies as those of Hallowell (1946) and Devereux (1951), which deal with personality types characteristic of specific culture areas and their survival through time and acculturation.
• The culture-area concept can add insight to the processes of culture history by filling in the archeo-logical record (see, for example, Steward 1955, chapter 11); in the mapping of culture areas or of trait or trait-complex distributions for successive periods, the same general areas or boundaries show tendencies to survive (Bennett 1948; Kroeber 1944; Smith 1952) or recur (Ehrich 1956; 1961).
• Culture-area mapping must initially be done with regard to single periods, but it is the repeated geo-graphical and distributional patterns that give some intimation of physiographic and ecological influences, and the dynamic processes of cultural formation and adjustment must in each case be separately analyzed and evaluated.
• Wissler is generally considered to have formulated the culture-area approach during the course of arranging the ethnological exhibits of the North American Indians for the American Museum of Natural History; his first major work on the subject appeared in 1917. Kroeber (1939, pp. 4-8), although describing Wissler’s approach as of gradual, empirical, almost unconscious growth, gives him full credit for the codification and development of then current usages, the recognition of the stabilizing effects of environment on cultural patterns, and the foundation of the idea of temporal culture climax by his enunciation of spatial culture centers.
• Driver (1962), however, points out that as early as 1904, Kroeber himself dealt with areal subdivisions of California, and that Wissler first mentioned the culture area in 1906. Also in 1904 Livingston Farrand suggested a seven-part classification of North American Indians, including considerations of both geography and culture, and then discussed them at some length (1904, pp. 101-194).
• Holmes (1903), writing on museum exhibits, mapped the North American Indians according to 19 geo-ethnic groups, which correspond well to the groupings in the later work of both Wissler and Kroeber. Furthermore, Kroeber (1939, p. 7, note 6) cites an article by O. T. Mason, published in 1896, that recognizes 18 culture areas or environments in the Western Hemisphere.
• Museum exhibits of ethnographic materials had been geo-graphically organized for some years (Wallace 1887), and this approach to ethnographical data was clearly derived from zoogeography.
• It is significant that the initial growth and formulation of the culturearea concept took place with regard to the North American Indians, for whom the documented ethnographic evidence was reasonably full and for whom the environmental settings were contrasting and limiting.