CULTURE AREA

also called cultural area, or culture province in anthropology, a contiguous geographic area comprising a number of societies that possess the same or similar traits or that share a dominant cultural orientation. The concept of culture area originated in the ethnographic work of Otis T. Mason at the turn of the 20th century. Among the most important writers on the subject of culture areas were Sir Halford Mackinder in Great Britain and Paul Vidal de La Blache in France. Such scholars were interested in the interplay of human society and nature as it served to organize the Earth's surface into analytically recognizable areal units. Mackinder held that the pivot region of the world's politics that vast area of Euro-Asia which is inaccessible to ships, but in antiquity lay open to the horse-riding nomads, and is to-day about to be covered with a network of railways. This pivot area was now being re-formed into a cohesive region by rail communication, and its peoples were moving into more and more southerly and easterly territories. Mackinder postulated that this expanded resource base, if ever coupled with access to the sea and the development of sea power, would then form the heartland of a worldwide political system. Vidal de La Blache held that societies eventually establish regions that are reflections of social purpose. He emphasized that the environment offers human society a variety of possibilities rather than a fixed, determinate path. To be sure, there are restrictions, but these are culturalthe values of the culture, the social organization, and the technology. Roughly similar to what the anthropologists called culture, this mix of attributes Vidal called a society's genre de vie, or way of life. Over long periods of time, society and environment develop a series of unique regions, each reflecting the initial environmental conditions chosen as well as the effects of the cultural instruments involved in that choice. Archaeologists and anthropologists long recognized the need for an areal classification system that would reflect patterns of similarity found in artifacts and fieldwork. Some museum exhibits were ordered in areal fashion, and there had been attempts to organize American Indian populations into culture-area complexes. There was significant debate, however, over whether these groupings were real and objective or merely analytical constructs. Alfred Kroeber claimed that the spatial distinctions are real, that they represent a nonphilosophical, inductive, mainly unimpeachable organization of phenomena analogous to the natural' classification of animals and plants on which systematic biology rests. Clark Wissler postulated an agearea hypothesis (q.v.). In this view, culture elements diffuse outward from an initial central point, the development of which is accidental, or historical. Once it is established, however, culture and environment interact, although the dominant feature is environmental because of the relative unchangeability of the natural environment. Nonetheless, argued Wissler, culture elements have a tendency to diffuse equally in all directions from this centre. It can therefore be inferred that, all things being equal, the element or elements having the widest distribution are the oldestthat is, have been in the process of diffusion the longest. This distribution was the basis for inferring age, and this was called the agearea hypothesis. Culture areas were conceived of as time-specific; that is, they attempted to organize cultural elements in a spatial framework frozen at a single instant in time. The agearea hypothesis was an attempt to place the findings of fieldwork in a temporal framework by pure inference. In some parts of the New World, South America in particular, there exist chronological sequences of culture areas. It was suggested that whenever such a sequence existed simultaneously for more than one culture area and wherever it could be shown or inferred that the cultures had been interacting through time, it should be called an area co-tradition. The application of the concept was limited to the New World. In Europe, where there was much more archaeological and historical evidence upon which to base typological constructs, the spatially oriented culture-area concept got little attention compared to that of the concept of Kulturkreis (q.v.; German: culture circle). Whereas both approaches were attempts to explain the distribution of culture traits, they approached the phenomena from opposite philosophical and methodological directions. The culture-area concept suggested, among other things, that there existed a body of interrelated culture elements that, in interaction with the environment, produced a culture complex that may or may not have been unique but that was produced in situ. Those who believed in Kulturkreis held that migration and diffusion accounted for the distribution of most culture traits and, thus, that independent invention was extremely rare. There were, in fact, only a limited number of Kulturkreise, or fonts of diffusion. By the late 20th century, however, the concept of culture area and such related concepts as Kulturkreis are perhaps best known as teaching devices or as simple typological structures for ordering data. As such, they remain useful analytical concepts. The fundamental areal assumptions of the concepts are still reflected in the curricular structure of courses in schools; and most professional scholars in geography and anthropology are identified as specialists in one, or perhaps two, culture areas. This is becoming less true in both disciplines, however, as systematic concepts are replacing what are now viewed as typological ones.