Soooo... just what is Geography of Human Cultures?

This course will attempt to serve several masters (Global Stewardship and University Scholars, and perhaps others), cover a variety of bases (disciplinary, topical, metainformational) and appeal to the breadth of interests of its members (still to be dicovered). It will engage us in a great variety of topics, some of which will arise out of discussions and serendipities. It will not be "orderly" or predictable, but it should be fun and it shouldn't be 'boring' (see two models I'm trying to avoid).

Developing skills for tending one's own wetware is a primary objective, and a lifelong process. Another is exploring the means to visualize data.

I will use Web-based texts and handouts as the reading for the course, including these:

Human Population: The Next Half Century (Joel E. Cohen) Science Volume 302, Number 5648, Issue of 14 Nov 2003, pp. 1172-1175. (one of a collection of articles in several successive issues of Science, on State of the Planet; others may also divert us)

AAAS Atlas of Population & Environment

perhaps Matter, Space, Energy, and Political Economy: The Amazon in the World-System (Stephen G. Bunker Journal of World-Systems Research Volume 9, Number 2, Summer 2003)--though I'm less pleased with its entirety than I'd expected to be

We will make extensive use of JSTOR, eHRAF, and various Internet search engines

We'll work at several levels of generalization, from global to local.

You'll be reading a lot, and it won't follow an orderly and coherent plan (unless you create one). You'll be keeping track of what you read and find in a novel medium (you log file). You'll be working with unfamiliar software (ArcMap is just the beginning...). You'll develop skills (a bit) and open cans of worms and wonder where it's all going... and you'll encounter ideas and people and places that add new dimensions to your continuing education.

Here's a primary Explicandum for the global level, though it also poses some very local problems:

...and our question is why is the pattern [are the patterns] as it [they] appear[s]? (To answer those questions we'd need to be able to zoom in to look at details, and deal with problems like this... and this... and this too, and yet another [these are all from r:\global\23xii.mxd, but are running the sutton layer from the CD-ROM in the D: drive of my Dell Precision 220... which may be problematic] ...but we'll also need to inform ourselves about the territories we're looking at). Another version of some of the same visual territory is available through /nigh/world2001.mxd, based in LandScan ("a worldwide population database compiled on a 30" X 30" latitude/longitude grid. Census counts (at sub-national level) were apportioned to each grid cell based on likelihood coefficients, which are based on proximity to roads, slope, land cover, nighttime lights, and other data sets...")

Geography may seem to be the least problematic element of the course's title, and the subject seems pretty straightforward: it's to do with space, with distribution. But why is Geography so ignored (or possibly dumbed-down) in American education? Pretty much everybody says "oh, I love maps...", but not many people are very sophisticated as map users, and cartographers are a rare (and vanishing) breed. Surveys of spatial knowledge of American adolescents (even at the what's-where level of geographical factoids) reveal a profound ignorance of the world, combined with a bottomless naiveté about its peoples (see Awash in a Sea of Geographical Ignorance [Alexander B. Murphy] and Survey Reveals Geographic Illiteracy [Bijal P. Trivedi] for two expositions of the problem). To "understand the geographic context within which events are situated" (in Murphy's phrase) seems an essential part of decision-making in just about any context, local or national or global, but most Americans are poorly equipped for the challenge.

The general questions, as I see them and as we'll try to approach them in the 12 weeks of this course, are:

Now we need to give some thought to this "Human Culture" thing... an artifact of a Committee's laborings over the course description. I've always thought of the subject simply as "Human Geography", but one of my correspondents wondered aloud if this too wasn't perhaps an oxymoron. But "Human Culture" does need to be ...erm... deconstructed. Is it a tautology ("Human" as opposed to what... "Bacterial" perhaps?), and even if it is, what's the territory that "Culture" is supposed to cover?

Such questions are, in a way, just what INTR 131 is supposed to be about: we [all of us, including me...] need to practise untangling the complexities of what seems at first to be dead obvious, until you start looking at it up close.

So what about "human culture"? One way to gauge the concept is to do a quick Google search and then inspect the results --not that we expect to have THE answer emerge from the procedure, but rather to encourage us to think about the frames in which the term appears. And what I see is

If we try to back up further and cope with "culture" we're deep in tarbaby territory... and we need some help. One source that you should know about is Raymond Williams' Keywords, whence comes this wonderful summary, which begins "Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language..."
Material about Raymond Williams can be found in many places. Here's one summary
Other bits of help: What Is Culture? from Washington State's collection of Learning Modules, in their Learning Commons

Wikipedia's entry is also worth a look (and if you don't know about Wikipedia, it should enter the array of tools...

The course title does say "Cultures", implying that we're somehow supposed to be dealing with the distribution and variety of the units into which humankind seems to be partitioned... and we could confine ourselves to descriptive inquiry. We could ask about the spatial (or the global) distribution of particular traits or 'patterns' (like endogamy, or subincision, or games of strategy... ). But I'm more interested in concentrating on the human problems and challenges of the moment than in the more conventional and descriptive core of anthropology. I want to explore territories of disciplinary and intellectual overlap between Anthropology and ...well.. just about anything, and I'm especially interested in the process of globalization that affects people(s) everywhere.

Part of my responsibility is to the Global Stewardship program, though in fact many of the members of this class aren't involved in any way with the program. The 'Global' part is another bit of challenge: there assuredly are global processes, though it's difficult to know how to set about studying them in the global aggregate...

And how does geopolitics figure in to G of HC?

A common view of the globe sees a jigsaw puzzle of jurisdictional borders, national and sub-national. There are anthropological analogs, like Murdock's Africa map. Such units are notional (says the OED: "Existing only in thought; not real or actually existent; imaginary") or, at the very least, utterly manmade and impermanent (see the idea of "imagined communities", a phrase associated with Benedict Anderson --viz world history hub and chapter outlines for the 1983 book). The implication of homogeneity of such units isn't even useful for Japan and Korea, arguably the most ethnically homogeneous of modern nations.

The basic approach: One can look at any piece of territory and ask: how are people's lives structured here? What are they doing, what forces impinge upon them from human and naural circumstances and conditions, what are the demographic circumstances, how does the chosen piece fit into regional and global configurations and processes, how has past history unfolded into present circumstances, and what are trajectories into the future?

Considering the 'cultural' perspective: ethnicity and cultural identity surely has a place in our explorations, but it's rarely simple, and is generally also crosscut by complexities of class or other social hierarchies --which are in turn considerably affected by linkage to supra-local (and sometimes global) connections and relationships. Thus, elites in Mexico and Canada and Malaysia may have more in common with each other than with the lower classes in their own societies (viz. Washington Post story, and Rebecca Mead in New Yorker --and see more of her oeuvre [pretty good ethnography of the Modern Scene]).

I've been thinking about which examples to use as centerpieces for this iteration of the course, combining my own knowledge and interests with opportunities to approach the problem of how to set about doing research in human geography. Two cases appeal particularly at the moment: Amazonia and Sarawak. I have quite a lot of material about each, and both present highly relevant issues.

Sarawak appeals particularly at the moment, and the scales are tipped by some recent news items about a large-scale project that's been in the works for a couple of decades: the Bakong Dam, in what was until quite recently a very remote part of the world. When I was in Sarawak 35+ years ago, it was impossibly remote --but see Sarawak by bike, which gives advice on using logging roads...