Top Cultural Geography Flashcards

Geography is one of the main forces shaping cultures, histories, and human lives. All cultures must find ways to deal with the challenges and opportunities found in their particular geographic location – how to survive extreme drought or extreme cold, for example, or where to find fertile soil for farming. The earliest human civilizations, for example, all set up their cities along the banks of rivers, which provide food, water, and easy long-distance transportation. Similarly, as cultures have spread across the globe their movement has been blocked (or at times accelerated) by geographic features like deserts, mountain ranges, and oceans.

In the modern, globalized world, it’s common for people to imagine that geography no longer affects culture – human migrations now take place through air travel, and communication takes place online, so how do oceans and mountain ranges matter? But the fact is that geography still exerts a powerful influence on modern cultures. Cultures never stop changing, blending and dividing – these changes are the sum total of millions of human decisions, like where to live, how to speak, and what music to play. Geography still determines these decisions and therefore plays a role in the transformation of cultures.