culture area

culture 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.

Origins in taxonomy and typology

The ancestry of the culture area approach can be traced to the classification of living things proposed by Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus in Systema Naturae (1735) and further developed by French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and others. These taxonomists used the underlying morphology, or physical structures of organisms (such as flowers, shells, and bones), to illuminate the relatedness of groups of living things. To denote information about the relations their data suggested, they created a biological nomenclature that ultimately consisted of the categories kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species.

Taxonomy’s success in organizing living things encouraged scholars in other fields to conceptualize their work through the tropes of biology. Just as a zoologist might study a relatively small group of birds (such as the many varieties of canaries) before moving to the family of which the group is a member (finches more generally), so a historian of the arts might evaluate a single artist’s paintings before moving to those of a period or region, and an anthropologist might focus on a group’s subsistence system before undertaking the analysis of its culture as a whole.

Cultural evolution

The Danish archaeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, curator of the National Museum of Denmark (1816–65), was among the first to use the taxonomic approach in the social sciences. In a painstaking study of the bracteate, a type of ancient pendant found in northern Europe, he charted a variety of morphological categories, such as insignia and size. By combining the typologies thus created, he showed that these Nordic ornaments had developed from earlier Roman coins. Thomsen later used similar techniques with a much larger body of data and eventually developed the basic chronology for Old World antiquities: the Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age.

Ideas and expressive culture also proved susceptible to taxonomic analysis. The American ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan gathered data from a large number of Native American tribes and created a typology based on their kinship terminology, which he presented in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871). Influenced by the evolutionary theses of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer and by Thomsen’s three-age system, Morgan later proposed a universal sequence of cultural evolution in his book Ancient Society; or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery Through Barbarism to Civilization (1877). In this work he suggested that all cultures went through a clearly defined series of evolutionary stages: first savagery, which was characterized by a hunting and gathering economy; next barbarism, the stage at which agriculture appears; and finally civilization, represented by hierarchical societies such as those of ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and Victorian England.

As one might suspect from Morgan’s choice of terms, 19th-century social sciences were intrinsically linked to the colonial endeavours of the period. This was the case whether the colonial effort took place domestically, as in the United States and Canada, or abroad, as it did for the countries of Europe. Although the labeling of a group as “savage” or “barbarous” was to some extent intended to convey specific technical information, the use of such easily misinterpreted labels also made the era’s overtly racist colonial policies more palatable to the general public: it was considerably less morally taxing to “civilize the savages” than to “forcibly assimilate an indigenous people.”

One of the principal preoccupations of social scientists at this time was the recording of “vanishing” indigenous cultures. This was often undertaken as part of a frank pursuit of the knowledge needed to achieve social and political control over a region, whether in domestic or in overseas contexts. Thus, many early ethnographies and cultural geographies were written by civil servants, military personnel, or missionaries.