Culture

Culture as a Superorganic or Socially Constructed Entity

The first question of importance for geographers is how culture affects society. Is culture imposed on a society as a superorganic entity from above and in a top-down fashion, or is it socially constructed from the bottom up and nothing more than the sum total of individual cultural expressions? Is culture static or constantly changing, and does it have a lasting, identity-building effect on individuals and communities, or is it rather fluent, with humans constantly reevaluating and redesigning their identities?

Superorganicism takes for granted that culture is an independent and stable entity. Culture is the agent that causes people to behave as they do. It superimposes behaviors and traits on them from beyond society. Values, beliefs, and meanings operate independently of individuals; they are not created and shaped by them, but individuals receive and are influenced by culture. Take the example of religion, where some groups argue that morals and dogma have been given to humans or were inspired by God rather than being constructed by humans as a consequence of their social interaction. Traditionally, cultural geography described the spatial form(s) (morphos in Greek) that culture imprinted on the landscape as an active agent, relegating individuals to passive recipients of information. Just as geomorphology described the natural formation of the landscape by the forces of nature, cultural geography illustrated the morphology (formation) of cultural landscapes by the force of culture. Carl Sauer's landmark essay on “The Morphology of Landscape” in 1925 represented this trend most clearly. In it, Sauer argued that geography ought to be concerned with the interactions of nature and culture as well as the influence that these entities have on each other. For Sauer, culture is an active agent that grows according to the natural landscape in which it is situated and remains attached to that landscape indefinitely. Nature provides a certain number of options for humans to transform and use it, and culture acts as the sum of all these potential options and not just the realized expressions. As humans realize certain cultural potentials that are given to them, they begin to transform nature and activate a set of cultural uses of the natural landscape. Thus, Sauer placed great emphasis on the use value of natural landscape and wanted geography to pay attention primarily to how productive human work makes natural landscapes permanently valuable for humans.

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