Introduction to Culture

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to (per CED LO PSO-3.A):

• Define culture per the CED: the shared practices, technologies, attitudes, and behaviors transmitted by a society (per EK PSO-3.A.1).
• Identify and give examples of cultural traits — including the three CED-named examples of food preferences, architecture, and land use (per EK PSO-3.A.2).
• Distinguish cultural relativism from ethnocentrism as competing attitudes toward cultural difference (per EK PSO-3.A.3).
• Identify a working geographer's stance toward another culture (relativism) and apply it to a current example.
• Recognize ethnocentrism in a primary source (a colonial map, a travel essay, a news article) and rewrite the same observation more carefully.

Per CED EK PSO-3.A.1, "culture comprises the shared practices, technologies, attitudes, and behaviors transmitted by a society." Notice what this definition contains and what it leaves out. It is precise on purpose.

Culture is shared

Culture is a property of a group, not an individual. A single person can hold a private preference (orange juice with breakfast); when many people in a community share the preference (orange juice rather than tea or coffee), and pass it on to their children, it has become cultural. The "shared" word in the CED definition is doing a lot of work — it is what distinguishes cultural patterns from individual quirks.

Culture is transmitted

Culture is learned and passed on, not biological or genetic. A child raised in another culture from infancy will adopt that culture, not the one of their birth parents. This is why the CED's definition uses the word "transmitted." It also explains why culture can change: each generation does not just inherit culture, it edits the version it inherited and passes the new version on.

Culture is more than tradition

The CED's definition includes practices, technologies, attitudes, and behaviors. Practices are what people do (rituals, holidays, customs). Technologies are tools and built artifacts (architecture, transportation, agriculture). Attitudes are beliefs and values (about gender, work, family, religion). Behaviors are observable patterns of action (greetings, consumption, social interaction). All four together make up culture.

Why this definition matters

The rest of Unit 3 depends on this definition. Cultural landscapes (Topic 3.2), regional patterns (Topic 3.3), and diffusion (Topics 3.4 through 3.8) all start from "what is culture?" If culture were biological, geographic patterns would mostly track ancestry. Because culture is shared and transmitted, geographic patterns track the much messier history of contact, communication, conquest, and exchange among groups — which is what makes cultural geography interesting.

Per CED EK PSO-3.A.2, "cultural traits include such things as food preferences, architecture, and land use." A cultural trait is a single, observable element of a culture — a piece small enough to map. Geographers use cultural traits as the unit of analysis when comparing places.

The CED highlights three examples explicitly. Each one is testable on the AP exam.

Other cultural traits geographers commonly study (covered in later Unit 3 lessons): language, religion, ethnicity, gender roles, music and dress, political institutions, kinship structures, and economic practices.

Per CED EK PSO-3.A.3, "cultural relativism and ethnocentrism are different attitudes toward cultural difference." The AP exam tests this distinction. Geographers practice cultural relativism as a methodological discipline, even when their personal views are different.

Cultural relativism is a methodological commitment, not a moral one. A geographer can practice cultural relativism in their research and still hold strong personal moral views. The discipline asks: understand first, judge second. The reverse order produces bad geography and worse policy.

Four cases that show the CED definition of culture and the three named cultural traits in different settings.

Japan · Food, Architecture, Land Use Together

~125M population · rice as cultural staple

Rice cultivation shapes Japanese cuisine (sushi, donburi, mochi), drives the architectural form of the traditional farmhouse with its tatami flooring, and determines the geometry of land use across river valleys and terraced hillsides. All three CED-named cultural traits are linked through one underlying agricultural pattern.

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Morocco · Vernacular Architecture

Riad houses · medina urban form

The traditional riad — an inward-facing courtyard house — encodes Moroccan attitudes about family privacy, the relationship between public and private space, and climate adaptation (cool central courtyards, thick walls). The medina (old city) shows how cultural attitudes about commerce, religion, and community are written into urban form.

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India · Food as Cultural Marker

Vegetarian regions · regional cuisine variation

Indian cuisine illustrates how food preferences encode religion, caste, region, and history. Vegetarianism follows certain Hindu and Jain communities; meat preferences differ by religion (no pork in Muslim communities, no beef in many Hindu communities); regional grain staples (rice in the south, wheat in the north) follow climate and history. Mapping food maps culture.

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United States · Land Use as Culture

Township-and-range vs colonial vs Spanish grants

The American landscape encodes three different cultural systems of land use. The Public Land Survey System (township-and-range) divides the Midwest into 1-mile squares. The original colonies use irregular metes-and-bounds parcels inherited from English practice. The Southwest still has long, narrow Spanish land grants oriented toward water. Land use as visible cultural history.

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1. The CED defines culture as "shared practices, technologies, attitudes, and behaviors transmitted by a society." Which of those four words (shared, transmitted, practices, attitudes) is most contested in the case of, say, internet culture or hip-hop — cultural forms that spread very quickly across societies that did not invent them?
2. The CED names three cultural traits explicitly: food preferences, architecture, and land use. What other traits might a geographer add to that list, and why do you think the CED chose these three?
3. Pick a current news article about another country or culture. Identify one ethnocentric phrase or assumption in the article. Rewrite the same sentence using cultural relativism.
4. Cultural relativism is a methodological discipline, not a personal moral position. Can a geographer practice cultural relativism in their work and still hold strong moral views? Why or why not?
5. Architecture is on the CED list as a cultural trait. Pick a building in your own community (a school, a church, a courthouse, a typical house). What does its design say about the culture that built it? Be specific about which cultural attitudes are encoded in the design.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP HG codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2020, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in CountryReports' own voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.

AP® and Advanced Placement® are registered trademarks of the College Board. The College Board was not involved in the production of this material and does not endorse it. Standards statements above are paraphrased; codes refer back to the official College Board CED, the NCSS C3 Framework, the Common Core State Standards, and other cited frameworks.