Page 111 - Encyclopedia Of World History

cultural and geographic areas 461

This map shows the cultural regions or
areas for the indigenous Americas
worked out by anthropologists in the
early twentieth century.

the hunting and gathering Apaches, who were
more recent immigrants, belonged to another.
Later scholarship, moreover, tended to question
whether the cultural unity of these naturally de-
fined areas extended much beyond narrow issues
of subsistence.

Cultural and
Linguistic Areas
In certain circumstances, the spread of a single
population over a large territory can give rise to a
relatively coherent cultural area. Since the expand-
ing population carries its language with it, cultural
areas of this type are linguistically marked. A
notable example is Polynesia, which covers a vast
expanse of the Pacific, from New Zealand in the
southwest to Hawaii in the north to Easter Island
in the southeast. All Polynesians are descended
from a single ancestral population, all have simi-
lar (although not identical) cultural patterns, and
all speak closely related languages. But while
Polynesia is one of the world’s clearest examples
of a cultural region, even it has some fuzzy bound-
aries. Polynesian “outliers,” for example, are
encountered on a few small islands that lie within
the bounds of the so-called Melanesian cultural
places. Coming together in this particular environment, realm, whereas in the case of Polynesian Tonga and
where they faced the same challenges, they were thought neighboring Melanesian Fiji, cultural interchange has
to have necessarily developed a common cultural system, resulted in striking hybridity.
albeit one marked by localized particularities. Similar Large cultural groups established by descent from a
arguments were made about the culturally similar inhab- common ancestral population tend to fade over time in
itants of the other natural regions of North America. the absence of unifying institutions or political systems.
One key question remained open: Were the cultural Social intercourse with neighboring peoples along the
similarities that characterized such areas the result of frontiers, the drift of cultural evolution, and the challenges
adaptation to particular natural environments, or had of living in different natural environments result in grad-
they arisen less systematically from proximity and ual divergence. Linguistic families, which by definition
exchange? In some parts of pre-Columbian North Amer- derive from single ancestral groups, therefore seldom
ica, groups belonging to distinct cultural traditions inhab- form coherent cultural areas.While one can, for example,
ited the same places, casting doubt on the environmental map a family of Turkic languages over vast expanses of
determinism implicit in the “cultural and natural areas” Eurasia, it is difficult to correlate this with any sort of dis-
model. In the Southwest, for example, the agricultural tinctive cultural patterns—although politically motivated
“Pueblo” Indians belonged to one cultural complex while attempts to do so, under the guise of pan-Turkism, have