Cultural geography

A map of the world that illustrates cultural areas.

Cultural geography is a concept inherent to human geography.

The term appears in the US at the turn of the 20th century, although with a different meaning. It was about the contrast in the maps of the representation of nature and the elements created by man: populations, communication routes, crops, etc. After the First World War, very similar ideas would appear in Germany, with a more pronounced conception of the human transformation of the environment. Cultural geography sets aside biological conditioning to consider only those that come from human activity.

In the United States, its greatest representatives, in the 1920s and 1930s, were Carl O. Sauer and his students from the Californian school of Berkeley. In 1931 Sauer published the essay: Cultural Geography , where he defined that; «Cultural geography is interested, therefore, in the human works that are inscribed on the earth's surface and give it a characteristic expression... cultural geography implies, therefore, a program that is unified with the general objective of geography: this it is, an understanding of the differentiation in areas of the Earth. It remains largely direct field observation based on the simple technique of morphological analysis.

In the XX century, especially after the Second World War, the idea of Cultural Geography is assumed naturally. The highest representatives are the German Schultze and the Austrian Bobek. In Italy Biasutti and Sestini stand out, in France from Max Sorre to Paul Michotte, Philippe Pinchemel and Paul Claval. But Max Sorre already surpassed the concepts of cultural Geography to bet decisively for a human Geography.

An American university text that was of decided importance as far as Cultural Geography is concerned is that of George F. Carter of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore:

Carter, George F. Man and the Land. A Cultural Geography. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964