What Is a Culture Area?

A culture area is a term used to refer to any specific region whose people tend to share a common activity or cultural factor. The phrase is most often used in cultural anthropology, and helps trace the history of cultural development based on various factors such as geography, time periods, and environments.

Typically culture areas exist during a certain period of history, and may die out later to be replaced by new ones in the same region.

The historical time period during which a culture area exists is a less important aspect to its definition than other factors such as:

• The specifics of the cultural behavior in question
• The exact location of the people that practice it

History of Culture Areas

Part of understanding a culture area involves understanding the history behind culture areas:

• Culture areas as a concept were first developed by museum curators and other types of historians during the 1800s.
• They were used to divide artifacts and historical pieces into categories representing the various “groups” of culture depending on the time in which they lived and the location in which they were located.
• The term has since been applied in multiple contexts and is generally understood to refer to major cultural divisions that are accepted as part of the history of human society, i.e. “ancient Rome” or “classical Greece.”

Types of Culture Areas

Typically, culture areas are divided based on their geographic location as well as any shared characteristic(s):

• The shared characteristics that divide culture areas can range from music to language to literature or art, and are generally accepted to be major influences which shape the particular way of life known in the area.
• The study of how these common factors influence those who are are a part of the culture, and how the various cultural aspects interweave between geographical areas, gives an excellent idea of how human societies develop and interact with one another.
• The study of culture areas also helps to understand how knowledge may pass back and forth between people of various societies over time and over distance.

Debates Over Culture Areas

There is actually some debate over culture areas:

• As with any type of categorization, there are those experts who say that dividing human history and societies into culture areas is a waste of time at best, and misleading at worst.
• This argument rests on the principle that any classifications created by humans and applied to these groups will be arbitrary, and based upon matters of opinion and understanding rather than any established facts.
• While this might be true, the wide acceptance of culture areas as part of our study of history and anthropology tends to indicate that the general categorizations in place are largely understood and considered valid concepts by most, if not all, historians and scholars who focus on the development of culture and the factors that contribute to it.

So, now you know more about what a culture area is and how culture areas are used to understand societies and people over time.