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Cultural landscape is a term used in the fields of geography, ecology, and heritage studies, to describe a symbiosis of human activity and environment.
Cultural geography is a subfield within human geography.Though the first traces of the study of different nations and cultures on Earth can be dated back to ancient geographers such as Ptolemy or Strabo, cultural geography as academic study firstly emerged as an alternative to the environmental determinist theories of the early 20th century, which had believed that people and societies are ...
Within his definition, the physical environment retains a central significance, as the medium with and through which human cultures act. [42] His classic definition of a 'cultural landscape' reads as follows: The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium ...
Geographer Carl Sauer, who had studied in Germany and had long tenure as the chair of the Geography department at Berkeley, in 1925 wrote the now classic definition of a cultural landscape: "The cultural landscape is fashioned from the natural landscape by a cultural group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, and cultural ...
Sauer viewed culture as "an agent within a natural area that was a medium to be cultivated to produce the cultural landscape." [ 7 ] Sauer's concept was later criticized as deterministic , and geographer Yi-Fu Tuan and others proposed versions that enabled scholars to account for phenomenological experience as well.
Cultural ecology as developed by Steward is a major subdiscipline of anthropology. It derives from the work of Franz Boas and has branched out to cover a number of aspects of human society, in particular the distribution of wealth and power in a society, and how that affects such behaviour as hoarding or gifting (e.g. the tradition of the potlatch on the Northwest North American coast).
Cultural heritage has been described as the 'most distinguishing form of a culture's expression' and includes both tangible and intangible elements such as 'traditional dances, customs and ceremonies'. [10] Cultural property is the essential elements of a culture that allow it to determined and identified. [10]
He proposed instead an approach variously called "landscape morphology" or "cultural history". This approach involved the inductive gathering of facts about the human impact on the landscape over time. Sauer rejected positivism, preferring particularist and historicist understandings of the world.