CULTURAL DIVERSITY

The Cultural Diversity of the Southern California

The Cultural Diversity of the Southern California

Introduction

Cultural diversity is a subfield of geography that is shared with anthropology and other allied fields. It positions itself in the centre of the human environment or “nature and society” tradition in geography (which itself is, considered being the core and uniqueness of geography) and concerns itself with the way in which humans are integral components of the environment and “diversity” of a place. It has long focused on the historical context of human-environmental relations, both the human, and the natural history of place and how humans have adapted to nature, as well as how humans have modified nature for their needs. Cultural diversity focuses on process rather than material culture.

Background

A discussion of diversity must also include the concept of culture. Often ethnicity and race are related to culture. Cultural diversity of Southern California as a noticeable subfield fell out of vogue during the 1990s, in part because of the critique regarding the lack of political contextualization and in part because of the rise of postmodern and poststructuralist tools to explain the larger processes of change. However, culture is more than just ethnicity and race. It is generally defined as the beliefs and practices, including knowledge, values, attitudes, and traditions, that are shared by a specific group of people. Individuals can belong to several cultural groups at the same time. Ethnicity has more to do with a person's ancestry, language, and physical characteristics. Race is considered to be a group of people with common biological traits that the group has used to define itself or seen as socially significant.

Discussion

During the 1990s, although diversity in southern California remained active, political diversity dominated, and many long-time cultural ecologists felt marginalized and turned their research in other directions. Some turned back to their earlier roots in physical geography; others embraced what began as historical diversity. Although some observers believe that cultural diversity has been subsumed under political diversity, there is a vibrant and growing community of young, neo-cultural or contextualized cultural ecologists practicing in geography today, many of whom eschew labeling their work as either cultural diversity or political diversity.

Political diversity, a cognate of cultural diversity that wholeheartedly embraces social theory, rose to prominence in the 1990s as the dominant approach in people-environment geography. Cultural diversity of California had long been driven by questions in the field and ...