Geographers refer to culture, which is the body of customary beliefs, material traits, and social forms that together constitutes the distinct tradition of a group of people. Geographers distinguish groups of people according to important cultural characteristics, describe where particular cultural groups are distributed, and offer reasons to explain the observed distribution. The distribution of cultural groups and the ways different cultures are expressed in the landscape gives rise to distinctive regions.

In everyday language, we think of culture as the collection of novels, paintings, symphonies, and other works produced by talented individuals. A person with a taste for these intellectual outputs is said to be “cultured.” Intellectually challenging culture is often distinguished from popular culture, such as TV. Culture also refers to small living organisms, such as those found under a microscope or in yogurt. Agriculture is a term for the growing of living material at a much larger scale than in a test tube.

The origin of the word culture is the Latin cultus, which means “to care for.” Culture is a complex concept because “to care for” something has two very different meanings:

• To care about—to adore or worship something, as in the modern word cult.

• To take care of—to nurse or look after something, as in the modern word cultivate.

Geography looks at both of these facets of the concept of culture to see why each region in the world is unique.

Geography & Culture: What People Care About

Geographers study why the customary ideas, beliefs, and values of a people produce a distinctive culture in a particular place. Especially important cultural values derive from a group’s language, religion, and ethnicity. These three cultural traits are an excellent way of identifying the location of a culture as well as the principal means by which cultural values become distributed around the world.

Language is a system of signs, sounds, gestures, and marks that have meanings understood within a cultural group. People communicate the cultural values they care about through language, and the words themselves tell something about where different cultural groups are located. The distribution of speakers of different languages and reasons for the distinctive distribution are discussed in Chapter 5.

Religion is an important cultural value because it is the principal system of attitudes, beliefs, and practices through which people worship in a formal, organized way. As discussed in Chapter 6, geographers look at the distribution of religious groups around the world and the different ways that the various groups interact with their environment.

Ethnicity is identity with a group of people who share the cultural traditions of a particular homeland or hearth. As addressed in Chapter 7, geographers find that problems of conflict and inequality tend to occur in places where more than one ethnic group inhabits and seeks to organize the same territory.

Geography & Culture: What People Take Care Of

The second element of culture of interest to geographers is production of material wealth—the food, clothing, and shelter that humans need in order to survive and thrive. All people consume food, wear clothing, build shelter, and create art, but different cultural groups obtain their wealth in different ways.

Geographers divide the world into regions of developed countries and regions of developing countries. Various shared characteristics—such as per capita income, level of education, and life expectancy—distinguish developed regions and developing regions. These differences are reviewed in Chapter 10.

Possession of wealth and material goods is higher in developed countries than in developing countries because of the different types of economic activities carried out in the two types of countries. People in developing countries are more likely to work in agriculture, whereas people in developed countries are more likely to earn their living through performing services in exchange for wages. This fundamental economic difference between developed and developing regions is discussed in more detail in Chapters 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13.

Spatial Association

A region gains meaning through its unique combination of features. The presence of some of these features may be coincidental, but others are related to each other. Spatial association is observed within a region if the distribution of one feature is related to the distribution of another feature. Spatial association is strong if two features have very similar distributions, and spatial association is weak if two features have very different distributions.

To illustrate spatial association, below displays the distribution of two features related to the opioid epidemic crisis in the United States. Is the spatial association between the two maps strong or weak?

The term opioid encompasses opiates, which are drugs, such as heroin, derived from the opium poppy plant. The term also encompasses synthetic substances manufactured into pain-management medications. The use of opioids increased rapidly in the late 1990s. Many doctors prescribed opioids for their patients, especially those who complained of chronic pain. Opioids became the most prescribed class of medications in the United States. Many of these patients became addicted to the opioids.

As the number of opioid users has increased in recent years, international criminal organizations known as drug cartels began flooding the United States with imported heroin from Mexico as well as synthetically manufactured opioids such as fentanyl. Addicted individuals found that these illegal sources were cheaper, more potent, and easier to acquire than prescription medications.

In the twenty-first century, drug overdose has become the leading cause of death of Americans under age 50. Two-thirds of overdose deaths are attributable to opioids, which in high doses over a long period can cause respiratory failure.

The above map shows the distribution of overdose deaths related to opioids. Though most opioid-related deaths are in heavily populated urban areas it shows shows the highest per capita rates within the United States are in the Appalachians and the Southwest.

This map shows the distribution of prescriptions written for opioids. Prescription rates vary widely by state and county—three times higher in Alabama than in Hawaii, for example. The distribution of places with relatively high prescription rates is similar to the distribution of deaths from overdose. The two maps together show a strong spatial association between overdoses and prescriptions for opioids.

Health issues that cause people pain do not vary much from place to place and do not explain this variability in prescribing. So the variation may be related to regional differences among doctors concerning how much pain medication to prescribe.