Understanding the Cultural Landscape

Understanding the Cultural Landscape

Language: English

Pages: 406

ISBN: 1593851197

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


This compelling book offers a fresh perspective on how the natural world has been imagined, built on, and transformed by human beings throughout history and around the globe. Coverage ranges from the earliest societies to preindustrial China and India, from the emergence in Europe of the modern world to the contemporary global economy. The focus is on what the places we have created say about us: our belief systems and the ways we make a living. Also explored are the social and environmental consequences of human activities, and how conflicts over the meaning of progress are reflected in today's urban, rural, and suburban landscapes. Written in a highly engaging style, this ideal undergraduate-level human geography text is illustrated with over 25 maps and 70 photographs.

Note: Many additional photographs related to the themes addressed in the book are available at the author's website (www.greatmirror.com.)

The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal

Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology

Precious Cargo: How Foods From the Americas Changed The World

Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth

The Anthropology of Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology Workbook/Reader (3rd Edition)

Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

is an important point, because it conflicts with the so-called stress models that we almost instinctively turn to when we try to explain the rise of agriculture. Stress models rest on the deceptively attractive assumption that agriculture arose because people were hungry. The grandaddy among this family of explanations was proposed by the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, whose much-reprinted New Light on the Most Ancient East (1928) proposed that hunters turned to farming when the postglacial

map of China shows a far western province of Xinjiang. (If you’re using an old atlas, it probably shows this province as Sinkiang. That’s because other methods of transliterating Chinese were used in the past. For more on these systems, see the note at the end of this chapter.) Xinjiang comprises two arid basins separated by the Tian Shan, or Heavenly Mountains. The basins are the more northerly Dzungaria, through which the old Silk Road passed, and the more southerly Kashgaria, also known as the

was using the next. It was apparently coined by Theodore Levitt, writing in the Harvard Business Review in 1983 to suggest that multinational companies were tending to market identical products around the world. Critics have pointed out that this hasn’t happened, at least not yet. McDonald’s serves congee, or rice porridge, in China, not Colorado; it serves Chicken Maharajah Macs in India, not Indiana. But if globalization hasn’t yet occurred in exactly the way Levitt meant, it certainly is

intermediate languages may be necessary, raising questions about the accuracy of the final translation of a speech delivered in Finnish, translated perhaps to German, then to Italian, and finally to Maltese. The best solution is bilingualism or multilingualism. That’s the position of Raymond Cohen, an Israeli who contrasts the “threadbare” English typically used by foreign speakers with the “luxuriant native language” used by native English speakers. Cohen argues that people whose native tongue

Powell River. They were icons of the provincial economy, but that didn’t stop them from being sold in 1987 to a New Zealand company which in turn sold them in 2000 to Norske Skog. The other two giants were Abitibi, based in Quebec and serving the big newspapers of the American Northeast, and Bowater, a South Carolina company tapping those fast-growing Southern pine forests. Competition for these companies may come from Russia, which has immense timber resources but whose forest-products output

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