Glossary - Human Geography: People, Place and Culture - page 506

Peace of Westphalia Peace negotiated in 1648 to end the Thirty
Years' War, Europe's most destructive internal struggle over religion.
The treaties contained new language recognizing statehood and nation-
hood, clearly defi ned borders, and guarantees of security.
Per capita GNP The Gross National Product (GNP) of a given
country divided by its population.
Perception of place Belief or “understanding” about a place devel-
oped through books, movies, stories or pictures.
Perceptual region A region that only exists as a conceptualization or
an idea and not as a physically demarcated entity. For example, in the
United States, “the South” and “the Mid-Atlantic region” are perceptual
regions.
Periphery Processes that incorporate lower levels of education, lower
salaries, and less technology; and generate less wealth than core pro-
cesses in the world-economy.
Periodic Movement Movement —for example, college attendence or
military service—that involves temporary, recurrent relocation.
Photosynthesis The formation of carbohydrates in living plants from
water and carbon dioxide, through the action of sunlight on chlorophyll
in those plants, including algae.
Physical geography One of the two major divisions of systematic ge-
ography; the spatial analysis of the structure, processes, and location of
the Earth's natural phenomena such as climate, soil, plants, animals, and
topography.
Physical-political (natural-political) boundary Political boundary
defi ned and delimited (and occasionally demarcated ) by a prominent
physical feature in the natural landscape—such as a river or the crest
ridges of a mountain range.
Physiologic population density The number of people per unit area
of arable land.
Pidgin language When parts of two or more languages are combined
in a simplifi ed structure and vocabulary.
Pilgrimage Voluntary travel by an adherent to a sacred site to pay
respects or participate in a ritual at the site.
Place The fourth theme of geography as defi ned by the Geography
Educational National Implementation Project ; uniqueness of a
location .
Placelessness Defi ned by geographer Edward Relph as the loss of
uniqueness of place in the cultural landscape so that one place looks
like the next.
Plant domestication Genetic modifi cation of a plant such that its re-
productive success depends on human intervention.
Plantation agriculture Production system based on a large estate
owned by an individual, family, or corporation and organized to produce
a cash crop. Almost all plantations were established within the tropics; in
recent decades, many have been divided into smaller holdings or reorga-
nized as cooperatives.
Pleistocene The most recent epoch of the Late Cenozoic Ice Age,
beginning about 1.8 million years ago and marked by as many as 20
glaciations and

Polytheistic religion Belief system in which multiple deities are re-
vered as creators and arbiters of all that exists in the universe.
Popular culture Cultural traits such as dress, diet, and music that
identify and are part of today's changeable, urban-based, media-infl uenced
western societies.
Population composition Structure of a population in terms of age,
sex and other properties such as marital status and education.
Population density A measurement of the number of people per
given unit of land.
Population distribution Description of locations on the Earth's sur-
face where populations live.
Population explosion The rapid growth of the world's human popu-
lation during the past century, attended by ever-shorter doubling times
and accelerating rates of increase.
Population pyramids Visual representations of the age and sex com-
position of a population whereby the percentage of each age group (gen-
erally fi ve-year increments) is represented by a horizontal bar the length
of which represents its relationship to the total population. The males
in each age group are represented to the left of the center line of each
horizontal bar; the females in each age group are represented to the right
of the center line.
Possibilism Geographic viewpoint—a response to determinism—
that holds that human decision making, not the environment, is the
crucial factor in cultural development. Nonetheless, possibilists view the
environment as providing a set of broad constraints that limits the pos-
sibilities of human choice.
Post-Fordist World economic system characterized by a more fl ex-
ible set of production practices in which goods are not mass-produced;
instead, production has been accelerated and dispersed around the globe
by multinational companies that shift production, outsourcing it around
the world and bringing places closer together in time and space than
would have been imaginable at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Postcolonialism A recent intellectual movement concerned with ex-
amining the enduring impacts of colonialism , not just in economic and
political relations (the focus of neocolonialism ), but especially in cul-
tural terms. Postcolonial studies examine the ways in which basic con-
cepts of culture and forms of cultural interaction continue to be shaped
by the hegemonic ideas and practices of colonialism.
Primary economic activity Economic activity concerned with the
direct extraction of natural resources from the environment—such as
mining, fi shing, lumbering, and especially agriculture .
Primary industrial regions Western and Central Europe; Eastern
North America; Russia and Ukraine; and Eastern Asia, each of which
consists of one or more core areas of industrial development with sub-
sidiary clusters.
Primate city A country's largest city—ranking atop the urban
hierarchy —most expressive of the national culture and usually (but not
always) the capital city as well.
Prime Meridian An imaginary north-south line of longitude on the
Earth grid, passing through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in
London, defi ned as having a longitude of 0°.
Primogeniture System which the eldest son in a family—or, in excep-
tional cases, daughter—inherits all of a dying parent's land.
Product life cycle

interglaciations of which the current warm phase, the
Holocene epoch, has witnessed the rise of human civilization.
Political ecology An approach to studying nature—society relations
that is concerned with the ways in which environmental issues both re-
fl ect, and are the result of, the political and socioeconomic contexts in
which they are situated.
Political geography A subdivision of human geography focused on
the nature and implications of the evolving spatial organization of politi-
cal governance and formal political practice on the Earth's surface. It is
concerned with why political spaces emerge in the places that they do
and with how the character of those spaces affects social, political, eco-
nomic, and environmental understandings and practices.

the introduction, growth, maturation and decline

of a product.
Protestant One of three major branches of Christianity (together
with the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic
Church ). Following the widespread societal changes in Europe start-
ing in the 1300s ce, many adherents to the Roman Catholic Church
began to question the role of religion in their lives and opened the door
to the Protestant Reformation wherein John Huss, Martin Luther, John