Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Guest
Field Note
Montgomery, Alabama
Located in a predominately African American neighborhood in Montgom-
ery, Alabama, the street intersection of Jeff Davis and Rosa Parks is sym-
bolic of the debates and disputes in the American South over how the
past is to be commemorated on the region's landscape. The Civil War and
civil rights movement are the two most important events in the history of
the region. The street names commemorate Montgomery's central role in
both eras, and they do so in the same public space. Montgomery was the
site of the fi rst capital of the Confederacy in 1861 while Jefferson Davis
was president. The Alabama capital was also the site of the 1955-1956
Montgomery bus boycott that launched the civil rights movement. The
boycott was sparked by Rosa Parks's arrest after she refused to give up her
seat on a city bus when ordered to do so by a white person. Most of my
research examines the politics of how the region's white and African
Americans portray these separate heroic eras within the region's public spaces, ranging from support for and against fl ying
the Confederate fl ag to disputes over placing statues and murals honoring the Civil War and the civil rights movement on
the South's landscape.
Figure 1.21
Credit: Jonathan Leib, Old Dominion University
Culture
Location decisions, patterns, and landscapes are funda-
mentally infl uenced by cultural attitudes and practices.
Culture refers not only to the music, literature, and arts of
a society but to all the other features of its way of life: pre-
vailing modes of dress; routine living habits; food prefer-
ences; the architecture of houses and public buildings; the
layout of fi elds and farms; and systems of education, gov-
ernment, and law.
Culture
is an all-encompassing term
that identifi es not only the whole tangible lifestyle of peo-
ples, but also their prevailing values and beliefs. Culture
lies at the heart of human geography.
The concept of culture is closely identifi ed with the
discipline of anthropology, and over the course of more
than a century anthropologists have defi ned it in many
different ways. Some have stressed the contributions of
humans to the environment, whereas others have empha-
sized learned behaviors and ways of thinking. Several
decades ago the noted anthropologist E. Adamson Hoebel
defi ned culture as:
houses and their porches, items on a roadside restaurant
menu (grits, for example), a local radio station's music,
the sound of accents that you perceive to be Southern, a
succession of Baptist churches in a town along the way.
These combined impressions become part of your over-
all perception of the South as a region.
Such cultural attributes give a certain social atmo-
sphere to the region, an atmosphere that is appreciated by
many of its residents and is sometimes advertised as an
attraction for potential visitors. “Experience the South's
warmth, courtesy, and pace of life,” said one such com-
mercial, which portrayed a sun-drenched seaside land-
scape, a bowing host, and a couple strolling along a palm-
lined path.
The South has its vigorous supporters and defend-
ers, and occasionally a politician uses its embattled history
to arouse racial antagonism. But today the South is so
multifaceted, diverse, vigorous, and interconnected with
the rest of the United States that its regional identity is
much more complicated than traditional images suggest
(Fig. 1.21). This serves as an important reminder that per-
ceptual regions are not static. Images of the South are rap-
idly changing, and perceptions of the South as a region
will change over time.
Regions, whether formal, functional, or percep-
tual, are ways of organizing humans geographically.
They are a form of spatial classifi cation, a means of
handling large amounts of information so we can make
sense of it.
[the] integrated system of learned behavior patterns
which are characteristic of the members of a society and
which are not the result of biological inheritance . . . cul-
ture is not genetically predetermined; it is noninstinc-
tive . . . [culture] is wholly the result of social invention
and is transmitted and maintained solely through com-
munication and learning.
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