Geography is the study of the earth and the people in it. Culture is the sum total of the knowledge, attitudes, and habitual behavioral patterns shared and transmitted by members of a society. Geography and culture are inter-related. Culture is the total way of life that characterizes a group of people. It is one of the most important things that geographers study. There are literally thousands of cultures on the planet today and each contributes to global diversity. One reason for the existence of so many cultures is that there are so many ways that the ever-growing population can be culturally different. Specifically, a culture consists of numerous cultural components that vary from one culture group to the next.From the perspective of new cultural geography, landscape was not simply a material artefact that reflected culture in straightforward ways, but was laden with symbolic meaning that needed to be decoded with respect to social and historical context, using new techniques such as iconography. Similarly, it was contended that other cultural practices, artefacts, and representations needed to be theorized and analyzed in much more contextual, contingent, and relational ways, sensitive to the workings of difference and power. Here, new cultural geographers argued that cultural identities are not essentialized and teleological, but rather need to be understood as constitutive of complex power geometries giving rise to all kinds of hybridity and diversity. The Cultural Components mostly include the religion, language, architecture, cuisine, technology, music, dance, sports, medicine, dress, gender roles, law, education, government, agriculture, economy, sports, grooming values, work, ethic, etiquette, courtship, recreation and gestures, to mention a few. Because of the innumerable cultural differences that characterize people and land all over the world, there was a need to focus on this subfield of geography. Hence, the subject devoted to the study of culture was appropriately named as cultural geography. Cultural geography is the study of relationships between humans and location. In broad terms, cultural geography examines the cultural values, practices, discursive and material expressions and artefacts of people, the cultural diversity and plurality of society. It also emphasizes on how cultures are distributed over space, how places and identities are produced, how people make sense of places and build senses of place, and how people produce and communicate knowledge and meaning. In the late 19th century, cultural geography sought to compare and contrast different cultures around the world and their relationship to natural environments. This approach has its roots in the anthropogeography of Friedrich Ratzel and, in common with anthropology, it aimed to understand cultural practices, social organizations, and indigenous knowledge, but gave emphasis to people’s connections with and use of place and nature. A cultural area is a region (area) with one relatively homogeneous human activity or complex of activities (culture). These areas are primarily geographical, not historical (but see below), and they are not considered equivalent to Culture circles. A culture area is a concept in cultural anthropology where a geographic region and time sequence (age area) is characterized by substantially uniform environment and culture. For example, a music area is a cultural area defined according to musical activity, and may or may not conflict with the cultural areas assigned to a given region.One of the main areas of cross-cultural differences and an important source of cultural misunderstandings is our difference perceptions. Different cultures perceive things differently, sometimes these differences are very subtle and sometimes perceptions can lead to totally opposite interpretations. We all have different cultural perceptions and these difference can impact our international business success.
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