Native American Culture Areas::

Culture Area Concept

By the time of European arrival, Native America was a vast region, with numerous and diverse nations ranging from the Arctic in the north to the Tierra del Fuego in the south. No single language or culture characterised these people who had apparently all arrived from Asia across the Bering Straits. Socio-political organisations covered bands, chiefdoms and states; customs, traditions and material cultures were as diverse as each tribe, band, village and community; there were nomadic hunter-gatherers, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers, small farming communities and large, complex agricultural systems supporting populous urban centres.

In order to organise and analyse so much diversity, anthropologists or ethnologists have tried to come up with various heuristic devices to classify Native American nations according to tribe, cultural traits or general geographic regions. The most popular and yet controversial device has been that of the culture area concept.

This concept tries to find regions where inhabitants share certain ecological, social, economic and ideological systems. A culture area can be said to be one whose inhabitants share and adapt to a particular environment in order to survive. Through geographical adaptation, cultures emerge and change and grow. According to this rather materialistic concept, geography is the primary factor that defines cultural activity and so groups of people sharing the same terrain with share similar cultural characteristics. So, for example, desert-dwellers have not developed maritime cultures but gather seeds and other wild foods, hunt small game, utilise or divert scarce water resources for small or large-scale agricultural ventures. Inhabitants of the arid Great Plains do not farm or spend large amounts of time gathering wild foods, but instead hunt buffalo.

There are many problems with the culture area concept that you must be aware of. It tends to freeze cultures in time and place, not allowing for cultural diversity within a specific region and not allowing for cultures to change. It has a very materialistic bias that has been challenged by many anthropologists and other social scientists over the years. Culture has as much of a constraining effect on the environment as the reverse. There is also the stress upon material culture - cultural possessions such as tools, clothing, housing styles, pottery styles - as a defining mode of classification. The Southwest culture area, for example, encompasses people who differ quite widely in terms of subsistence, housing styles and languages. There have been hunter-gatherers as well as agriculturalists predominant in the region; housing styles range from the Navajo hogans to the multi-room complexes of the Puebloan nations; and at least four major language stocks are represented there. When you read about specific cultural regions, pay attention to the dissimilarities as well as the similarities between Indian nations.

A further problem is that anthropologists have not agreed on the number of culture areas and who should be represented in them. Variations of the following scheme tend to be the most popular: the Arctic, Subarctic, Northwest Coast, Northeast, Southeast, the Plains, Southwest, Plateau and Basin and California.