Heritage and culture

Abstract

Cultures are manifested physically as people transform their landscapes in distinctive ways and expressed socially through how people behave and interact. When certain cultural landscapes and cultural behavior patterns become valued, particularly by powerful and/or majority groups within a society, such expressions of culture come to be seen as part of that society's heritage and thus as something that needs to be preserved, maintained, and revered. Processes of economic, technological, and social change unsettle what were once relatively stable and localized patterns of heritages and cultures. In response to these processes, many people seek to preserve, and frequently succeed in preserving, aspects of their cultures and heritages in a dynamic, diasporic, and increasingly globalized world. Both cultural groups, and the various levels of government face growing spatial, temporal, and social challenges in protecting, preserving, and mediating between heritages in the multicultural societies, resulting from the globalization of economies and popular cultures and widespread international migration. Geographers consider ecological, historical, and political processes when studying the environments from which cultures and heritages emerge, and within which they are constantly transformed.