Regionalization: Dividing a Cultural World.
Our planet earth is divided into 192 independent countries and about 40 dependencies. Throughout history, the political map of the world has changed repeatedly dividing the world into several groupings of nations. Nations can be divided by hemispheres, economists, languages or cultures. Dividing the earth's surface through cultures creates many different divisions on the map also known as regionalization. Regionalization attempts to classify cultures into specific locations making it easier to obtain a clearer understanding of the world. With that however, regionalization can also create dangers which can lead to oversimplification.
In order to create a regionalization of the world, human geographers have to delimit an important set of cultural regions. Delimiting these regions requires assessments on four basic subjects.
1. criteria for inclusion;.
2. data or time period (since cultural regions change over time);.
3. spatial scale; and.
4. boundary lines (Norton 184).
All four of these points are all much unified, and are not that simple to determine. If you look at Europe for instance, trying to delimit cultural regions is very difficult. Europe is such a huge area to divide making it extremely difficult to delimit main cultural regions. During the 14 and 1500's, Europe was believed to be one single continent with Asia being separate by itself. Once this miscalculation had been fixed, a new divide was needed because the image of a detached continent was so dominant in the eyes of many Europeans. Today, a political map of Europe created in the mid 1980's is used, showing twelve basic qualities that are measured for each European country. These topics include religion, per capita income, and free elections. This European political map works today because it gives us a clearer understanding of Europe using regionalization. It is also not too oversimplified through regions or too numerous that it becomes superficial.
