Cultural area

[3] A precursor to the concept of culture areas originated with museum curators and ethnologists during the late 1800s as means of arranging exhibits, combined with the work of taxonomy.

[4][5][6] This iteration of the concept is sometimes criticized as arbitrary, but the organization of human communities into cultural areas remains a common practice throughout the social sciences.

"[7] Sauer's concept was later criticized as deterministic, and geographer Yi-Fu Tuan and others proposed versions that enabled scholars to account for phenomenological experience as well.

Different boundaries may also be drawn depending on the particular aspect of interest, such as religion and folklore vs dress, or architecture vs language.

[17] It may have been coined first by Ronald Berndt in 1959 to describe the Western Desert cultural bloc, a group of peoples in central Australia whose languages comprise around 40 dialects.