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.

Clark Wissler 's map of Native American cultural areas within the territory of the United States (1948)
Cultural areas of the world as defined by Whitten and Hunter (shown with bold borders; associated with traditional economic forms, also shown in colors)
Cultural areas of Africa as defined by Melville J. Herskovits
Sinosphere , areas with historical influence from Chinese culture
The Celtic nations , homelands of the Celtic languages , can be classed as a cultural region.