Analysis of Culture-driven Mechanism in Evolution of Ethnic Settlement Landscape

The ethnic minority settlement landscape is a special type of cultural landscape. Evolution of ethnic settlement landscape should be considered as a cultural change, whose drive mechanisms include internalization, externalization, and acculturation. The internalized mechanism explains human’s meaning identification and paradigm conformity to settlement landscape. Volition is always expressed as the regimes or stipulations of settlement landscape in the externalized mechanism. The acculturation mechanism can result in four different ways: cultural separation, integration, assimilation and marginalization. Thus, based on the cultural analysis of the evolution of traditional and modern ethnic settlement landscape, the strategies including reconstructing the meaning systems, optimizing the regimes and developing real cultural landscapes, and promoting cultural confidence and self-awareness are put forward to resist the modern alienation of ethnic minority settlement landscape in this paper.