One Global Culture?
You can eat a Big Mac in Beijing, drink Coca Cola in Venezuela, and buy Levi's in Amsterdam. It is one of the outcomes of the proces of globalisation, although sometimes it seems like Western massculture is overtaking other cultures.
Yet, this is not really the case. The large cultural regions in the world remain important constants in global developments. Cultures are being preserved, among other things through education and through national policy. Wherever cultures are oppressed, conflicts are inevitable, and where large cultural regions meet, numerous problems exist.
It is a bit problematic to find criteria for dividing the world into cultural areas. The concept of culture differs from region to region. It brings on associations with civilization, but it is impossible to classify the world according to 'levels of civilization.
It is less controversial to classify the world into cultural areas on the basis of language and religion. That is what we will do here. But beware: each indicator that can be used to classify cultures will produce a different map of the world's cultural mosaic!
Language
In the past, language has often been used by dominant population groups to express their ethnic superiority, or to create national unity in a country. Language is a symbol for ethnic and social identity. That is why minorities are often very devoted to the subsistence of their language.
The map below shows the areas in which some of the world languages are spoken. Even though this map has been generalised to a very large extent, it does give a hint of the complexity of the distribution of languages.
Where people meet, cultural influencing, mixing, or even destruction takes place. For ages, contacts between cultures have resulted from trade and the exchange of produce. As early as the 15th century there was intensive trade between countries in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The central axis in this trade was the Middle East. The Arabian merchants helped in diffusing scientific and technical knowledge from China to Europe.
Religion
Military supremacy has also contributed to cultural diffusion. Quite often, the colonial expansion did not just have political and economical motives. Religious motives where equally important. For example, after Colombus 'discovered' the America's in 1492, the native people of the 'New World' where ruthlessly subjected to Christianity. Most of the natives did not get the chance to convert; only a few survived the diseases that the Europeans brought with them. The Indian civilizations of the Inca's, the Aztecs, and the Maya's where for ever destroyed.
Events such as these took place also in Africa and in the Far East, although not always as dramatic as in the America's. The outcome of centuries of contacts between people with different cultural backgrounds is a very complex map of religions in the world. Christianity, budhism, Islam and Hinduism have spread over the entire world. Yet, to classify countries under a few world religions does not pay justice to the cultural differences between countries within such a religious realm. Just think about the cultural differences between Islamic Shia's and Sunnits, or between Greek-orthodox catholics and protestants.
Nowadays, processes of cultural diffusion are different than in the past. As a result of globalisation, a proces that was initiated by economic scale-up and the use of modern communication technologies, the delimitations of cultural regions have fainted. Not only does Western culture spread from centres in Europe, de US, and Japan, but also from metropolis in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These cities, that are connected through international trade, have a more or less 'westernized' business district. Not only international trade, but also the mass media, the movie-industry, and tourism cause the diffusion of Western values.
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