Cultural Traits and Landscapes
Chopsticks, blue jeans, and physical brick housing styles are examples of this type of culture, which consists of physical, tangible objects created by a society.
Material Culture
High-speed internet, smartphones, and global air travel have dramatically reduced the friction of distance, a phenomenon known as this.
Time-Space Compression/Globalization
Place-names like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and El Paso in the American Southwest reflect the region's colonial history and are known geographically as these.
Religions like Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism actively seek converts globally and are classified under this broad religious category.
Universalizing Religions
Shared national holidays, a common language, and a unified national sports team act as these unifying forces within a country.
Centripetal Forces
The idea that a culture should be viewed within the context of its own values is known as
Cultural Relativism
When Italian immigrants moved to New York City in the early 1900s and brought traditional pizza recipes with them, the cuisine spread through this specific type of diffusion.
Relocation Diffusion
Swahili across East Africa and English in international aviation and business serve as common trade languages used by speakers of different native tongues, known as this.
Lingua Franca
Hinduism and Judaism are closely tied to specific cultural groups and geographic locations, making them examples of this type of religion.
Ethnic Religions
Deep political polarization, religious conflict, and linguistic discrimination act as these dividing forces within a state
Centrifugal Forces
The unique architectural features of Santa Fe, New Mexico, such as low-rise adobe buildings and earth-toned plaster, give the city a strong, distinct feeling known as this.
Suburbs with strip malls and chain restaurants may give off this other feeling.
Sense of place, placelessness
A high-fashion trend that begins on runways in Paris, spreads to luxury boutiques in Tokyo, and eventually lands in fast-fashion suburban malls in Ohio is an example of this
Hierarchical Diffusion
A regional variation of a language distinguished by distinctive vocabulary, spelling, and pronunciation, such as Southern American English versus British English, is called this
Lingua Franca
Both Buddhism and Hinduism originated in South Asia in this modern-day country's cultural hearth region.
India
The legacy of 19th-century European activity left many countries in South America speaking Spanish or Portuguese as their official national tongue, demonstrating the impact of this historic process on global language patterns.
Colonialism/imperialism
In many places, colonial structures sit directly over Indigenous sites, which are now surrounded by modern highways. This layered historical imprint on the land is called this.
Sequent Occupance
When McDonald's expanded into India, it adapted its menu to serve vegetarian burgers instead of beef. This adoption of an underlying idea with local modification is called this.
Stimulus Diffusion
English, Spanish, Hindi, and Russian all belong to this massive language family, which claims the largest total number of speakers worldwide
Indo-European
The presence of tall pagoda towers with curved roof eaves across East Asia is a distinct cultural landscape feature associated with branches of this universalizing religion.
Buddhism
Day of the Dead (Día de los Muertos) in Mexico blends Indigenous Aztec respect for ancestors with Catholic All Saints' Day traditions, creating a new, distinct celebration. This is a classic example of this process.
Syncretism
When a government adopts policies that force minority groups such as Native Americans to abandon their language, attend boarding schools, and dress to completely merge into the dominant culture, this process has occurred.
Assimilation
When a new regional slang term spreads outward from a single neighborhood in London to adjacent streets and nearby local schools through daily, face-to-face interactions, this specific process is occurring.
Contagious Diffusion
To save their endangered indigenous language from extinction, the Maori people of New Zealand established early childhood immersion schools known as language nests to achieve this goal.
Language preservation/revitalization
While universalizing religions actively seek converts globally through expansion and relocation diffusion, ethnic religions typically diffuse through this process as practitioners move to new location
Relocation diffusion
When enslaved African populations and European settlers interacted in Caribbean island environments, their native languages blended to form entirely new, stable native languages known as these.
Creole languages