Cultural Landscapes & Identity
The physical trace of a culture on the land—including architecture, symbols, and artifacts—is known by this two-word term.
Cultural Landscape
This is the specific language family that includes Hindi, Farsi, Greek, and Romance languages, covering the widest geographic area of any family.
Indo-European
These types of religions, such as Christianity and Islam, attempt to be global and appeal to all people regardless of location.
Universalizing Religions
This is the identity with a group of people who share the cultural traditions of a particular homeland or hearth—distinct from race, which is biological.
Ethnicity
A restriction on behavior imposed by social custom, such as not eating pork in certain religions.
Taboo
This term describes the blending of different cultural beliefs and practices into a new, unique form, such as Santería or Tex-Mex cuisine.
Syncretism
A language mutually understood and commonly used in trade by people who have different native languages.
Lingua Franca
This is the world’s largest ethnic religion, primarily concentrated in India.
Hinduism
This process involves a more powerful ethnic group forcibly removing a less powerful one to create an ethnically homogeneous region (e.g., the Balkans in the 1990s).
Ethnic Cleansing
The belief that one's own culture is superior to others, often used as a framework to judge other cultures.
Ethnocentrism
This process occurs when a minority group is forced or chooses to abandon its customs and completely blend into the host culture.
Assimilation
A boundary that separates regions in which different language usages predominate, such as the "pop" vs. "soda" line in the U.S.
Isogloss
The Three Baskets (Tripitaka) are the sacred texts of this religion, which originated in modern-day Nepal/India.
Buddhism
A neighborhood, district, or suburb which retains some cultural distinction from a larger, surrounding area, like "Little Italy" or "Chinatown."
Ethnic Enclave
The opposite of ethnocentrism, this is the practice of judging a culture by its own standards rather than through the lens of one's own culture.
Cultural Relativism
This 19th-century theory, often associated with Friedrich Ratzel, incorrectly argued that human behavior and cultural development are strictly dictated by physical geography and climate.
Environmental Determinism
This term describes a simplified form of speech that adopts a limited vocabulary from a lingua franca; it has no native speakers and is used for basic communication.
Pidgin Language
This term describes a state whose government is under the control of a ruler who is deemed to be divinely guided, or under the control of religious leaders (e.g., Vatican City or Iran).
Theocracy
This occurs when a fundamental idea spreads but a specific trait is rejected or changed (e.g., the McDonald’s "Veggie Burger" in India).
Stimulus Diffusion
This concept describes the physical "imprint" of various successive cultures on a single place over time, like layers of history in a city like Rome or New Orleans.
Sequent Occupance
In the context of "Sense of Place," this phenomenon occurs when a group feels a deep, emotional attachment to a location, often resulting in "insider" status, while others are viewed as "outsiders."
Topophilia
While most European languages belong to the Indo-European family, these three European countries speak languages from the Uralic family.
Estonia, Finland, and Hungary
While Christianity is universalizing, its distribution in the U.S. is highly regional; this specific denomination dominates the "Deep South" from Texas to Virginia.
Southern Baptist
In the 1990s, this country underwent a violent "Balkanization" process, where the death of leader Josip Broz Tito led to the collapse of a multi-ethnic state into several independent, ethnically-defined nations.
Yugoslavia
This is the process where a cultural trait is "stolen" or used by a dominant culture in a way that is perceived as disrespectful or exploitative, often losing its original sacred or social context.
Cultural Appropriation