Cultural Patterns and Processes

Culture is a group's whole way of life, from beliefs and customs to tools and habits, learned and handed down rather than inherited. A culture trait is one piece of it, like a food, a style of building or a way of using land. Ethnocentrism means judging other cultures by your own culture's standards, while cultural relativism means trying to understand a culture on its own terms.

The cultural landscape is the visible mark people leave on the land, from farms, factories and places of worship to street signs and buildings in traditional or postmodern styles. Sequent occupance is the layering left by groups who lived in a place one after another. Istanbul's Hagia Sophia shows it: built as a cathedral, made a mosque in 1453, a museum in 1934 and a mosque again in 2020. Ethnic neighborhoods, women's roles in the workforce and Indigenous lands also shape how space is used.

Where languages, religions and ethnic groups cluster, they give a region its own feel, or sense of place. Placemaking is how people shape a space to reflect who they are, for example with murals, festivals or signs in their language. These same traits can be centripetal forces that unite a country or centrifugal forces that divide it, like the language split between Dutch-speaking Flanders and French-speaking Wallonia in Belgium.

Culture spreads from a hearth in two main ways: relocation diffusion, when people move and take their culture with them, and expansion diffusion, when an idea spreads outward while staying strong at home. Expansion can be contagious (person to person, like a viral trend), hierarchical (from powerful people or big cities down) or stimulus (the core idea spreads but changes, like McDonald's serving no beef in India).

Colonialism, imperialism and trade spread languages, religions and foods around the world, which is why Spanish, English, French and Portuguese are spoken far from Europe. When cultures mixed, new forms appeared: creolization blends cultures into something new, like Haitian Creole, and a lingua franca is a shared language people use to communicate across language lines, like Swahili in East Africa or English today.

Today urbanization, globalization, media and the internet spread culture faster than ever, and time-space convergence means travel and communication now take far less time. This is spreading English and causing some Indigenous languages to disappear, and it leads both to cultural convergence (cultures becoming more alike) and cultural divergence (groups protecting or reviving what makes them different).

Languages and religions spread from hearths, and you can trace them on maps and in toponyms (place names), like the Spanish names across the U.S. Southwest; Indo-European is the language family with the most native speakers. Universalizing religions, which welcome converts anywhere (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Sikhism), spread by both expansion and relocation diffusion, while ethnic religions tied to a particular people, such as Hinduism and Judaism, are mostly found near their hearths or spread when their followers move.

When cultures meet, people may adopt some new traits while keeping their own (acculturation), or take on the majority culture so fully that their original culture fades (assimilation). They may also blend traits into something new (syncretism), like Mexico's Día de los Muertos, which mixes Indigenous traditions with Catholic holidays. Multiculturalism is when many cultures live side by side and keep their own identities, as Canada has made official policy since 1971.