Cultural Region, Major Cultural Regions of the World

• A cultural region is an area occupied by people who share one or more common cultural traits: language, religion, ideas, customs and elements of material culture.
• It can also be:
  • a spatial unit that works as a distinct entity in political, social, technological or economic terms; or
  • a region its own people perceive as culturally different from the areas around it.
• Cultural regions are therefore spatial expressions of cultural homogeneity and of perceived identity. At the largest scale they combine into cultural realms, the units into which the world is divided.

Cultural Region: Concept and Types

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Formal Cultural Region

• A formal (uniform) cultural region is one where people share one or more uniform, measurable traits, such as language, religion or a farming practice.
  • It shows cultural homogeneity over a contiguous area.
  • It is found by grouping places with similar measurable characteristics.
  • Based on a single trait, it is the simplest level of cultural regionalisation. Based on many traits together, it becomes a composite culture area.
• Geographers use formal regions to map spatial variation in traits and to read patterns of cultural distribution.
• Examples:
  • an Odia-language region, mapped from the share of Odia speakers by district;
  • a coconut-cultivation region along the Keralam (Kerala) and Konkan coasts;
  • the Islamic realm at world scale, defined by a majority religion.
• Nirmal Kumar Bose (Cultural Zones of India, 1956) divided India into 18 cultural zones on material traits. His later survey (Peasant Life in India, 1961) mapped the material traits of village India: house types, staple diets, oil presses, ploughs, dress and bullock carts. He found broad northern and southern culture areas meeting in a wide zone of overlap. This is formal regionalisation from material culture.
• Core and periphery: a formal region usually has a core where the trait is strongest. The trait weakens outward into a periphery that overlaps the next region.

Functional Cultural Region

• A functional (nodal) cultural region is organised around a central node through interaction, flows and linkages, not through sameness.
  • It holds together because of movements: of people, goods, pilgrims, information or authority.
  • Its edge is where the node’s influence fades and another node takes over.
• Examples:
  • the zone of influence of a city, such as Kolkata’s newspaper, market and commuter hinterland;
  • the pilgrim field of a temple, such as Puri’s Jagannath temple or Tirupati;
  • the area administered from a capital, or a diocese organised around a cathedral;
  • the labour and supply area of an industrial centre.
• Functional regions are dynamic: they grow or shrink as transport, markets and institutions change.

Vernacular (Perceptual) Cultural Region

• A vernacular region exists in the minds of its people. It rests on shared feeling, belief and sense of place, not on objective criteria.
  • It shows up in regional names, traditions, songs, cuisine and cultural consciousness.
  • Its boundaries are fuzzy and differ from person to person.
• Wilbur Zelinsky (1980) mapped North America’s vernacular regions, such as “Dixie” and the “Midwest”, from the names businesses used.
• Indian examples: the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan, the Braj country around Mathura–Vrindavan, Bundelkhand, Kongu Nadu in western Tamil Nadu, and “the Doab”.
• Vernacular regions show the subjective dimension of cultural geography.

Origin, Formation and Persistence of Cultural Regions

Human Traits behind Cultural Regions

• Three sets of human traits must be considered.
• Biological traits:
  • The senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch) let people perceive their environment and develop behavioural responses.
  • Historically they shaped habits, lifestyles and ways of dealing with the environment.
  • Biological traits have stayed nearly constant, while culture keeps changing. They cannot explain regional differences on their own.
• Ecological traits:
  • The natural environment strongly conditions culture. Traits develop as people adapt to their surroundings and seek harmony with or control over nature.
  • Culture evolves through innovation and adaptation, and environmental diversity favours cultural diversity. Culture is therefore dynamic and responsive to ecological change.
• Social and intellectual traits:
  • People, as social beings, create culture through interaction: language, literature, art, beliefs, ideologies and symbols.
  • The capacity to learn, innovate and transmit knowledge lets people develop new ideas and technologies and so transform both culture and environment.
  • Culture has moved through stages from hunting and gathering to agriculture and urban civilisation.

Formation of Cultural Regions

• Cultural regions arise from the interaction of a people with its environment in a particular area.
• When people with similar social and intellectual traits occupy an area for a long time, they develop distinct traits and complexes.
• Innovation plays a key part. Plough agriculture or irrigation, for example, raises productivity and supports permanent settlement, around which a region’s culture matures.
• When traits become spatially concentrated and consistently distributed, a formal cultural region emerges.
• Regions also form around functional nodes: cities, temples, courts and administrative centres.
• Regions also form through perception, when people feel culturally distinct from their neighbours.
• Wilbur Zelinsky’s doctrine of first effective settlement (1973): the first group to establish a viable society in an area leaves a lasting imprint out of proportion to its numbers.
• A region’s distinctiveness therefore comes from the geographical environment, from social and intellectual traits, or from both together.

Geographical Basis of Hearths

• Cultural regions often begin in fertile, resource-rich settings.
• River valleys were the early culture hearths: fertile soil, water and easy transport gave a farm surplus, which supported cities, writing and states.
  • The Indus, the Huang He, the Nile and the Tigris–Euphrates.
• Mountain valleys, plateaus and islands supported other centres:
  • Mesoamerica (the Maya and the Aztec civilisation of central Mexico);
  • the Andes (the Inca civilisation, centred on Peru and extending into Bolivia, Ecuador and Chile).

Persistence and Change

• Cultural regions are not permanent. Their boundaries expand and contract; some regions last for millennia, others are short-lived.
• Factors that favour persistence:
  • Geographical isolation by mountains, deserts or the sea, as in Ladakh, the Andaman Islands or the highlands of New Guinea.
  • Political barriers that limit contact.
  • Strong institutions of religion, language and kinship.
• Factors that drive change: conquest, migration, trade, colonialism, industrialisation and now globalisation.
  • Global media and markets are blurring older regional cultures. Minority and ethnic groups find it harder to preserve traditional identities.
  • Globalisation also provokes revival of regional languages and identities.

Problems of Delimiting Cultural Regions

• Jan O. M. Broek and John W. Webb (A Geography of Mankind, 1968) noted that dividing the earth into cultural regions requires four basic decisions. Each creates a problem:
  • Criteria: which trait or combination of traits defines a region?
  • Dateline: culture changes, so for which period is the map drawn?
  • Scale: local, regional or global?
  • Boundary: where exactly do the lines or transition zones go?

Problem of Criteria

• Regions are drawn by choosing significant traits or complexes and mapping their distribution. But:
  • No universal set of traits defines every region.
  • A trait vital in one culture may be irrelevant in another. Caste, for example, is central in South Asia and absent in most of the world.
  • Traits differ in relative weight from region to region.
• Delimitation is therefore subjective and context-specific. A culture must be studied as a historically evolved whole, not as a list of separate traits.
• Language and religion are the most widely used criteria, because they are mapped by censuses, mark identity strongly and change slowly. Yet their regions seldom coincide:
  • Arabic is spoken by Muslims and Christians alike.
  • Islam spans Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Urdu, Bengali, Malay and Hausa speakers.
  • Punjab shares one language across a border that separates mainly Sikh and Hindu from mainly Muslim populations.

Problem of Time (Dateline)

• Culture is dynamic. Regions keep expanding and contracting as diffusion and contact proceed.
• Any map of cultural regions is a snapshot, like a still frame from a moving film, valid only for its date.
  • Maps drawn in the 1960s placed Eastern Europe with the Soviet realm. After 1991 most of it joined the European Union.
• Permanent boundaries are therefore hard to define.

Problem of Scale

• The scale of analysis changes the answer.
  • At a regional scale (South-East Asia, West Asia) fine distinctions can be drawn and many small regions identified.
  • At a global scale generalisation is unavoidable, and exceptions and small variations are ignored.
• The same area can thus be regionalised differently at different scales. India is one realm globally but more than ten cultural regions nationally.

Problem of Boundaries

• Cultural boundaries are rarely sharp:
  • Traits are fluid and overlapping, and one region merges gradually into the next.
  • Geographers therefore identify transition zones (border zones), whose width depends on how traits are distributed.
• Within a region there is a core where traits are strongest. Outward they weaken and blend with neighbouring cultures. Donald W. Meinig (1965) called these zones the core, domain and sphere.
• A precise line is often neither possible nor meaningful.

Other Difficulties

• Relic boundaries (truce lines): a cultural boundary can persist after the forces that created it have gone, through social memory, institutions and identity. Such lines reflect historical continuity and cultural inertia.
  • The borders of the 19th-century partitions of Poland, for example, still show in its voting and economic maps a century after they were erased.
• Fluidity and overlap:
  • Traits intermix and produce hybrid landscapes.
  • Even a single trait shows fuzzy, transitional edges, so regions overlap and identities are hard to assign.
• Physical and political barriers:
  • Sharp cultural boundaries do occur where mountains, deserts or rivers restrict contact, or where political borders limit movement. The Himalaya between the Indic and Tibetan worlds and the Sahara between Arab North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa are examples.
  • These are exceptions. Most regions blend gradually.

Major Cultural Regions of the World

Schemes of World Cultural Regionalisation

• Geographers simplify world diversity into broad units called civilisations, cultural realms, major cultural regions, macro-cultures or culture worlds. These work at the most general level, the cultural realm, which stresses the macro-scale pattern and keeps smaller regional terms from being stretched.
• Richard J. Russell and Fred B. Kniffen (Culture Worlds, 1951) made the first systematic attempt.
  • They related cultural groups to the areas they occupied and recognised seven culture worlds: Polar, European, Dry, African, Oriental, Pacific and American, with one transitional area.
  • Each was a product of the long evolution of human–land relationships.
• Jan O. M. Broek and John W. Webb (1968) gave the most widely used scheme. It is led by religion:
  • four major realms: Occidental (Western), Islamic (North African–South-West Asian), Indic and East Asian (Sinic);
  • minor realms: South-East Asian, Meso-African and Southern Pacific (Melanesian–Polynesian).
  • The traits of each culture realm and its sub-realms make it the classic world classification.
• Samuel P. Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations, 1996) recognised nine civilisations, defined mainly by religion: Western, Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese.
• Harm J. de Blij and co-authors (Geography: Realms, Regions and Concepts) divide the world into twelve geographic realms. These combine culture with physical setting and political economy.
• Older schemes have dated. They describe the world of the mid-20th century:
  • Eastern Europe was grouped with the Soviet Union. After 1991 most of it joined the European Union and converged culturally with the west.
  • North Africa, long placed with the Arab realm, is also seen through its African identity (pan-Africanism), expressed in the African Union.
• A contemporary division into fourteen cultural regions rests on a combination of common language, shared religion or philosophy, social practice, and political and economic systems.
  • The regions differ greatly in size, population, development and historical depth.
  • The lines on the map stand for broad transition zones, not abrupt divides.

South Asia (Indic Realm)

• India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives, with Afghanistan sometimes included. Together they form the Indic realm.
• Seat of one of the oldest civilisations, the Harappan (Indus Valley) civilisation, centred on the Indus basin.
• Extraordinary physical diversity, from the Himalaya to the plains, plateaus and coasts, matches extreme socio-cultural diversity.
• One of the world’s most linguistically diverse regions: India alone recorded 121 languages in Census 2011.
• Religious plurality: the hearth of Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism, with large Muslim populations and Christian, Parsi and tribal communities.
• Older racial labels for the region: Proto-Australoid, Negroid, Mediterranean, Caucasoid and Mongoloid elements. These categories are dated, and they record mixture, not sharp groups.
• Social structure: a caste-stratified agrarian society on the plains, with tribal communities in the hills, forests and plateaus.
• The region’s internal variety is mapped in the cultural regions of India.

South-East Asia

• Mainland, peninsular and island countries, with strong contrasts between highlands and plains, and between coasts and the sea.
• An extremely diverse region shaped by early settlement, successive religious infusions (Hindu–Buddhist, Islamic, Christian), Chinese and European influence and political fragmentation.
• Ethnic make-up: older schemes class the region as predominantly Mongoloid, with Chinese, Malay, Burmese, Karen, Rohingya and Mon-Khmer groups.
• Languages: Malay, Vietnamese, Thai, Burmese, Khmer, Karen, Cham, Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao), Papuan and many more.
• Religions: Buddhism (Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia), Islam (Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei), Christianity (Philippines, Timor-Leste), and Bali’s Hinduism.
• Economy: subsistence rice farming alongside plantations and, today, export manufacturing.
• Often called a “cultural low-pressure area”, more a receiver than a source of traits. Its fragmentation earned it the label “Balkans of Asia”.

East Asia (Sinitic Realm)

• The Chinese cultural sphere, extending to Korea and Japan.
• China: a long, continuous civilisation. After 1949 it was relatively closed. Market reforms from 1978 made it a major economic power.
• Japan: a highly industrialised and urbanised island nation. With few resources, it imports raw materials and exports manufactures. It blends Asian cultural roots with Western economic institutions.
• Korea: North Korea is authoritarian and closed, with farming long prominent beside state-built heavy industry; South Korea is democratic and highly industrialised. Both share deep historical and cultural unity.

West Asia (Islamic Arab–Persian Realm)

• Associated with arid and semi-arid lands.
• Unity rests on Islam, on Arabic, Persian and Turkic languages, and on similar ecology and ways of life.
• It is not homogeneous: it contains non-Arab peoples (Persians, Turks, Kurds) and non-Muslim communities (Jews in Israel, Christians in Lebanon).
• It is a bridge and barrier between three continents and their cultures, and has seen recurrent conflict.
• Oil wealth after the 1973 price rise brought rapid urbanisation and investment in economic diversification, especially in the Gulf states.

Central Asia

• Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, formerly part of the Soviet Union and independent since 1991.
• Islamic heritage, a tradition of nomadic pastoralism, and the influence of Persian, Turkic, Russian and Chinese cultures. Older racial schemes class its peoples as mainly Mongoloid and Caucasoid.
• The region is building a post-Soviet identity, reviving Islamic and Turkic traditions alongside Russian-language urban culture.

Russia

• The largest country in the world, culturally distinct from Western Europe.
• Its identity is rooted in Byzantine, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, not in the Latin West.
• After the 1917 revolution it became the core of the Soviet Union and a dominant force in 20th-century world politics.
• The collapse of the Soviet Union (1991) brought political and economic restructuring and new states in Europe and Central Asia.
• Traits: Orthodox Christianity, the Russian language and considerable ethnic diversity, including Muslim Tatar and Caucasian peoples.

Europe

• Traditionally divided into Western and Eastern Europe on historical, political and economic grounds.
• Western Europe: highly industrialised and urbanised, shaped by capitalism and democracy, and historically dominant in shaping world political and cultural systems.
• Eastern Europe: long under Soviet influence and communist ideology. It was called a “shatter belt” for its instability.
• After the Cold War most of it joined the European Union (27 members since the United Kingdom left in 2020), and the two halves are converging.
• Shared traits: Christian heritage alongside high secularism, Indo-European languages, high literacy and development.

North Africa

• Geographically African but culturally close to the Arab world, hence “Arab Africa“.
• Traits: Islam, the Arabic language alongside Berber (Amazigh) languages, and Mediterranean influence. Older accounts trace its peopling to Caucasoid groups speaking Hamitic and Semitic languages.
• The cultural divide between Arab North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa runs through the Sahel, cutting across countries such as Sudan, Chad and Nigeria.
• Colonial legacy: strongest from France in the Maghreb.

Middle Africa

• Also called Central or tropical Africa. The old term “Negro Africa” is no longer used.
• The core of Africa’s indigenous cultures, long less touched by outside cultures than its neighbours, with hundreds of ethnic groups and languages, many in the Niger-Congo family.
• Economy: mining, fishing, forestry and subsistence farming.
• Religion: Christianity and Islam, often blended with traditional beliefs.
• A transition zone, or shatter belt, between Arab North Africa and Christian Southern Africa.

Southern Africa

• A largely Black African population, with European settlers (Dutch-descended Afrikaners and British) and Asian communities (Indians and Cape Malays).
• Afrikaans culture is strong in parts of South Africa.
• A history of racial domination under apartheid, which ended with democratic elections in 1994.
• Marked ethnic and cultural diversity. South Africa recognises twelve official languages (South African Sign Language was added in 2023).

Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific

• Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands.
• European settler populations predominate. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are 3.2% of Australia’s population (2021 Census), and people of the Māori ethnic group are 17.8% of New Zealand’s (2023 Census).
• Population is concentrated on the coasts; the Australian interior is sparsely peopled.
• Indigenous rights, land claims and Asian immigration are reshaping the region’s identity, and Indigenous peoples are being drawn further into mainstream society.
• The Pacific islands form a Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesian cultural world, the minor “Southern Pacific” realm of older schemes.

North America

• The USA and Canada, sometimes called “Anglo-America”, a term now contested.
• Traits: Christianity and the English language, industrial capitalism and democracy.
• Society: Indigenous peoples largely dispossessed; an African American population descended from slavery; and growing multiculturalism through immigration from Latin America and Asia.
• Long described as a “melting pot”, increasingly as a “salad bowl” of distinct groups.
• Internal contrast: French-speaking Quebec within English-speaking Canada.
• Economically, politically and militarily the world’s leading power.

Middle America

• The lands between the Rio Grande and Colombia, with the Caribbean islands.
• Traits: Spanish language and Catholic Christianity, with Indigenous (Maya, Nahua) and African (Caribbean) heritage.
• One of the earliest civilisation hearths (Mesoamerica) and the first area of European colonisation in the Americas.
• Racial and cultural mixing (mestizaje) is a defining trait, alongside strong historical continuity.
• Grouped with South America as Latin America.

South America

• Home to Indigenous civilisations such as the Inca, later colonised by Spain and Portugal.
• Traits: Catholic Christianity (with fast-growing Protestant churches), Spanish and Portuguese languages, and extensive mixing of Indigenous, European and African peoples.
• Political life swings between left and right, and development varies widely within and between countries.

Evaluation

• World cultural regions give a broad framework for reading global diversity and for comparing ways of life.
• Limits:
  • Boundaries are fluid, and regions are internally diverse.
  • Schemes privilege religion and language and may ignore economy and environment.
  • Older schemes are Eurocentric in naming and used racial categories that science has abandoned.
  • Continuous change by migration and globalisation reshapes the map.
• Cultural regionalisation is therefore both analytical and interpretative. It organises human cultures at the global scale, but every map is provisional.