World Cultures Mapped

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A culture is a group of patterns of human activity inside society and the symbolic structures that give importance to such activity. Social norms, religious faiths, and traditions, laws, architecture, dress are all examples of cultural elements.

Despite the wide variety of cultures, all cultures can be conventionally combined into large groups or clusters. There are several classifications of human cultures.

World Cultural Spheres

The U.S. political specialist Samuel P. Huntington split the world into the “major civilizations”:
– The Catholic and Protestant countries of Europe and their former colonies
– Orthodox countries;
– Latin America;
– Muslim countries;
– Hindu countries;
– Buddhist countries;
– Countries of tropical Africa

These cultural areas can be subdivided into subareas.

Cultural spheres transcend terrestrial and political borders, although they often overlay (for example, Russia + Kazakhstan).

Three primary cultures

The ministry Global Mapping International published the world map, visualizing the story of biblical contextualization and honor-shame cultures (guilt, shame, and fear).

The map below visualizes the more than 13 thousand global results from TheCultureTest.com to show which countries are guilt, shame, or fear.

Human culture sees the world through one of three types of values:

Guilt and Innocence – Individualistic cultures (e.g., Western countries) view wrongdoing as a transgression of the law; such people are guilty and require forgiveness to become innocent.

Shame and Honor – Collectivistic societies (e.g., Asian and Arab nations) shame people who fail to meet community expectations; the person’s honor must be restored to avoid exclusion.

Fear and Power – Animistic contexts (e.g., tribal) fear the unseen world of spirits, curses, and ancestors; people employ magical rituals to gain power over the spiritual world.

Inglehart–Welzel Cultural Map of the World

The Inglehart–Welzel cultural map of the world was designed by political experts Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel. The world map depicts nearly associated cultural values that vary amongst nations in 2 dimensions: traditional opposite secular-rational values on the vertical y-axis) and survival opposite self-expression values on the horizontal x-axis. Going up on this map presents the change from traditional values to secular-rational ones, and going rightward shows the shift from survival values to self-expression values.

Traditional values highlight the importance of religion, respect to authority, parent-child relations, and traditional family values. Secular-rational values place less significance of faith and the traditional family.

Survival values highlight economic and physical safety. Self-expression values significantly prefer personal well-being, self-expression, and quality of life.

Besides, countries are divided into 9 clusters: the English-speaking, Catholic Europe, Protestant Europe, Orthodox Europe, Latin America, African-Islamic, Baltic, South Asian, and Confucian clusters.