Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Getting Religion: How It Moves and Grows
Now let's see how the concepts mentioned up to this point come into play, beginning with religion.
Looking at the geography of religion allows you to examine one of the more important culture traits
and to make connections between cultural geography and contemporary matters. In Figure 13-3, a
highly generalized map of the world's principal religions reveals culture areas that vary greatly in
size. Christianity and Islam, for example, exhibit multi-continental expanses. Judaism, in contrast, is
dominant in Israel, a comparatively small culture area, and in even smaller scattered urban enclaves
mainly in Europe.
Putting diffusion to work
With the exceptions of the traditional (or what some people might call “tribal”) religions, virtually all
of the distributions shown in Figure 13-3 are results of cultural diffusion. In that regard, Buddhism
and Christianity are interesting in that their present distributions have little in common geograph-ic-
ally with where they originated — Israel and the West Bank in the case of Christianity, and India
in the case of Buddhism. The Jewish population of Israel largely consists of recently (post-World
War II) relocated individuals and their descendants, while the other Jewish enclaves worldwide are to
some extent latter day expressions of the ancient Diaspora (the dispersion of Jews after the Babylo-
nian exile). In Africa, Europe and Southwest Asia, the Islamic realm is largely the result of relocation
diffusion (migration and conquest) of people from Arabia coupled with conversion of peoples with
whom they came into contact (contagious expansion diffusion). Another interesting geographic as-
pect of Islam is its dominance in Indonesia (which contains more Muslims than any other country
on Earth), Malaysia, and the southern Philippines, which are products of ages-old trans-Indian Ocean
trade between Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian lands (contagious expansion diffusion).
Getting effects into action
To a certain degree, barrier effects are also evident on the map. The Himalayan Mountains, a formid-
able physical barrier, mark the boundary between parts of the Hindu and Buddhist realms. In West
Africa, the interface between the Islamic and “traditional religion” realms coincide with the tropical
forest fringe. A similar effect is seen in the Amazon, where tropical forests have isolated practitioners
of traditional religions from agents of culture change.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search