Modern-Day Cultural Familiarities

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

I know this has been covered before, but I want people to look at this list and give me some feedback from it.

Latin American: Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.
Western: Western Europe, Israel, and most of North America, including the United States, Canada, British Isles, France, Spain, Germany, Scandinavia, Iceland, Italy, Switzerland, and Austria. Also includes Australia, New Zealand, and other places where European Colonialism displaced the native peoples.

There is no more case for making Latin America separate from Spain and Portugal than for making the United States and Canada separate from the British Isles. I would call them all Western.

Bill Stoddard

[Lord Carnifex]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Should Islam be one big CF? If so, it should go all the way from Turkey to Indonesia, which I'm not sure is good. Neither is it entirely and wholly and blatantly obviously ungood.

I would think not. I think that Saudi Arabia, Albania, and Indonesia are sufficiently distinct from each other to not constitute one CF, despite all three nations having Muslim majorities.

Muslim =/= Middle East (the Middle East includes secularists, Christians, Jews, and others). Muslim =/= Arabic (The Muslim world includes Persians, Turks, Berbers, Indians, East Africans, West Africans, and Pacific Islanders.)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

Bantu African: The culture of the village-dwelling people in the bulk of Sub-Saharan Africa. (The Zulu are the most notable of these people, I do believe.)
Congo Pygmy: The hunter-gatherer culture of the deep African rainforest, named after the most notable group.
South African Bushman: The hunter-gatherer culture of the Bushmen of South Africa, and others like it.
West African: The people of western Africa, including the Guinean, Mande, and Bantoid peoples, mainly inhabiting Gambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Senegal, Guinea, Togo, Benin, Burkina, and Sierra Leone.

How do you get West African different from Bantu African? West Africa is the original source from which the Bantu languages dispersed, and is not radically different from the regions further to the south.
On the other hand, Ethiopia is a somewhat distinct region, and coastal East Africa has a somewhat divergent culture because of its involvement in the Indian Ocean trade sphere of the Arab seafarers, including the slave trade.

Bill Stoddard

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

Australian Aboriginal: The culture of the aborigines of Australia.

If you aren't doing indigenous American as a separate culture, I don't see doing indigenous Australian either. Or conversely, I see a case for doing indigenous American being just as strong.

Another separate region I don't think you have is New Guinean. Between having 20% of the world's languages on that one island, having the unifying factor of Tok Pisin, and having some really distinctive belief systems such as Rot Blong Kago, they merit some recognition, I think.

Bill Stoddard

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

there are traits of Scandinavian culture that I wish hunted down and exterminated

Sheesh! You're even more fanatical then Professor Henry Higgins

"By rights he should be taken out and hung. For the cold-blooded murder of the English tongue."

I'm glad you haven't become Evil Overlord yet.

But if you won't have CF: Internet, how about CF: TV Tropes?

[MGibster]

How about Deaf culture?

[Lord Carnifex]

Originally Posted by MGibster

How about Deaf culture?

Too fine-grained. Cultural Familiarities are about the stuff everyone is expected to know about exisisting in a culture: do you tip waiters? How about taxi drivers? Barbers? How much? Do you tell the bus driver where you want to get off as soon as you get on? How do street signs and addresses work? Do married people show affection in public? How long should a woman's skirt be? Do you use the car horn only in emergencies or every three microseconds?

Most of which isn't different for Deaf people in a culture than anybody else.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by MGibster

How about Deaf culture?

I don't see why not.

[Dorin Thorha]

I guess we need to decide whether we are going to select an acceptable definition of "culture" and decide how many groups there are that fit, or choose a desired number of CFs to fit with Cultural Adaptability and then divide human cultures into that many subcategories as coherently as we can. I think the latter approach is probably the best, personally.

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

From what I remember there are some measurable differences between cultures in different parts of the Arab world.

1.) Fertile Crescent -- Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Palestinian areas -- and variants within, partially dependent on religions (Druze, Alawite, Sunni Muslim, et alii)

2.) Arab Peninsula -- Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Emirates; Oman and Yemen each have their own variant, and western Saudi A. (the Hejaz) isn't the same as eastern Saudi Arabia.

3.) Egypt -- in the Arab world a class by itself.

4.) Maghreb -- Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya -- with variants, especially between Tunisia and elsewhere.

I'm sure I'm missing some details but this gives some idea of how many possible cultural variants you can see in the "Arab Muslim" world alone.