Geography and Culture

Unlike America, East Asia still has a thriving mall culture. Cities have massive skyscraper malls filled with hot pot restaurants, KTV, and every luxury brand you can think of. It’s easy to deride this sort of thing as vapid and consumerist. That is, until you get there and experience 38 degrees celsius and 100% humidity. Then you get it. Why in the world would I hang out anywhere other than an air-conditioned mall?

When you live in a developed country, the effect of geography on the culture you live in is hard to discern. Infrastructure is built to minimize the inconveniences of the physical world, so you’re not affected the same way your cultural forebears were. And like how a fish can’t tell they’re swimming in water, you can’t separate what’s inherent to life and what’s inherent only to your culture.

That changes when you travel - especially to less developed countries.

The most startling example of this I’ve ever seen was the Tibetan sky burial. The deceased’s body is given several days of “rest” - time for the soul to separate from the physical world. After that, it’s taken to a open plain, dismembered, and fed to vultures. When the vultures hopefully pick the bones clean - not guaranteed, they are actually fussy eaters - the bones are grinded up with flour and fed to crows. The entire body is gone by noon.

To the Tibetans, this is grounded in Buddhist beliefs. The process of the soul’s transmigration has left your body already an empty vessel. It’s best to participate in the cycle of life by nourishing other living creatures.

But to an outsider it seems grounded almost entirely in geography. A brief visit to the Tibetan plateau and it’s obvious why. When you look around, there are no trees. You are 4000m up. You can’t cremate. When you look down, the topsoil goes ~20cm deep before it hits mountainous rock or permafrost. You can’t bury. In fact, the literature suggests Tibetans buried their dead this way long before Buddhism. This form of burial does logically reflect Buddhism, but at least part of it is rationalization of a practice derived from geographic and environmental constraints.

This leads me to think about which parts of American culture are strongly influenced by geography - for example, the idiosyncratic American brand of individualism. But none of those theories are feel as viscerally true as the ones I come up with for other cultures. I am but a fish in water, so I wait for the next Tocqueville to bless us with their insights.