Territorial traditions

Territorial traditions

Human culture is generally established on a territory, firstly, and on the determined territory consequently and secondarily the culture feeds and establishes itself on the population that belongs to that territory, or settles there sedentary for a long period of ages, centuries, millennia.

Therefore, contrary to some anthropological and behavioral sociology and historical premises, explanations and studies on social behavior always start from the human factor, which is not illogical: but culture is always established geographically, not by simple climatic or ethnic determinism, firstly it is on a physical basis that all other physical and virtual human institutions, intangible, are maintained and structured, in those abstract dimensions.

The first languages ​​are designated on a territory, in any part of the Amazon territory the indigenous dialects are circumscribed in zones of territory on which the tribes settle, just as the more than 800 dialects of India are distributed by territories and regions, in China the more than 400 dialects refer before the cultures and ethnicities are marked by territories and regions.

The first religion to be detached from the territory was Christianity, which when it became official in the Western Roman Empire granted citizenship to all cultures and ethnicities under Roman multiculturalism, with its great divisions between the Ottoman and Roman Empires, many languages, many religions, and many cultures, it was the first extraterritorial religion.

Muslims do not make a break between religion and territory and wherever they migrate they exercise their territorial vision of religion, demanding the observance of dates, customs and Islamic culture to where they migrate because the Islamic religion is still territorial. Some cultural expressions are still territorial, such as samba, which is gradually ceasing to be from Rio de Janeiro and becoming more Bahian, São Paulo, Gaucho, and even Japanese. It leaves the territoriality of the favelas first to go to the rich neighborhoods of the south zone of Rio de Janeiro before conquering other territories. Many practices still belong to the strict territoriality, such as Japanese Kaabuki, many languages, American football, strictly territorial in the United States, Indian, New Zealand, Australian, and Pakistani cricket, famous Nordic mathematicians, the Arabic language spread throughout the Middle East, Jazz from New Orleans, are trends that are being relocated, some of them, but all of them originate from the point of territorial accumulation that built the critical mass in a territorial location. Territorial atavism still persists in politics, where communism does not share the same territory with another ideological conception, unlike liberalism, which works well with all ideological and political tendencies in the same territory. Where there is communism in the same territory, there is no room for capitalism and another different or divergent political current. Communism is territorial, just as all dictatorships are territorial.

Some religions still belong to the exclusive territorial concept, such as Buddhism, Shintoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, and many other religions such as Islam.

Illicit drug traffickers prefer to draw a delimited territory to carry out their business; it is more rational to maintain control over a specific geographic area.

All metropolises have a highly dense central zone where most of the people and leading companies accumulate in a small, cramped territory that is disputed and valued.

Cities take advantage of the point of accumulation density where services are arranged at a small spatial distance between them, this is the essence of our entire civilization structured in geographic concentration.

Roberto da Silva Rocha, professor universitário e cientista político