Southeast Asia and Singapore: Crossroads of world civilizations

It is remarkable, but unremarked  upon(in my experience), that Southeast Asia is at the crossroads of the four major civilizations of the world: Christian, Islamic, Indic and Sinic.

The four civilizations exercice their dominent influence in the following countries:

1. Christian (Roman Catholic): The Philippines (except Mindanao), East Timor

2. Islamic: Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei, Mindanao (Philippines)


3. Indic
    a. Theravada Buddhism:  Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia.
    b. Hinduism: Bali (Indonesia)

4. Sinic: Vietnam, Singapore

Singapore, uniquely in Southeast Asia, shows the strong presence of all four civilizations.

Cultural realms, civilizations

I have found the following conceptual framework of world civilizations by Jan Broek ("A Geography of Mankind" (1968,1973,1978), Jan O.M. Broek and John W. Webb) very useful.

A. Major civilizations:

 1. Occidental (Christian)
 2, Main Islamic (excluding SE Asia)
 3. Indic (Hindu)
 4. Sinic (East Asian)

B. Minor civilizations:

 5. Southeast Asian
 6. Meso-African (Negro-African, sub-Saharan African)
 7. Southern Pacific (Melanesian-Polynesian)

"The Clash of Civilizations" by Samuel P. Huntington provides a more contemporary, more geo-political, framework, shown in the following map (map source: Wikipedia):

Broek's conceptual framework accommodates Huntington's nine civilizations, thus:

A, 4 Major Civilizations:

1. Christian
   a. Western
   b. Latin American
   c. Orthodox

 2. Islamic

 3. Indic
    a. Hindu
    b. Buddhist

 4. Sinic
    a. Chinese-Korean-Vietnamese
    b. Japanese

B. Minor Civilization:

  5. Meso-African

A similar view of the major civilizations can be gained by examining the spread of the major religions.

                                                        (source)

Cultural comparison in five dimensions (Geert Hofstede)

I have just come across Geert Hofstede's fascinating five-dimensional quantitative model of culture. Data have been collected for 66 cultures across the globe, including those of US, UK, China, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Ranked by Individualism, one of the five dimensions, US, Australia and UK are the top nations. Ranked by Uncertainty Avoidance, Singapore is the nation most ready for uncertainty.  Surprisingly, Malaysian culture  is the most willing to accept the existence of a power elite.  (For analysis of the Hofstede scores of individual societies, see this.)

Reducing a culture to five numbers is inherently unsatisfactory and subjective. However, such an exercise provides a global perspective that complements the in-depth understanding of an individual culture which each person can only hope to attain for a few cultures in his/her lifetime.

The World Values Survey is a similar project that produces the interesting Inglehart–Welzel Map (map source: Wikipedia), where the vertical axis correlates strongly with Atheism, and the horizontal axis correlates strongly with Wealth. These two dimensions arose out of a factor analysis of ten variables, and account for more than 70% of the variance.