Modelling the Spatial Dynamics of Culture Spreading in the Presence of Cultural Strongholds

TL;DR

This paper presents a minimal model of cultural spread emphasizing the influence of strong cultural centers, like Kyoto, showing that information dissemination in pre-modern Japan resembles an Eden growth process with spatially coherent patches.

Contribution

It introduces a novel minimal model linking linguistic map properties to cultural dynamics, highlighting the role of geographic strongholds in information flow.

Findings

Cultural spread in Japan can be modeled as an Eden growth process.

Spatial patches of cultural information are about a day's walk in size.

Communication times between patches are comparable to human generation times.

Abstract

Cultural competition has throughout our history shaped and reshaped the geography of boundaries between humans. Language and culture are intimately connected and linguists often use distinctive keywords to quantify the dynamics of information spreading in societies harbouring strong culture centres. One prominent example, which is addressed here, is Kyoto's historical impact on Japanese culture. We construct a first minimal model, based on shared properties of linguistic maps, to address the interplay between information flow and geography. In particular, we show that spreading of information over Japan in the pre-modern time can be described as a Eden growth process, with noise levels corresponding to coherent spatial patches of sizes given by a single days walk, and with patch-to-patch communication time comparable to the time between human generations.