Global (Cross-Cultural)

"Global (Cross-Cultural)" is less a geographic region than an honest admission: some traditions have no single homeland, or are so widely diffused that naming one would mislead. Placed here are atheism, agnosticism, and secular humanism, stances toward religion that arise wherever people question or set aside belief in the divine, and that cannot be located in any one culture. Organized disbelief and doubt have ancient roots in several civilizations at once: the materialist Carvaka school of ancient India denied an afterlife and the authority of the Vedas; strands of classical Greek and Roman thought (the Epicureans, the skeptics) questioned the gods; and comparable currents appear in classical Chinese thought.

The modern forms, systematic atheism, principled agnosticism (a term coined by T. H. Huxley in the nineteenth century), and secular humanism as an ethical worldview grounded in reason and human dignity rather than revelation, are genuinely transnational, gaining institutional shape through documents like the Humanist Manifestos and organizations spanning many countries. This category also implicitly covers the many new and syncretic movements that draw on sources worldwide. The designation marks a real feature of the modern religious landscape: the rise of worldviews defined precisely by their independence from any particular sacred geography, belonging to humanity in general rather than to a place.

This heading exists for subjects that genuinely belong to no single place, and it carries a standing risk that the atlas states here rather than pretending away.

Some things really are cross-cultural. Every human society buries or burns its dead, marks the passage from child to adult, and has practices for illness and for weather. A page about death rites in general is a legitimate object, and comparing them is how anyone learns what is distinctive about any of them.

The risk is that a global heading becomes a place to put things whose home was never established. Several of the great comparative categories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries turned out to be that: shamanism, totemism, animism and fetishism were coined by European observers, applied to societies across four continents, and treated as one phenomenon on the strength of surface resemblance. Every one of them has since been criticised for describing the observer's framework better than the practices. Shamanism is the clearest case, since the word belongs to one Siberian language family and was extended to unrelated traditions that had their own words.

The atlas keeps such categories because the literature uses them and a reader will search for them, and records where each came from and what it flattens. The working rule is that a tradition goes under the region it belongs to whenever one can be identified, and comes here only when the subject really is the comparison itself.