South America:
Culture Spheres
South America is a continent of great cultural diversity. The great variety of Amerindian cultures, European descendants of the Iberian colonizers and from elsewhere, Africans brought over to work on the sugar cane plantations, as well as Asians from India, Japan, and Indonesia have created a complex cultural landscape. Geographer John Augelli, who devised the Rimland-Mainland concept for Middle America, makes sense out of this cultural mosaic by dividing South America into five culture regions, or "spheres".
A quick review of the The Regional Concept may be useful:
Study the criteria of each of these cultural regions:
Tropical-plantation
European-commercial
Amerind-subsistence
Mestizo-transitional
Undifferentiated