CatBus said:

LexX said:

I think people in the US and UK (the places where the movies were made) seem to think that they have more global significance than what it really is.

Yeah, I think global significance is a pretty big stretch for any cultural work. The Bible and Greek/Roman mythology may have meant everything in Europe for a thousand years, but they meant squat to the Maori. Global communication and media changes this a little, but not as much as you'd think--language and cultural barriers are still pretty tough to bridge.

By the same token though, there really isn't anything that is "global" if you are going to include every isolated community in every far corner of the world. As far as a "global" culture can actually exist, I'd say the Bible and classical religions fit the bill more appropriately than anything else I can think of. The only region in the world that was not directly shaped by these was east Asia, but in terms of trade and economy and to some degree politics they were directly linked into the world systems of both the Hellenistic era and Medieval Europe.