By Dr. BJ Enverga
In 1910, a German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener noticed something strange while studying a map. The eastern coastline of South America seemed to fit perfectly with the western coastline of Africa, as though they were pieces of a giant puzzle.
That similarity was difficult to ignore.
Wegener began to wonder if the continents had once been joined together. Over the next several years, he began collecting evidence from different fields: fossil records, geological formations, and ancient climate patterns. The same prehistoric fern appeared in South America, Africa, India, and Australia. Mountain ranges in North America matched those in Scotland and Scandinavia. Even traces of ancient glaciers appeared in places that are now tropical.
In 1912, Wegener proposed a radical idea: the continents were not fixed. They moved. Long ago they had been joined together in a supercontinent he called Pangaea, and over millions of years they slowly drifted apart. Most scientists rejected his idea. They argued that continents could not possibly move across the Earth’s crust. The president of the American Philosophical Society at the time colorfully described Wegener’s theory as “Utter, damned rot!”
Wegener never lived to see his theory accepted. He died in 1930 during an expedition in Greenland, buried beneath the ice he had spent his life studying. Decades later, however, the discovery of plate tectonics proved him right. Today we take continental drift for granted. We understand that the continents move, slowly but constantly.
But landmasses are not the only things that drift.
People drift.
Technologies drift.
And when they do, cultures change.
In fact, much of human culture is the product of movement.
This is one of the central insights to come from theorists of globalization. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai once suggested that the world is shaped by what he called “scapes.” People move across borders (ethnoscapes). Technologies spread across countries (technoscapes). Media, money, and ideas circulate globally, and they shape ordinary life in local communities.
Culture, in other words, is rarely static. It is constantly being carried across continents.
Consider something as familiar as adobo. Many Filipinos proudly claim it as a national dish. And it certainly is. But the word adobo comes from Spanish, derived from adobar, meaning to marinate. Versions of adobo exist across Spain and Latin America. The Philippine version developed during centuries of colonialism when Spain’s culinary styles amalgamated with local cooking traditions. Over time, these adapted to local tastes, ingredients, and methods. The result was our version of adobo, which is uniquely Filipino yet unmistakably global in its origins.
The same is true of halo-halo, the colorful dessert whose name literally means “mix-mix.” While it is now a staple of Filipino cuisine, historians trace its origins to Japanese migrants in the early twentieth century who introduced a shaved ice dessert known as kakigori. Filipinos adapted it, adding local ingredients such as leche flan, ube, and sweetened beans. What began as one dessert slowly drifted into another.
Cultural drift is not unique to the Philippines. Even traditions that seem quintessentially European often began elsewhere. We can look at British tea as an example. Today it is difficult to imagine Britain without tea. Roughly 100 million cups are consumed there every day, and “tea time” has become a stereotype of British culture. Yet tea is not native to Britain. It arrived in the seventeenth century through Dutch and Portuguese trade networks linking Europe to China. Its popularity surged after 1662 when the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza married King Charles II and brought her tea-drinking habits to the English court. Soon the East India Company was importing tea commercially, and what began as a foreign luxury eventually became a national ritual.
Does knowing this make British culture less British? Hardly.
Instead, it reminds us that cultures are rarely pure or isolated. They are shaped by encounters, exchanges, and journeys. Recipes travel. Stories migrate. Technologies spread. Over time, these influences mix together in ways that produce something new.
At a time when many societies seem to be turning inward and global cooperation appears fragile, it is worth remembering how interconnected our cultures already are. The foods we eat, the stories we tell, and the traditions we cherish often emerged from centuries of exchange across borders.
Those connections exist because people, ideas, and traditions have always moved from place to place.
In other words, culture drifts—much like continents.
Alfred Wegener’s great insight was that the Earth’s surface is not fixed. It is always moving, even if we cannot see it happening. The same might be said of culture. What we experience today as tradition is often the product of centuries of movement, as people, ideas, and practices slowly drift across the world and settle into new homes.
That is what this column, Continental Drifts, is about.
Wegener showed us that landmasses drift slowly across the Earth.
Culture drifts too.