It is on the tip of my tongue...but I can't think of it! *sigh* so frustrating....

I just thought of it.....globalization!

Do you mean costumes or custom? 1) Trans-cultural diffusion or inter-cultural diffusion: "Trans-cultural diffusion is used in cultural anthropology to describe the spread of cultural items — such as ideas, styles, religions, technologies, languages etc. — between individuals, whether within a single culture or from one culture to another. It is distinct from the diffusion of innovations within a single culture. Diffusion across cultures is a well-attested and uncontroversial phenomenon. For example, the practice of agriculture is widely believed to have diffused from somewhere in the Middle East to all of Eurasia, less than 10,000 years ago, having been adopted by many pre-existing cultures. Other established examples of diffusion include the spread of the war chariot and iron smelting in ancient times, and the use of cars and Western business suits in the 20th century." Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-cultural_diffusion 2) "A meme (pronounced /miːm/) consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus. As a unit of cultural evolution, a meme in some ways resembles a gene. Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, recounts how and why he coined the term meme to describe how one might extend Darwinian principles to explain the spread of ideas and cultural phenomena. He gave as examples tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothing-fashions, and the technology of building arches. Meme-theorists contend that memes evolve by natural selection (similarly to Darwinian biological evolution) through the processes of variation, mutation, competition, and inheritance influencing an individual entity's reproductive success. So with memes, some ideas will propagate less successfully and become extinct, while others will survive, spread, and, for better or for worse, mutate. "Memeticists argue that the memes most beneficial to their hosts will not necessarily survive; rather, those memes that replicate the most effectively spread best, which allows for the possibility that successful memes may prove detrimental to their hosts."" Source and further information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme