Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Xhosa
"Xhosa" is the generic name used for a number of related cultural groups in South Africa. Xhosa groups include the Mpondo, Bomvana, Bhaca, Thembu, Mpondomise, Xesibe, Mfengu, Hlubi, and the Xhosa proper. These Southern Nguni peoples, as...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Turks
Ethnically, the Turks are a cultural group united by a common language, but the term "Turk" has no clearly defined racial significance; it can be properly applied to those communities historically and linguistically connected to the...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Turkana
"Turkana" is the name given to the pastoral and formerly pastoral people living in the arid and semiarid range lands of northwestern Kenya. The Turkana refer to themselves as "Ngiturkan" and their land as "Eturkan." The Turkana ethnic...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Tuareg
The Tuareg, a seminomadic, Islamic people who speak a Berber language, Tamacheq, live in the contemporary nation-states of Niger, Mali, Algeria, and Libya. They are believed to be descendants of the North African Berbers and to have...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Tswana
Batswana are divided into a number of subgroups or "tribes", There are approximately twenty-five totems, which crosscut "tribal" boundaries. Although Batswana received Christian missionaries in the early nineteenth century and most...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Tsimihety
The term "Tsimihety" usually refers to one of the eighteen or twenty tribes or ethnic groups of the Republic of Madagascar; however, Tsimihety possess neither political unity nor an ideology of unity. They are best described as an...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Zoroastrians
The ethnic identity of this Iranian minority group is derived from their religion, Zoroastrianism. They constitute only 0.18 percent of the Iranian population. The term "Zoroastrian" is taken from the name of their prophet Zarathushtra...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Shona
The Shona-speaking peoples comprise about 80 percent of the population of Zimbabwe, with significant groups in Mozambique. Most of what follows applies to the Shona in Zimbabwe, who have been extensively studied. There are now around...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Songhay Marriage and Family
The Songhay are the fourth-largest ethnic group in Niger, West Africa. There are also considerable Songhay populations in Mali and Benin. They are closely related culturally to the Zarma. The Songhay are spread over a large area of...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Suri
"Suri" is the self-name of a little-known group of agro-pastoralists/cultivators straddling the borderland of southwestern Ethiopia and Sudan. They show some historical and cultural affinities with the Nilotic peoples in neighboring...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Suku
"Suku" is the term now accepted by the Suku themselves and in Zaire and in the ethnographic literature. Just before and after 1900, they were often referred to as "Yaka" or, more specifically, "Yaka of MiniKongo" -- in contrast with...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Teda
The Teda inhabit the Tibesti Massif, in northern Chad. They are generally considered to be part of a larger grouping of people known as "Tebu," "Tebou," "Tibbu," or "Toubou." Patterns of growth, intraethnic differentiation, and migration...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Tandroy
The Tandroy live in the far south of Madagascar and speak a Malagasy dialect. Their land is known as "the Androy," literally, "where the roy ( Mimosa delicatula ) is," but more commonly rendered as "land of the thorny bush" or "spiny...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Tigray
The Tigray are the largest ethnic group in the Ethiopian province of Tigray and in the Eritrean nation. The Tigray have not been as thoroughly studied as their culturally similar neighbors, the Amhara, with whom they share an "imperial"...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: San Speaking Peoples
San-speaking peoples do not constitute an ethnic group in the usual sense. The most widely known are those who call themselves "Zhu I oasi" (!Kung or Juwasi in most ethnographies), although the other peoples mentioned above have also...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Samaritans
The Samaritans are a sect numbering about 500 who currently reside in Nablus, on the west bank of the Jordan River in Israeli-occupied Jordan, and in Holon, south of Tel Aviv, on the Mediterranean coast of Israel. The Samaritans call...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Sakalava
The Sakalava inhabit an expansive region of Madagascar; their territory today encompasses nearly all of the west coast of this large Indian Ocean island. "Sakalava" is a compound term meaning "the long valleys" or "rivers." A noun as...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Pokot
During the colonial period, the Pokot were called "Suk" by Europeans. To some Pokot, the older designation is a reminder of an era in which Africans lacked the power to name themselves; to others, it represents the clever ruse of a...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Persians
Persians are an ethnic group defined primarily by language and location. The Persian language, also known as Farsi, which linguists classify in the Indo-Iranian Branch of the Indo-European Language Family, had about 23 million speakers...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Peripatetics of the Maghreb
Very little is known of peripatetic communities in the Maghreb. It is known, however, that in Morocco the Bez Carne were known to others as Beni Bacchar and consisted of four subgroups. The community that called itself Romani was known...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Rukuba
The Rukuba live in central Nigeria, on the High Plateau at some 30 kilometers west of the town of Jos, capital of Plateau State. They are one among the numerous small groups inhabiting the region. These groups are, by African standards,...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Qizilbash
The Qizilbash were formed out of several Turkish Shia groups that were living in northwest Persia (Azerbaijan) in the fifteenth century. These groups were oppressed by the Osmanli Turks in the early years of the Ottoman Empire. Shaykh...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Qashqa'i
The Qashqa'i are tribally organized, Turkic-speaking, nomadic pastoralists and agriculturists who live in southwestern Iran. They are Shia Muslims, unlike most of Iran's other minorities, who are either Sunni Muslims, Christians, Jews,...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Pende
The Pende occupy a territory that extends from the banks of the Lutshima, a tributary of the Kwilu, to the Kasai. The last colonial census (1959) indicated that there were 200,000 western Pende and another 40,000 Pende in Kasai, the...