Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Edo
"Edo" is the name that the people of the Benin Kingdom give to themselves, their language, and their capital city and kingdom. Renowned for their art of brass and ivory and for their complex political organization, the Edo Kingdom of...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Betsileo
The Betsileo (Bts) are one of approximately twenty "ethnies," or ethnic units, into which Madagascar divides its population. The Betsileo began to use that term for themselves after their conquest by the Merina in the nineteenth century....
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Berbers of Morocco
"Berber" refers to any native speaker of a dialect of the Berber language, although many Arabic speakers in North Africa are also Berber by descent, even if they have lost the language. Especially in Morocco, "Imazighen" is today the...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Chaldeans
Today the term "Chaldean" is used to refer to a branch of the Nestorian Orthodox church that became affiliated with Rome while preserving its liturgical language and ecclesiastical customs. For example, Chaldean priests, unlike their...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Chagga Kinship
In the nineteenth century the Kichagga-speaking people on Mount Kilimanjaro were divided into many small, autonomous chiefdoms. Early accounts frequently identify the inhabitants of each chiefdom as a separate "tribe." Although the...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Cape Coloureds
The term "Cape Coloureds" generally refers to those South Africans of mixed cultural and racial stock whose ancestors include Europeans, Khoi and other indigenous African people, and Asians. Today their descendants are found throughout...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Basseri
The Basseri are traditional pastoral nomads who inhabit the Iranian province of Fars and migrate along the steppes and mountains near the town of Shiraz. The Basseri are a clearly delineated group, defined by political rather than by...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Bamileke
Bamileke is a collective term referring to a loose agglomeration of some 100 kingdoms or chiefdoms of the eastern Grassfields in the Western Province of Cameroon. These kingdoms have similar cosmology and social and political structures;...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Bemba
The Bemba are the largest ethnic group in the Northern Province of Zambia. Seventeen or eighteen ethnic groups in this general area of Zambia comprise the Bemba-speaking peoples, and they form with the Bemba a closely related culture...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Ewe and Fon
"Ewe" is the umbrella name for a number of groups that speak dialects of the same language and have separate local names. Fon and Ewe are often considered to belong to the same, larger grouping, although their related languages are...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Dyula
"Dyula" is a Manding word typically referring to "traders" as a socio-professional category, particularly to Muslim long-distance traders who speak one or another dialect of Manding. The name is used as an ethnic label by...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Dogon
The Dogon are a group of about 250,000 people who live primarily in the districts of Bandiagara and Douentza in the western African nation of Mali. They are primarily agriculturists, their principal crops being millet, sorghum, rice,...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Dinka Kinship
"Dinka" is a term that has been used for centuries to refer to a people who speak of themselves as "Moinjaang," or "the people of the people." They live over a wide area in southern Sudan, amid the many streams and small rivers that feed...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Copts
The Copts of Egypt are a religious minority (numbering about 6 million in Egypt) whose church they believe to have been founded by Saint Mark the Evangelist. The Coptic church is the ancient church of Egypt. Outside of Egypt, Coptic...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Bakhtiari
The term "Bakhtiari" refers to a group of people and the area they occupy. The Bakhtiari inhabit the central Zagros Mountains of Iran. The Bakhtiari are traditionally nomadic pastoralists who make their winter encampments in the low...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Anuak
The Anuak live in a region straddling the border of the southern Sudan and Ethiopia. The Anuak language is most closely related to Shilluk. Together, the two languages comprise a subfamily within the larger classification of Nilotic....
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Introduction to Africa
This introduction provides some basic information as background for the detailed accounts of the particular cultures that follow. The cultures have been selected to represent Africa, in the sense that they include the larger and...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Aimaq
In western Afghanistan and far eastern Iran, "Aimaq" means "tribal people," which distinguishes the Aimaq from the nontribal population in the area, the Persians (Fariswan) and Tajiks. Most of the population of live in Afghanistan; those...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Afrikaners
The Afrikaners are descendants, to a great extent, of Dutch, German, and French Huguenot settlers, and, to a lesser extent, of English, Scottish, Irish, and other settlers of South Africa. The Dutch language of the first White settlers...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Bagirmi Kinship
The term "Bagirmi" refers to a multi-ethnic society organized as an archaic state. Major populations in the Bagirmi region were the Barma, who formed and dominated the state; Arabs, who were its most numerous inhabitants; and the Fulani,...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Baggara
"Baggara" as a term refers to a group of tribes that share certain cultural characteristics and claim kinship to each other and to a tribe in the Hejaz (southern Arabian Peninsula). The five main tribes of Baggara are the Messiriya,...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Assyrians
Ancient Assyrians were inhabitants of one the world's earliest civilizations, Mesopotamia, which began to emerge around 3500 B . C . The Assyrians invented the world's first written language and the 360-degree circle, established...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Amhara
Amhara culture is often identified with Abyssinian culture, which is regarded as the heir to the cultural blending of ancient Semitic and Cushitic (African) patterns. "Ethiopia" is derived from an ancient Greek term meaning "people with...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Alur
The Alur speak DhuAlur, a Western Nilotic language of the Lwo Group. They live in northwestern Uganda and in the neighboring parts of northeastern Zaire. Some two-fifths of the Alur live in Uganda and three-fifths in Zaire. The family is...