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: 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: Bedouin
Bedouin societies are found in the arid steppe regions of Arabia and North Africa and along the margins of rain-fed cultivation. Bedouin groups move their animals to areas where pasture is regularly found. Often these societies plant...
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: Druze
The Druze are a closed, tightly knit, Arab minority who live in southern Syria, in the mountains of central Lebanon, and in Israel, including the Golan Heights. There are also small communities in Jordan, the United States, Canada, and...
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: 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: Acholi
The name "Acholi" is used for peoples living in the former Acholi District of northern Uganda and the adjoining area of the southern Sudan. The primary language of Acholi today is Luo, a Western Nilotic language spoken by groups...
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,...