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: South and Southeast Asians of the United States
A webpage with some brief information about the culture of South and Southeast Asians who live in the United States.
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: Arabs
The Arab world is usually considered to be comprised of the following nineteen countries: Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Chad, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi...
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: Asians of Africa
The Asian population of Africa is a small but significant minority. Whereas there have been Asians, primarily merchants, who lived on the east coast of Africa for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, a great influx of Asians came to...
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: 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: Baha'is
The Baha'i faith originated from one of the sects within the Shiite Muslim religion in Iran. The Baha'i religion developed directly from the Babis, an extremely militant sect willing to die to convert the people of the world to their...
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,...