Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Iraqw
The Iraqw are an agrico-pastoral people who live in north-central Tanzania. With the expansion of their territory, the Iraqw have come to interact and coexist with other ethnic groups. Maize is the staple crop of the Iraqw; it is...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Igbo
Igbo-speaking peoples can be divided into five geographically based subcultures: northern Igbo, southern Igbo, western Igbo, eastern Igbo, and northeastern Igbo. Each of these five can be further divided into subgroups based on specific...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Ibibio
The name "Ibibio" identifies the largest subdivision of people living in southeastern Nigeria, in Akwa Ibom State, and it is generally accepted and used for both ethnic and linguistic descriptions. Like their Igbo neighbors, the Ibibio...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Karamojong
The Karamojong are a pastoral group who inhabit the plateau region of Uganda. Linguistically, the Karamojong belong to the Central Group of the Nilote Language Family, which also includes several neighboring groups that speak a mutually...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Karaites Economy
The majority of Karaites in Cairo worked as artisans -- primarily as gold- and silversmiths or engaged in trade or peddling. Some attained positions as doctors and lawyers or entered the commercial middle class. In Israel, most Karaites...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Kanuri
The Kanuri are the dominant ethnic group of Borno Province in northeastern Nigeria. They number over 3 million in Nigeria, about 500,000 in Niger, 100,000 in Chad, and 60,000 in Cameroon. They are called "Beri-beri" by the Hausa, but...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Jews of Yemen
Jews have lived in Yemen, a large and rugged country in the southwest part of the Arabian Peninsula, for at least 1,500 years. They identify themselves and are identified by others, as part of the widespread Jewish people. They...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Jews of Iran
Until mass emigration began in 1948, Jews constituted one of the largest and longest-settled non-Muslim populations in Iran. Dispersed in every city and town in the country, Iranian Jews were almost always a minority except in a few...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Fali
The Fali belong to the vast paleonegritic group of people who are sometimes designated "Kirdi" (pagans), as opposed to the Islamized Peul or Fulbe, with whom they share the northern part of Cameroon. The Fali are farmers and...
Countries and Their Cultures
Countries and Their Cultures: Falasha
The Falasha are a northern Ethiopian highland population of Jewish belief. They are one of the dozens of small ethnic minorities in Ethiopia and have been recognized as a "nationality" in the Ethiopian constitution of 1986. More than...
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: Circassians
The Circassians are a people indigenous to the northwestern Caucasus who are also found today as minority communities in four Middle Eastern countries: Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. They call themselves "Adyge," the term...
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: 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: 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: 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...