eHRAF World Cultures

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The Abipón were a nomadic people occupying the Gran Chaco region of Paraguay and Argentina. Traditionally subsistence was based on hunting, fishing, and gathering, with some very limited farming. After the acquisition of the horse from Spanish or other ethnic groups, they abandoned farming entirely for a life of raiding, and were much feared by their neighbors as well as the Spanish. By the 1770s or early 1800s the Abipón ceased to exist as a viable tribal group as the result of warfare, disease or by assimilation into surrounding ethnic populations.

Most Abkhazians live in Abkhazia, an autonomous republic within the Republic of Georgia; since 1993 Abkhazia has been a disputed breakaway state. The Abhkazian economy is based on animal husbandry, household craftwork, and the growing of maize, millet, tobacco, tea, and citrus fruits. Abkhazian culture is centered on the family and family relations, marked by patrilocal residence, patrilineal descent, and strong patriarchal authority. Abkhazians are renowned for extreme longevity.

Most African Americans today descend from people forcibly brought to what is now the United States as slaves. Slaves were largely obtained from western and central Africa and came from diverse cultural backgrounds and spoke different languages. A creole language known as Ebonics emerged which allowed communication across different linguistic backgrounds. African Americans largely lived in the rural south until after World War II. Afterwards, large numbers migrated north to major cities. Beginning in the 1970s, the majority of African Americans were city-dwellers. African Americans share a common origin in Africa as well as common struggle against “racial” discrimination and prejudice, even for those in the highest social strata.

The Ainu are a group of people in northern Japan who used to earn their living mainly by combining hunting, fishing, and plant gathering. Their traditional homeland was the northwest coast of southern Sakhalin Island, a region historically contested by Russia and Japan.  At the end of World War II, this land became part of the USSR and the Japanese government relocated many Ainu families to the nearby Hokkaido. Over the years since then, the Ainu as a distinct group have almost disappeared.

The Akan live between the Volta river and the Atlantic coast in southern and central Ghana and in southeastern C&ocirc;te d'Ivoire. They include a large number of ethnic groups, the most well-known of which are the Ashanti (Asante) and the Fanti (Fante). The Akan share a common language, Twi, which belongs to the Akan branch of the Kwa subfamily of the Niger-Congo family of languages. The Akan peoples have a long history beginning around 1000 AD with the migration of Twi-speaking Gbon people from the Niger bend south to the Ghanaian coast where various kingdoms were founded in succession.The different ecological zones have contrasting types of agriculture. In the south there has been widespread development of major commercial crops.

Most Albanians live in Albania, a country bordered by the Adriatic and Ionian seas to the west, Montenegro, Serbia, Kosovo, and Macedonia to the north and east, and Greece to the south. A third of all Albanians live outside Albania's political borders, with large Albanian communities in Greece and Italy, and smaller enclaves in Turkey, Egypt, Russia, and the United States. In Albania, there are two main regional groups, the Tosk and Gheg, each speaking a unique Albanian dialect of the same name. Extended households and clans were the basis of local social and political organization until the 1950s when they were replaced by a socialist collective system and afterwards in the 1990s by a democratic system. Islam, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and Catholicism are the three main religions practiced.

The Aleut live in the Pribilof and Aleutian Islands of Alaska. They made their living off the rich marine habitat, which supported a more complex society than the neighboring, closely-related Eskimos. Their population declined dramatically following contact with Russian explorers and fur traders in the second half of the 18th century, when they became engaged in the fur trade. In modern times the Aleut are involved in the commercial fishing industry.

The Alorese live on the Island of Alor, in East Nusa Tenggara Province, Indonesia. Alor is noted as an area of tremendous cultural and linguistic diversity. Alorese estimate between 48 and 60 mutually unintelligible languages are spoken on Alor. These languages are Austronesian. In addition to &#x22;native&#x22; languages, many of the inhabitants speak Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia.  The people in the highland live in small villages, practice Christianity, and their major subsistence activity is agriculture. The people on the coast tend to be Muslim.

The term &#x22;Alutiiq&#x22; refers to the Eskimo groups of southern Alaska, frequently referred to in the literature as the Pacific Eskimo, who are located from the Alaska Peninsula east to Prince William Sound, including the Koniag of Kodiak Island and the Chugach of the Kenai Peninsula. The language traditionally spoken by the Alutiiq was Yup'ik. English is now the dominant spoken language. The traditional subsistence economy was based on the hunting of marine and land animals, fishing, and gathering. Following their involvement in the Russian fur trade in the late eighteenth century up to the late twentieth century, the Alutiiq are more directly involved in the cash economy. They usually work for cash and provide the canneries with salmon, and crabs. Many find employment in these same processing plants.

The Pano-speaking Amahuaca live in the upper Ucayali River area of eastern lowland Peru. They sustain themselves by hunting, gathering, horticulture, and fishing. In the past, Amahuaca men worked as rubber tappers and for oil companies. The Amahuaca live in small autonomous villages united by kinship, marriage, and joint cooperative practices. They believe in animal and plant spirits of a generally malevolent nature.

The Amhara people of the Ethiopian central highlands are one of the two largest ethnic groups in Ethiopia. They constitute almost one-third of the country's population and, along with the Tigray, are the main adherents of the Christian Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The Amharic language was the official language of Ethiopia until the 1990s. The spread of Islam produced relative isolation in Ethiopia from the seventh to the sixteenth centuries. A feudal land tenure system was in extant officially until 1975, however feudalistic traditions persist to the present. Ethiopia is primarily rural and subsistence farming is the mainstay of the economy.

The Old Order Amish Mennonites are a people of Swiss-German background who migrated to the United States during two main periods from 1727-1790 and 1815-1865. The earlier migrants settled in Pennsylvania, while the later settled in Ohio, New York, Indiana, and Illinois. The Amish are characterized by the maintenance of a voluntary  and disciplined community, separation from the “outside” world, adult rather than infant baptism, and emphasis on simple living.

The Andamanese were the indigenous hunters and gatherers of the Andaman Islands which are located in the Bay of Bengal. There were thirteen distinct ethnic groups at the beginning of the twentieth century. Today there are four. The Andamanese live for the most part on the coast where fish is the main staple. After the December 2005 tsunami, only an estimated 500 Andamanese survived.

Americans of Arab ancestry are a heterogeneous amalgam of national and religious subgroups. Their link is a common Middle-Eastern Arab cultural and linguistic heritage. Arab Americans live primarily in cities or adjacent suburbs. Many recent arrivals tend to gravitate to Arab ethnic neighborhoods, such as the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan. Many of the early immigrants left homes in Greater Syria. A second post-World War II wave of immigration included refugees displaced by the 1948 Palestine War. Following the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1970s and 80s witnessed a massive influx of Arab immigration to the U.S.

Arab Canadians are first-generation Christian or Muslim Arabic-speaking immigrants and their descendants who originally came from the Arab world and have roots in the 1400-year-old Arabic culture. The largest communities are found in major cities, such as Montreal and Toronto. For historical, religious, and political reasons, some immigrants may identify themselves according to their country of origin. Immigration was marked by two waves: an early wave beginning in the 1880s of largely Lebanese and Syrian Christians, and a second wave in the 1960s and 1970s from throughout the Arab world.

The term Aranda refers to a language group that is made up of at least eleven dialects, the speakers of which constitute separate cultural communities who live or lived in the central Australian desert. These groups were independent of each other and had no sense of common identity. Relations between Aranda groups have varied from friendship, alliance, and intermarriage on the one hand, to enmity and hostility on the other.  Today the Aranda groups are either extinct or have become assimilated.

The original Armenian homeland encompassed a highland region including modern Armenia and adjacent areas of Azerbaijan and Iran, as well as much of eastern Turkey. Armenians are one of the oldest Christian peoples. Traditional subsistence depended on cereal agriculture and dairying. For much of the nineteenth century, the Armenian people were stateless as their country was divided between the Russian and the Ottoman empires. In 1915, systematic removal and genocide in the Ottoman west forced most Armenians to flee. Contemporary Armenian culture and society is greatly influenced by collective memory of this event, together with over seventy years of communist rule as part of the former Soviet Union.

The Assiniboine are a Siouan-speaking people closely related linguistically to the Sioux and Stoney. Contemporary Assiniboine live on two reservations in northern Montana and on four reserves in southern Saskatchewan. The traditional economy was focused on buffalo hunting for food and for most material culture.

The Austronesian-speaking Atayal live across the north-central region of Taiwan. Originally inhabiting mountain areas above a thousand meters where they practiced swidden horticulture, many communities were resettled to coastal lowland regions where they now practice wet rice cultivation. Social and territorial organization is based on sharing and participating in customary behaviors that are connected to religious beliefs and practices centered on ancestral spirits.

The Aymara live in the Bolivian and Peruvian altiplano around Lake Titicaca. They make up a quarter of Bolivia's population. Their language is closely related to Quechua. The Aymara are primarily dependent on agriculture and secondarily on animal husbandry and fishing. The lineage or Ayllu is the basic kinship and political unit. Leadership is based on prestige gained through community service, sponsoring rituals, and specializing in magic.

The Zamucoan-speaking Ayoreo are former foragers and semi-nomadic seasonal horticulturalists of the Chaco region of Bolivia and Paraguay who, following missionization during the mid-twentieth century, became settled subsistence agriculturists and wage laborers on farms and ranches. They have a patrilineal descent system with exogamous clans, fundamentally organized into extended family households based on agnatic or cognatic relations and bound by reciprocity and redistribution, over which women have considerable influence. Despite such fundamental economic and gender equality, there was a traditional hierarchy of social prestige and power, and male chiefs who had mainly proven themselves in warfare.

The Azande are a large group, living in Sudan and the Central African Republic as well as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Azande constitute a conglomeration of originally distinct ethnic groups that became culturally, politically, and linguistically united through conquest during the first half of the eighteenth century. They were led by two dynastic clans.  In colonial times, traditional patterns of shifting cultivation were disrupted by cotton growing and other economic schemes and consequent resettlement. The diet is supplemented by hunting and fishing. Since independence, coffee has become an important cash crop in western Zandeland, and in many areas some cotton is still grown. The Zande have long been known as expert blacksmiths, potters, and wood carvers.

The Uto-Aztecan speaking Aztecs were the dominant partners of an alliance of city-states based in the Valley of Mexico that ruled an expansive empire. Otherwise independent city-states (themselves organized into wards providing a number of services, including education) were bound together by an emperor ruling through a council of similarly-ranked elites, on down through a military, priesthood, and bureaucracy dominated by an hereditary nobility. Social promotion of commoners was possible through achievement in warfare, trade, and education. Subsistence depended on both extensive and intensive agriculture, supplemented by small animal husbandry, and by hunting and gathering. There were highly developed market, trade, and imperial tribute systems; artisans specializing in a number of crafts resided in particular urban wards.

Babylon was a major political and cultural center in the Near East during the early second and late first millenniums BCE, an heir to the Sumerian and Akkadian empires, and competitor with the Assyrian empire. Although politically unified, Babylonia was a dynamically multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual population, with successive emigrant populations and dynastic Aramaic-speaking elites, who adopted the formal cuneiform writings of Sumer and Akkad. Agriculture, animal husbandry, and fishing were the bases of subsistence. Temple and palace institutions maintained large land holdings and a dependent labor force, controlling a fundamentally redistributive economy. A parallel entrepreneurial economy operated throughout the ancient Near East and into the Indus Valley. City gods and cults, along with grand myths and associated rituals, made up a rich religious tradition.

In the sixteenth century, the Badaga migrated from the Mysore district to the Nilgiri hills; in the 20th century, they occupied over 300 villages. They practiced swidden cultivation, growing millet and potatoes, and entered into various exchange networks with neighboring tribes.  British settlers in the area introduced tea cultivation, which has become a major cash crop.

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