Peoples of the World: Their Cultures, Traditions, and Ways of Life

The book discibes every imaginable group and the history of its formation. This is a very wonderful book that helped me to understand more about cultures, their traditions. It contains a lot of beautiful pictures that help to visualize and comprehend better about other ethnic groups.

Have you ever wondered about the innumerable people representing diverse cultures that populate the world? What constitutes a people? What are the elements necessary to coalesce in order to produce an ethnic group? Where do they live? What languages do they speak? How did they originate? What are their customs?Look no further, National Geographic's coffee-table reference book, PEOPLES OF THE WORLD, provides us with transportation to 150 countries around the world where we meet some of the world's most compelling ethnic groups. No doubt, this is a daunting task and as mentioned in the introductory Editor's Note, "Peoples of the World is unquestionably an ambitious topic for a single book."Soliciting the advice of no less than fifteen contributors, who are experts in the fields of anthropology and demography, this brilliant reference text, quenches our thirst. At the same time, and as a coda to the book, the reader is encouraged to investigate the topic further and is provided with an extensive list of five thousand ethnic groups scattered around the globe.The tome divides itself into nine chapters each of which concentrates on a particular geographical area of the globe that have a unique broad cultural cohesion. These are: Asia, Oceania, South America, Mesoamerica & The Caribbean, North America, Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa & The Middle East and the Arctic. Within these nine divisions we are introduced to more than 150 peoples that constitute part of the myriad of cultures inhabiting the earth.To name a few, we discover the descendants of escaped African slaves, the Saramaka, who live in the deep forests of Suriname; the Nukak of eastern Colombia, who not until 1988 have had any sustained contact with Western civilization; the Tapirapé of central Brazil, who until the early 20th century had virtually no contact with Europeans; the Yanomami, the most numerous of the indigenous groups of South America; the Inuit that encompass the Greenlanders, the Polar Eskimos, the Caribou, Iglukik, Netsilik and Copper Eskimos.We are also fortunate in being provided with a wealth of exquisite colour photos depicting the many characters and scenes that form part of this cultural diversity. These photos illustrate the desire expressed by humans to relish their distinctiveness and their ability to express themselves as part of a particular group.Wade Davis, Explorer-in-Residence of the National Geographic Society concludes the book in his thought provoking observation that by destroying a people's way of life, or ethnocide, we will all become poorer. As Davis points out to us, Margaret Mead before her death, expressed her concern about the diminishing cultural diversity and stated: "as we drift toward a more homogeneous world, all of human potential might be reduced to a single modality, a blandly amorphous generic culture, a monochromatic world of monotony. Her greatest fear was the possibility that we might awake one day as from a dream, having for

Within the realms of contemporary concern and interest about ethnic identity and global diversity "Peoples of the World" provides excellent presentation and commentary.The book starts with "Introduction: Ethnicity and Culture" by David Maybury-Lewiswhich offers one of the best dicussions I have ever read on trying to identify these elusive concepts and how they relate to the contemporary world. From there various specialists discuss a sample of about 150 groups and cultures from all six continents. Their text is supplemented by excellent photography of some of these groups/cultures which portrays them not in their traditional pasts but as they live today. The text closes with "Afterword: Cultures in Crisis" by Wade Davis which establishes an interesting concept of the"ethnosphere" and how many of its components (cultures) are imperilled by the onrush of contemporary technological and societal development. The book closes with an extensive list of groups/fcultures and their locations around the world, perhaps one of the largest such list ever published (although not totally complete). The book offers an excellent summation of the peoples of the world at the dawn of the twentyfirst century. It strikes a good balance by presenting the realities especially of smaller indigenous ethnic groups/cultures around the world but largely avoids the contemporary fashion to patronize them. Although I disagree with some points in the Afterword I highly reccommend this book to anyone who is interested in the nature of mankind.