Product Description

The Central African Republic is one of the least-known African countries. This volume is the first to give a cultural overview of the key elements of this former French colony. Wood fork shows how the Republic has the fundamental building blocks, with plenty of natural resources, to take on the challenges of the modern world. The diverse ethnic groups, including Bandas and pygmies, are responding to changes such as increased urbanization.

Readers will learn about the various ways of life of the major groups and their farming, nomadic pastoral, and trading pursuits. The aggressive Islamic and Christian evangelizing alongside witchcraft and indigenous beliefs in other deities and spirits in the Central African Republic is covered as well. The chapter on food and clothing discusses the great vocabularies for food and drink in the country and the typical vibrantly colored clothes. The indigenous and French influences in cultural institutions such as education and media and literary output are explained.Insight into the family and women's roles, celebrations, and music and dance is given as well.

Product Description
This digital document is an article from Countries and Their Cultures, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 1280 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Covers the broad range of popular religious culture of the United States at the close of the twentieth century. Beliefs, practices, symbols, traditions, movements, organizations, and leaders from the many traditions in the pluralistic American community are represented. Also includes cults and phenomena that drew followers, such as Heaven's Gale and UFOs. ... Read more

Product Description
Chapters: Central African Music, Languages of the Central African Republic, National Symbols of the Central African Republic, Religion in the Central African Republic, Sport in the Central African Republic, Freedom of Religion in the Central African Republic, African Elephant, Sango Language, Music of the Central African Republic, Flag of the Central African Republic, La Renaissance, Coat of Arms of the Central African Republic, Central African Republic at the 2009 World Championships in Athletics, Tales From the Heart, Gbaya Languages, Bongo-Bagirmi Languages, Central African Republic at the Olympics, Roman Catholicism in the Central African Republic, Kaba Languages, Zande Language, Fer Language, Aja Language, Vale Languages, Islam in the Central African Republic, Kara Languages, Public Holidays in the Central African Republic. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 64. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: The Constitution provides for freedom of religion, although it prohibits what the Government considers to be religious fundamentalism or intolerance and establishes fixed legal conditions based on group registration with the Ministry of Interior. The Government generally respected the right to religious freedom in practice; however, witchcraft is a criminal offense under the penal code. Private actors continued to abuse and discriminate against those accused of witchcraft. The country has an area of approximately 242,000 square miles (630,000 km) and a population of 4,369,000. According to a 2005 census report, Protestants compose 51 percent of the population, Catholics 29 percent, and Muslims 10 percent. The remainder of the population practices traditional beliefs (animism), although many traditional beliefs are also incorporated into Christian and Islamic practice throughout the coun...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=16142415 ... Read more

Product Description

South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions helped to end apartheid by providing a forum that exposed the nation's gross human rights abuses, provided amnesty and reparations to selected individuals, and eventually promoted national unity and healing. The success or failure of these commissions has been widely debated, but this is the first book to view the truth commission as public ritual and national theater. Catherine M. Cole brings an ethnographer's ear, a stage director's eye, and a historian's judgment to understand the vocabulary and practices of theater that mattered to the South Africans who participated in the reconciliation process. Cole looks closely at the record of the commissions, and sees their tortured expressiveness as a medium for performing evidence and truth to legitimize a new South Africa.

Customer Reviews (1)

There is unique performative potency in the conflation of theatricality and justice
"Performing South Africa's Truth Commission" is on the ROROTOKO list of cutting-edge intellectual nonfiction. Professor Cole's book interview ran here as the cover feature on February 12, 2010. ... Read more

Product Description

Book Review

Many people merely dream of traveling around the world. This highly unusual man acts on his dreams. Every time he starts to wonder about an interesting place he has not been, he simply packs his bags, grabs a camera and goes to the airport to claim his seat. Soon he is in Brazil, China, Africa or anywhere there are people to meet, things to see and do, like taking pictures, buying art, shaking hands, asking questions and being entertained by professional guides and story tellers. "Hello, how are you, good to meet you. I'm Leon Freeman from Memphis, Tennessee." I found his introduction by a tribesman in Papua New Guinea as a cousin the most striking story of them all.

Mr. Freeman retired from his school teaching career and immediately set out to explore the world. Over the years he visited five continents, sixty-two countries and a string of islands ringing the globe like pearls. He discovered one satisfying fundamental fact: in human essence, we are all one. Whatever differences there might be in our outer physical appearance or our diverse cultural extensions, there are no qualitative differences to the principle: 'all human babies are created equal.'

In this picture book, Mr. Freeman provides the viewer with unforgettable, vicarious experiences to enjoy time and time again for many years to come.

- Maia Jaribu Ajanaku, SMU - Retired Teacher, Entrepreneur ... Read more

Product Description
By 1840, American politics was a paradox--unprecedented freedom and equality for men of European descent, and the simultaneous isolation and degradation of people of African and Native American descent. Historians have often characterized this phenomenon as the _white republic._ Race and the Early Republic offers a rich account of how this paradox evolved, beginning with the fledgling nation of the 1770s and running through the antebellum years. The essays in the volume, written by a wide array of scholars, are arranged so as to allow a clear understanding of how and why white political supremacy came to be in the early United States. Race and the Early Republic is a collection of diverse, insightful and interrelated essays that promote an easy understanding of why and how people of color were systematically excluded from the early U.S. republic. ... Read more

Product Description
The Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, continues to struggle with socioeconomic and political development. Culture and Customs of the Congo provides the full context of traditional culture and modern practices against a backdrop of a turbulent history. The volume opens up a land and peoples little known in the United States. Written expressly to meet the needs of students and the general audience, the work will inform about the geography, economy, political history, and history from the slave trade to dictatorship; ancestral religions and inroads of western faiths; ancestral literary heritage and communication; art, architecture, and housing; diet and dress; marriage, family, and women; lifestyles and life events, and traditional and modern music and dance. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Challenging Hegemony: Social Movements, and the Quest for a New Humanism in Post-Apartheid South Africa is a collection of essays by leading social movement activists and scholars that analyzes the emergence of new political struggles in post apartheid South Africa. The volume reflects on the mushrooming of new movements that represent what Frantz Fanon called “the untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute:” a quest for a new humanism which is manifested in the movements’ most simple and basic of demands for land, housing, and medicine.A central problem addressed in the volume is how the challenge to hegemony can possibly be connected to the quest for a new humanism (or a “true humanity” in Steve Biko’s words). The essays investigate how new movements (including organized “social forums” as well as local movements) are not only challenging neo-liberal capitalist globalization, but also attempting to articulate alternatives and raise the question of what it means to be human. Whether reconnecting electricity, or struggling for housing or for HIV/AIDS anti-virals, the movements are a challenge, in the most human of ways, to the mantra that “there is no alternative” to capitalist globalization.This collection of essays edited by Nigel Gibson brings together some of the most outstanding intellectuals writing on the rise of social movements in South Africa. The writers whose work is collected in this volume include the cutting edge of intellectuals who have shown tremendous courage in their quest to be not only commentators but activists in this emerging anti neo-liberal movement. There is something valuable in every page of this collection and those interested in thoughtful and provocative analyses of the South Africa transition will be well served. Out of the dystopia of apartheid followed by neo-liberal South Africa emerges the story told in these pages of an incredible resurgence of resistance.—Ashwin Desai, author, author of We are the Poors: Community Struggles in Post-Apartheid South Africa ... Read more