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Page 79 of 82

Q1924

StillnessBiography

Neşet Ertaş inherited the Abdal and bozlak tradition from his father Muharrem Ertaş, then renewed it through an extensive body of his own songs and performances.

Ertaş grew up inside a working musical lineage, accompanying his father and learning not only melodies but the social world that gave them weight. His singing let the bozlak's high, unguarded cry hold separation, poverty, love, pride and the road; his bağlama answered without ornament for ornament's sake. He became nationally known without sanding away the Abdal tradition that formed him. The achievement was not escape from inheritance, but a voice distinct enough to keep inheritance alive.

Neşet ErtaşRead card

Q1925

WonderBiography

Peruvian singer Yma Sumac commanded an exceptionally broad range, moving between cavernous lows, brilliant high notes and vocal colours that resisted a single category.

Born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo in Peru, Sumac entered international popular culture through recordings that placed orchestral spectacle around her astonishing instrument. Publicity often wrapped her in fantasies of an exotic Inca princess, a story easier to market than a modern artist directing her own sound. The mythology should not be mistaken for the achievement. Her voice could move from subterranean resonance to airborne precision and make the distance feel architectural.

Yma SumacRead card

Q1926

StillnessBiography

Queen Liliʻuokalani composed more than ceremonial music: songs such as Kuʻu Pua i Paoakalani turned intimate melody into memory during political dispossession and confinement.

Liliʻuokalani was Hawaiʻi's last reigning monarch and a prolific composer whose songs joined poetic language to a keen sense of place. After the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, she was confined in ʻIolani Palace; music written around that period carried loyalty, loss and attention to those outside the room. Aloha ʻOe became globally familiar, but familiarity can blur the political life behind the melody. Her songbook is also an archive of a sovereign mind refusing to be reduced to defeat.

LiliʻuokalaniRead card

Q1927

DriveLanguage

Solomana Kanté created the right-to-left N'Ko alphabet in 1949, giving Manden languages dedicated letters and tone marks rather than forcing their sounds into another script.

Manden languages use tone to distinguish meaning, so a writing system that ignores pitch leaves important work to context. Kanté built N'Ko with letters, numerals and diacritics suited to that linguistic reality, then translated and wrote works that helped create a reading public across national borders. The script now moves through print, keyboards and phones as well as handwriting. Its achievement is not simply representation; it is the confidence produced when a language sees its own structure taken seriously.

N'Ko scriptRead card

Q1928

WonderLanguage

Developed in Liberia in the early 1830s, chiefly by Mọmọlu Duwalu Bukẹlẹ, the Vai syllabary organises signs around spoken syllables instead of importing a European alphabet unchanged.

Each Vai sign represents a syllable rather than a single consonant or vowel, giving the page a logic shaped by the language it records. The script spread through teaching, correspondence and record-keeping in Vai communities across Liberia and Sierra Leone, and its forms were repeatedly standardised as use expanded. Digital encoding added another medium without making the script newly legitimate. Vai literacy had already demonstrated that writing can be invented, taught and sustained outside colonial models.

Vai syllabaryRead card

Q1929

DriveLanguage

Modern Neo-Tifinagh adapts historic Amazigh letterforms into standardised alphabets used for teaching, public signage and digital communication across North Africa.

Tifinagh is not one frozen alphabet but a family of related forms with deep roots in North Africa, including the writing maintained among Tuareg communities. Modern institutions and language activists developed Neo-Tifinagh orthographies to serve contemporary Amazigh varieties in schools, books and civic space. Standardisation made fonts and keyboards possible, while also requiring choices among regional practices. Revival is rarely a return to an untouched past; it is the careful design of a future in which inherited signs can do new work.

TifinaghRead card

Q1930

WonderLanguage

Roughly two dozen wooden objects bearing rongorongo glyphs survive from Rapa Nui, but no proposed decipherment has won scholarly acceptance and the texts remain unread.

The surviving lines carry compact figures—human, animal, plantlike and geometric—often arranged in a reverse direction when the tablet is turned. Their makers left no bilingual key, and the knowledge needed to read them did not survive the violence, disease and social rupture that transformed Rapa Nui in the nineteenth century. Claims of a solution arrive regularly; evidence has not yet made one persuasive. The silence belongs not to the objects, but to the historical conditions that severed text from reader.

RongorongoRead card

Q1931

StillnessLanguage

Vedic recitation preserves words, pitch accents and pronunciation, using patterned sequences that recombine words and word-pairs to detect and resist errors in oral transmission.

A written transcript can record a sentence while losing how each syllable rises, falls or joins the next. Vedic teachers preserve those dimensions through exact imitation and recitation patterns that reorder words into controlled combinations, making a mistake easier to expose. The discipline demands years because the archive is distributed across trained bodies rather than stored in one object. Its precision shows oral memory not as the absence of technology, but as a technology refined around breath, repetition and mutual correction.

Vedic chantRead card

Q1932

WonderLanguage

Across South and Southeast Asia, scribes prepared palm leaves as pages, writing or incising texts before stringing the narrow folios between protective boards.

Palm-leaf manuscripts carried literature, ritual, law, astronomy and medicine in many languages and scripts across a vast region. Their long, narrow format reflects the material itself; holes and cord kept separate leaves in sequence, while boards guarded the bundle. Heat, insects and humidity made periodic recopying part of preservation, so survival depended on active readership rather than passive storage. Today's digitisation protects access, but the page still bears the shape of a plant and the labour of a hand.

Palm-leaf manuscriptRead card

Q1933

DriveLanguage

Beginning with Hawaiian-medium preschools in 1984 and public immersion schooling in 1987, community-led education rebuilt a path for ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi from early childhood to university.

By the late twentieth century, generations of English-dominant schooling had pushed Hawaiian out of many homes and classrooms. Families and educators answered by building Pūnana Leo preschools, then fighting for public immersion pathways that could continue through secondary and higher education. Children were not asked merely to study the language; they learned mathematics, science and daily life through it. Revitalisation became durable when Hawaiian was allowed to carry a whole future, not just describe a treasured past.

Hawaiian languageRead card

Q1934

StillnessLanguage

Ainu is critically endangered, yet community classes, instructor training, family programmes and museum-based teaching are creating new settings in which it can be spoken and heard.

Assimilation policies and discrimination interrupted the everyday transmission of Ainu across generations in Japan. Revitalisation now takes several forms at once: beginner and advanced courses, new teaching materials, training for instructors, parent-child learning and public programmes led by Ainu knowledge holders. A museum can preserve recordings and objects, but a language needs situations in which one person addresses another. The decisive unit of survival is not the word in a catalogue; it is the relationship that gives someone reason to say it.

Ainu languageRead card

Q1935

DriveLanguage

Since 1989, Kaurna people and collaborating linguists have reclaimed the Adelaide Plains language from community knowledge and nineteenth-century records for teaching and public use.

German missionaries wrote down substantial Kaurna vocabulary and grammar in the 1840s, even as colonisation was breaking the conditions for transmission on the Adelaide Plains. More than a century later, Kaurna leaders used those records as tools—not authorities—to reconstruct pronunciation, create new terms and place the language in welcomes, songs, education and signage. Reclamation does not pretend the rupture never happened. It makes an ethical reversal: paper gathered under colonial power now serves living Kaurna decisions.

Kaurna languageRead card

Q1936

WonderFood

Injera batter is fermented—traditionally with a starter carried from an earlier batch—then cooked on one side until bubbles open into the soft, absorbent surface known as eyes.

Teff often gives injera its structure, although households also work with other grains and blends. During fermentation, microbes sour the batter and fill it with gas; on the hot griddle those bubbles set into a porous sheet strong enough to carry stews and tender enough to tear by hand. The same surface serves as food, utensil and shared table. A saved starter links today's meal to the last one, making continuity something tasted rather than announced.

InjeraRead card

Q1937

WonderFood

Xochimilco's chinampas are raised fields built from lake sediment and organic matter, threaded by canals and often edged with ahuejote willows that help hold the banks.

Calling chinampas floating gardens hides the labour that makes them stable. Farmers dredge nutrient-rich canal mud onto constructed plots, manage water at the field edge and use rows of slender willows as living reinforcement; the canals also create habitat and temper local conditions. This is agriculture as a negotiated boundary between land and lake, not the conquest of one by the other. Its survival inside Mexico City depends as much on defending water and farming communities as on admiring an ingenious form.

ChinampaRead card

Q1938

WonderFood

Pacific voyagers carried selected breadfruit plants between islands for thousands of years, establishing long-lived food trees and hundreds of locally named cultivars.

A canoe carrying breadfruit carried more than calories. Many prized cultivars had to travel as living shoots or rooted plants, demanding moisture, protection and the confidence that someone would tend them after landfall. Once established, the trees could feed communities for generations within layered agroforestry systems. Their distribution maps a form of navigation measured not only by where people reached, but by the edible futures they deliberately planted there.

BreadfruitRead card

Q1939

StillnessFood

Across Algeria, Mauritania, Morocco and Tunisia, cooks roll moistened semolina into grains and steam them, preserving distinct local methods inside a widely shared meal.

Couscous begins before the pot: semolina is moistened, rolled by hand, separated into grains and prepared for steaming, a tactile judgement learned through observation and practice. Broths, vegetables, meats, seasonings and occasions vary across regions and families. Its UNESCO recognition came through a joint nomination by four countries, an unusual act of cultural diplomacy. The dish offers a mature model of belonging—shared deeply, made differently, owned completely by no single border.

CouscousRead card

Q1940

WonderFood

During tempeh fermentation, Rhizopus fungi grow a white network of mycelium through cooked soybeans, binding separate beans into a firm cake while transforming flavour and texture.

Tempeh is often described as fermented soy, but its structure is as important as its flavour. The fungus grows between the beans, its fine filaments making thousands of biological joins while enzymes reshape compounds in the soy. In Java and across Indonesia, makers learned to manage heat, moisture, airflow and inoculum long before the organism had a laboratory name. Fermentation here is neither decay nor mystery; it is a cultivated partnership whose success can be lifted from its wrapper in one piece.

TempehRead card

Q1941

WonderFood

Garum and related Roman sauces were made by salting fish and allowing enzymes and microbes to break the flesh into a savoury liquid traded throughout the empire.

Garum was not one standard recipe but a family of fish sauces and pastes sold in different grades, from everyday seasoning to branded luxury. Salt controlled the fermentation while enzymes in the fish liquefied tissue, concentrating savoury compounds long before anyone named umami. Jars from Pompeii carry painted labels identifying contents and makers; the producer Aulus Umbricius Scaurus even displayed sauce containers in a floor mosaic. The condiment reveals an ancient market already fluent in processing, reputation and packaging.

GarumRead card

Q1942

DriveFood

Cassava contains cyanogenic compounds in varying amounts, so established methods such as peeling, grating, soaking, fermenting, pressing and drying are vital parts of making it safe.

Cassava thrives in difficult conditions and stores useful energy underground, but its roots cannot be treated as a universally ready food. Cyanogenic compounds differ by variety and environment; no single preparation step fits every product. Across Africa, South America and beyond, communities developed multi-stage processes that rupture cells, dissolve or expel compounds and allow volatile cyanide to escape. The staple's reach rests on agricultural resilience and on culinary knowledge precise enough to turn hazard into nourishment.

CassavaRead card

Q1943

StillnessFood

Indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woodlands harvested spring maple sap and concentrated it into sugar long before Europeans arrived, developing the knowledge newcomers later adopted.

Maple sap runs during a narrow swing of freezing nights and milder days, turning weather knowledge into a harvest calendar. Indigenous makers cut or tapped trees, gathered sap in bark containers and concentrated it with heated stones or boiling, producing transportable sugar as well as syrup. European settlers learned from these practices and later introduced metal tools and large-scale equipment. The familiar bottle therefore begins with older expertise: how to read a forest precisely at the moment it changes season.

Maple syrupRead card

Q1944

StillnessFood

In southwestern Morocco, argan oil production moves through harvesting, drying, pulping, cracking, grinding and mixing—skills traditionally transmitted among rural women.

The hardest-looking moment is cracking the nut between stones, but argan knowledge lives in the entire chain: when to gather fruit, how long to dry it, which kernels to roast for culinary oil and how to judge paste and water by touch. The oil enters cooking, body care, remedies, hospitality and wedding exchange. Its value is inseparable from the argan woodlands and from the people who maintain the practice. A marketable product sits at the end; ecological and social judgement begin much earlier.

Argan oilRead card

Q1945

DriveFood

Indigenous makers pounded dried bison meat and mixed it with rendered fat, sometimes adding berries, to produce energy-dense pemmican that kept well on long journeys.

Removing water from lean meat slowed spoilage; enclosing the powder in warm fat added energy and protection, creating provisions suited to winter, travel and uncertain supply. Plains peoples developed this food long before commercial fur companies depended on it. Métis producers later organised large bison hunts and supplied brigades moving through the interior, making pemmican part of a colonial economy with immense appetite. Its efficiency should be admired alongside the harder history of extraction that grew around it.

PemmicanRead card

Q1946

WonderArt

Indonesian batik makers apply hot wax in lines and dots to resist dye, then repeat waxing, colouring and removal to build patterned cloth through controlled acts of concealment.

Wax does not colour the cloth; it preserves selected ground while dye changes everything exposed. Removing the wax, adding new barriers and dyeing again lets a maker layer decisions that may be almost invisible until the final boil. In Indonesia, motifs and uses accompany life from infant slings to weddings, work, performance and burial, while designs also register centuries of exchange. Batik's surface is therefore both image and process map: every colour records where the cloth was open, and where it was deliberately kept safe.

BatikRead card

Q1947

WonderArt

Asante and Ewe weavers create distinct kente traditions by weaving narrow silk or cotton strips, cutting and arranging them, then sewing the lengths into expansive cloths.

The scale of a finished kente wrapper can hide its modular construction. Long, narrow bands emerge from the loom carrying complex warp and weft designs; joining them demands decisions about rhythm, interruption and alignment across the whole cloth. Asante and Ewe makers have related but different histories, techniques and visual vocabularies, so kente should not be flattened into one code of colour meanings. Its later association with Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-African identity added global political resonance to already specific local arts.

Kente clothRead card