Culture: quotes, facts and reflections - Page 3

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Q1917

StillnessMusic

In qawwali, lead singing, answering voices, handclaps, percussion and repeated poetic lines gather momentum until devotion becomes a shared physical experience.

Qawwali is rooted in South Asian Sufi gatherings, including performances at shrines and devotional assemblies. A lead singer may unfold a line of Urdu, Persian or Punjabi poetry; the chorus returns it, claps mark the pulse, and harmonium and drums tighten the frame. Repetition does not leave the words where it found them: emphasis, improvisation and audience response alter their emotional weight. The ensemble turns listening from private reception into collective participation.

QawwaliRead card

Q1920

WonderMusic

Azerbaijani mugham gives performers a modal framework rather than a fixed script, asking the singer and instrumentalists to shape an unfolding architecture through improvisation.

In a classical mugham trio, a singer commonly performs with tar and kamancha, while holding a frame drum. Modes, melodic routes and inherited poems provide the grammar, but no notation can prescribe the weight of every pause or ascent. Each interpretation therefore carries disciplined memory and present-tense judgement at once. The tradition has absorbed centuries of exchange across Persian, Turkic and Caucasian worlds without losing its demand that a musician find the road anew.

MughamRead 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Q1950

WonderArt

Artisanal Talavera in Puebla and Tlaxcala depends on a linked process of clay preparation, shaping, glazing, pigment work and kiln control transmitted through specialist workshops.

Talavera is often recognised by its luminous surface, but the visible decoration is only one stage in a demanding chain. Clay bodies, wheel or mould, enamel, mineral pigments and firing must behave together; some makers oversee the whole sequence while others inherit one specialism. The Mexican tradition grew through Indigenous knowledge, Spanish ceramic forms and wider trade, a history of contact shaped by unequal power as well as invention. Each workshop keeps a distinct hand inside a shared process.

Artisanal Talavera of Puebla and TlaxcalaRead card

Q1951

WonderArt

Chinese paper-cut artists use scissors, knives or chisels to turn a single sheet into connected motifs for windows, interiors, festivals, weddings and other social occasions.

Every opening must leave enough paper to hold the rest together, so composition is also an exercise in structure. Regional practices range from fine, delicate scenes to bold forms; makers adapt motifs to birthdays, marriage, seasonal festivals, prayer and the architecture of a particular room. The art has often been passed among women from childhood, while contemporary artists also use machines and new media. Its vitality lies in that elasticity: one inexpensive sheet can still carry a highly local world.

Chinese paper cuttingRead card

Q1953

StillnessArt

Armenian khachkars are upright stone steles centred on a carved cross and surrounded by interlaced plant, geometric and figurative motifs, each composition individually worked.

A khachkar may mark worship, remembrance, protection or a bond between secular and sacred life. Craftspeople cut local stone with chisels and fine points, often setting the cross above a sun or wheel of eternity and surrounding it with patterns dense enough to seem woven. Families and master-apprentice lineages transmit methods while leaving room for regional character and individual invention. Repetition supplies the grammar; dignity comes from refusing to make any memorial merely interchangeable.

KhachkarRead card

Q1954

WonderArt

Pacific barkcloth makers strip and beat selected inner bark until the fibres spread into supple sheets, then join, dye, rub, stencil or paint the material for local uses.

Barkcloth is not one pan-Pacific style. Paper mulberry and other plants become materials with different names, textures, designs and social lives across Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, Hawaiʻi, Fiji and many other islands. Beating expands and locks the fibres without weaving; makers may build great sheets from smaller pieces and pattern them with plant dyes, rubbing boards or freehand marks. In some communities cloth accompanies birth, marriage, rank, mourning and exchange, making a tree's inner skin part of the public fabric of life.

BarkclothRead card

Q1957

WonderArt

For many suzanis, a draftswoman drew one design across loosely joined cotton strips, which were separated for relatives to embroider and finally sewn back together.

Suzani derives from a Persian word for needle and names large embroidered textiles associated especially with settled communities in present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. They formed part of a bride's dowry and furnished interiors, their flowers, vines and medallions carrying the time of women working together. Because separate strips could be embroidered simultaneously, motifs sometimes meet imperfectly and neighbouring colours shift at the seam. Those irregularities are not failed finish; they are evidence that one composition was entrusted to several lives.

SuzaniRead card

Q1962

WonderHistory

Al-Idrisi completed the Tabula Rogeriana for Roger II in 1154 after years of comparing written geography with reports gathered from travellers.

At the Norman court in Sicily, al-Idrisi worked across languages, trade routes and rival geographic traditions. The resulting book paired regional maps with descriptions of roads, ports, distances and economies; like much Islamic cartography of its era, its world map placed south at the top. Orientation was a convention, while verification was the ambition.

Tabula RogerianaRead card

Q1964

WonderHistory

The Kangnido combined Chinese, Korean and Islamicate geographic knowledge into one of East Asia's earliest surviving maps to depict Africa and Europe.

Made in early Joseon Korea, the Kangnido enlarged East Asia while compressing lands farther west—a map of relevance as much as scale. Yet its Africa, Arabia and Europe reveal information travelling through Mongol-era connections and Chinese access to Islamic cartography. Long before satellites, a world picture could be collaborative across centuries and continents.

KangnidoRead card

Q1968

WonderDesign

A cartogram deliberately distorts geographic area or distance so a variable such as population, travel time or emissions becomes the map's scale.

Conventional maps give visual power to physical size: large territories dominate before the data is read. A cartogram changes the contract. It may swell a small, crowded region or shrink an enormous, sparsely populated one, trading recognisable outlines for proportional evidence. The unfamiliar geography asks a useful question: what, exactly, deserves to occupy the page?

CartogramRead card