Customer Reviews

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

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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-Lewis
which 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.

It may be titled "Peoples of the World" but National Geographic have chosen just c150 "peoples" and made up for their lack of depth by including a "coda" of what claims to be an "exhaustive list of more than 5000 ethnic groups worldwide" at 1 line per group!
They excuse the lack of better coverage by stating that there were space limitations. So, just to use examples from UK, why waste space on eg the "Northern Islanders" (peoples of Orkneys/Shetlands) and the "Cornish"? Really major ethnic groups worldwide have been left out whilst these (highly dubious) ethnic groups have been included! The section on sub-saharan Africa is particularly thin - eg in W africa there are no Mossi or Malinke whilst Australian Aboriginal groups get a disproportionate coverage in realtion to their population. But Population details are not shown as standard - so we are not told how many Hausa there are for instance (and the Fulani are subsumed withn the Hausa)

I can fully understand that this is not meant to be a book for specialists but there are better non-specialist books available second hand eg "Atlas of Man" ed J Gainsford - better maps, more comprehensive.
Ok so the photos are not as good - if you want a picture book get this one.

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.