Search Results (14)

Angola’s cultural mosaic and ethnolinguistic diversity reflect the multilocational traditional customs and power, which are key to the country’s social organisation. A Soba, a traditional leader whose status is recognised by the Angolan Constitution, exerts political influence, shapes the collective life, and helps to preserve cultural identity. Customary law, entrenched after independence, became central to the political and administrative restructuring of the country, which had an impact on decentralisation efforts and legal pluralism. This study analyses the traditional leadership of Sobas in Angola in the context of placemaking and territorial co-management. Backed by the theory of Afrocentricity, a multidisciplinary approach is adopted towards setting Africans as the subjects of their own history. It is based on a literature review and critical analysis of the interaction between administrative law and customary law, which imply a hybrid model for territorial governance. The results indicate that the influence of Sobas on decision-making directly affects the use of the territory and cultural development, highlighting the importance of institutionalising traditional power. This paper suggests that recognising and strengthening such hybrid models is key to promoting territorial cohesion and fostering community engagement, whilst integrating traditional practices can result in more inclusive and effective public policies. Full article

Neonatal encephalopathy suspected to be due to hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy (NESHIE) carries the risk of death or severe disability (cognitive defects and cerebral palsy). Previous genetic studies on NESHIE have predominantly focused on exomes or targeted genes. The objective of this study was to identify genetic variants associated with moderate–severe NESHIE through whole-genome, unbiased analysis. Variant filtering and prioritization were performed, followed by association testing both on a case–control basis and to compare the grades of severity and/or progression. Association testing on neonates with NESHIE (N = 172) and ancestry-matched controls (N = 288) produced 71 significant genetic variants (false discovery rate corrected p-value < 6.2 × 10⁻⁴), all located in non-coding regions and not previously implicated in NESHIE. Disease-associated variants in non-coding regions are considered to affect regulatory functions, possibly by modifying gene expression, promoters, enhancers, or DNA structure. The most significant variant was at position 6:162010973 in the Parkin RBR E3 ubiquitin protein ligase (PRKN) intron. Intronic variants were also identified in genes involved in inflammatory processes (SLCO3A1), DNA repair (ZGRF1), synaptogenesis (CNTN5), haematopoiesis (ASXL2), and the transcriptional response to hypoxia (PADI4). Ten variants were associated with a higher severity or lack of improvement in NESHIE, including one in ADAMTS3, which encodes a procollagen amino protease with a role in angiogenesis and lymphangiogenesis. This analysis represents one of the first efforts to analyze whole-genome data to investigate the genetic complexity of NESHIE in diverse ethnolinguistic groups of African origin and provides direction for further study. Full article

This article presents an introductory historical, sociolinguistic, and ethnographic study of “Wazobia gospel music”, a twenty-first-century Nigerian congregational musical genre. The term ‘Wazobia’ signifies a fusion of the three regionally recognized local languages in Nigeria: Wa (Yorùbá), Zo (Hausa), and Bia (Igbo)—words that mean ‘come’ in the respective languages. In the Nigerian context, the Wazobia concept could also symbolize the inclusion of more than one ethnicity or language. By dissecting three multilingual Nigerian congregational songs, I unveil the diverse perceptions of Wazobia gospel music and the associations of the musical genre in line with the influencing agencies, text, and performance practices. Furthermore, I provide a detailed description and analysis of the textual and sonic contents of Wazobia gospel music, emphasizing its roles, meanings, and functions in the Lagos congregations context. I argue that Wazobia gospel music—multilingual singing in Nigerian churches—embodies multilayered roles in negotiating identity and creating hospitality. The complexity of studying congregational singing in cosmopolitan cities (like Lagos, Nigeria) due to multiple ethnolinguistic and musical expressions within local and transnational links is also addressed. To tackle this complexity, this article adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining historical research, oral history, and hybrid ethnography. This approach ensures a thorough and in-depth understanding of Wazobia gospel music, a topic of significant importance in the study of Nigerian music, linguistics, and cultural studies. By employing frameworks of musical localization and signification, I incorporate the results of my ethnographic studies of three Protestant churches in Lagos, Nigeria, to illustrate Wazobia gospel music’s continued importance. The article conceptualizes multilingual singing and offers fresh perspectives on studying Nigerian Christian congregational music in the twenty-first century. Full article

The main goal of this paper is to explore the difficulties the refugee minors face in the process of seeking inclusion in Portugal. The project conducting this research takes place in a shelter for refugee minors in Portugal, and its inhabitants are the main focus of the analysis. The research is guided by Applied Anthropology which means that, in methodological terms, we use active listening, participant observation, and artistic workshops in drawing and photography in order to get to know them better and establish a closer relationship with the minors. Our interlocutors are refugee minors, boys and girls, aged between 15 and 18, who have been institutionalized by an NGOD responsible for hosting them in Portugal while they await their residence permit. These minors are characterized by a diversity of nationalities, socio-cultural and ethnolinguistic references and different life projects. The artistic focus (drawing and photography) is explored as a non-invasive methodology, a tool that best helps to express emotions, perceptions and desires in a creative and uncompromising way. We chose to focus our analysis not on the traumatic past, as is usually the case when it comes to refugees, but on the future. In other words: we invite these minors to think about their future, what they want for themselves in Portugal and the European Union. As we discuss our difficulties of conducting fieldwork in the institutionalized context, we conclude the article with the idea that working with refugee minors in that environment should not be an end in and of itself, but rather an opportunity to do more profound research. This investigation should continue, preferably outside the institutional gates, on a more personalized basis. As a practical goal, we also propose the idea of organizing an exhibition with the results of the workshops to facilitate the two-way process of inclusion. Full article

The five independent countries of Central Asia, namely Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, contain one of the richest areas in the world for the specific and intraspecific diversity of temperate fruit and nut tree species. Research was carried out via the collaboration of national research and education institutes with local community-based agencies and farmer communities. Raw data (2014 observations) for almond, apple, apricot, cherry plum, currant, grapevine, pear, pomegranate, and walnut were collected at the household (HH) level across the five countries: Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan. A set of models was used, including household variety richness as the dependent variable, to understand the influence of socio-ecological variables on the amount and distribution of crop varietal diversity in the farmers’ production systems. Four variables were included as explanatory variables of variety richness (fixed factors): ecoregion, ethno-linguistic group, management, and abiotic stress. The results show clear evidence that abiotic stress determines a higher richness of intra-specific diversity in the form of local varieties grown by farmers living in climatically unfavorable areas. The results for the studied ecoregions follow the same trend, with ecoregions with harsher conditions displaying a higher positive correlation with diversity. Mild environments such as the Central Asian riparian woodlands show an unexpectedly lower diversity than other harsher ecoregions. Ethno-linguistic groups also have an effect on the level of varietal diversity used, related to both historic nomadic practices and a culture of harvesting wild fruit and nuts in mountainous areas. The home garden management system hosts a higher diversity compared to larger production systems such as orchards. In Central Asia, encouraging the cultivation of local varieties of fruit and nut trees provides a key productive and resilient livelihood strategy for farmers living under the harsh environmental conditions of the region while providing a unique opportunity to conserve a genetic heritage of global importance. Full article

In the last decades, ethnolinguistic Otherness has assumed an increasingly prominent position in many audiovisual products focusing on non-mainstream cultures otherwise quite voiceless in audiovisual media and giving voice to multilingual discourse practices where code-switching stands out as a key conversational strategy in expressing linguacultural diverse identities. This ties issues of on-screen multilingualism to the field of audiovisual translation and raises new challenges as far as the screen representation/translation of linguacultural specificities is concerned. All this is interestingly to be observed in animated films; indeed, since the early 1990s, such important animation production companies as Walt Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks began to produce ethnically diverse films offering deep sociolinguistic insights into non-dominant countries and populations whose richness is conveyed on the screen by dialogues interspersed with their native languages, acting as vital symbols of their ethnocultural identity. Starting from these observations, this paper aims at looking contrastively and diachronically at how L3s, i.e., languages different from both the language of the original film and the language of the film’s dubbed version, used in instances of turn-specific, intersentential and intra-sentential code-switching, have been dealt with in the original version and in the Italian dubbed version of thirty American multilingual animated films, released between 1991 and 2022. The main objectives of this study are: to verify to what extent the original ethnolinguistic Otherness is either retained for the Italian audience or manipulated in dubbing; to observe whether and how the screen translation studies’ approach in conveying linguistic diversity in animation has possibly changed over the last thirty years; and to point out what can be achieved by audiovisual translation in terms of intercultural/interlingual transmission when autochthonous linguacultures are represented in animated films. Full article

Northern Thailand, the main part of the Lanna region, is home to a diverse range of ethnic groups, each with their own food and cultural heritage. The bacterial compositions in fermented soybean (FSB) products indigenous to three Lanna ethnolinguistic groups, including Karen, Lawa, and Shan, were investigated in this study. Bacterial DNA was extracted from the FSB samples and subjected to 16S rRNA gene sequencing using the Illumina sequencing platform. Metagenomic data showed that the predominant bacteria in all FSBs were members of the genus Bacillus (49.5–86.8%), and the Lawa FSB had the greatest bacterial diversity. The presence of genera Ignatzschineria, Yaniella, Atopostipes in the Karen and Lawa FSBs and Proteus in the Shan FSB might be indicators of food hygiene problems during processing. The network analysis predicted antagonistic effects of Bacillus against some indicator and pathogenic bacteria. The functional prediction revealed some potential functional properties of these FSBs. The presence of Bacillus in all FSBs and Vagococcus in the Shan FSB suggests that these FSBs could potentially be good sources of beneficial bacteria, and they should be conserved and promoted for health and food security reasons. However, food processing hygiene measures should be introduced and monitored to warrant their properties as health foods. Full article

Genomics data are currently being produced at unprecedented rates, resulting in increased knowledge discovery and submission to public data repositories. Despite these advances, genomic information on African-ancestry populations remains significantly low compared with European- and Asian-ancestry populations. This information is typically segmented across several different biomedical data repositories, which often lack sufficient fine-grained structure and annotation to account for the diversity of African populations, leading to many challenges related to the retrieval, representation and findability of such information. To overcome these challenges, we developed the African Genomic Medicine Portal (AGMP), a database that contains metadata on genomic medicine studies conducted on African-ancestry populations. The metadata is curated from two public databases related to genomic medicine, PharmGKB and DisGeNET. The metadata retrieved from these source databases were limited to genomic variants that were associated with disease aetiology or treatment in the context of African-ancestry populations. Over 2000 variants relevant to populations of African ancestry were retrieved. Subsequently, domain experts curated and annotated additional information associated with the studies that reported the variants, including geographical origin, ethnolinguistic group, level of association significance and other relevant study information, such as study design and sample size, where available. The AGMP functions as a dedicated resource through which to access African-specific information on genomics as applied to health research, through querying variants, genes, diseases and drugs. The portal and its corresponding technical documentation, implementation code and content are publicly available. Full article

The Lanna region, the main part of northern Thailand, is a place of ethnic diversity. In this study, we investigated phak-gard-dong (PGD), or pickled mustard green (Brassica juncea L. Czern.), for its beneficial bacteria content and to analyse the variations in bacterial compositions among the PGD of three different ethnolinguistic groups, the Karen, Lawa, and Shan. DNA was extracted from the PGD pickled brine, and 16S rRNA gene Illumina sequencing was performed. Metagenomic data were analysed and the results demonstrated that the dominant bacterial species were Weissella (54.2%, 65.0%, and 10.0%) and Lactobacillus (17.5%, 5.6%, and 79.1%) in the PGD of the Karen, Lawa, and Shan, respectively. Pediococcus was found only in the PGD of the Karen and Shan. Bacterial communities in PGD of the Lawa were distinctive from the other ethnic groups, both in the alpha and beta diversity, as well as the predicted functions of the bacterial communities. In addition, overall network analysis results were correlated to bacterial proportions in every ethnic PGD. We suggest that all ethnic PGDs have the potential to be a good source of beneficial bacteria, warranting its conservation and further development into health food products. Full article

Changes to the global infrastructure have contributed to the growing (linguistic) diversity of large metropolises. However, there have been calls from scholars to explore “emerging superdiversity” (DePalma and Pérez-Caramés 2018) in peripheral regions in order to fully understand the complexities and nuances of the sociolinguistics of globalisation (Wang et al. 2014; Pietikäinen et al. 2016). This article, therefore, explores language ideologies among a purposive sample of five young adults of Cape Verdean origin living in the peripheral region of Galicia, Spain, and draws on interview data to examine the ways in which multilingual migrants engage with the language varieties in their linguistic repertoire. In studying immigration from a former African colony to a bilingual European context, we can see how language ideologies from the migrant community are reflected in local ones. The sociolinguistic dynamics of Cape Verde and Galicia share many similarities: both contexts are officially bilingual (Galician and Spanish in Galicia, Kriolu and Portuguese in Cape Verde), and questions regarding the hierarchisation of languages remain pertinent in both cases. The ideologies about the value and prestige of (minority) languages that Cape Verdean migrants arrive with are thus accommodated by local linguistic ideologies in Galicia, a region which has a history of linguistic minoritisation. This has important implications for the ways in which language, as a symbolic resource, is mobilised by migrants in contexts of transnational migration. The findings of this study show how migrants are key actors in (re)shaping the linguistic dynamics of their host society and how, through their practices and discourses, they challenge long-standing assumptions about language, identity and linguistic legitimacy, and call into question ethno-linguistic boundaries. Full article

As the ethnic composition around the world is becoming more diverse, the need to produce vital statistics for ethnically mixed populations is continuously increasing. Our aim is to provide the first life expectancy estimates for individuals with uniform Finnish, uniform Swedish, and mixed Finnish-Swedish backgrounds, based on individuals in the native population of Finland who can be linked to both their parents. Life expectancy at birth in the period 2005–2015 was calculated from population and mortality numbers at the one-year level based on each person’s sex, year of birth, and the unique ethnolinguistic affiliation of the index person and each parent. Swedish-registered individuals with Swedish-registered parents had the longest life expectancy at birth, or 85.68 years (95% CI: 85.60–85.77) for females and 81.36 for males (95% CI: 81.30–81.42), as compared to 84.76 years (95% CI: 84.72–84.79) and 78.89 years (95% CI: 78.86–78.92) for Finnish-registered females and males with Finnish-registered parents. Persons with mixed backgrounds were found in between those with uniform Finnish and uniform Swedish backgrounds. An individual’s own ethnolinguistic affiliation is nevertheless more important for longevity than parental affiliation. Similar register-based analyses for other countries with mixed populations would be useful. Full article

The prehistory of the Lithuanian population and genetic relationship to other populations are poorly studied. Thus, the Lithuanian population, as an object of study, is interesting due to its partial isolation with genetic distinctiveness within the European context and with preserved ancient genetic composition. The main objects of this study was to infer demographic parameters, effective population size (Ne), and divergence time using high-density single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping data generated with the Illumina HumanOmmiExpress-12v1.1 array in 295 individuals from the Lithuanian population and to compare our data with other populations from the Human Genome Cell Line Diversity Panel (HGDP-CEPH). We also aimed to reconstruct past events between the main ethnolinguistic regions—Aukštaitija and Žemaitija of Lithuania. Historically, these regions probably developed as two independent Baltic tribes. Our results of Ne in the Lithuanian population through time demonstrated a substantial reduction of Ne over the 150,000–25,000 years before present (YBP). The estimated long-term Ne of the Lithuanian population is quite low—it equals 5404, which likely is a consequence of the bottlenecks associated with the last glacial period of 25,000–12,000 YBP in Europe. The obtained divergence time estimates between the study populations are in agreement with recent studies. The reconstructed past events in Aukštaitija and Žemaitija showed significant differences between these two regions of Lithuania. Full article

The many growing migratory flows render our societies increasingly heterogeneous. From the point of view of social welfare, achieving all the positive effects of diversity appears as a challenge for our societies. Nevertheless, while it is true that ethnolinguistic diversity involves costs and benefits, at a country level it seems that the former are greater than the latter, even more so when income inequality between ethnic groups is taken into account. In this respect, there is a vast literature at a macro level that shows that ethnolinguistic fragmentation induces lower income, which leads to the conclusion that part of the difference in income observed between countries can be attributed to their different levels of fragmentation. This paper presents primary evidence of the role of education in mitigating the adverse effects of ethnolinguistic fractionalization on the level of income. While the results show a negative association between fragmentation and income for all indices of diversity, the attainment of a certain level of education, especially secondary and tertiary, manages to reverse the sign of the marginal effect of ethnolinguistic fractionalization on income level. Since current societies are increasingly diverse, these results could have major economic policy implications. Full article

This study will analyze the processes of community organization implemented by Eastern Orthodox Christian ethno-religious groups, and Greek Orthodox Christian communities in particular, to establish themselves in American civil society. It will be argued that the symbiotic relationship formed between ethnicity and religion in this tradition, as well as the democratized grassroots mode of community organization that American civil society fosters, contributes to a strong sense of belonging amongst members of the ethno-religious Orthodox Christian congregations. In turn, this sense of belonging has produced a multi-layered mechanism for solidarity-building in these communities. It will then be suggested that in addition to contributing to America’s religious diversity, the preservation of ethno-linguistic heritage by the various Orthodox Christian churches simultaneously contributes to America’s poly-ethnicity and linguistic diversity as well. Last, it will be argued that the continued survival of ethno-religiosity in American Orthodoxy can either lead to further isolation amongst the separate ethnic congregations, or it can alternatively open avenues for the cultivation of a form of Orthodox Christian multiculturalism that supports neither homogeneity nor isolationism. Full article