Difficult Cultures and Languages
In the last recent years, traveling has become affordable and more convenient than ever before. Today, it’s very easy to visit even the remote places of the world.
And traveling around the world means exploring a lot of new things, trying different food, visiting famous places, encounter people with a lot of languages and cultural differences. But exploring different and difficult cultures has always been the best and fun part of traveling.
Well, culture is an important part of a community; it shows how people of that community are living their lives, their views, their values, custom, hopes, loyalties, and their worries and fears.
We are surrounded by a lot of cultures and races; wherever we go we find a new and completely different culture. Some cultures are so difficult to understand and people find them hard to follow. Learn here the facts about Martenitsa Bulgarian traditions!
In this article, we will discuss those difficult cultures around the world and what makes a culture difficult. So, let’s start!
What Types of Cultures Are Considered Difficult?
The world is full of multicultural people, everyone follows their own culture and tradition. Some cultures are so tough that most people can’t follow them. This is because they have strict traditions and values. Some of them are as follow:
Sulawesi Region, Indonesia
Sulawesi region from Indonesia has a tradition that you can’t imagine something very strange and weird. The Toraja people from the Sulawesi region live with their dead ones. Yes, it’s hard to believe but it’s true.
The young boys of Satere Mawe Tribe become men at the age of 13, but they need to prove it by an initiation ceremony. The boys need to prove their worth of being a man; they headed towards the jungle to collect and bring angry bullet ants.
The sting from an angry bullet ant is much more painful than a bee sting, or you can say that as painful as a gunshot. After bringing those bullet ants back to the village, the chief elder intoxicates the ant in an herbal mixture and then puts them into some special pair of gloves.
The initiation ceremony begins after the ants wake up. The boys have to put their hands in those gloves for almost 10 minutes and perform a traditional dance along with it. The whole thing repeats 19 times more, and the boys can call themselves men.
According to the Satere Mawe Tribe, the initiation ceremony prepares them to build courage and but ant makes them strong to tolerate the pain of adulthood. Moreover, it makes them manage pain without showing any weakness.
Sulawesi Region, Indonesia
Sulawesi region from Indonesia has a tradition that you can’t imagine something very strange and weird. The Toraja people from the Sulawesi region live with their dead ones. Yes, it’s hard to believe but it’s true.
Everywhere around the world, people bury the dead body of their loved ones when they passed away, but the Toraja people do this tradition that disturbs our senses. They live with the dead people for some months and then organize funerals and burial ceremonies. According to these people, they celebrate this to make sure the good fortune of deceased family members.
El Colacho, Spain
The tribe in the north of Spain, El Colacho has strange traditions, which originates from pagan rituals. In the 17th century, these traditions become the local tradition of Castrillo de Murcia. They have a common tradition named “baby jumping”, to clean up the soul of a newborn baby.
The event is a mixture of both pagans and Catholic traditions; held every year on Sunday after the Feast of Corpus Christi. They start the event with the procession through town and after the walk; they put the babies born in the last year, on a mat.
The men of the tribe dressed as a devil and start running between and jump over the babies. Later on, the leaders of the Catholic Church from the Burgos region clean them with holy water.
Lip-Plating, Ethiopia
People of Ethiopia insert clay plates into the lips of Mursi women of the tribe. They do this tradition to cause the lips to stretch. The people of Chai and Tirma practice this culture as well. When girls reach the age of 15 or 16, they cut their lower lip and after some time when the lip is healed, a lip plate is inserted into the lips. According to them, it shows the strength and self-esteem of females.
Red Ink, South Korea
Korean people have the tradition of writing the names of dead ones, on the family register with red ink. If someone writes the name of a living person with red ink, it will be considered that the person wants to harm the other. Now, people in South Korea avoid using red ink, because it is considered rude.
There are some of the formal complex cultures, with the toughest traditions and customs. Today, people want to make their lives easy and these traditions are hard to even believe, so most people don’t follow these cultures.
Difficult Cultures and Their Languages
Languages are an important aspect of culture. People around the world speak different languages due to cultural differences. Let’s have a look at the languages of people who follow the difficult cultures we have mentioned above:
Satere Mawe Region, Brazil
The Sater Mawe language is a part of the Tupi language branch. People of Brazil living in the states of the Amazonas, speak the Sater Mawe language. Until the 18th century, a mixture of Indian and Portuguese languages is spoken in colonial Brazil. Today most of the people of Satere Mawe region are bilingual; men speak their Portuguese language on the other hand women mostly speak Satere-Mawe.
Sulawesi Region, Indonesia
Around 114 languages are spoken in the Sulawesi region of Indonesia. All the languages belong to Malayo-Polynesian subgroups of the Austronesian Language. Buginese language with five million speakers and Makassarese language with two million people speakers are the most spoken languages there.
Spain
The official language of Spain is Castilian Spanish. There are a lot of culturally diverse regions and people speak different languages there. Some of the regional languages are the Basque language, Catalan and Galician languages. These languages make Spain rich in cultural diversity.
Ethiopia
The Semitic languages are spoken in the northern part of Ethiopia. These languages include Ge’ez, Gurage, Amharic, and Hareri. Amharic is the most spoken principle language there.
South Korea
Korean is an East Asian language spoken in South and North Korea. It has around 77 million speakers. Moreover, it is the national language of both North and South Korea.
Conclusion
Learning and exploring new languages and cultures has always been so much fun and makes us open the door to so many new things that we never know before. Moreover, it also makes people stop doing racism and believe in humanity, it tells us to respect the cultures of other people as well.
And the most important part it helps people learn their own culture more accurately than ever before. The above-discussed cultures are difficult, and it is hard to believe them but we have to respect everyone’s culture.
