festivals
A Peaceful Future for the Kargil District of Ladakh
While most of the literature about Ladakhi peacefulness focuses on India’s Leh District, the primarily Buddhist portion of Ladakh, the Muslim district called Kargil after its principal town appears to have a culture that is just as nonviolent. The two districts are populated with basically the same people who have many similar customs. They differ […]
Zapotec Festival in Central California
Juan Santiago, a young Zapotec leader in central California, believes that traditions of community service, which are so important in the villages of Oaxaca, need to revived among the immigrant communities in the Golden State. Although the Zapotec migrants used to be able to cross the border and return to their home villages in Mexico […]
Lepcha Festival Celebrates Peaceful Coexistence
The Pang Lhabsol, one of Sikkim’s foremost festivals, celebrates the eternal peace declared 800 years ago between the original Lepcha inhabitants and the Bhutias, Tibetan Buddhist peoples who were then invading the region. According to legend, Thekong Tek, the chief priest of the Lepcha, and Khye Bhumsa, the ancestor of the Bhutia monarchs, assembled with […]
Ladakh Confluence Music Festival Cancelled
A much-anticipated international music festival, part of the summer tourism calendar in Ladakh, was supposed to start today—but it was cancelled at the end of last week due to pressures from unhappy Ladakhi groups. Called Ladakh Confluence, the festival was scheduled to run through the 18th in Shey, near the capital city of Leh. In […]
Tourist Festival in Ladakh Symbolizes Harmony and Peacefulness
The Chief Minister of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, traveled to Leh on Saturday to open the annual Sindhu Darshan festival, which celebrates the peaceful, multi-cultural identity of Ladakh and modern India. The three-day annual festival, held at the time of the full moon in June, was first organized in 1997. […]
Traditional Inuit Festival Has Modernized, Somewhat
The annual spring festival—Toonik Tyme—in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, will be held next week, from April 7 through 12, at various locations around the city. Started in 1965, the spring festival features many traditional Inuit arts, crafts, and activities, but it now also includes events that would be familiar to anyone in Canada. A […]
Protecting Zapotec Corn
Upside Down World, an online progressive magazine focusing on Latin America, carried a story last week about a Zapotec festival held in the town of Santa Gertrudis earlier in February. The fourth annual Feria of the Cornfield—Globalization and the Natural Resources—was organized by a local group, the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of […]
Guelaguetza Festival Organized in Oregon
The guelaguetza festival, which migrated into southern California with the Zapotec immigrants from Mexico’s Oaxaca state, has been celebrated at the California State University San Marcos for 14 years. This year, a group of indigenous people from Oaxaca organized a guelaguetza festival in the central Willamette Valley of Oregon, in the city of Salem. The […]
Landless Birhor Misrepresented at Major Exhibition
Last week, the Telegraph, one of Calcutta’s major newspapers, published two different articles about the Birhor and the way they are perceived by the majority Indian society. The first article described the visit of some officials to a couple villages in the state of Jharkhand. The deputy commissioner of the state, K. K. Soan, accompanied […]
New Year Celebrations in Ladakh [anthology chapter review]
ANI, the Indian news agency, reported last week that the annual Losar festival, the Ladakhi New Year celebrations, had begun. Fernanda Pirie, whose recent book analyzed the peacefulness in Photoksar, has published a detailed description of the Losar celebrations that were held in the remote village a few years ago. It appears in a new […]
