Folklore
Lullabies are frequently not comforting
Songs sung to get children to sleep share musical features across the world and, in their words, cover subjects a great deal darker than the tune suggests.
Kohopoho — Small stories from a wide world
Places
What a heritage listing does to a place
International recognition brings visitors, funding and constraints, and the effect on the people living inside the designated area is not consistently positive.
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Places
When one employer is the whole town
Settlements built around a single mine, mill or plant have a recognisable life cycle, and the ending is the part that has been studied least and experienced most.
Festivals & Ritual
The gift that has to be returned
Gift exchange looks generous and functions as an obligation system, and the anthropology of it explains a good deal of behaviour that otherwise seems irrational.
Folklore
Riddles: the oldest game with words
Riddling appears across an extraordinary range of societies, frequently in formal settings, and it does considerably more than entertain children.
Food Cultures
Street food is a system, not a category
Cooked food sold in public space has existed as long as cities have, and it does specific work in a household economy that home cooking cannot.
Language & Words
Children who grow up with three languages
Multilingual childhood is the global norm rather than the exception, and most of the anxieties attached to it in monolingual societies are not supported.
Craft Traditions
All craft traditions →
Craft Traditions
Mending as a visible act
Several traditions repair objects in ways that draw attention to the break rather than hiding it, and the reasoning behind them is more practical than the current framing suggests.
Craft Traditions
Thatch, mud and stone: building with what is within reach
Vernacular building uses materials available within a short distance, and the resulting forms are so closely fitted to local conditions that they change over remarkably small distances.
Craft Traditions
Boats built without plans
Traditional boatbuilders work by eye and by proportion, producing hulls of considerable subtlety, and the knowledge is held in the shape of the shed rather than on paper.
Food Cultures
All food cultures →Food Cultures
Street food is a system, not a category
Cooked food sold in public space has existed as long as cities have, and it does specific work in a household economy that home cooking cannot.
Food Cultures
Famine foods and the knowledge nobody wants to need
Most food traditions include a set of things eaten only when there is nothing else, and that knowledge is among the first to disappear and the hardest to reconstruct.
Food Cultures
Hands, sticks and bread: how food is actually carried to the mouth
Eating implements are not a progression from primitive to civilised. Each system is fitted to the food it evolved alongside, and the rules around it are elaborate everywhere.
Language & Words
All language & words →Language & Words
Children who grow up with three languages
Multilingual childhood is the global norm rather than the exception, and most of the anxieties attached to it in monolingual societies are not supported.
Language & Words
Whistled and drummed languages: speech carried across a valley
In mountainous and forested regions, people developed ways to encode ordinary speech into whistles and drum tones that carry far beyond shouting range.
Language & Words
Sign languages are languages, and each one is its own
They are not gestural versions of spoken languages, they are not universal, and they have grammar of a kind that spoken languages cannot easily produce.
Festivals & Ritual
All festivals & ritual →Festivals & Ritual
The gift that has to be returned
Gift exchange looks generous and functions as an obligation system, and the anthropology of it explains a good deal of behaviour that otherwise seems irrational.
Festivals & Ritual
The obligations of a host
Hospitality customs across many societies impose duties on the host that are far more demanding than politeness, and the reasons are practical.
Festivals & Ritual
Fire festivals: the ones that survived everything
Communal fires at fixed points in the year persist in places where nearly every other traditional observance has lapsed, and the reasons appear to be practical as much as symbolic.
Folklore
All folklore →Folklore
Lullabies are frequently not comforting
Songs sung to get children to sleep share musical features across the world and, in their words, cover subjects a great deal darker than the tune suggests.
Folklore
Riddles: the oldest game with words
Riddling appears across an extraordinary range of societies, frequently in formal settings, and it does considerably more than entertain children.
Folklore
Weather lore: what the sayings actually predict
Traditional weather sayings range from reliable short-range indicators to complete nonsense, and the distinction is fairly easy to draw.
Places
All places →
Places
What a heritage listing does to a place
International recognition brings visitors, funding and constraints, and the effect on the people living inside the designated area is not consistently positive.
Places
When one employer is the whole town
Settlements built around a single mine, mill or plant have a recognisable life cycle, and the ending is the part that has been studied least and experienced most.
Places
Mountains that are not for climbing
A number of prominent peaks around the world are treated by the people who live beneath them as places where you do not go, and the resulting disputes with visitors have been long-running.
About Kohopoho
Culture, craft, food traditions, language and folklore — reported slowly, from the places where people still do things by hand. We publish explanatory articles rather than news, which means an article here is written to still be useful a year from now. Every piece is bylined, sourced and read by an editor before it appears — the full process is set out in our editorial policy.