Guyana
Guyana the Co-operative Republic of Guyana, is a country on the northern mainland of South America. It is considered part of the Caribbean region because of its strong cultural and political ties with other Anglo-Caribbean countries and the Caribbean Community. Guyana is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the north, Brazil to the south and southwest, Venezuela to the west, Suriname to the east. With an area of 215,000 square kilometres, Guyana is the third-smallest sovereign state on mainland South America after Uruguay and Suriname; the region known as "the Guianas" consists of the large shield landmass north of the Amazon River and east of the Orinoco River known as the "land of many waters". Major rivers in Guyana include the Essequibo, the Berbice, the Demerara. Inhabited by many indigenous groups, Guyana was settled by the Dutch before coming under British control in the late 18th century, it was governed as British Guiana, with a plantation-style economy until the 1950s. It gained independence in 1966, became a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations in 1970.
The legacy of British rule is reflected in the country's political administration and diverse population, which includes Indian, African and multiracial groups. Guyana is the only South American nation; the majority of the population, speak Guyanese Creole, an English-based creole language, as a first language. Guyana is part of the Anglophone Caribbean. CARICOM, of which Guyana is a member, is headquartered in Guyana's capital and largest city, Georgetown. In 2008, the country joined the Union of South American Nations as a founding member; the name "Guyana" derives from Guiana, the original name for the region that included Guyana, French Guiana, parts of Colombia and Brazil. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, "Guyana" comes from an indigenous Amerindian language and means "land of many waters". There are nine indigenous tribes residing in Guyana: the Wai Wai, Patamona, Kalina, Pemon and Warao; the Lokono and Kalina tribes dominated Guyana. Although Christopher Columbus was the first European to sight Guyana during his third voyage, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote an account in 1596, the Dutch were the first Europeans to establish colonies: Essequibo and Demerara.
After the British assumed control in 1796, the Dutch formally ceded the area in 1814. In 1831 the three separate colonies became a single British colony known as British Guiana. Since its independence in 1824 Venezuela has claimed the area of land to the west of the Essequibo River. Simón Bolívar wrote to the British government warning against the Berbice and Demerara settlers settling on land which the Venezuelans, as assumed heirs of Spanish claims on the area dating to the sixteenth century, claimed was theirs. In 1899 an international tribunal ruled; the British territorial claim stemmed from Dutch involvement and colonization of the area dating to the sixteenth century, ceded to the British. Guyana achieved independence from the United Kingdom on 26 May 1966 and became a republic on 23 February 1970, remaining a member of the Commonwealth; the US State Department and the US Central Intelligence Agency, along with the British government, played a strong role in influencing political control in Guyana during this time.
The American government supported Forbes Burnham during the early years of independence because Cheddi Jagan was identified as a Marxist. They provided secret financial support and political campaign advice to Burnham's People's National Congress, to the detriment of the Jagan-led People's Progressive Party, supported by Guyanese of East Indian background. In 1978, Guyana received international notice when 918 members of the American cult, Peoples Temple, died in a mass murder/suicide drinking cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. However, most of the suicides were by Americans and not Guyanese. More than 300 children were killed. Jim Jones's bodyguards had earlier attacked people taking off at a small remote airstrip close to Jonestown, killing five people, including Leo Ryan, a US congressman. In May 2008, President Bharrat Jagdeo was a signatory to the UNASUR Constitutive Treaty of the Union of South American Nations. Guyana has ratified the treaty; the territory controlled by Guyana lies between latitudes 1° and 9°N, longitudes 56° and 62°W.
The country can be divided into five natural regions. Some of Guyana's highest mountains are Mount Ayanganna, Monte Caburaí and Mount Roraima on the Brazil-Guyana-Venezuela tripoint border, part of the Pakaraima range. Mount Roraima and Guyana's table-top mountains are said to have been the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1912 novel The Lost World. There are many volcanic escarpments and waterfalls, including Kaieteur Falls, believed to be the largest water drop in the world. No
Protestantism
Protestantism is the second largest form of Christianity with collectively between 800 million and more than 900 million adherents worldwide or nearly 40% of all Christians. It originated with the 16th century Reformation, a movement against what its followers perceived to be errors in the Roman Catholic Church. Protestants reject the Roman Catholic doctrine of papal supremacy and sacraments, but disagree among themselves regarding the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, they emphasize the priesthood of all believers, justification by faith alone rather than by good works, the highest authority of the Bible alone in faith and morals. The "five solae" summarise basic theological differences in opposition to the Roman Catholic Church. Protestantism is popularly considered to have begun in Germany in 1517 when Martin Luther published his Ninety-five Theses as a reaction against abuses in the sale of indulgences by the Roman Catholic Church, which purported to offer remission of sin to their purchasers.
However, the term derives from the letter of protestation from German Lutheran princes in 1529 against an edict of the Diet of Speyer condemning the teachings of Martin Luther as heretical. Although there were earlier breaks and attempts to reform the Roman Catholic Church—notably by Peter Waldo, John Wycliffe, Jan Hus—only Luther succeeded in sparking a wider and modern movement. In the 16th century, Lutheranism spread from Germany into Denmark, Sweden, Latvia and Iceland. Reformed denominations spread in Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland and France by reformers such as John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, John Knox; the political separation of the Church of England from the pope under King Henry VIII began Anglicanism, bringing England and Wales into this broad Reformation movement. Protestants have developed their own culture, with major contributions in education, the humanities and sciences, the political and social order, the economy and the arts, many other fields. Protestantism is diverse, being more divided theologically and ecclesiastically than either the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, or Oriental Orthodoxy.
Without structural unity or central human authority, Protestants developed the concept of an invisible church, in contrast to the Roman Catholic view of the Catholic Church as the visible one true Church founded by Jesus Christ. Some denominations do have a worldwide scope and distribution of membership, while others are confined to a single country. A majority of Protestants are members of a handful of Protestant denominational families: Adventists, Anglicans, Reformed, Lutherans and Pentecostals. Nondenominational, charismatic and other churches are on the rise, constitute a significant part of Protestant Christianity. Proponents of the branch theory consider Protestantism one of the three major divisions of Christendom, together with the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodoxy. Six princes of the Holy Roman Empire and rulers of fourteen Imperial Free Cities, who issued a protest against the edict of the Diet of Speyer, were the first individuals to be called Protestants; the edict reversed concessions made to the Lutherans with the approval of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V three years earlier.
The term protestant, though purely political in nature acquired a broader sense, referring to a member of any Western church which subscribed to the main Protestant principles. However, it is misused to mean any church outside the Roman and Eastern Orthodox communions. Protestantism as a general term is now used in contradistinction to the other major Christian traditions, i.e. Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy. During the Reformation, the term protestant was hardly used outside of German politics. People who were involved in the religious movement used the word evangelical. For further details, see the section below. Protestant became a general term, meaning any adherent of the Reformation in the German-speaking area, it was somewhat taken up by Lutherans though Martin Luther himself insisted on Christian or evangelical as the only acceptable names for individuals who professed Christ. French and Swiss Protestants instead preferred the word reformed, which became a popular and alternative name for Calvinists.
The word evangelical, which refers to the gospel, was used for those involved in the religious movement in the German-speaking area beginning in 1517. Nowadays, evangelical is still preferred among some of the historical Protestant denominations in the Lutheran and United Protestant traditions in Europe, those with strong ties to them. Above all the term is used by Protestant bodies in the German-speaking area, such as the Evangelical Church in Germany. In continental Europe, an Evangelical is either a Calvinist, or a United Protestant; the German word evangelisch means Protestant, is different from the German evangelikal, which refers to churches shaped by Evangelicalism. The English word evangelical refers to evangelical Protestant churches, therefore to a certain part of Protestantism rather than to Protestantism as a whole; the English word traces its roots back to the Puritans in England, where Evangelicalism originated, was brought to the United States. Martin Luther always disliked the term Lutheran, preferring the term evangelical, derived from euangelion, a Greek word meaning "good news", i.e. "gospel".
The followers of
Caste
Caste is a form of social stratification characterized by endogamy, hereditary transmission of a lifestyle which includes an occupation, status in a hierarchy, customary social interaction, exclusion. It is an extreme evolution of a system of legally-entrenched social classes endogamous and hereditary, such as that of feudal Europe. Although caste systems exist in various regions, its paradigmatic ethnographic example is the division of Indian society into rigid social groups, with roots in India's ancient history and persisting until today. In biology, the term is applied to role stratification in eusocial animals like ants and termites, though the analogy is imperfect as these involve stratified reproduction; the origins of the term'caste' are attributed to the Spanish and Portuguese casta, according to the John Minsheu's Spanish dictionary, means "race, lineage, or breed". When the Spanish colonized the New World, they used the word to mean a "clan or lineage", it was, the Portuguese who first employed casta in the primary modern sense of the English word ‘caste’ when they applied it to the thousands of endogamous, hereditary Indian social groups they encountered upon their arrival in India in 1498, as a direct extension of the concept of ‘casta’ in contemporary Portugal.
The use of the spelling "caste", with this latter meaning, is first attested in English in 1613. Modern India's caste system is based on the artificial superimposition of a four-fold theoretical classification called the Varna on the natural social groupings called the Jāti. From 1901 onwards, for the purposes of the Decennial Census, the British classified all Jātis into one or the other of the Varna categories as described in ancient texts. Herbert Hope Risley, the Census Commissioner, noted that "The principle suggested as a basis was that of classification by social precedence as recognized by native public opinion at the present day, manifesting itself in the facts that particular castes are supposed to be the modern representatives of one or other of the castes of the theoretical Indian system." The system of Varnas propounded in ancient Hindu texts envisages the society divided into four classes: Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Shudras. The texts do not mention any untouchable category in Varna classification.
Scholars believe that the Varnas system was never operational in society and there is no evidence of it being a reality in Indian history. The practical division of the society had always been in terms of Jātis, which are not based on any specific principle, but could vary from ethnic origins to occupations to geographic areas; the Jātis have been endogamous groups without any fixed hierarchy but subject to vague notions of rank articulated over time based on lifestyle and social, political or economic status. Many of India's major empires and dynasties like the Mauryas, Shalivahanas,Chalukyas,Kakatiyas among many others, were founded by people who would have been classified as Shudras, under the Varnas system, it is well established that by the 9th century, kings from all the four castes, including Brahmins and Vaishyas, had occupied the highest seat in the monarchical system in Hindu India, contrary to the Varna theory. In many instances, as in Bengal the kings and rulers had been called upon, when required, to mediate on the ranks of Jātis, which might number in thousands all over the subcontinent and vary by region.
In practice, the jātis may or may not fit into the Varna classes and many prominent Jatis, for example the Jats and Yadavs, straddled two Varnas i.e. Kshatriyas and Vaishyas, the Varna status of Jātis itself was subject to articulation over time. Starting with the British colonial Census of 1901 led by Herbert Hope Risley, all the jātis were grouped under the theoretical varnas categories. According to political scientist Lloyd Rudolph, Risley believed that varna, however ancient, could be applied to all the modern castes found in India, " meant to identify and place several hundred million Indians within it." In an effort to arrange various castes in order of precedence functional grouping was based less on the occupation that prevailed in each case in the present day than on that, traditional with it, or which gave rise to its differentiation from the rest of the community. "This action removed Indians from the progress of history and condemned them to an unchanging position and place in time.
In one sense, it is rather ironic that the British, who continually accused the Indian people of having a static society, should impose a construct that denied progress" The terms varna and jāti are two distinct concepts: while varna is the idealised four-part division envisaged by the Twice-Borns, jāti refers to the thousands of actual endogamous groups prevalent across the subcontinent. The classical authors scarcely speak of anything other than the varnas, as it provided a convenient shorthand. Thus, starting with the 1901 Census, Caste became India's essential institution, with an imprimatur from the British administrators, augmenting a discourse that had dominated Indology. “Despite India's acquisition of formal political independence, it has still not regained the power to know its own past and present apart from that discourse”. Upon independence from Britain, the Indian Constitution listed 1,108 castes across the country as Scheduled Castes in 1950, for positive
Esmeraldas Province
Esmeraldas is a province in northwestern Ecuador. The capital is Esmeraldas; the province is home to the Afro-Ecuadorian culture. Ethnic groups as of the Ecuadorian census of 2010: Mestizo 44.7% Afro-Ecuadorian 43.9% White 5.9% Indigenous 2.8% Montubio 2.4% Other 0.3% The province is divided into 7 cantons. The following table lists each with its population at the time of the 2001 census, its area in square kilometres, the name of the canton seat or capital; the cantons are divided into many parroquias: In Muisne: Bellavista Daule Maldonado Muisne Pedro Carlo Tola Union of Daule Cantons of Ecuador Provinces of Ecuador
Afro-Ecuadorian
Afro-Ecuadorians are an ethnic group in Ecuador who are descendants of enslaved Africans brought by the Spanish during their conquest of Ecuador from the Incas. They make up from 7% to 10% of Ecuador's population. Ecuador has a population of about 1,120,000 descendants from African people; the Afro-Ecuadorian culture is found in the country's northwest coastal region. The majority of the Afro-Ecuadorian population are to be found in the province of Esmeraldas and the Valle del Chota in the Imbabura Province, they can be found in Quito and Guayaquil. Their best known cultural influence known outside Ecuador is a distinctive kind of marimba music. Most Afro-Ecuadorians are the descendants of enslaved Africans who arrived in Ecuador from the early 16th century. In 1553, the first enslaved Africans reached Ecuador in Quito when a slave ship heading to Peru was stranded off the Ecuadorian coast; the enslaved Africans escaped and established maroon settlements in Esmeraldas, which became a safe haven as many Africans fleeing slave conditions either escaped to there or were forced to live there.
They started moving from their traditional homeland and were settling everywhere in Ecuador. Racism ingrained from the Spanish colonial era is still encountered. Poverty is rampant amongst them. Many Afro-Ecuadorians have participated in sports, for instance playing with the Ecuadorian national football team. After slavery was abolished in 1851, Africans became marginalized in Ecuador, dominated by the plantation owners. Afro-Ecuadorians live all over the country but there are two places of historic presence which are Esmeraldas province and the Chota Valley along the Mira River in Imbabura province. There is a strong presence in Quito and Guayaquil which have neighborhoods with high Afro-Ecuadorian populations and Ibarra. Afro-Ecuadorian culture may be analysed by considering the two main centers of historical presence: the province of Esmeraldas, the Chota Valley. Marimba music comes from Esmeraldas, gets its name from the prominent use of marimbas, along with drums and other instruments specific to this region such as the bombo, the cununo and the wasa.
Sometimes this music is played in religious ceremonies, as well as in parties. It features response chanting along with the music; some of the rhythms associated with it are currulao and andarele. On the other hand, in the Chota Valley there is bomba music; this music is different from marimba, having a more prominent Spanish and indigenous influence. It can vary from mid tempo to a fast rhythm, it is played with guitars, as well as the main local instrument called bomba, a drum, along with a guiro, sometimes bombos and bongos. A variation of it played by la banda mocha, groups who play bomba with a bombo and plant leaves to give melody. Religious practice among Afro-Ecuadorians is Roman Catholic. There is no significant African cult, although Catholic worship is distinctive in Esmeraldas, sometimes is done with marimba music. Numerous organizations have been established in Ecuador to care for the needs of Afro-Ecuadorians; the Afro-Ecuadorian Development Council. Afro-Ecuadorian Development Corporation, institutionalized in 2002, Asociación de Negros Ecuatorianos, founded in 1988, Afro-Ecuadorian Institute, founded 1989, the Agustín Delgado Foundation, the Black Community Movement and The National Confederation of Afro-Ecuadorians are amongst some of the insititutional frameworks in place in Ecuador.
The World Bank has funded Afro-Ecuadorian development proposals in Ecuador since 1998, loaning $34 million for related projects between 2003 and 2007, USAID overlooked the 2006 elections in Ecuador to see that Afro-Ecuadorians were represented. Nelson Estupiñán Bass and author Monica Chala, first Afro-Ecuadorian to win the Miss Ecuador beauty pageant, 1996 Agustin Delgado, Ecuadorian soccer player hailing from Juncal village.
Ecuador
Ecuador the Republic of Ecuador, is a country in northwestern South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, the Pacific Ocean to the west. Ecuador includes the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific, about 1,000 kilometres west of the mainland; the capital city is Quito, the largest city. What is now Ecuador was home to a variety of Amerindian groups that were incorporated into the Inca Empire during the 15th century; the territory was colonized by Spain during the 16th century, achieving independence in 1820 as part of Gran Colombia, from which it emerged as its own sovereign state in 1830. The legacy of both empires is reflected in Ecuador's ethnically diverse population, with most of its 16.4 million people being mestizos, followed by large minorities of European and African descendants. Spanish is the official language and is spoken by a majority of the population, though 13 Amerindian languages are recognized, including Quichua and Shuar; the sovereign state of Ecuador is a middle-income representative democratic republic with a developing economy, dependent on commodities, namely petroleum and agricultural products.
It is governed as a democratic presidential republic. One of 18 megadiverse countries in the world, Ecuador hosts many endemic plants and animals, such as those of the Galápagos Islands. In recognition of its unique ecological heritage, the new constitution of 2008 is the first in the world to recognize enforceable Rights of Nature, or ecosystem rights, it has the fifth lowest homicide rate in the Americas. Various peoples had settled in the area of the future Ecuador before the arrival of the Incas; the archeological evidence suggests that the Paleo-Indians' first dispersal into the Americas occurred near the end of the last glacial period, around 16,500–13,000 years ago. The first Indians who reached Ecuador may have journeyed by land from North and Central America or by boat down the Pacific Ocean coastline. Much migrations to Ecuador may have come via the Amazon tributaries, others descended from northern South America, others ascended from the southern part of South America through the Andes.
They developed different languages while emerging as unique ethnic groups. Though their languages were unrelated, these groups developed similar groups of cultures, each based in different environments; the people of the coast developed a fishing and gathering culture. Over time these groups began to interact and intermingle with each other so that groups of families in one area became one community or tribe, with a similar language and culture. Many civilizations arose in Ecuador, such as the Valdivia Culture and Machalilla Culture on the coast, the Quitus, the Cañari; each civilization developed its own distinctive architecture and religious interests. In the highland Andes mountains, where life was more sedentary, groups of tribes cooperated and formed villages. Through wars and marriage alliances of their leaders, a group of nations formed confederations. One region consolidated under a confederation called the Shyris, which exercised organized trading and bartering between the different regions.
Its political and military power came under the rule of the Duchicela blood-line. When the Incas arrived, they found that these confederations were so developed that it took the Incas two generations of rulers—Topa Inca Yupanqui and Huayna Capac—to absorb them into the Inca Empire; the native confederations that gave them the most problems were deported to distant areas of Peru and north Argentina. A number of loyal Inca subjects from Peru and Bolivia were brought to Ecuador to prevent rebellion. Thus, the region of highland Ecuador became part of the Inca Empire in 1463 sharing the same language. In contrast, when the Incas made incursions into coastal Ecuador and the eastern Amazon jungles of Ecuador, they found both the environment and indigenous people more hostile. Moreover, when the Incas tried to subdue them, these indigenous people withdrew to the interior and resorted to guerrilla tactics; as a result, Inca expansion into the Amazon Basin and the Pacific coast of Ecuador was hampered.
The indigenous people of the Amazon jungle and coastal Ecuador remained autonomous until the Spanish soldiers and missionaries arrived in force. The Amazonian people and the Cayapas of Coastal Ecuador were the only groups to resist Inca and Spanish domination, maintaining their language and culture well into the 21st century. Before the arrival of the Spaniards, the Inca Empire was involved in a civil war; the untimely death of both the heir Ninan Cuchi and the Emperor Huayna Capac, from a European disease that spread into Ecuador, created a power vacuum between two factions. The northern faction headed by Atahualpa claims that Huayna Capac gave a verbal decree before his death about how the empire should be divided, he gave the territories pertaining to present-day Ecuador and northern Peru to his favorite son Atahualpa, to rule from Quito. He willed that his heart be buried in Quito, his favorite city, the rest of his body be buried with his ancestors in Cuzco. Huáscar did not recognize his fa
Casta
A casta was a term to describe mixed-race individuals in Spanish America, resulting from unions of European whites and Africans. Racial categories had legal and social consequences, since racial status was an organizing principle of Spanish colonial rule. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European elites created a complex hierarchical system of race classification; the sistema de castas or the sociedad de castas was used in the 17th and 18th century in New Spain, a vast area of land starting just below Alaska stretching all the way to the Isthmus of Panama, plus the entire Caribbean, the Floridas and Spanish Philippines, to formally rank the mixed-race people who were born during the post-Conquest period. The process of mixing ancestries in the union of people of different races was known as mestizaje. In Spanish colonial law, mixed-race castas were classified as part of the república de españoles and not the república de indios, which set Amerindians outside the Hispanic sphere.
Other terminology for classification is categorization based on the degree of acculturation to Hispanic culture, which distinguished between gente de razón and gente sin razón, concurrently existed and supported the idea of the racial classification system. Created by Hispanic elites, the sistema de castas or the sociedad de castas, varied due to their birth, color and origin of ethnic types; the system of casta was more than socio-racial classification. It had an effect on every aspect of life, including taxation. Both the Spanish colonial state and the Church required more tax and tribute payments from those of lower socio-racial categories. Related to Spanish ideas about purity of blood, the colonists established a caste system in Latin America by which a person's socio-economic status correlated with race or racial mix in the known family background, or on phenotype if the family background was unknown. From the colonial period, when the Spanish imposed control, many wealthy persons and high government officials were of peninsular and/or European background, while African or indigenous ancestry, or dark skin was correlated with inferiority and poverty.
The "whiter" the heritage a person could claim, the higher in status they could climb. Casta paintings were a new, secular art form produced in eighteenth-century Mexico. A notable exception to the secular nature of the genre is Luis de Mena's 1750 painting of Virgin of Guadalupe with castas. Casta is an Iberian word, meaning "lineage", "breed" or "race", it is derived from the older Latin word castus, "chaste", implying that the lineage has been kept pure. Casta gave rise to the English word caste during the Early Modern Period; the idea of "purity of blood", limpieza de sangre, originating under Moorish rule, developed in Christian Spain to denote those without the "taint" of Jewish heritage. It was directly linked to religion and notions of legitimacy and honor following Spain's reconquest of Moorish territory, it was institutionalized during the Inquisition. The Inquisition only allowed those Spaniards who could demonstrate not to have Jewish and Moorish blood to emigrate to Latin America. Both in Spain and in the New World crypto-Jews were aggressively prosecuted.
Some emigrated as Portuguese merchants to Mexico City and Lima, following the successful revolt of Portugal in 1640 against the Castillian Crown. Several spectacular autos de fe in New Spain in the mid-seventeenth century featured the public punishment of those convicted of being "Judaizers". In Spanish America, the idea of purity of blood was in a complex fashion linked to ideas of race pertaining to mixing of whites and non-whites. Spaniards had become obsessed with lineage, following the expulsion of Moors and Jews, forced conversion of those who chose to remain. Evidence of lack of purity of blood had consequences for marriage, eligibility for office, entrance into the priesthood, emigration to Spain's overseas territories. Having to produce genealogical records to prove one's pure ancestry gave rise to a trade in the creation of false genealogies; when the concept of purity of blood was transferred overseas, it retained the concerns about tainted ancestry of Jews or Muslims in a family line.
During the early colonial decades, the Spanish in the New World had unions and marriages with indigenous women, resulting in generations of mixed-race children. In the late sixteenth century, some investigations of ancestry classified as "stains" any connection with Black Africans and sometimes mixtures with indigenous that produced Mestizos. While some illustrations from the period show men of African descent dressed in fashionable clothing and as aristocrats in upper-class surroundings, the idea that any hint of black ancestry was a stain developed by the end of the colonial period, it was illustrated in eighteenth-century paintings of racial hierarchy, known as casta paintings. The idea in New Spain that native or "Indian" blood in a lineage was an impurity may well have come about as the optimism of the early Franciscans faded about creating Indian priests trained at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, which ceased that function in the mid-sixteenth century. In
