Traditional beverage: Brazilian Indian Kaschiri

This Brazilian kaschiri is brewed from masticated cassava. The alcoholic cassava products are beverages similar to beer or solid foods. To obtain cassava beers it is necessary to hydrolyze the starch before starting fermentation by yeast. Cassava is a shrubby tree with large tuberous roots that are rather immune to insect attack because of the high levels of cyanide in the tuber skin.

The poison is removed by squeezing the grated and ground tubers on water and then heating or evaporating the products. The starchy juice pressed out of ground cassava is fermented or it is chewed in the starchy form, which aids the change into sugar. Nowadays, malting enzymes usually replace saliva.

For Brazilian Indians, this beverage plays a main part in religious feasts and especially in the death-feasts. In this occasion the beverage give the drinkers the power of resistance against evil spirits.
Traditional beverage: Brazilian Indian Kaschiri

What is Consanguineous Marriages?

Consanguineous literally means ‘related (con) by blood (sang)’. Geneticists define marriages between people related as second cousins or closer as consanguineous.

The institution of consanguineous marriage – a marriage contracted between close biological relatives – has been a basic building block of many societies in different parts of the world.

It has been practiced for hundreds of years in many communities throughout the world. Although in the western world consanguineous marriages constitute less than 1 percent of total marriages, this practice of intra-familial unions between couples related as second cousins or closer has enjoyed widespread popularity in North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

Consanguinity rates vary from one population to another depending on religion, culture and isolation.

However, according to the principles of Mendelian genetics, consanguineous marriage confers an elevated risk that a child would have an autosomal, recessively inherited genetic disease.
What is Consanguineous Marriages?

What is traditional marriage?

For nearly two millennia, the western legal tradition defined marriage as a heterosexual, monogamous union, designed for the procreation and nurture of children, the mutual help and companionship of husband and wife, and the mutual protection of both parties from sexual sin and instability.

Traditional marriage is a permanent and sexually exclusive relationship of extraordinaire care between a man and a woman.

The ordinary goal of traditional marriage is to raise the offspring of the husband and wife in an environment of safety and security. It has traditionally defined the husband as the head of the family. A married woman assumes her husband’s social and legal identity, as well as his surnames.

In this type of marriage, the woman is primarily the homemaker while the man is primarily the breadwinner. In former times, women stayed at home and looked after their husband and children throughout.

In traditional marriage also, husband and wife tend to focus a bit narrowly on bringing up their children and often end up viewing each other only a parents. They play down their emotional needs, for example by not demonstrating love and affection to one another.
What is traditional marriage?

Fermentation of milk

Milk can be consumed raw, or it can be transformed into a variety of other forms, such as butter, yogurt, kefir, cheese and other fermented milk products. In pastoral societies, milk is traditionally consumed mostly in the form of fermented milk.

The art of fermenting milk is widespread in Africa. Cattle and camels are important dairy animals, and milk fermentation product vary widely.

For example, jben and ayib are Moroccan and Ethiopian cheeses, nono is a Nigerian yoghurt-like product, and Zimbabwe and Sudan also have fermented milk products.

The milk is either home-consumed or sold in the immediate vicinity of the herd.

Across Central Asia, yak milk is churned into butter and added to hot, salty tea, which is consumed in vast quantities on a daily basis. Bovine milks may be mixed with blood and/or grain by some pastoralist before consumption

Yogurt has been consumed since recorded time. Perhaps it was discovered by Mesopotamians in about 5000 BC when herdsman carry the milk with them in pouches made from an animals’ stomach.

These stomachs contained a natural enzyme called chymosin, which forms gel or coagulum when added to milk.

Cultured dairy products history also reported that Genghis Khan loved the taste of cultured products and mandated that all of his soldiers consumed them on regular basis.

In Kenya various additives such as wood ash, animal blood, urine and sometimes leafy vegetables may be added to preserve fermented sour milk called maziwa lala.
Fermentation of milk

Traditional Civilizations (Part II)

In traditional civilization, a specialization also appears.

Food producers provided the crops and domesticated meats that full time craftsmen and tradesmen: millers, bakers, brewers, batchers, tanners, weavers, tailors, smiths, carpenters, masons, metalworkers, jewelers, stonecutters and so on.

Craft turn into art as great art styles are born.

In politics, monarchs make use of kinship: Dynasties are founded by leaders or priests, others as war leaders, seizing power by force of arms.

In addition, monarchs usually employ tax collectors, district administrators and engineers public works.

Royal bureaucracies appear, usually defined as an extension of the monarch’s household.

The state commissions traders to travel abroad – another type of full time specialists. Market places emerge as the places for “administered trade” between civilized royal governments and tribal peoples.

Tribesman usually exchange raw material for fine handcrafted goods.

Yet while urban elites and high cultures of the arts, literature religion, and philosophy may flourish in cities, folk cultures of local knowledge develop along side them in the peasant villages of farmers ad in isolated fastnesses of herding nomads on the fringes of states domains.

Peasants may turn inward and encapsulated themselves in sectarian versions of their former urban culture.

Others, especially herdsmen, may resist the urban state by force of arms, sometimes even conquering the center and founding new dynasties.

In sum, the institutions that have now emerged inside the community form of either green or nucleated, walled cities with associated peasant hamlets and villages are.

• A state cult organized by full time priests around shrines officially recognized by the dynamic state.

• The extension of the fraternity-age-grade principle to recruit enormous armies for conquest and defense.

• A variety of tradesmen and craftsmen, often organized fraternally into guilds, performing all manner of services and handcrafting all of goods.

• The extension of the monarch’s household to form a bureaucracy, divided into bureaus of war (army), public works, and tax collecting/local administration.

• The extension of kinship to royal dynasties, with lineage as the ideology of legitimacy for rule.

• The beginning of officially organized long distance trade and the possibility of marketplaces for moving goods locally. Most goods, however, continue to move as tribute and offerings to be distributed by royal and priestly rituals to bureaucrats, soldiers and ordinary citizens, who in traditional societies are better terms “subject” and “cultists”.
Traditional Civilizations (Part II)

Traditional Civilizations

The same processes that obliged human beings to group themselves in semisettled, warring and trading tribal communities also obliged some of them, in historically distinct times and places, to settle down in cities and to develop the state out of their political behaviors.

Under pressure to reap new resources from crowded, often degraded habitat, and reacting to a more complicated internal social structure and to competition from nearby groups, certain horticulturalists develop more intensive gardening in appropriate habitats – always river valleys.

Internally, their tribal politics and competitive feasting gave way to priestly rule followed by military rule and the rise of dynasties.

Cities are accompanied by the greater factoring out of the array of human institutions into full time specialization. Rural, food producing communities fall into satellite arrangements around urban centers, two forms of such traditional civilizations are possible: one, the green city, has decentralized urban institutions and dispersed populations; the other the nucleated, walled city, has centralized cities and aggregated populations.

That is, in the one form a monarch may inhibit an isolated palace, his council may convene someplace else, his army may be scattered in barracks around the realm, and collective royal ceremonies may be performed at yet some other place – a shrine or royal tomb perhaps.

The rural population of food producers is spread more or less evenly over the cultivable land. In the other kind of city the central institutions of state, army, religion, and trade are all concentrated in a single settlement, side by side in usually distinct architecture.

Moreover, the population is densely packed around the urban center, usually defended by strong wall. The food producing population lives in village scattered around, but there is strong tendency, encouraged by defense in warfare, to bring the villagers inside the city and settle each one in an urban ward.

At this level of community, ritual becomes a full time specialty of priests at shrines, which are at once the intellectual, economic, and often – especially in start-up phases of civilization – political centers of civilization. Temples and their plazas form the stage-drop for the dialogue of civilization, that communication taking place between particular local “folk” peoples and the elites – full time leaders specializing in the emerging institutions.
Traditional Civilizations