Culture
The U'wa speak a language of the Chibchan family called Uw Cuwa ("people's tongue"). They have no written tradition and have passed down their knowledge and customs primarily through song.
Their religious tradition includes an obligation to gather in the summer months and "sing the world into being" as well as to maintain equilibrium between the layers of the world: earth, water, oil, mountains, and sky. Their identification of petroleum, which they call Ruiria, with the blood of Mother Earth, stiffened their resolve in their conflict with oil corporations in the 1990s.
The U'wa consider non-U'wa to be impure, and place high importance on purification rituals, which makes interaction with outsiders difficult.
Read more about this topic: U'wa People
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian—even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been “ghosted”Mor made to seem invisible—by culture itself.... Once the lesbian has been defined as ghostly—the better to drain her of any sensual or moral authority—she can then be exorcised.”
—Terry Castle, U.S. lesbian author. The Apparitional Lesbian, ch. 1 (1993)
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgment but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.”
—Midge Decter (b. 1927)