Culture

As with all Palestinians in what is often described as the world’s largest open-air prison, life for the women of the Gaza Strip is choked with adversity.

Climate change will affect all of humanity: men and women, young and old, rich and poor. If there’s one thing that looks past race, religion, age and income status, it’s the effects of climate change. Of course, let’s not overlook the other living organisms – all flora and fauna. The impact of our changing planet will affect them, too.

One of the largest ethnic groups in Cambodia, the Kuy community lives in harmony with the forest. For them, life follows the organic rhythm of Nature, rooted in the essence of community life. “We call this place our home. This is where we feel protected,” they explain. A community strongly tied to their animist beliefs, the Kuy people says that the Neaktah – or ancestral spirits – have blessed their presence in the forest. The Neaktah watch over people and places, as long as they are paid respect through prayers and offerings.

For centuries, indigenous tattooists working across Asia have marked human skin with powerful designs and symbols in their quest to signal ethnic identity and render the body sacred. Carried through life and onwards into death, these marks of humanity testify to an ancestral legacy that is in danger of gradually fading away.

They wear pink saris, wield sticks and don’t hesitate to use violence in their fight for women’s rights. These are the ladies of the Gulabi Gang, an association created by Sampat Pal Devi to eradicate gender violence in India

Kowloon Walled City – 300 interconnected high-rise buildings, built without contributions from architects or engineers, and home to nearly 40,000 people. This was the most densely-populated place on the planet until its demolition in 1993.

Rock art dated to a minimum age of almost 40,000 years has been discovered in the Maros region of southern Sulawesi, Indonesia. This is an incredible finding, first published in Nature in 2014, because one of the biggest challenges in rock art research is dating.

If nothing else, 2016 has demonstrated the unexpected power of a popular mythology to capture people’s hearts, minds, and wallets. Among the more demonstrations of this fanaticism is Pokémon Go, a GPS-based, augmented reality smartphone game that rebooted the global pop culture phenomenon of Pokémon.