Category: Article
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How does racialisation work in Panama?
The concept of race is a strange thing. It has long been debunked as a pseudoscience, but has proven to have a long afterlife, with “racial identity” being a hot topic even in countries that don’t classify their citizens by “race” (the UK census notes people’s “ethnicity”, not “race”). Half of this is because the…
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Why do cloud forests have more flowers than jungles?
A curious thing about the cloud forest of Valle de Cocora was that it, somehow, looked even more like a jungle than actual jungles. It had a similar tangle of vegetation to the rainforest in Soberanía, but whereas Soberanía was mostly a uniform green and brown, Valle de Cocora had near-constant bursts of colour from…
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Why do Canadian First Nations have casinos?
The coach from Calgary to Banff didn’t just pass through prairie and forest. There were a few settlements on the way too, one of which was a First Nations* village of the Stoney Nakoda, its buildings scattered across a wide area. One of the buildings, I noticed, was a casino. This surprised me. I had…
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Why do towns and villages in France look so much older than the ones in Wales?
One of the great appeals of travelling in France is its antique towns and villages. Anyone looking up places to visit in France online can easily end up wandering among a plethora of pictures of castles and timber-framed houses that look straight out of a fairytale. I saw these places myself, in Foix and, to…
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Why are white palm fronds painted on Amazigh houses?
Tiout was quite an ordinary village, but in a way I found very appealing. It was so ordinary that it formed a perfect archetype of what an Amazigh village should be, with its lush palmery, half-pristine, half-ruined kasbah, and hilltop marabout. The stripes of purple or blue paint that outlined the occasional doorframe and window…
