1) Conversational styles and sports

- What is basketball style? Where is it spread?

Steal the ball, dribble, make your point. US, Canada, Britain

- Bowling style?

Priority is given to older people, frequently corporate style. Japan, Korea, Thailand, China.

- Rugby style?

You always expect to be interrupted. Warmer countries – Africa, Latin countries, Russia.

2) Endangered cultures

- What is the Neolithic Revolution? When did it happen?

8.000 – 6.000 B.C. 1^st agricultural revolution (from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlements. Groups into societies)

- What’s genocide? Provide examples of it

Deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. Example: Jews in Nazi [natsi] Germany

- What’s ethnocide?

Cultural genocide. The destruction of certain culture. Example: Tibet by Chinese

- What are initiations rites?

Rites of introducing someone into the society in order for him to become its member.Example from the script: the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada in nothern Colombia.

The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years: two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spend in their natural mother's womb; now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother. And for this entire time, they are inculturated into the values of their society, values that maintain the proposition that their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic -- or we might say the ecological -- balance. And at the end of this amazing initiation, one day they're suddenly taken out and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18, they see a sunrise. And in that crystal moment of awareness of first light, suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory. And the priest steps back and says, "You see? It's really as I've told you. It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect."

- Who are nomads? Indigenous people?

Nomads – those who move from place to place, f.e. to find better pastures. Extract from the script:

Wherever you look around the world, you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away; these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to: whether it's the egregious deforestation in the homeland of the Penan -- a nomadic people from Southeast Asia, from Sarawak -- a people who lived free in the forest until a generation ago, and now have all been reduced to servitude and prostitution on the banks of the rivers .

Indigenous population – those who initially populate certain territory. Extract from the script:

they have, nevertheless, through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it, but on a far subtler intuition: the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness.

- What’s multiculturalism? Cultural diversity?

As a normative term, multiculturalism refers to ideologies or policies that promote this diversity.It is provided by the gover nmental structures (like French school in Baku). Cultural diversity (as opposed to a single culture) supposes respect to each other.

- The Cultural Revolution – when, where and why

Tibet, 1966-76, initiated by Mao Zedong to enforce socialism by removing traditional and cultural elements from the society. It signified the return of Mao to power after failed Great Leap Forward (1958-61, rapid industrialization and collectivisation, нихера не получилось у него – it was the 1^st time of negative growth of Chinese economy).