| It has taken ten years of work to produce this ten-volume Encyclopedia of World Cultures. Thirteen editors, six associate editors, 800 contributors, 20 translators, and the staffs of the Human Relations Area Files, G. K. Hall and Co., and Macmillan Library Reference have been involved in the process.
In keeping with the global scope of the subject matter, the 800 contributors represent 52 different nations, with the majority writing from the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. Some 150 articles were translated from Russia, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Ukrainian, Kazakh, and Chinese for inclusion in the Encyclopedia. That so many nations are represented reflects the time-consuming and costly effort by the volume editors to involve anthropologists from other nations in this project.
Our work has produced some 1,430 articles covering 1,800 cultures and three appendices covering an additional 1,200 cultures. Thus, these ten volumes provide descriptive information on 3,000 cultures around the world. While some of the cultures described here are only a few hundred people strong, at the other extreme one finds the Han Chinese who number over one billion but as the world's largest ethnic group are described in a single article.
The years during which we worked on the Encyclopedia were ones of enormous global political, social, and economic change. That these changes have influenced cultures around the world and relations among cultures is well documented in many of the articles. These global changes also influenced our work on the Encyclopedia. The break-up of the former Soviet Union made it possible for anthropologists in Russia and formerly Soviet but now newly independent republics to contribute to the Encyclopedia. That their contributions contain much information on material culture and folklore but little on kinship and political organization tells as much about how anthropological research was controlled during the years of Soviet rule. Continuing political and cultural repression in China, on the other hand, made it difficult to find scholars who would be allowed to write for a Western audience and, in fact, ultimately determined what cultures in China we could cover. |
