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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   30074 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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countries unknown from countries that nobody ever heard of.

I recently was surprised to learn that South America is not all Spanish/Portuguese. There is a Dutch speaking country, Republiek Suriname, which is almost as large as Uruguay, and which largest ethnicity are Hindu Asian Indians.

It is less populated than Uruguay and mostly jungle though.

Yeah. One fact that I always love is that the largest Japanese population outside of Japan is in Brazil.

There's also a few Hmong in French Guiana. Instead of bringing old allied Hmong to the metropole the French basically looked around, found an equivalent jungle geography, and sent them there. And instead of getting culture-bound diseases they flourished instead!

There's also several large enclaves of Mennonites/Anabaptists. I recall specifically in Bolivia and Argentina but there are probably some elsewhere.

Brazil used to have a sizeable Japanese diaspora in the millions.

Wikipedia's list of sovereign states may be of interest to you.

The rightmost column of the table also includes information on autonomous regions. If 1 percent of people have heard of Suriname and Guyana, then 0.1 percent of people have heard of Gagauzia and Adjara!

I've been to Adjara and I've still never heard of it. I would imagine it's an "autonomous region" in the same way Russia has "autonomous oblasts". From a quick read it seems like it used to have a lot of autonomy under a local strongman until a local crisis in 2004 after Georgia's colour revolution.

Batumi was a pretty popular resort in the Soviet era, so you’re underestimating Adjara, even if only counting Americans.

I was aware of Gagauz people but not the autonomous region.

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