Culture

“We need to hear more about our different cultures and it’s good if these people could also write their own folklores,” says Sir Michael Somare.

Sir Michael says such events allow the people of a particular place to narrow down and portray on what they believe in.

But Sir Michael adds that more should be done.

He states the shows are telling a story…but folklores must also be written to capture these beliefs and traditions.

East Sepik Provincial Day was held at the Murray Barracks, recording the biggest crowd of the day.

The venue was packed and many more still making their way in by midday.

The public even joined in on adorning a few traditional attire and body paints and danced along with traditional singsing groups who took the arena.

A recent study found that more than 2 billion adults and children globally are overweight or obese and suffer health problems because of that -- but this is nothing new.

In recent times, these activities have also been aimed at preserving culture and transferring local knowledge from the older to younger generations.

One such event was the recent gathering of the Women Weavers of Milne Bay early this month.

This saw women from around the province gather in Alotau for a two-day show and tell event.

It was specifically for sharing knowledge on cultural practices, particularly the art of weaving.

The boat, the Hokule'a, took three years to journey around the globe.

Its crew navigated without modern instruments, using only the stars, wind and ocean swells as guides.

They aimed to use the same techniques that brought the first Polynesian settlers to Hawaii hundreds of years ago.

Hawaii celebrated the Hokule'a's homecoming on Honolulu's Magic Island peninsula on Saturday.

Built in the 1970s, it has travelled around 40,000 nautical miles (74,000km) on this latest trip, known as the Malama Honua voyage, meaning "to care for our Island Earth".

Tiny "golden lotus" feet -- achieved through breaking girls' toes and arches and binding them to the sole of the foot with cloth -- were thought to be a passport to a better marriage and a better way of life.

"In the conventional view, it existed to please men. They were thought to be attracted to small feet," said Laurel Bossen, co-author of the new book "Bound feet, Young hands."

But Bossen's research suggests that the custom has been massively misunderstood.

I explained that the symposium, in part, responds to those who doubt the wealth, breadth and quality of modernism in this region. She laughed, knowing all too well the criticism that Middle East art practitioners face.

As an arts writer, I've heard the uninformed allegations countless times.

"The Middle Eastern art scene is a bubble."

"Its art arena is five minutes old."

"There is no institutional interest or acquisition."

And nobody celebrates like Rio de Janeiro, where thousands of people come together to party in the streets, bars and restaurants and balls of Carnival.

Carnival 2017 starts on Friday, February 24 and ends on February 28, also known as Shrove Tuesday or Fat Tuesday. It's the hurrah before the Christian faithful start observing Lent, a period of contemplation and reflection before the coming of Easter.

A story says that a choirmaster, in 1670, was worried about the children sitting quietly all through the long Christmas nativity service. So he gave them something to eat to keep them quiet! As he wanted to remind them of Christmas, he made them into a 'J' shape like a shepherds crook, to remind them of the shepherds that visited the baby Jesus at the first christmas. However, the earliest records of 'candy canes' comes from over 200 years later, so the story, although rather nice, probably isn't true!

The weekend’s event which saw close to a hundred traditional cultural groups performing, attracted close to 400 international and tens of thousands of local tourists.

Though the event was normal throughout the program from Saturday to Sunday, following the closure of the event on Sunday, thousands of young people gathered outside the showground for ‘Mela’ the Melpa Jump, a traditional courtship which is now popularly called ‘Waipa’.