Culture Smart! provides essential information on attitudes, beliefs and behavior in different countries, ensuring that you arrive at your destination aware of basic manners, common courtesies, and sensitive issues. These concise guides tell you what to expect, how to behave, and how to establish a rapport with your hosts. This inside knowledge will enable you to steer clear of embarrassing gaffes and mistakes, feel confident in unfamiliar situations, and develop trust, friendships, and successful business relationships. Culture Smart! offers illuminating insights into the culture and society of a particular country. It will help you to turn your visit-whether on business or for pleasure-into a memorable and enriching experience. Contents include: * customs, values, and traditions * historical, religious, and political background * life at home * leisure, social, and cultural life * eating and drinking * do's, don'ts, and taboos * business practices * communication, spoken and unspoken

"The Land of a Thousand Hills," is known for its abundant natural beauty and iconic wildlife, from chimpanzees in the Nyungwe Forest to the returning lions and rhinoceros of Akagera National Park. This is a country of tea, coffee, and intricately woven baskets, of expressive drumming, and the subtle and artistic Intore dancers. It has a growing film industry, a world-class cycling team, a thriving contemporary music scene, and a burgeoning economy. The capital, Kigali, glimmers with new construction, and has become a home for investment and economic growth. Rwandans today remain a dignified, reserved, and welcoming people. They share a deep pride in their unique culture and history—demonstrated by their eagerness to showcase it to visitors—and they are dedicated to development. But to get the most from your stay, plunge in deeper and get to know them on their own terms, and you will find that you can make lifelong friends.

This is a book about one of the great untold stories of modern cultural life: the remarkable ascendancy of prizes in literature and the arts. Such prizes and the competitions they crown are almost as old as the arts themselves, but their number and power--and their consequences for society and culture at large--have expanded to an unprecedented degree in our day. In a wide-ranging overview of this phenomenon, James F. English documents the dramatic rise of the awards industry and its complex role within what he describes as an economy of cultural prestige. Observing that cultural prizes in their modern form originate at the turn of the twentieth century with the institutional convergence of art and competitive spectator sports, English argues that they have in recent decades undergone an important shift--a more genuine and far-reaching globalization than what has occurred in the economy of material goods. Focusing on the cultural prize in its contemporary form, his book addresses itself broadly to the economic dimensions of culture, to the rules or logic of exchange in the market for what has come to be called "cultural capital." In the wild proliferation of prizes, English finds a key to transformations in the cultural field as a whole. And in the specific workings of prizes, their elaborate mechanics of nomination and election, presentation and acceptance, sponsorship, publicity, and scandal, he uncovers evidence of the new arrangements and relationships that have refigured that field.

Nicknamed "The Warm Heart of Africa," "Land of the Lake," and "The Land of Smiling Faces," this small, landlocked country in southeast Africa offers travelers a true African experience. Within a single day, visitors can go on safari, enjoy sprawling tea gardens, and watch the sun sets over Lake Malawi, the third-largest lake in Africa and home to many rare species of fish. The country has nine unique national parks and wildlife reserves and has been home to many diverse African cultures, from the indigenous hunter-gathers to the incoming iron-working Bantu settlers. Dress, dance, masks, language, and traditional festivals all reflect waves of migrating tribes—those fleeing Shaka Zulu in the south, Swahili Arab slave traders in the east, and Bantu from Central Africa. Other cultural influences came through the slave trade routes, contact with Portuguese and Indian traders, and English missionaries who introduced Victorian-era buildings. This historic blend has produced a people who are strong, good-humored, conservative, traditional, yet adaptable, creative, loyal, and hard-working.

Culture Smart! provides essential information on attitudes, beliefs and behavior in different countries, ensuring that you arrive at your destination aware of basic manners, common courtesies, and sensitive issues. These concise guides tell you what to expect, how to behave, and how to establish a rapport with your hosts. This inside knowledge will enable you to steer clear of embarrassing gaffes and mistakes, feel confident in unfamiliar situations, and develop trust, friendships, and successful business relationships. Culture Smart! offers illuminating insights into the culture and society of a particular country. It will help you to turn your visit-whether on business or for pleasure-into a memorable and enriching experience. Contents include: * customs, values, and traditions * historical, religious, and political background * life at home * leisure, social, and cultural life * eating and drinking * do's, don'ts, and taboos * business practices * communication, spoken and unspoken

This guide covers all the main towns, cities, and parks of one of the most beautiful countries on Earth. Travel information and tips for the hot spots of Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Johannesburg, and Durban are all extensively updated for this latest edition. The book also includes spotlights on food and drink, shipwrecks, surfing, diving, and wild animals to help travelers get the most out of their time in this multifaceted destination. Kruger National Park, the Kalahari, and the Western Cape wine lands are featured, and readers can also enjoy a Footsteps to Freedom walk, a Maloti Mountains drive, and luxury train trips through the Transvaal. The National Geographic Traveler guidebooks are in tune with the ever growing trend toward experiential travel, providing inspiring photography, insider tips, and expert advice for a more authentic, enriching experience of the destination. The guides provide information, historical context, and cultural interpretation not available online.

A nation with eleven official languages, innumerable cultural influences -- from the anakwetha to the Zulu dancer, and nine provinces that cover no less than seven separate vegetation biomes, South Africa boasts a complexity of geology, climate, culture and biodiversity shared by no other country in the world. This remarkable portfolio of images reflects the many extraordinary faces of this land of contrasts: from the Cape's famous landmark of Table Mountain, along the flower routes of the West Coast into the semi-desert reaches of the Kalahari and the Northern Cape to the rich cultural heritage that seems to permeate every corner -- from the traditional homesteads of the Wild Coast and battlefields of the Drakensberg foothills, to the farmland of the Free State and the great cities of Gauteng. The book traces the vast and complicated heritage of indigenous people and settlers, and the places -- flora and fauna, beaches and mountains, deserts and rainforests -- that make up this land of exceptional contrasts.