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■■□□ New here? Every tradition is marked with four squares showing how it's doing today —
549 traditions archived3,920 sources cited8 rooms on the wall

Every tradition gets its own room.

Global

A free public archive of the world's traditions, the living, and the ones that have stopped. Every claim names its source, or it is not published.A free archive of traditions from around the world. We show what's alive, what's stopped, and we link every fact to its source.

549 traditions3,920 sources8 on the wall
Photo: Brett Jordan · Wikimedia Commons

Rooms with the lights on

6 rooms showing
Rugovo▢▢▢▢Dance · Place unrecordedbooks.google.comRoger de Coverley▢▢▢▢Dance · Place unrecordedlccn.loc.govSammi▢▢▢▢Dance · Place unrecordedpunjab.gov.inRodat▢▢▢▢Dance · Place unrecordedkomunikasi.gov.mySamoan dance▢▢▢▢Dance · Place unrecordedbooks.google.co.inApsara Dance▢▢▢▢Dance · Cambodiamuse.jhu.edu
This week’s question

maloya has no citable condition yet.

If you know how it is doing, one sourced sentence moves it out of grey. Corrections are reviewed, not published blind.

549
traditions, each with its own room
3,920
publishers cited, deduplicated
4
claims published without a source
465
honestly unassessed — help move one out of grey

Four lamps in every room.

How a tradition is doing · all 549 counted
4 of 4 lit1ThrivingDoing wellPerformed often and taught in institutions.
3 of 4 lit76StableHolding steadyStill practised, though a source records pressure on it.
2 of 4 lit0FadingGetting rarerFewer practitioners each decade, according to a source.
1 of 4 lit7CriticalAt serious riskA source records it as at risk of being lost.
none lit465Not yet sourcedStill being documentedNo source has told us yet. Know one? Send it in.

The more lamps lit, the better a tradition is doing. A lamp is only lit when a source says so — never guessed. The dashed room is what the archive does not know yet.

Seven families.

The seven never grow
410DanceFolk and tribal dance78MusicSong, drum and string1TextileTextiles and handloom1CraftPottery, metal, wood, bamboo, toys, puppetry0PaintingPainting, wall art, face and body art0FoodPlace-linked food traditions2StorytellingTheatre and oral traditions

Every tradition belongs to one of seven families. The number is what the archive holds on record so far.

The whole world, placed →Atlas · 128 placed
25th century BCE210th century BCE16th century BCE15th century BCE33rd century BCE16th century1By century, from BCE forward →Timeline · 207 entries

Four ways into the archive

Sort by craft, not by country.

Every tradition belongs to one of seven families — dance, music, textile, craft, painting, food, storytelling. Browse a family and every room in it stands together, wherever in the world it's practised.

7 FAMILIES · 549 TRADITIONS
Browse by family →

Every way in

Traditions549Places128Artists2Groups1Communities1Instruments4Materials2Categories6Ways in5Timeline207Shows0Sources3,920

No country is the host of this building. Coverage is uneven, and the figures say so.

Editions · placed on the wall
India44Indonesia18Japan12France11Spain8Mexico8United States of America7Peru6South Korea5Cuba5Brazil4Greece4

Read it in English today, every page of it. folkroom never machine-translates, a tradition appears in another language when somebody who speaks it writes it there. Write one in yours →

Two rooms, one wall. The door is open.

Sourced or silent
A claim names its publisher, or it does not appear.
Its own room
No tradition is a footnote to a bigger one.
Free forever
No paywall, no account to read, no advertising.
Credit always
Photographers, communities and publishers are named.