- Catalog
- Research
On July 2 the catalog added sixty peoples that ethnographic photography made famous. They include the Himba, the Mursi, the Hamar, the Suri, the Karo and the Wodaabe, the wider Lower Omo Valley, four San peoples of the Kalahari, and the Herero-related peoples of southwest Africa. The catalog grew from 1,489 to 1,549 pages.
Each page launched with an editorial record covering homeland, language, society and appearance, plus a portrait from the image pipeline. Every record carries a region from the catalog's canonical region vocabulary, so each new people appears on its region hub and among its neighbors.
On July 9 four long-form hub articles tied the new pages together: the peoples of the Lower Omo Valley, the Himba and Herero, the San of the Kalahari, and the Wodaabe and the Gerewol. They run from 1,184 to 1,346 words each, are grounded in named ethnography, and link out to the catalog pages of the peoples they cover.
Under the hood
- Each new people is a structured editorial record with homeland, language, society and appearance fields, written through idempotent operations, so any rerun converges on the same catalog state.
- Region membership runs on a controlled vocabulary of canonical region values. Region hubs match on it and sibling lists match it exactly, so each new page links to its region, to about 31 sibling groups and to its country pages.
- The image pipeline renders portraits in batches for every catalog entry that has none, newest records first.
- The hub articles cite named fieldwork: Turton on the Mursi, Strecker and Lydall on the Hamar, Lee and DeVore on the Ju|'hoansi, Dupire on the Wodaabe. They describe modal traits rather than predictions about individuals, and together they carry 31 links into the catalog.
- The selection leaves out three recently contacted or isolated peoples on sensitivity grounds.
- peoples added
- 60
- people pages
- 1,549
- long-form hub articles
- 4
Peoples in this entry
See it on the site
Sources and open data
Related build notes
- Jul 26, 2026A new way through the catalog: browse by language familyEleven language-family hubs plus Bantu, Nilotic and Polynesian branch pages, and the open phenotype dataset rebuilt from 484 to 1,779 groups.
- May 5, 2026The phenotype catalog goes open on Hugging FaceAll 484 groups, each with an original profile of 300 to 450 words, published as an open CC BY 4.0 dataset one load_dataset() call away.
- Jul 16, 2026The Erotic Pose Catalog launches with 104 keypoint-mapped positionsA named catalog of sexual positions with keypoint skeletons and historical provenance, published as the open CC BY 4.0 dataset EthnicErotic/pose-catalog.