Anthropologist Dick Hebdige wrote that subcultures are identifiable through their fashions, mannerisms, and slang. They have a belief system that outsiders might not understand but is sacred in their own circles. Modern media has transformed how subcultures spread and has introduced scores of them to the general public. The following are 10 interesting subcultures which you may not have heard about yet.

1. Zapatistas

The Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) is an anti-globalization revolutionary militia that appeared in 1994 as a response to NAFTA. Most people know of them because their leader, Subcomandante Marcos, smokes a pipe while wearing a ski mask. The Zapatistas were eventually given some autonomy took over the eastern part Mexico’s poorest state, Chiapas. They’ve since developed a subculture that is an interesting amalgam of revolutionary imagery, Catholicism, and Maya-centrism. Posters of Che Guevara next to the Virgin Mary with epithets in a colloquial version of Spanish are fairly common. Subcomandante Marcos gives speeches with a rooster that he calls “el pingüino” (“the penguin”) because of its hobbling walk, which is supposed to symbolize the proletariat.

2. Bills

Spaghetti westerns about Buffalo Bill became incredibly popular with the poor youth of Léopoldville (now Kinsasha) in the late-’50s. Buffalo Bill struck a chord with the Congolese because his story was similar to tall tales about traditional hunter heroes. The most popular of these westerns was Pony Express, where Charlton Heston played Buffalo Bill. For nearly a decade, it was common to see Léopoldville youth walking around the city wearing cowboy kerchiefs, jeans, and 10 gallon hats and calling themselves “Bills”. They even developed their own language called Hindoubill, based on the misconception that the Indians in westerns were Hindus from India. Dressed up Bills started disappearing by the late-’60s after being absorbed into local gangs, but even modern gangs in Kinsasha still speak Hindoubill and brandish kerchiefs to show their allegiance.

3. Asgarda

In Histories, Herodotus discussed a war that the Greeks had with a group of woman archers who removed a breast to freely use a bow. These women were called the Amazons and were placed on boats after being defeated. They managed to escape, intermarried with the Scythians, and ended up in modern day Ukraine. The Asgarda claim to be contemporary extensions. Their origin is rooted in a recent Ukrainian movement to rediscover traditional martial arts but they splintered into an all-woman subculture that secluded in the Carpathian mountains. Asgarda practice a strict training routine that involves fist-fighting styles and medieval weaponry. Interviews with them read like issues of Wonder Woman, complete with ultra-feminist proclamations about the downfall of man’s society.

4. Rolingas

Uruguayan rock bands that pinched the sound and style of The Rolling Stones became popular in Argentina in the ’60s. They died out quickly but the bar bands they inspired in Buenos Aires cultivated a rabid following that coalesced into the Rolinga (“Rolling”) subculture. Rolingas are identifiable by their Polynesian cargo cult style deification of The Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger hair styles, and disdain for anything that isn’t Rolinga. They heavily borrow customs from soccer hooligans, so concerts are cramped affairs with chanting fans, giant flags with epithets, and the occasional streak of violence. Rolingas enjoyed a moment of popularity in 1995 when The Rolling Stones toured Argentina and invited a few Rolinga bands to open for them. It didn’t last long; a 2004 club fire caused a massive backlash towards Rolingas that pushed them back into the suburbs.

5. Burrnesha

The Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit, Albania’s code of conduct, describes women as a “sack made to endure” and gives all wealth to men. It also promotes blood feuds between men. This practice has often wiped out entire generations of men and left women with no claims over property and possessions. The Burrnesha subculture was created to solve this dilemma. Burrnesha sacrifice their femininity and live as men in Albania’s patriarchal society when no men of age are available in a family. They swear a vow of chastity before town elders, chop off their hair, and adopt male mannerisms. They are expected to drink heavily, chain smoke, and carry weapons. The subculture is slowly dying out in modern Albania as women claim more rights; only about 40 remain.

6. Raggare

Sweden is the land of Ikea and buxom blondes, right? It is also the land of the Raggare (loosely translates to “pick-up artist”), a subculture that idolizes 1950s American pop culture. Raggare listen to rockabilly, dress like James Dean from Rebel Without a Cause, and even speak Swedish with a Greaser twang. While they’re mostly seen as a noisy nuisance today, the Raggare caused a moral panic when they first appeared in the ’50s: who wouldn’t be shocked to see hundreds of young Swedes dressing and talking like the Fonz? They are best known for their large classic American cars. These can be seen lumbering around the streets of Sweden with scores of Raggare car surfing along. They also celebrate the Confederate Flag and peckerwood while being completely oblivious to the racist undertones of both.

7. Pokemones

Speaking of moral panics, the next one is a doozy. Ultraconservative Chile has recently been horrified at public orgies called ponceo. Ponceo operate like flashmobs: a Facebook bulletin or a series of tweets yields hundreds of Chilean youth in public parks. The difference is that these flashmobs involve androgynous bisexuals making out and giving each other blow jobs while Reggaeton blares in the background. The subculture that host these orgies are called Pokemones - so-called because their hairstyles resemble Pokemon characters – and are identifiable by their tight jeans, multiple piercings, brightly dyed hair, and thick eyeliner. The end result of the moral panic was people bashing Pokemones in public. The Chilean government sponsored an anti-violence campaign called “Foundation for a Better Future” as a result.

8. Goreans

If Scientology has proven anything, it is that some people will take bad science fiction too seriously. John Norman began writing sword and planet novels in the late-’60s about the medieval planet of Gor. The Gorean subculture is comprised of people claiming to live their lives by a creed laid out in Norman’s novels, where an insect race called the Priest-Kings have transplanted entire cultures to Gor. In the novels, it is populated by men who are as ripped as Conan the Barbarian and by Red Sonya-esque sex slaves, controlled by a rigid caste system. Before you get too excited, real world Goreans’ appearances tend to be disappointing. Over time, the Goreans have evolved into an entire BDSM subculture that enjoys cheesy science fiction. They are also extremely prevalent on Second Life due to their inherently nerdy nature.

9. Guro Lolitas

No one really knows why Japanese subcultures have a reputation of being slightly odder than the subcultures one would find in the rest of the world. Some argue that it is because people have to go to extremes in order to stand out in an extremely homogeneous population. But not even Japan was prepared for the Lolita subculture that took the country by storm in the ’70s. All of a sudden, thousands of young Japanese were dressing like Victorian aristocrats. It quickly reached a peak by the ’90s, and these days Lolita clothing can be found in practically every Japanese department store. So, it was only natural when Lolita subculture created its own subcultures. The most bizarre group is the Guro Lolita. Guro Lolita is devoted to dressing and acting like a broken doll. A typical Guro Lolita limps around, wears an eye patch, is covered in bandages, and blood splatters cover her clothes.

10. Wannarexics

Like all things, the pressure to be thin is taken to extremes on the internet. Pro-anorexia and pro-bulimia websites promote personified versions of the diseases named Ana (anorexia) and Mia (bulimia) in ways that mirror Greek cults. Central to these groups is the belief that anorexia and bulimia are lifestyle choices and not diseases. They are extremely wary of strangers because of the ongoing outrage surrounding their existence, and a subculture of people who are new to the groups has come into existence as a result. Wannarexics are viewed as crash dieters, and therefore less devoted to the cause, so they go to extremes to prove their worth. Wannarexics are extremely ephemeral because, unlike the larger pro-ana subculture, they are more likely to quit after hitting a target weight.

Most of the stories we grew up hearing about Africans, Polynesians, and other “savages” eating colonists were exaggerated blood libels used to justify enslaving them. The following are 10 incidents of cannibalism. They delve into the cultures that practiced it, tell the stories of a few murdering cannibals, and also of some extreme situations where people were driven to eat their fellow man in order to survive.

1. Aghori

The Aghori are Hindu sadhus who believe immortality is attainable by spending 12 years bringing oneself closer to everything that is unclean in society. Most sadhus are content to roam around India smoking hash, but Aghoris smear themselves with cremation ash, drink wine and urine from human skulls, and practice cannibalism. They collect corpses that have been ceremonially disposed of by family members in the Ganges and consume them after praying. Aghoris believe that the proper combination of prayer and cannibalism gives them powers such as levitation and the ability to control weather.

2. Anyoto

Also known as the Human Leopard Society, the Anyoto was an 18th century West African secret society that practiced cannibalism. Each member had to murder a loved one to join, and had to provide a fresh victim every four years thereafter. They believed that a victim’s body fat allowed wishes to be granted. Members dressed in leopard skins and attacked travelers with weapons resembling a leopard’s claws and teeth. The flesh of victims was cut from the body, distributed to members, and consumed in a ceremony. Edgar Rice Burroughs based Tarzan’s Leopard Men on the Anyoto.

3. watuSimba

Today, watuSimba (were-lion) stories are used to scare misbehaving children. But in the ’40s, the watuSimba were young women who had been enslaved by East African witch doctors. They were forcefully addicted to drugs to make them compliant, forced to live in tight cages, and had their foot tendons reshaped to give them the gait of a stalking lion. The witch doctors would then send them out as assassins. The watuSimba wore the skin of a lion and were outfitted with prosthetic claws while hunting. Most shockingly, they were primarily fed the meat of their victims. They killed approximately 300 people over the course of four years and continued to kill even after the witch doctors were captured and hanged.

4. Fritz Haarmann

Fritz Haarmann‘s victims were young refugees that he picked up at train stations in a post-World War I Germany. Similar to the watuSimba, Haarmann killed by gnawing through the throats of his victims until they were decapitated. He then sold their flesh as horse meat, ate what he couldn’t sell, and disposed of the bones in the Leine. In 1924, Haarmann was caught and charged with 27 murders after some local boys discovered human skulls while fishing. He was Germany’s first experience with a serial killer and it was just their luck that he would also be history’s most prolific cannibalistic murderer. Some investigators believe he killed many more people, with estimates reaching as high as 600 people in one year alone.

5. Albert Fish

Albert Fish was a pedophile who described the flesh of children as the “sweetest.” He claimed the idea came from a deck hand who described a trip to Hong Kong during a famine when children were being sold as meat. Fish was caught when he sent a letter to the mother of his final victim, a 10-year-old girl, six years after she vanished. In the letter he gave graphic details about using her body to make a stew, complete with bacon strips, carrots and onions. Fish spent the next nine days locked in his room, eating his stew and compulsively masturbating. Fish was a religious maniac who punished himself by inserting needles into his groin. These needles caused Sing Sing’s electric chair to short circuit during the first attempt to execute him.

6. The Siege of Suiyang

Fish wasn’t entirely off the mark when he claimed that the Chinese had resorted to cannibalism during a famine. He was, however, wrong about the time and place. In 757 AD, the Tang army was fending off a siege by the Yan army in the city of Suiyang. The Tang were vastly outnumbered and placed their hopes on outlasting the Yan. A local governor forced Suiyang to share supplies with surrounding fortresses, causing supplies to run out after a few months. Unwilling to give themselves up to the Yan, the people of Suiyang eventually resorted to cannibalism. A total of 20,000-30,000 people were eaten. In reference to this, The Old Book of Tang eerily states: “People always remained loyal.”

7. The Siege of Ma’arrat al-Numan

In 1098, the city of Ma’arrat al-Numan, in what is modern-day Syria, was besieged by a group of defeated crusaders who had run out of supplies. They massacred a large portion of the Muslim population after they surrendered, but quickly discovered that the city was not as rich as they had hoped. By winter, supplies were dwindling again and the crusaders resorted to cannibalizing the remaining Muslim population. One of the crusader commanders wrote to Pope Urban II: “A terrible famine racked the army in Ma’arra, and placed it in the cruel necessity of feeding itself upon the bodies of the Saracens.”

8. Richard I of England

The Siege of Ma’arrat al-Numan was not the last time crusaders resorted to cannibalization. Richard I of England, better known as Richard the Lionheart, was one of the main architects behind the Third Crusade, a move to reclaim the Holy Lands. But Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt and Syria, earned the crusaders’ respect by being too shrewd, organized, and powerful to defeat. The best Richard could do was to negotiate a peace treaty that gave Christians the right to visit Jerusalem’s holy places, and he remained very bitter about the defeat. In spite, he invited some of Saladin’s ambassadors to attend a banquet and reputedly dined on the curried head of a Muslim warrior in their presence.

9. Idi Amin

Idi Amin was Uganda’s military dictator from 1971 to 1979. (He is also a frequent subject on this site.) Over those eight years he managed to wipe out a fairly large portion of Uganda’s population for fairly tenuous reasons. Basically, if he hated you, you died. When he first rose to power he had the military leadership rounded up and decapitated. He then sat on a pile of their heads and chastised them while taking bites from their flesh. Amin was a member of the Kakwa tribe. They believed that if you ate a section of a man you killed then his spirit could not return to haunt you. Amin ate a lot of his enemies before switching to oranges.

10. Joshua Blahyi

In the ’90s, Joshua Blahyi was one of many Liberian warlords who killed thousands of people. What separated Blahyi from the rest was that went by the nickname “General Buck Naked” and believed his nakedness protected him from bullets. His group routinely performed human sacrifices that involved cannibalism before battle. A quote from Blahyi said:

So, before leading my troops into battle, we would get drunk and drugged up, sacrifice a local teenager, drink their blood, then strip down to our shoes and go into battle wearing colourful wigs and carrying dainty purses we’d looted from civilians. We’d slaughter anyone we saw, chop their heads off and use them as soccer balls. We were nude, fearless, drunk and homicidal. We killed hundreds of people – so many I lost count.

Blahyi now works as a minister, talk about an amazing career transition. There is a documentary about him in the works.