The universal hunter?

ABSTRACT

Commercial hunters in southern Africa often claim that they have immediate and privileged access to the culture of indigenous hunter-gatherer groups because they share the same subsistence pursuit. In this contribution I challenge these claims on two accounts. First, I highlight that hunting was part and parcel of many different social groups in southern Africa and I outline some of the historical shifts that have occurred to ‘hunting’ as the historical context changes in which hunting is being practiced across time and space. I propose a notational system to identify differences (and similarities) in the hunting practice. Second, I underline that hunting is only appropriately described in terms of the social relations that it constitutes. I suggest to apply the notion of ‘community of practice’ in a way that facilitates the comparison of various forms of interaction between commercial and indigenous hunters in terms of the positioning of the agents involved.

KEYWORDS:

• Hunting
• community of practice
• cultural diversity
• indigenous people
• ethnography
• San
• southern Africa
• commercialisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Thomas Widlok is a professor for African Anthropology at the University of Cologne. He has published extensively on hunter-gatherers in Africa and in other regions of the world where he has carried out long-term ethnographic field research. His publications include Living on Mangetti: ‘Bushman’ autonomy and Namibian independence (1999), and Anthropology and the Economy of Sharing (2016). He has co-edited two volumes entitled Property and Equality (2005), and is co-founder of the International Society for Hunter-Gatherer Research.

Notes

1. In its original, the advertisement of this book reads as follows: ‘Das Autorenteam Polzer/Huber verbindet seit vielen Jahren neben ihrer Freundschaft und jagdlichen Passion eine enge Beziehung zu den letzten freien Kung-Buschleuten Namibias. Während Prof. Dr sc. Dr Gottlieb Polzer seit vielen Jahren gemeinsam mit den Buschleuten auf die Jagd geht, lebt Arnold H. Huber als Berufsjäger im Buschmannland und ist bereits über 20 Jahre mit einer Buschmannfrau verheiratet. Ihre außergewöhnliche Kenntnis über das Land und diese Menschengruppe, die sich bisher jeglicher Zivilisation entzog, spiegelt sich in diesem einzigartigen Bildband wider. Die großartigen Fotos entstanden in den letzten 25 Jahren. Während die über 600 Abbildungen zum einen die Schönheit, Aufrichtigkeit und Urwüchsigkeit dieses Volkes dokumentierten, sollen zum anderen die Gefahren aufgezeigt werden, die ungebremste Zivilisationszwänge bewirken. Verlassen und hilflos ist der zivilisierte Mensch des 21. Jahrhunderts im Buschmannland, nicht anders ergeht es dem Buschmann in aufgezwungener Zivilisation. Wohl niemals zuvor ist eine derart lückenlose Bilddokumentation über ein Urvolk und deren Beschreibung so gelungen. Möglich war dies nur durch ein blindes Vertrauen von Ur- und Neuzeitjäger. Denn Jagd verbindet - ungeachtet jeglicher Grenze, ob Sprache, Nationalität oder gesellschaftlicher Entwicklung’.

2. Alfred Gell used, and I think invented, the scheme of notation that I adopt here in his comparison of tattooing in the Pacific, more specifically with regard to creation of particular designs (Gell 1993). He was able to show how different types of tattooing could be understood as modifications of an underlying structure that in turn correspond to transformations of the social organization in the region.

3. By ‘canons’ I include not only the legislation and formal training of hunters but also the formalised exchange of hunters through media such as books, specialised rifle and hunting magazines, websites, Internet communities and so forth.

4. The programmatic idea is to document hunting communities of practice and to understand how they help agents to generate knowledge and skills, knowledge about others and their potential contributions but also knowledge about their own contributions. Thereby, providing a better position for understanding how knowledge can be transferred across situations and settings and beyond language groups or ethnic groups. It also allows one to understand the loss of knowledge, problems of transferring knowledge across generations or into new situations. The results of such research could further provide insights relevant for future cooperation between scientists and local people as well as between generations and between formal and informal educators.