Ethnoecology of Hunting in an Empty Forest. Practices, Local Perceptions and Social Change Among the Baka
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ADVERTIMENT. Lʼaccés als continguts dʼaquesta tesi queda condicionat a lʼacceptació de les condicions dʼús establertes per la següent llicència Creative Commons: http://cat.creativecommons.org/?page_id=184 ADVERTENCIA. El acceso a los contenidos de esta tesis queda condicionado a la aceptación de las condiciones de uso establecidas por la siguiente licencia Creative Commons: http://es.creativecommons.org/blog/licencias/ WARNING. The access to the contents of this doctoral thesis it is limited to the acceptance of the use conditions set by the following Creative Commons license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/?lang=en Ethnoecology of hunting in an empty forest. Practices, local perceptions and social change among the Baka (Cameroon) PhD Dissertation Romain Duda Under the supervision of: Dr. Victoria Reyes-García Dr. Serge Bahuchet PhD Programme in Environmental Science and Technology Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals, ICTA Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, UAB June 2017 II British English spelling and conventions are used in this work. III IV Acknowledgments I first wish to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Victoria Reyes-García. Being supervised and supervised and encouraged by such an experienced scientist was a real chance. Thanks to her patient guidance, I overcame all the shortcomings of a fairly hybrid university cursus, and learned with her the codes of the academic writing and analytical methods. I am grateful to her for having accepted me thank the LEK project and, at the end, for reading and correcting so many proofs of this work until the last moment. Special thanks should be given to Professor Serge Bahuchet. This thesis highly benefited from his great experience, and his advice has always been useful. Spending a year in his country house, amid his memories and things, between the wooded souls of Central Africa and the fragile Japanese prints and pots, was an enormous source of inspiration for me. To be supervised by these two directors was both a chance and a challenge, namely to concile two very different and sometimes antagonistic approaches to anthropology. I hope I have succeeded at least in part, and that they both find in this manuscript some source of satisfaction. I am obviously grateful to Sandrine Gallois, who was in a way the third co-director of this thesis. What we shared together in Cameroon was life-changing. Your courage, your sensitivity and your strength are outstanding and I could not have completed this thesis without you and your unflinching support. I would like to thank my research assistants and translators (but above all friends) in Cameroon. Ernest Isidore Simpoh for having invested so much energy in our research work, his tenacity, his desire to learn and his spirit of initiative will no doubt make him a reference person in the area for many other researchers. You are the ideal mediator and advocate for the Baka and Nzime cause. Thanks to Appolinaire Ambassa, “l’Ambassadeur” who learned so quickly to leave his cassava and his snare traps to conduct interviews and share his own knowledge with us. My stays on the field would not have been possible (or not as pleasant), without the help of Alain Fezeu, IRD driver. I will always remember the morning when, trembling with tears, you pushed me into the Land Rover, because after a 12 months of attachment you knew that one must leave quickly, without looking back, without saying goodbye, since you knew well before me that with the Baka people one does not leave, one only comes back. It is a just a matter of seasons. My most intimate gratefulness goes toward this end of the route, to this warm forest unknown to all but where part of the heart of the world is beating with so little means. Where tirelessly every night falls into the lament of the Hyraxe and the women’s songs, where tomorrow, for people, exists only so little. In these moments of voluntary exile one relies more on other humans than on protocols, the cultural distance reduces and one discovers and constructs a bond one once thought impossible. I thank this village where I was in spite of myself both “le Père” and the child of each person. I thank the old sages. First of all Papa Mpina, whom I knew very well that from his Momban encampment he protected me from all the spells that threatened me. I thank Akpangui and Noni, Hine and Libala, Andopa, Akpakua and Camille, Ina and Mekpa, Aloh, Wulo, Mathurin and David, elsewhere: Jean Ambassa, Janvier and Alamba. I would never forget the place they gave me and their daily protection. An emotional thought for those who left this world in my absence: Moyunda Martin the old chief, Soma great holder of all the knowledge, Yan the ‘Old White’. My life on the spot would obviously not have been sustainable without the welcome and protection of some good people from the Nzime village, especially His Highness Ebeh Antoine for accepting my presence in his village, Alexandre Tjoélé for his kindness and his enthusiasm to share with me his knowledge on history and local culture, Laïs, Beng Basile and Rosalie. Finally, a big thank you to Mother Madeleine, who considered me as her own son, and whose generosity has earned her the nickname “La Mère”. V I would like to express my gratitude those who took the time to read parts of my thesis, and provided insightful comments, an essential step of confidence-building, in chronological order: Ana Catherina Luz, Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, Kelly Hopping, Marine Robillard, Aili Pyhälä, Matthieu Salpetteur, Camille Oloa Biloa and Camille Manfredi. Thanks to my friend Christophe Révillon who, although worlds apart, helped me make these maps. I obviously have a friendly thought for those with whom I have been living for these past few months: Nastassia Reyes, Anouck Bessy, with who I share the torments of the writing marathon. Thank you to all those who accompanied me during the different stages of this work, who listened to me and helped me so gracefully: Adèle de Palaminy, Pauline Laval, Vanessa Cholez, Julie Scapino, Clément Garineaud, Maya Leclerc, Victor Narat, and Marine Legrand. I have a special thought for the remarkable LEKipo team whose members support each other whether they be in Borneo rainforests or along the Maniqui river in Bolivian Amazon. Merci Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares, Isabel Diaz-Reviriego, Tezza Napitupulu, Aili Pyhälä and Maximilien Guêze. Thank you for all those moments we shared in Barcelona, in Betesa or in the Bhutanese Himalaya. I am grateful to the members of the Ethnobiology and Eco-anthropology laboratory, this welcoming home in which I have been growing up since my M.A. I notably thank Richard Dumez, Jeanne Le Duchat, Françoise Aubaile and Alain Froment. I especially wish to thank Alain Epelboin whose enlightening comments in the mystical and nebulous atmosphere of his office have steered my vision of field anthropology, observation in sharing, practice of the ‘baguenaude’ and floating observation, as well as fuelled my curiosity and encouraged me to challenge the way one looks at the world. My taste for images made sense to him, who also considers film as a necessary avatar of the observer’s gaze. Without him, I would not have exhumed hours of film and found in this medium a tool that speaks more than anything else. His assistance with film editing was simply decisive. Other great researchers provided me insightful help at different stages of the thesis. In Yaounde, Patrice Levang help me feel confident in Cameroon, as well as all the CIFOR and IRD team. A special thank to Edmond Dounias for his help during the last month of writing. Throughout these past five years, Marine Pouvreau has to be warmly thanked, she was present at a distance. I thank Kelly Hopping for sharing so much with me, from Bhutanese mountains and bridges to the plains of Colorado. My Northern friends, Vianney (now for us serene plains and valleys), Camille, Lou and Vincent, among plenty of others, who made me put this academic work into perspective with the joy of living. My friends from Brittany also deserve my gratitude for this full year of peace and silence spent in the Vau d’arz eden in Morbihan: Julie, Anthony, Christophe, Anne, Anne-Lyse and Timy. Thanks also to Yann Jézequel and Camille Seynhaeve who made me see the field differently by joining me in the Baka village. I thank my parents, Roseline and Michel and my brothers, for believing in me, for supporting me in this unexpected adventure, who accepted for long my aversion for sedentary life. So happy that you came to the village Baka to share with me the plain cassava, the mosquitoes and the delicious elephant and monkey meat... Thank you for offering me, tirelessly, year in, year out, world atlases whose contemplation when I was a child, gave me the desire to leave everything behind, in short to see elsewhere how to turn the world’. Finally, a warm “thank you” to Lydia Sevette for her love, her daily support, and her patience especially during the last months of this thesis. You endured, sometimes more than I did, the tremendous daily life of the Ph.D student in the home stretch. VI VII Contents LIST OF TABLES XIII LIST OF FIGURES XIV PREFACE XVII ABSTRACT XVIII RESUMEN XIX RÉSUMÉ XX ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS XXI FOREWORD XXII INTRODUCTION 1 1. BACKGROUND, RATIONALE, AND OBJECTIVES 3 1.1. BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATIONS 3 1.2. RATIONALE 5 1.3. OBJECTIVES AND AIMS OF THE THESIS 6 2. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 7 2.1. SOCIETY AND ENVIRONMENT: EMERGENCE IN SCIENCES 7 2.2.BIOCULTURAL DIVERSITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION 8 2.3.