With my fieldwork diary coming to a close, I would like to reflect on an experience I had very early in my fieldwork. This is not going to be a long post. I will talk about death, or rather letting people die – and I think there is only so much that can be gracefully said about that.

This post is about an experience which certainly wasn’t my proudest moment in the field and was, probably, the most uncomfortable I have felt in a very long time: the experience of being a tourist. So if emotional voyeurism is your thing, this is the fieldnote for you.

As an academically-inclined person I am driven to understand stuff. More precisely, as an anthropologist, I want to understand why people do certain things or how their actions are interwoven and related. Attempting to make sense of the actions of one particular community has left me wondering, “Can we ever fully grasp another culture’s rationale?”

Let’s have a debate… Whilst doing anthropological fieldwork in Tsumkwe I got involved with/co-founded a project which, in my humble opinion, is pretty exciting: CEDU is a grassroot organisation which is helping the Ju/’hoansi San, one of the oldest indigenous groups in the world, claim back their public image by producing their own media.

Leon is a tour guide at the lodge where I camp in between village visits, and where I have stayed for the last two or three weeks (I shudder to think of the bill coming my way). When I am there, Leon comes to visit in the morning.

I just started fieldwork with the San (sometimes referred to as "Bushmen", known through the film “The Gods must be crazy”,countless other documentaries and my recent post) in Tsumkwe, Namibia. During Apartheid the area used to be the designated “Bushmanland”.

In 2011, two German pre-historians started a project called “Tracking in Caves” [i]. The premise of their idea was simple: Pastoors and Lenssen-Erz invited three San hunter-gatherers from the Kalahari in Namibia to help them interpret some human footprints they had found in a cave in the Pyrenees.