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?”
Read MoreDoes our indigenous media project “destroy” tribal people?
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.
Read MoreFirst Impressions of the Horrors I Did Expect
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”.
Read MoreContemporary Namibians reading Stone Age Tracks: Advances in- and the flipside of - applications of indigenous knowledge
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.
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