Cameroons bushmeat in the news

Bushmeat in Africa is a hot topic right now, less so in South and Southeast Asia. No one so far has written clear theory for the study of bushmeat – as with many such crises, it’s the conservation folks and the journalists who are making the running. We anthropologists are only just waking up on this one.

Here’s the BBC article that links through to an excellent documentary on eating bushmeat in Cameroon. I have to admit to serious discomfort, not just at the endless pictures of dead monkeys for sale, but at Stefan Gates’ apparent indifference to the practice – he really is there in part to decide whether or not porcupine or civet cat are tasty, though he does take a stand when it comes to primates.

We need to think about bushmeat clearly: the young restauranteuse cheerfully declaring that the chimpanzees and gorillas will never go extinct is not so surprising in itself; nor is the fact that the same police who raid the bushmeat stalls will cheerfully tuck in to bushmeat stew. Yet there has been a Cameroons public education campaign that all the hunters, vendors, cooks and eaters have obviously heard—and in that context, the insistence that ‘no matter how much we eat, I know it can never disappear’ seems to be more of a claim about the bush itself than an educated claim about population sustainability. Bowen-Jones, Brown and Robinson used commodity-chain analysis in a 2003 article, which established the socioeconomic complexity of the problem; but there’s been almost nothing on the anthropology of bushmeat—and without this, seemingly incomprehensible claims of the inexhaustibility of bushmeat will remain incomprehensible.