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.<\/p>\n
Here’s the BBC article<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 –… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[173,174],"tags":[187,38,194,198,6,205,207,143],"class_list":["post-896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-fomenting","tag-africa","tag-anthropology","tag-bushmeat","tag-conservation","tag-ethnobiology","tag-ethnoecology","tag-fieldwork","tag-theory"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2DSYH-es","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/896\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tending.to\/blether\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}