“Ever seen a baboon up close? Their teeth are designed for ripping flesh. And we are provoking them. The Hadza are armed with bows and arrows. I have a pocketknife.”
I am a firm believer that it is always a good thing to educate the general public about anthropology. However, articles written in popular magazines sometimes need to be fact-checked in the anthropological literature. I am impressed with the recent (December 2009) National Geographic article on the Hadza of Tanzania.
The Pros
The author seems to have done his due diligence on researching the group as well as framing his narrative as just that – his experience with the band. There are not many broad statements about the whole cultural group and those that are made appear to be validated (see “Why the Hadza are Still Hunter-Gatherers” for an anthropological ethnography of the Hadza). For example, the author states that the Hadza seem to have a “minimalistic” religion with no concept of an afterlife. It was also stated that the Hadzane language does not appear to be related to any other with only a handful of individuals in the world who are bilingual in both Hadzane and English.
My favorite ethnographies are ones where the authors are able to make astute observations while at the same time able to interject their own feelings about their experiences. The best part of this brief, but informative, article is the hunting scene that is described throughout. This article reads like a novel in that it keeps returning to suspenseful scenes of a baboon hunt in which the author is absolutely terrified. The author is also able to portray some of the daily life of the Hadza, such as the quarrels that occur between spouses and band members.
The Cons
My only gripes about this article are the continuous references to the “ancient” lifeways of the Hadza and the rather maudlin statements made as the author is leaving the group. First, there are a few references to how little their foraging lifestyle has changed over the last 10,000 years. He states that anthropologists hate to make statements like that and releases a single caveat that we cannot really think of them in those terms, but then returns to making these statements about their “unchanged existence”.
Secondly, the author admits he was only in the field for 2 weeks during the relatively pleasant dry season but waxes poetic about how his short time with the group had changed him to the core. They “altered his perception of the world” and made him “feel calmer, more attuned to the moment”. He goes on to state that his “time with the Hadza made [him] happier” and that he wished to prolong the reign of the hunter-gatherer. Although this seems like the sort of portrayal of emotion that I should enjoy, it was just a little cliche for my taste.
Final Thoughts
Otherwise, I was very pleased with this account of the Hadza. I believe it was written in a way that would reach many of its readers and get them to think a little more about this small cultural group, the effects of globalization, and anthropology in general.