Abstract
Hunting is often either portrayed as the ultimate means to enact a close connection between the human being and nature, or investigated in terms of its contribution to livelihoods. Through in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, we explored the meaning of hunting in the lower Omo valley, Ethiopia, and found that large game hunting was best understood as an activity that served to establish and maintain human–human relationships. Hunting was important as it created the basis for long-term bond-relations between a hunter and his friend (‘misso’) and a hunter and his honorary elder sister (‘misha’) that could be drawn on in times of hardship. By contrast, interactions between hunter and wildlife were given hardly any attention by our participants. We discuss implications in relation to the stark decline in wildlife and the degradation of grazing land over the last decades, and the consequences of our findings for conservation and development activities.
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Notes
Here, we refer to pre-modern societies that are not systematically embedded in market economies (yet). Some types of hunting are to a large degree driven by financial interests, with a potentially large profit margin, such as ivory and rhino-horn poaching. However, as these crucially depend on well-functioning connections to international markets, they are thus qualitatively different (whether the societies in question could, in other respects, be seen as pre-modern or not) and will not be addressed here.
Sources of quotes are coded as follows: The first letter denotes the ethnic group (Hamar, Bashada, Kara, Arbore), the second the location of the interview, and the third the individual speaker. This is followed by the gender (M-male, F-female) and the approximate age.
We use the term ‘killer’ here in line with the terminology of our participants to denote the person who, in a specific situation, has successfully hunted.
It could be argued that our lack of information on human–nature relationships and resource use rules was due to our choice of methods, as we used interviews and group discussions rather than participant observation—and, as Marks (1976:135) reports for the Zambian Valley Bisa, “hunting matters” might also in lower Omo be “reserved for discussion among hunters”. However, this is unlikely to be the case, as our findings seem to complement rather than contradict the insights of Lydall and Strecker (1979a), Turton (1987) and Epple (1995). Also, our participants were very outspoken when talking about the social aspects of hunting, and there was no indication that they avoided certain topics when speaking to us.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank all participants of the group discussions and interviews for their contributions, as well as our interpreters Manyahlew Girma, Berki Belayneh, Hora Gacha and Tilahun Kibret, Fetene Hailu for his help, and Deborah Randall for all her work at the start of this project. Liz Dinnie, Karen Laurenson, Zelealem T. Ashenafi, Justin Irvine and an anonymous reviewer provided helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript, and Bill Slee and Charlie Mackie suggested useful literature. This work was conducted as part of the project “HUNT” (Hunting for Sustainability, http://fp7hunt.net/) and funded by the European Union’s Framework Programme 7 and Frankfurt Zoological Society.
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Tadie, D., Fischer, A. Hunting, Social Structure and Human–Nature Relationships in Lower Omo, Ethiopia: People and Wildlife at a Crossroads. Hum Ecol 41, 447–457 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-012-9561-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-012-9561-9