- Romain Duda is a postdoctoral researcher at the Pasteur Institute (Paris). MSc in Ethnoecology, Romain has completed a PhD in Anthropology & Environmental Sciences at the UAB ... moreRomain Duda is a postdoctoral researcher at the Pasteur Institute (Paris).
MSc in Ethnoecology, Romain has completed a PhD in Anthropology & Environmental Sciences at the UAB (Barcelona) and Musée de l'Homme (Paris). Since 2012 he has conducted several fieldworks in Cameroon, Congo and DRC. His research among the Baka focused on the changes in the sociocultural aspects of hunting & relations to wildlife. In 2018, he worked as a freelance researcher to propose adapted solutions to improve healthcare & rights access to Aka communities.
He is currently working at Institut Pasteur Paris on human-wildlife contacts, at the interface of anthropology & epidemiology of emerging diseases.
Interested in ethnozoology, local knowledge, he also makes ethnographic films about Baka & Aka dailylifeedit
In the Congo Basin, food is an everyday concern and its acquisition and transformation often structure many of the activities of a human group. While agriculture provides the main source of calories, meat of wild animals, commonly... more
In the Congo Basin, food is an everyday concern and its acquisition and transformation often structure many of the activities of a human group. While agriculture provides the main source of calories, meat of wild animals, commonly referred to as bushmeat, represents the main source of protein for local people in the region and plays an important role in terms of dietary diversity and health. However, the increase of bushmeat consumption in towns and more efficient hunting practices have pushed the harvest of wild animals to unsustainable levels, generating a “bushmeat crisis”. The growing demand for bushmeat has created strong pressures and a lure of profit pushing the hunters of southern Cameroon to sell (illegally) their harvest. A dynamic that might affect both local diets and the modalities of relations between humans and animals. Therefore, this paper aims to describe the importance of wild meat for the Baka, an ethnolinguistic group of Southeastern Cameroun, traditionally hunter-gatherers. It analyses the place of the animal in the Baka daily life through its contribution in dietary, symbolic and economic terms. The paper combines a qualitative ethnography with individual-level data on food diversity intake and meat selling, and describes different aspects related to meat sharing and consumption.
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In: Juhé-Beaulaton (Dominique) & Leblan (Vincent) (sous la dir.), Le spécimen et le collecteur : savoirs naturalistes, pouvoirs et altérités (xviiie-xxe siècles), Paris : Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, 2018, 509 p. (Archives ; 27).
Research Interests: Biological Anthropology, History of Science, History of Anthropology, Race and Ethnicity, Anthropometrics, and 10 moreHistory of Collections, History of Human Sciences, Phrenology, Histoire Des Sciences, Scientific Expeditions, Human zoos, Moulage, Alexandre Dumoutier, Dumont D'Urville, and History of scientific expeditions
For long, the importance of fishing for forest societies has been hiding behind the term “hunter-gatherers”. Whereas the importance of hunting is commonly recognized among such societies, some research has also highlighted that fishing is... more
For long, the importance of fishing for forest societies has been hiding behind the term “hunter-gatherers”. Whereas the importance of hunting is commonly recognized among such societies, some research has also highlighted that fishing is a primordial resource for subsistence, as well as a key element in the cosmology of several forest societies. However, very few studies — and less so among Central African forest societies — have focused on fishing practices and their social, cultural and symbolic complexity. To contribute to fill this gap, we analyze fishing activities among two Baka communities from southeastern Cameroon, particularly focusing on fishing productivity as well as the ethnoecological specificities and the socio-cultural role of fishing. Data were collected through interviews and systematic observations of fishing activities carried out with children and adults and weekly interviews on productivity carried out during twelve months (n = 272 individuals). Results of this study highlight that fishing, and most specifically dam fishing, a collective women fishing technique, bears a specific place in Baka society. In contrast with hunting, whose value is mostly associated to the cultural valorization of the wild meat, the cultural importance of fishing is largely based on the activity in itself, through its socio-cultural dimension. Dam fishing creates a specific space where, in the absence of men, women create social cohesion through exchanges and sharing. Furthermore, dam fishing represents a privileged space for learning, because it allows not only the transmission of ethnoichthyological knowledge, but also the transmission of other aspects of cultural knowledge that shape the early gender differentiation between boys and girls. This paper aims to highlight the socio-cultural value of fishing activities in the livelihood of contemporary forest hunter-gatherers.
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Background: The acquisition of local knowledge occurs through complex interactions between individual and contextual characteristics: as context changes, so it changes the acquisition of knowledge. Contemporary small-scale societies... more
Background: The acquisition of local knowledge occurs through complex interactions between individual and contextual characteristics: as context changes, so it changes the acquisition of knowledge. Contemporary small-scale societies facing rapid social-ecological change provide a unique opportunity to study the relation between social-ecological changes and the process of acquisition of local knowledge. In this work, we study children's involvement in subsistence related activities (i.e., hunting and gathering) in a context of social-ecological change and discuss how such involvement might condition the acquisition of local knowledge during childhood. Methods: We interviewed 98 children from a hunter-gatherer society, the Baka, living in two different villages in southeastern Cameroon and assessed their involvement in daily activities. Using interviews, we collected self-reported data on the main activities performed during the previous 24 h. We describe the frequency of occurrence of daily activities during middle childhood and adolescence and explore the variation in occurrence according to the sex, the age group, and the village of residency of the child. We also explore variation according to the season in which the activity is conducted and to the predicted potential of the activity for the acquisition of local knowledge.
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Researchers have analysed whether school and local knowledge complement or substitute each other, but have paid less attention to whether those two learning models use different cognitive strategies. In this study, we use data collected... more
Researchers have analysed whether school and local knowledge complement or substitute each other, but have paid less attention to whether those two learning models use different cognitive strategies. In this study, we use data collected among three contemporary hunter-gatherer societies with relatively low levels of exposure to schooling yet with high levels of local ecological knowledge to test the association between i) schooling and ii) local ecological knowledge and verbal working memory. Participants include 94 people (24 Baka, 25 Punan, and 45 Tsimane') from whom we collected information on 1) schooling and school related skills (i.e., literacy and numeracy), 2) local knowledge and skills related to hunting and medicinal plants, and 3) working memory. To assess working memory, we applied a multi-trial free recall using words relevant to each cultural setting. People with and without schooling have similar levels of accurate and inaccurate recall, although they differ in their strategies to organize recall: people with schooling have higher results for serial clustering, suggesting better learning with repetition, whereas people without schooling have higher results for semantic clustering, suggesting they organize recall around semantically meaningful categories. Individual levels of local ecological knowledge are not related to accurate recall or organization recall, arguably due to overall high levels of local ecological knowledge. While schooling seems to favour some organization strategies this might come at the expense of some other organization strategies.