2023-12-14 01:55:12
A museum in southwestern Sweden opened, from this Wednesday until the last day of the year 2023, a telephone line to ask a Hadza hunter from Tanzania questions such as anguish over war in the world or fear of death. The unusual “existential line” will operate every day between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. Tanzania time, according to Linda Karlsson, spokesperson for the Museum of World Culture (Världskulturmuseet) in Göteborg, told the AFP news agency.
The person in charge of clearing up doubts is called Bagayo, and he is a hunter from the Hadza tribe who, said Karlsson, “will go to a mountain at that time to be able to access the network and thus come into contact with those who have existential questions,” although Questioners must reserve an appointment for the telephone appointment.
Bagayo is a member of the Hadza, one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in the world. It is estimated that this tribe has lived on the same land for 40,000 years, in northern Tanzania, around Lake Eyasi, in the Great Rift Valley, near the Serengeti Plain, where Homo Sapiens originated. .
The Hadza constitute one of the smallest ethnic communities on the continent and one of the last to remain in the cultural stage of hunter-gatherers. Its population is estimated to be close to 1,300 people, of which between 300 and 400 live as hunter-gatherers, closely following the customs of their ancestors for tens of thousands of years, before the use of agriculture. They live without a calendar or ceremonies of a religious nature; The knowledge necessary for gathering and hunting is transmitted orally and they do not build permanent homes.
Their diet, based on the fruits, roots and tubers collected by the women, is complemented by hunting almost all the animals in the area, with the exception of snakes and hyenas, because the latter eat their dead. This allows the Hadza to have a microbiome – the complex community of intestinal bacteria that we all have, which weighs between 1 and 2 kilos in an adult, and is key to the immune system – much more developed and diverse than the common one.
Thea Skaanes, the person who had the idea of “socializing” the intellectual capacity of the Hadza and is the curator of the “existential line” project, has been working with the tribe since 2011. “It is a part of my network of contacts that I open to the Swedish public,” this anthropologist from Aarhus University in Denmark told AFP. And she added: “The Hadza, particularly their philosophy and cosmology, are studied by researchers in anthropology, psychology and biology who seek to understand our human species, Homo Sapiens.”
Telephone interviews on existential topics are aimed at people between 14 and 25 years old, an age segment, as Skaanes pointed out, “that usually asks these types of questions on a daily basis.”
(With information from AFP)
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