Hello everyone,
I found hunter-gatherer anthropology the way a lot of you found me: I became a mother, fell apart a little (two under two, no family nearby), and went looking for a way to make sense of what I was experiencing. What I found was Melvin Konner’s The Evolution of Childhood, and then Marjorie Shostack’s Nisa — a !Kung (Ju/’hoansi) woman’s life told in her own words. For years afterward I kept hoping to find something like Nisa from another culture.
Then I found Bonnie Hewlett’s Listen, Here Is a Story.
Bonnie is a professor of cultural anthropology at Washington State University who spent years living in forest camps with the Aka of the Central African Republic — the same rainforest foragers her husband, Barry Hewlett, is famous for studying. But where Barry studied fatherhood, Bonnie went deep with the women, and this episode is a tour through the whole arc of an Aka woman’s life.
We talk about why weaning is so often a hunter-gatherer’s very first childhood memory. About play as serious business — kids trusted with a (dull) machete at eighteen months, four-year-olds giving what a Western infant specialist called genuinely “sensitive, attuned care” to their baby siblings, Aka women horrified to learn that we put our children to sleep in separate rooms.
We get into the sex, too, because the Aka talk about it with a frankness I loved, and startling intensity with which they want children — which feels very different from our culture.
Finally, we covered Bonnie’s involvement in researching the mind-blowing phenomenon of grandmother breastfeeding. She’ll tell you what that was like to discover. And we end where the Aka’s lives so often turn: on loss, and the remarkable resilience Aka show in coping with so much death.
This was one of my favorite conversations of the year. I hope you love it as much as I did.
