Thea Skaanes
Contact me if you are interested in carrying out research on African collections or research on matters relating to Africa with our museum in Gothenburg. I am part of the team working on the coming permanent exhibition at the museum; together with great colleagues I am developing policies on active collecting procedures; and I am working my way into knowing the collections. Hopefully I will be able to continue the work with the creation of a Hadza owned museum.
Research:
Anthropology and museums: material culture, anthropological museum practices, collecting methodologies, fieldwork, power-objects, fetishism.
Doctoral work with the Hadza in Tanzania: indigenous religions, hunter-gatherer research, Hadza, cosmology, personhood, rituals, animal-human relations, the living and the dead, demand-sharing, meat-sharing, material culture, eland, hunting rites, rites of passage, female/male complementarity.
Leadership experience: management, strategic communication, outreach initiatives, concept development, partnerships, internships and talent scouting, fundraising, budgets, accounting, and reporting.
Co-founder of Human by Nature (humanbynature.dk) helping organizations transform into regenerative organizations setting out a path towards a future with thrivability for people, planet, and prosperity.
Supervisors: Professor Rane Willerslev and Professor Audax Mabulla
Phone: +4522374851
Research:
Anthropology and museums: material culture, anthropological museum practices, collecting methodologies, fieldwork, power-objects, fetishism.
Doctoral work with the Hadza in Tanzania: indigenous religions, hunter-gatherer research, Hadza, cosmology, personhood, rituals, animal-human relations, the living and the dead, demand-sharing, meat-sharing, material culture, eland, hunting rites, rites of passage, female/male complementarity.
Leadership experience: management, strategic communication, outreach initiatives, concept development, partnerships, internships and talent scouting, fundraising, budgets, accounting, and reporting.
Co-founder of Human by Nature (humanbynature.dk) helping organizations transform into regenerative organizations setting out a path towards a future with thrivability for people, planet, and prosperity.
Supervisors: Professor Rane Willerslev and Professor Audax Mabulla
Phone: +4522374851
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Hunted meat is a cherished food for both bellies and thought among the hunting and gathering Hadza. It is festive, celebrated, and in poetics, it is metaphorically associated with sex. Like sex, it is both ordinary, mundane yet also celebrated and extraordinary.
Unfolding big game hunt and meat-sharing among the Hadza, we find aspects of esotericism in combination with the mundane. “If gifts make friends, friends make gifts”, Marshall Sahlins (1972) wrote. Yet, if we consider the ethics of sharing, we might ask what the means of sharing look like in practice, and what the ends of such transactions are? The Hadza have provided scholars with insights on egalitarian meat-sharing, demand- sharing, immediate-return systems, and how to live a society where accumulation is regarded as anti-social, as indeed unethical. Yet, accumulation occurs with the big game hunt, but why, then, is the surplus shared and not exchanged? With this paper, we ask what relations are established with meat sharing? What are the social and esoteric relations in an ecology of human and non-human persons sharing meat-matter? Sharing meat is profoundly anchored in ethics and with ideas of prosperity, collective regeneration and for carving out a shared future.
Hunted meat is a cherished food for both bellies and thought among the hunting and gathering Hadza. It is festive, celebrated, and in poetics, it is metaphorically associated with sex. Like sex, it is both ordinary, mundane yet also celebrated and extraordinary.
Unfolding big game hunt and meat-sharing among the Hadza, we find aspects of esotericism in combination with the mundane. “If gifts make friends, friends make gifts”, Marshall Sahlins (1972) wrote. Yet, if we consider the ethics of sharing, we might ask what the means of sharing look like in practice, and what the ends of such transactions are? The Hadza have provided scholars with insights on egalitarian meat-sharing, demand- sharing, immediate-return systems, and how to live a society where accumulation is regarded as anti-social, as indeed unethical. Yet, accumulation occurs with the big game hunt, but why, then, is the surplus shared and not exchanged? With this paper, we ask what relations are established with meat sharing? What are the social and esoteric relations in an ecology of human and non-human persons sharing meat-matter? Sharing meat is profoundly anchored in ethics and with ideas of prosperity, collective regeneration and for carving out a shared future.