‘Hunting Hunters: Production and Politics in a Central African Autonomous Zone’

by Dr. Louisa Lombard

In this talk Lombard develops a framework for thinking through the mode of integration-without-incorporation of a Central African autonomous zone into broader circuits of exchange. She draws on the anthropological literature on hunting to argue that the ways in which the northeastern Central African Republic (CAR) has become productive to places further afield centre on hunting.

Hunting is conceived as both a theatre of encounter and a personal orientation involving flexibility, shape-shifting, camouflage, movement, and the transgression of boundaries. It includes not just the killing of animals (human and otherwise) but also the tracking and capturing of opportunities across scales. And it entails moving beyond “home,” whether that home is France or Ndele (one of the autonomous zone’s major towns), and into “the bush,” whether geographical or theoretical. The talk sketches the contours of these dynamics from the late nineteenth-century trans-Saharan trades in people and ivory, through the period of French terror, neglect, and protection, into the violent conservation projects that began in the 1970s, and finally into the post-2005 dynamics of rebellion. 

Dr. Louisa Lombard gave an interview for Dutch newspaper NRC while she visited the CTD project.