Pygmies Web Resource

http://www.pygmies.org/

A website dedicated to the hunter-gatherer peoples living in Central African rainforests, commonly called Pygmies, this is an excellent resource about an often mysterious and little understood indigenous peoples of Africa.

Presenting hundreds of photos and other material collected during his fieldwork among the Baka of Cameroon and Gabon and among other pygmy groups in Central Africa, this website reveals life and traditional activities of these peoples, the Central African rainforest biodiversity, and the increasingly rapid disappearance of this world.

I think this is an important general resource for indigenous peoples research, especially in a time when migration to Africa has endangered its indigenous peoples, very similar in nature to indigenous peoples all over the world.  This website presents ethnographic descriptions serving as introduction to pygmy cultures and commentary on the photos.   Impressively, the technology translates into an excellent multimedia-rich experience that each internal page also includes sound or music recordings relative to the soundscape of the rainforest and pygmy camps.

The purpose of this web resource is to “ultimately provide an introduction to the cultures of pygmy peoples and to promote their protection, documenting their richness and showing some of the factors that increasingly threaten their survival.” In a way, the methodologies presented by this website almost reverses the colonial paradigms of “research” so prominent in the 19th and 20th centuries. Luis Devin, an ethnomusicologist, lives among the Pygmy in Central Africa, conducting anthropological and ethnomusicological fieldwork in Central Africa, studying in particular the music and rituals of the Baka and other pygmy groups.

What strikes me the most is that during an expedition in the rainforest of Cameroon, he took part into the male initiation rite that marks the transition to adulthood of the young Baka boys, a secret rite conducted by the Spirit of the Forest and by elderly members of the group. After a week of rituals he was accepted in a Baka patrilinear clan.   Since Baka male initiation is an almost completely secret rite (occurring in secret places of the African rainforest), Devin respected the Pygmy peoples, and only published only those images and sounds concerning the “public” ceremonies.  In fact, as he puts it, it is

“essential to respect the Baka traditions and cultural secrets. After all, they let me be part of a rite which has always been forbidden to foreigners. Even the other African peoples can seldom assist to these ceremonies. Besides, they did not want anything in exchange.”

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