Traditional Beekeeping and Honey Hunting in Central Cameroon. Ethnographic Film Research : Study Report

The study report describes the making of the ethnographic documentary film “Gbaya: Beekeeping and Honey Hunting” (Gruber 2015). The film follows an accomplished beekeeper, Jean Sardi, on a beekeeping excursion in the Savanna landscape in the vicinity of the city of Ngaoundéré. Together with family members, the main character demonstrates the manufacturing of a traditional beehive from palm leaves and grass, the harvesting of honey from such a hive as well as the salvaging of honey from wild living honeybees. In interviews and informal conversations, Sardi gives important contextual information on his practice and situates it as an important element of Gbaya culture, with which he identifies. Traditional beekeeping and honey hunting are presented as economically and culturally significant activities that afford a high degree of manual skill and embodied knowledge. Ethnographic film was perceived here as an ethnographic research method in the sense of participant observation with a camera (Henley 2000). The archived dataset consists of footage of a beekeeper at work, as well as contextualizing interviews with the protagonist.

The study report places the ethnographic film in the broader context of the anthropological research project BeeCultures, which investigates human honeybee entanglements in Cameroon, Japan and Germany. The report also discusses the theoretical and methodological framework of the project.