Full Description
Biologists studying large carnivores in wild places usually do so from a distance, using telemetry and noninvasive methods of data collection. So what happens when an anthropologist studies a clan of spotted hyenas, Africa's second-largest carnivores, up close—and in a city of a hundred thousand inhabitants? In Among the Bone Eaters, Marcus Baynes-Rock takes us to the ancient city of Harar in Ethiopia, where the gey waraba (hyenas of the city) are welcome in the streets and appreciated by the locals for the protection they provide from harmful spirits and dangerous "mountain" hyenas. They've even become a local tourist attraction.
At the start of his research in Harar, Baynes-Rock contended with difficult conditions, stone-throwing children, intransigent bureaucracy, and wary hyena subjects intent on avoiding people. After months of frustration, three young hyenas drew him into the hidden world of the Sofi clan. He discovered the elements of a hyena's life, from the delectability of dead livestock and the nuisance of dogs to the unbounded thrill of hyena chase-play under the light of a full moon. Baynes-Rock's personal relations with the hyenas from the Sofi clan expand the conceptual boundaries of human-animal relations. This is multispecies ethnography that reveals its messy, intersubjective, dangerously transformative potential.
Contents
Contents
Foreword by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Past Finding Around Harar
2 Lines of Reason for Hyenas
3 Between Different Relations
4 You Hyenas
5 The Legend of Ashura
6 On the Tail of a Hyena
7 Encounters with the Unseen
8 Reflections from a Hyena Playground
9 Death, Death, and Rhetoric
10 Blood of the Hyena
11 Across a Human/Hyena Boundary
12 A Host of Other Ideas
13 Returning to Other Hyenas
14 Talking Up Hyena Realities
15 Looking Through a Hyena Hole
Notes
Bibliography
Index
