The Limits of Archaeology and Cultural Anthropology: Archaeological Witnesses and Ethnographical Data Among the Bakola-Bagyeli “Pygmies” (South Cameroon)

Abstract

The reading of the transformations recorded in the material equipment of disappeared societies still remains largely inspired by the dogma of materialism. This inclines inferences, in archaeology, to systematically deduce evolutionary stages on a double level, chronological and economic, from the material remains of technological changes only. However, the unpredictable experience of human societies can often reveal situations that contradict the established inferential model. Such a reality therefore poses the problem of searching for an approach capable of achieving balance in the possible equation between the experience of human societies and the methodological means implemented to account for it. The question therefore remains to know whether data collected and explained in a methodological approach specific to a discipline always reproduce the improbable nature of the reality of human societies, both living and extinct? Thus, ethnographic, qualitative data and archaeological facts are do they still agree regarding the current experience of life of the Bakola-Bayéli “Pygmies” of South Cameroon, since the 1990s? The hypothesis supports: data collected according to the orthodoxy of techniques specific to dissociated disciplinary fields, in a conventional manner, can contradict each other on the same fact. The complexity of the reality of human societies escapes the specific filter of conceptual and methodological practices characteristic of the disciplines that separate techniques specific to each method. The archaeological witnesses, taken from surveys carried out on the sites where the Bakola-Bagyéli “Pygmies” live, contradict the oral testimonies, given by these same populations through interviews, directive and semi-directive, guided by a questionnaire. A comparative study of qualitative and quantitative data makes it possible to verify the hypotheses put forward. The theoretical approach acquired to the cause of disorganization and opposed to the terminism of ends makes it possible to discuss the a priori organization of cultural facts and the accomplishment of reserved goals.