Geography

The research site for our studies is a camp called Farm 6 in Mangetti West, northern Namibia, with some 200 ≠Akhoe Hai//om.

At 825,418 km2 (318,696 sq mi) and 2.5 inhabitants per square kilometre (6.5 /sq mi), Namibia is the least densely populated country in the world after Mongolia. The Namibian landscape consists generally of five geographical areas, each with characteristic abiotic conditions and vegetation with some variation within and overlap between them: the Central Plateau, the Namib Desert, the Escarpment, the Bushveld, and the Kalahari Desert. Although the climate is generally extremely dry, there are a few exceptions. The cold, north-flowing Benguela current of the Atlantic Ocean accounts for some of the low precipitation. Summer temperatures in the area can reach 40°C, and frosts are common in the winter.

People and Culture

The ≠Akhoe Hai//om are a group of hunter–gatherers living in the savanna of northern Namibia. According to the official census there were 7,506 ≠Akhoe Hai//om speakers living in northern Namibia in 1991 but as with all figures on people and languages of low reputation this count is not very reliable. Their language is part of the Khoekhoe cluster within the Central Khoisan language family. Despite political and economical marginalization, many aspects of ≠Akhoe Hai//om traditional culture have been maintained. Striking features include healing trance dances, hunting magic and intensive usage of wild plant and insect food, a unique kinship and naming system, frequent storytelling and an absolute linguistic system for spatial relations. Besides the dominant absolute system in the language, the speakers have an intrinsic and a rarely used relative system with left–right–front–behind terms.

The CoCoA group conducts psychological experiments with ≠Akhoe Hai//om adults and children in the domains of spatial cognition and the development of fairness norms.

Sources: 

http://www.mpi.nl/DOBES/projects/akhoe/people

http://www.pnas.org/content/103/46/17568

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namibia#Geography