‘Children are the food sent by God’: culinary imagery and the making of persons in the Cameroon Grassfields

Abstract

The article explores aspects of personhood as these emerge through rites of passage and culinary imagery in Batié, an eastern Grassfields polity in west Cameroon. Food appears as a gendered medium which, by being exchanged, cooked, and ingested by persons – and by collectives perceived as persons – has the power to transform others (persons and collectives) and make them act. Persons and collectives are revealed, at the different stages of their ceremonial journey, as the outcome of similar processes – exchange, cooking, and ingestion of food – occurring each time on different scales, and thus displaying fractal properties. Introducing a split between agent and (cause of) agency, the article finally suggests that agents’ successive (ritual) transformations are the result of their own actions as well as the actions of (‘individual’ or ‘collective’) others upon them.

Tales of a stitched anus: fictions, analytics, and personhood in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania★

“…Seizing on the conjecture that some of Strathern's ideas come out of Africa and drawing inspiration from experiments with them elsewhere on the continent (Lambek & Strathern ; Myhre 2016 a ; Piot ; Sanders ; Strathern ; Tsékénis ), I extend this engagement to tell another tale of the stitched anus. Specifically, I displace symbolic classification to make room for a Chagga concept with which Gutmann wrestled, yet Moore and subsequent scholars neglect.…”