Cooking, swallowing, chewing: ‘culinary semiotics’ and the political economy of witchcraft in the Cameroon Grassfields

Abstract

Cooking, swallowing, chewing: 'culinary semiotics' and the political economy of witchcraft in the Cameroon Grassfields 1 2 Emile TsékénisIn the Cameroon Grassfields, persons IntroductionThe argument of this paper focuses on two common topics in social anthropology: personhood and witchcraft. Its aim is, first, to decipher the culinary idiom in which these concepts are couched, and, second, to examine how the key terms of this idiom switch to a lexicon pertaining to political economy. In particular, it will be shown that the key terms of both these languages cover a wide semantic field and that they can be easily substituted for one another.This interchangeability and 'semantic volatility' can explain, at least in part, the widely acknowledged ambiguity/ ambivalence of witchcraft discourses (Ciekawy and Geschiere 1998;de Rosny 1981; Geschiere 1994: 78; 1997: 9; Nyamnjoh 2002: 119; Rowlands and Warnier 1988: 129;Warnier 1993). This ambiguity/ambivalence, in turn, accounts for the ability of witchcraft discourses to translate abstract/remote/global ideas and forces into local terms and accommodating historical changes.3 This is what I intend to illustrate in the third and final section, arguing that witchcraft can be understood not so much as a 'belief' but, rather, as 'a modality of mediating the imagination' (Englund 2007: 297).In terms of methodology, the paper argues that the exploration of such themes calls for the combination of both discursive (e.g. the culinary metaphors used by people when talking about persons and/or witchcraft) and non-discursive (culinary practices and ritual performance) approaches since, as it will be made clear, knowledge of the self, others and the world emerges to a great extent through culinary imagery and practices.I shall begin with eating. From culinary metaphors to the political economy of persons Cooking, eating, and exchangingThe Batié, like all Grassfielders of West Cameroon, make a sharp distinction between swallowing with and without chewing: pfuo and ndzǝ.