<i>Kesum‐body</i> and the places of the gods: the politics of children’s masking and second‐world realities in OKU (cameroon)

Argenti, Nicolas

doi:10.1111/1467-9655.00051

Cited by 20 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 41 publications

(13 reference statements)

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“…Warnier and Argenti, for example, both stress the power of material culture in shaping the self/subject. The former stresses the process of subjectivation in relation to bodily conducts‐cum‐material culture (Warnier ; ; ; ), while the latter underscores performance and embodied social memory (Argenti ; ; ; ; ). Both authors alike privilege the non‐discursive aspects of social life and suggest that there is a continuity, as far as the ‘structural’ position of subaltern categories (women, children, and social cadets) is concerned, between the precolonial, the colonial, and the postcolonial eras (Warnier ; ).…”

Section: Aspects Of ‘Grassfields Personhood’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As Argenti has noticed, in the Grassfields the earth is a ‘womblike second world in which the deceased are in a state of gestation’ (: 307 n. 15; also Argenti ). Communities may provide people to the earth, but the earth provides people back to the world.…”

Section: From Gender Complementarity/hierarchy To the ‘Cooking’ Of Chmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Besides being otherworldly, neonates in the Grassfields are, as one would expect, also androgynous (Argenti ; ; Diduk ). Since the present study focuses on gendering processes, I will elaborate on the second aspect.…”

Section: Towards the ‘Fractal Person’mentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Tsékénis

2015

Royal Anthropological Inst

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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.

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Section: Aspects Of ‘Grassfields Personhood’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: From Gender Complementarity/hierarchy To the ‘Cooking’ Of Chmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Tsékénis

2015

Royal Anthropological Inst

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“…In the North West Province of Cameroon, far to the south of Tupuriland, Nicholas Argenti (1998Argenti ( , 2001) examines dance performances by youth in Oku. In one case, he shows that the modernist aesthetic of dancers (tracksuits and military gear) belies a strong continuity with earlier masquerade forms in which symbols of 'wild foreign' power (bush animals, European military might, and later Cameroonian gendarmes) are appropriated and transformed in the context of dance.…”

Section: Power To Remake Society: Youth Performance In Africa and Elsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making Ethnic Elites: Ritual Poetics in a Cameroonian Lycée

Ignatowski¹

2004

Africa

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This case study of youth cultural production in Cameroon examines how lycée students introduce idioms of tradition and the ancestral past into the lycée context by creating a club modelled on a dance society popular in the region. In pre-colonial rural Tupuriland, the gurna society was a key site for the moral–sexual socialisation of youth and a cultural–political arena where competition was staged between individuals and villages during death celebrations. Today, the gurna remains popular in Tupuri villages, though it has been recreated in urban contexts and modern institutions where members use its forms to mediate new social relations and modern realities. This paper explores the meanings, functions, and effects of the creation of the ‘Gurna Club’ by students in the Lycée de Doukoula, by examining students' Youth Day dance performances, vibrant song discourse, and nostalgia for earlier forms of indigenous socialisation (e.g. the gurna, youth initiation, and wrestling). By inserting the communal poetics of the gurna into the lycée, Tupuri youth seek to yoke multiple facets of their identity, making visible their desire to be gurna, even as they pursue their civic obligations as students. In creating the Gurna Club, students begin to participate in an increasing trend in Cameroon toward the use of idioms of parochialism (such as ethnically based elite associations) as strategies for garnering national power and recognition.

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“…Besides being otherworldly (see subsequent sections) (Argenti 2001 and2011 for Oku;Diduk 2001 for the Kedjom), neonates in the Cameroon Grassfields are also considered androgynous (Tsékénis 2015: 340-341). Up to the age of approximately eight or nine Batié boys and girls perform both 'male' and 'female' work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Tsekenis¹

2016

Punctum

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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.

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Kesum‐body and the places of the gods: the politics of children’s masking and second‐world realities in OKU (cameroon)

Cited by 20 publications

References 41 publications

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

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

Making Ethnic Elites: Ritual Poetics in a Cameroonian Lycée

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

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