Remembering the future: Slavery, youth and masking in the Cameroon Grassfields1

Argenti, Nicolas

doi:10.1111/j.1469-8676.2006.tb00023.x

Cited by 13 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Similar associations and valuations are mentioned by Argenti for Oku (Argenti : 55 n. 15), by Feldman‐Savelsberg for Bangangté (Feldman‐Savelsberg : 58, 211 n. 12), and by Pradelles de Latour for Bangwa (Pradelles de Latour : 49‐50).…”

supporting

confidence: 66%

“…Many studies have shown that in Africa, witchcraft beliefs and practices reveal the ways in which personhood is conceptualized and that witchcraft discourses incorporate historical changes (Argenti ; ; Warnier for the Cameroon Grassfields; Ardener [1970] and Geschiere for Cameroon; Shaw for Sierra Leone). Therefore, witchcraft appears as a privileged vantage‐point from which to track historical transformations and conflicting conceptualizations of personhood.…”

Section: Aspects Of ‘Grassfields Personhood’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…4; Warnier ) . Cannibalism accounts for the ‘disappearance’ of young bachelors who fed the Atlantic slave trade (Argenti ; Warnier ), while zombie discourses refer to the introduction of plantation economy (Argenti : 105; Warnier )…”

Section: Aspects Of ‘Grassfields Personhood’mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…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%

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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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supporting

confidence: 66%

Section: Aspects Of ‘Grassfields Personhood’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Aspects Of ‘Grassfields Personhood’mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Aspects Of ‘Grassfields Personhood’mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

‘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 witchcraft stories Grassfields teenagers tell each other sound misleadingly parochial in that, as I will try to show, witchcraft discourses have the ability to 'bring the remote close' -therefore 'shrinking' space -and accommodating historical changes (Argenti 2007;Austen 1993;Shaw 2002) -often bringing the past into the present (Argenti 2006(Argenti , 2007. In so doing, witchcraft discourses function as a 'glocal' idiom, making sense of modern, global, remote, and abstract forces in local terms (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xxii;1999: 286;Geschiere , 2014Piot 1999;Shaw 2002).…”

Section: Instantiations Of Witchcraftmentioning

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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Slavery, Memory and Religion in Southeastern Ghana, c. 1850–Present

Venkatachalam¹

2015

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Based on a decade of fieldwork in southeastern Ghana and analysis of secondary sources, this book aims to reconstruct the religious history of the Anlo-Ewe peoples from the 1850s. In particular, it focuses on a corpus of rituals collectively known as 'Fofie', which derived their legitimacy from engaging with the memory of the slave-holding past. The Anlo developed a sense of discomfort about their agency in slavery in the early twentieth century which they articulated through practices such as ancestor veneration, spirit possession, and by forging links with descendants of peoples they formerly enslaved. Conversion to Christianity, engagement with 'modernity', trans-Atlantic conversations with diasporan Africans, and citizenship of the postcolonial state coupled with structural changes within the religious system - which resulted in the decline in Fofie's popularity - gradually altered the moral emphases of legacies of slavery in the Anlo historical imagination as the twentieth century progressed.

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Remembering the future: Slavery, youth and masking in the Cameroon Grassfields1

Cited by 13 publications

References 11 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

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

Slavery, Memory and Religion in Southeastern Ghana, c. 1850–Present

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