Anthropologist
religion, beliefs, worldviews, symbols
Food and eating are central metaphors in all cultures. Importantly, they grace essential rituals in our lives, from birth to death. Halloween, and specifically the Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead), whose origins are traceable to Mexican society, offers us an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which humans construct world views and then naturalise them (by treating these views as if they are timeless and natural).
In Faith, Power and Family, Walker-Said details Christianity’s role in reconfiguring African marriage and family-building among French Cameroonians in the southern forest, coastal zones and the western Grassfields.
In his book, Lela in Bali: History through Ceremony in Cameroon (2006), anthropologist, Richard Fardon contends that Lela could be understood as a “barometer of the state of play in Bali politics: a ceremony that has adjusted to reflect the changing composition and external relations of the community” (2, italics mine). To extend this argument, it’s absence over several consecutive years could also index the state of politics – one that shows the growing dissonance between the ruled and the rulers.
Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd by Francis B. Nyamnjoh is a deeply infused treatise that aims to exorcise a hegemonic spell, occasioned by the ready-made epistemologies that have enthralled its consumers and reproducers in a dreamy state since the colonial age.
A Bibliography of Published Literature on the Bali Chamba of Cameroon & Nigeria, arranged thematically and by discipline.