Anthropologist
book reviews, published in journals and blog
In recent times, Africa’s cities and towns have experienced an explosion of Pentecostal fervour as more and more “men of God” invest in the business of saving souls or peddling the shibboleth that divine favour is best measured by the size of one’s material endowments.
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 review of The Lion and his Pride: The Politics of Commemoration in Cameroon by Kathrin Tiewa