Description
Book Synopsis The Cameroon Grassfields, home to three ethnic groups – Grassfields societies, Mbororo, and Hausa – provide a valuable case study for the anthropological examination of identity politics and interethnic relations. In the midst of the political liberalization of Cameroon in the late 1990s and 2000s, local responses to political and legal changes took the form of a series of performative and discursive expressions of ethnicity. Confrontational encounters stimulated by economic and political rivalry, as well as socially integrative processes, transformed collective self-understanding in Cameroon in conjunction with recent global discourses on human, minority, and indigenous rights. The book provides a vital contribution to the study of ethnicity, conflict, and social change in the anthropology of Africa.
Trade Review “Pelican’s book is a fascinating descent into the dazzling complexities that ethnicity can take on even within a small area, and provides original and helpful tools for making sense of these complexities… [Her] observations make this book an inspiring example of how detailed ethnography can engender theoretical insights of a wider purport.” • Africa Review
“…necessary and significant, [this study is] a much-welcomed monograph that builds on and advances the corpus of knowledge about the evolution and dynamics of interethnic relations in the Cameroon Grasslands.” • American Anthropologist
Table of Contents Acknowledgements
Notes on Transliteration
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1. Setting the Scene: Cultural Difference and Political Rivalry in Times of Transition
Chapter 2. The Power of the Fon: Nchaney Political History
Chapter 3. From Pastoral Society to Indigenous People: Mbororo Identity Politics
Chapter 4. A Shift to Economic Competition? Farmer–Herder Conflict and Cattle Theft in the Misaje Area
Chapter 5. On Being Hausa: Consolidation of the Hausa Ethnic Category in the Grassfields
Chapter 6. Grassfielder by Birth, Muslim by Choice: Religious and Ethnic Conversion
Chapter 7. The Murder of Mr X: Legal Pluralism and Conflict Management in the Early 2000s
Epilogue
Glossary
References
Index
