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Men Own the Fields, Women Own the Crops
Based on a decade of fieldwork, this work tracks the negotiations between chiefs and subchiefs and women and men over ritual power, economic power, and administrative power. Though Nso' men obviously dominate their society at both the local level and nationally, women have had power of their own by virtue of their status as women. Men may own the land, for example, but women control the crops through their labor. Goheen explains clearly the place of gender in very complex historical processes, such as land tenure systems, title societies, chieftancy, marriage systems, changing ideas of symbolic capital, and internal and external politics.
Mortgaging the Ancestors
This title looks briefly at European and North American theories on private property and the mortgage, then shows how these theories have played out as attempted economic reforms in Africa.
Making Women's Histories
Making Women's Histories showcases the transformations that the intellectual and political production of women’s history has engendered across time and space. It considers the difference women’s and gender history has made to and within national fields of study, and to what extent the wider historiography has integrated this new knowledge. What are the accomplishments of women’s and gender history? What are its shortcomings? What is its future? The contributors discuss their discovery of women’s histories,the multiple turns the field has taken, and how place affected the course of this scholarship. Noted scholars of women’s and gender history, they stand atop such historiographically-defined vantage points as Tsarist Russia, the British Empire in Egypt and India, Qing-dynasty China, and the U.S. roiling through the 1960s. From these and other peaks they gaze out at the world around them, surveying trajectories in the creation of women’s histories in recent and distant pasts and envisioning their futures.
The Modernity of Witchcraft
To many Westerners, the disappearance of African traditions of witchcraft might seem inevitable wuth continued modernization. In The Modernity of Witchcraft, Peter Geschieres uses his own experiences among the Maka and in other parts of eastern and southern Cameroon, as well as other anthropological research, to argue that contemporary ideas and practices of witchcraft are more a response to modern exigencies than a lingering cultural custom. The prevalence of witchcraft, especially in African politics and entrepreneurship, demonstrates the unlikely balance it has achieved with the forces of modernity. Geshiere explores why modern techniques and commodities, usually of Western Provenance, have become central in rumors of the occult.
African Witchcraft and Otherness
This work of African philosophy and theology uses the thought of Emmanuel Levinas to provide an analysis of tfu (witchcraft) among the Wimbum people of Cameroon along with a critique of intersubjective relations. Taking an approach he calls "critical contextualism," author Elias Bongmba employs Levinas's philosophy, particularly the concept of the Other, to engage in cross-cultural philosophy that does not destroy the perspective of the culture under study. Insights from anthropology, African studies, and the author's own experiences are also important throughout the book. Bongmba discusses the cultural background of the Wimbum people and explores the concepts and terms used to discuss the acquisition of several categories of power generally described as tfu. Bongmba argues that when properly explored and understood, these terms refer to complex practices that involve power that can be used for good and power that can be abused. Drawing from Levinas, the author demonstrates that negative use of tfu constitutes a totalizing praxis. He goes on to endorse Levinas's call for a phenomenology of eros as a way of reconfiguring interpersonal relationships.
Women Farmers and Commercial Ventures
In this volume, case studies reveal that farm women in Africa, Asia and Latin America are rapidly becoming more than subsistence producers. It explores the societal and domestic changes brought about as women move to positions as wage labourers, contract growers and farm owners.
Women in the New Millennium
In this dynamic analysis of the gender revolution, authors Anne Breneman and Rebecca Mbuh create a platform for scholars from a variety of cultures to reflect upon their experiences as women and men in gendered cultures and upon their visions of prospects for gender equality and empowerment. Conceived during the United Nation's Fourth World Women's Conference in 1995 and continued during the Beijing +5 conference in 2000, this work represents the culmination of a ten-year project involving women from China, Sweden, Korea, Cameroon, Indonesia, South Africa, and the USA. Organized in five parts—Beginning, Women Awakening, Women Arising, Hazards of Growing up Female, and Reflections and Prosp...
Petitioning for our Rights, Fighting for our Nation. The History of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women, 1949-1960
Thousands of Cameroonian women played an essential role in the radically anti-colonial nationalist movement led by the Union of the Populations of Cameroon (UPC): they were the women of the Democratic Union of Cameroonian Women (UDEFEC). Drawing on women nationalists' petitions to the United Nations, one of the largest collections of political documents written by African women during the decolonization era, as well as archival research and oral interviews, this work shows how UDEFEC transcended ethnic, class, education and social divides, and popularized nationalism in both urban and rural areas through the Trust Territories of the Cameroons under French and British administration. Foregrounding issues such as economic autonomy and biological and agricultural fertility, UDEFEC politics wove anti-imperial democracy and notions of universal human rights into locally rooted political cultures and histories. UDEFEC's history sheds light on the essential components of women's successful political mobilization in Africa, and contributes to the discussion of women's involvement in nationalist movements in formerly colonized territories.
Nso and Its Neighbours. Readings in the Social History of the Western Grassfields of Cameroon
This is a rich and compelling volume of readings in social history on Nso' and its neighbours in the Western Grassfields of Cameroon. It consists of 19 essays by some of the leading historians, archeologists and ethnographers of the region, with seminal contributions by Jean-Pierre Warnier, Paul Nchoji Nkwi, Bongfen Chem-Langhee, Phyllis Kaberry, E.M Chilver, Miriam Goheen, Ian Flower, Dan Lantum and V.G. Fanso. The book covers a broad range of themes from precolonial times to date, including trade, alliances, diplomacy, the iron industry, colonial impact, continuities, discontinuities and compromise, general persistence, ideology and conflict. Warnier draws on linguistic and archaeological ...
Negotiating Culture
How are cultural boundaries created, conceived, and experienced? On the public level, the political practices of (sub-)nationalism have been revitalized by contemporary ideologies of multiculturalism providing new rhetorical forms which ultimately deny the legitimacy of indeterminacy. Yet, on the private level, the creation of new intersubjectivities is a normal consequence of movement, mixing, and living together, resulting in novel repertoires of individual and collective experiences. This book seeks to connect both the public and the private within the same frame of analysis. Reginald Byron is professor of sociology and anthropology, University of Wales, Swansea (UK). Ullrich Kockel holds a chair in European Studies at Bristol University of the West of England (UK), where he leads the European Ethnological Research Unit.
