Intestines of the State
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A01=Nicolas Argenti
activism
africa
Author_Nicolas Argenti
authority
cameroon grassfields
Category=JBSP1
Category=JBSP2
Category=JPVR
Category=JPWS
ceremony
colonialism
embodiment
empire
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnography
exploitation
fieldwork
folklore
forced labor
german imperialism
history
marginality
marginalization
masculinity
masked dance
masquerade
memorial
mortuary rites
nonfiction
oku
oppression
performance
rebellion
revolt
revolution
ritual
slavery
violence
youth
Product details
- ISBN 9780226026121
- Weight: 595g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2007
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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The young people of the Cameroon Grassfields have been subject to a long history of violence and political marginalization. For centuries, the main victims of the slave trade, they became prime targets for forced labor campaigns under a series of colonial rulers. Today's youth remain at the bottom of the fiercely hierarchical and polarized societies of the Grassfields, and it is their response to centuries of exploitation that Nicolas Pandely Argenti takes up in this absorbing and original book. Beginning his study with a political analysis of youth in the Grassfields from the eighteenth century to the present, Argenti pays special attention to the repeated violent revolts staged by young victims of political oppression. He then combines this history with extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Oku chiefdom, discovering that the specter of past violence lives on in the masked dance performances that have earned intense devotion from today's youth. Argenti contends that by evoking the imagery of past cataclysmic events, these masquerades allow young Oku men and women to address the inequities they face in their relations with elders and state authorities today.
Nicolas Pandely Argenti is a research lecturer in anthropology at Brunel University in England. He is coeditor of Young Africa: Realising the Rights of Children and Youth.
