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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:The King as a Container in the Cameroon Grassfields
Author:Warnier, Jean-PierreISNI
Year:1993
Periodical:Paideuma
Volume:39
Pages:303-319
Language:English
Geographic term:Cameroon
Subjects:monarchy
symbols
Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups)
History and Exploration
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/40341668
Abstract:Whilst carrying out research on modes of accumulation among contemporary businessmen and women of the Cameroon western highlands or Grassfields, the author came across a theme ever present in their discourse: the theme of the 'vital piggy bank'. The same theme was found in Grassfields iconography and in royal rituals. The metaphor of the vital piggy bank, or the container, does not apply only to notables or businessmen and women. It applies first and foremost to chiefs and kings. The king is perceived as a container holding a number of ancestral substances and transmissible life essence, breath, saliva, semen and blood. The author demonstrates that the metaphor of the container is well documented in material culture and the ethnographic record, and that it provides an idiom and an ethos for contemporary accumulation, linking up the past and the present in a long history of inequality and hierarchy in the Grassfields. The author discusses the royal rituals aimed at sealing off and containing the chiefdom and deals with issues relating to the metaphor of the container, namely the theme of spilling and wastage, the material embodiment of containment in boxes, bowls, horns and bags, the control of sex, and accumulation and inequality. Bibliogr.
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