Masks and Staffs: Identity Politics in the Cameroon Grassfields (11) (Integration and Conflict Studies, 11) - Hardcover

"Masks and Staffs belongs to a very distinguished series on ethnicity, identity, and conflict ...and is a worthwhile contribution to that series...Pelican has effectively demonstrated how overlapping, internally differentiated, and changing groups and categories exist and operate in this particular region, with lessons that are highly applicable to other if not all parts of the world." . Anthropology Review Database"

The Cameroon Grassfields, home to three ethnic groups - the Grassfields societies, the Mbororo, and the 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.