Forests of Belonging: Identities, Ethnicities, and Stereotypes in the Congo River Basin

5. Tangles: Parallel Clans, Alliances, Rituals, and Collective Work

147 E thnic affiliations are thick with historical, linguistic, and ideological value. While not immutable over time, monolithic across communities , or of constant emotional value among individuals, ethnic affiliations are collectively valued, recognized, and upheld. As a result, it is relatively difficult for people to manipulate their ethnic affiliations outright to suit particular interests in particular contexts. In contrast, interethnic social relations are established and nurtured, and interethnic social identities emerge where individuals live in a shared environment, face shared crises and opportunities, and experience shared historical events and social change. Where existential conditions are common, collaborative relationships result in interethnic networks and communal social identities that individuals call on with frequency and ease. While maintaining partnerchapter five Tangles parallel clans, alliances, rituals, and collective work 148 chapter five ships of any kind requires constancy and effort, in southeastern Cameroon individuals are involved in numerous interethnic social relations at once, offering a diversity of ways to interact and to promote mutually beneficial relationships and identities. Moreover, interethnic social relationships have both calculative and affective dimensions, as people balance practical and emotional reasons for coming together in partnerships and networks, or for abandoning these relationships. By exploring the tangles of belonging that bring people of different ethnic affiliations together, it becomes apparent that processes of identification provide multiple channels for people to position themselves in the plural, multiethnic communities of southeastern Cameroon, enabling individuals selectively to emphasize social relationships that transcend their particular ethnic affiliations. Bangando, Baka, Bakwélé, and Mbomam individuals come together in numerous collaborative social contexts, including parallel clans, interethnic alliances, shared ritual ceremonies and societies, and collective work efforts. These channels of interethnic collaboration highlight the many, varied ways that people in the Lobéké forest region come together, building on and sustaining the core of shared experiences that enable individuals to form meaningful , lasting relationships and fluid, flexible ways of identifying oneself fig. 5.1 Building friendship, Dioula Village, 1996 tangles 149 and others. As lianas and vines integrate the forest into a dynamic, interactive ecosystem, so do partnerships, alliances, and collaborative ties integrate the people of southeastern Cameroon in horizontally tangled relationships that cut across vertical trunks of ethnic affiliation. Clans and Parallel Clans Throughout the Lobéké forest, families of the four main ethnic communities are internally organized according to patrilineal clans, representing extended families whose narratives of social origins indicate that individuals belonging to the clan have descended from a common, although often mystical, set of ancestors. In addition to sentiments of ethnic affiliation that are based on the sharing of a primary language and story of origin, membership in clans adds another layer of emotional solidarity among individuals of shared patrilineage. As clan members recount stories of the clan’s history , uphold taboo restrictions, and overlap in domestic space, individuals belonging to particular clans recognize and reaffirm their deep interconnectedness .1 By clan I refer to a kinship group in which members of each group believe themselves to be agnates related by unilineal descent, even though they often cannot trace their relations with other members of the kinship group with genealogical precision (Radcliffe-Brown and Forde 1950; Burnham 1980). Membership in the clan is passed to each individual from his or her father, who in turn “received” his membership from his father, and so on. Membership in a particular clan is represented by three social features that are passed from a father to his children: a clan name, an emblem or totem (which reflects the clan name), and the social rule of exogamous marriage2 (see Burnham 1980: 83 to compare with Gbaya clans). Bangando, Baka, Bakwélé, and Mbomam clans offer ligaments of structural parallelism, facilitating interethnic collaboration. The clan systems of all four groups are based on patrilineal, exogamous, noncorporate structures . This organizational alignment across the communities means that their basic kinship structures often correspond and can operate in tandem. Thus if individuals from different ethnic backgrounds marry, the fundamental systems of kinship organization of their respective families are often analogous, allowing the couple and their eventual children to fit within the structural logic of both families. This structural congruence facilitates interethnic marriage, because couples find that despite differences in lan- 150 chapter five guage and history of origin, the principles and structures of kinship in both families are fundamentally coherent. In addition, certain clan affiliations are held by more than one ethnic group among the Bangando, Baka, Bakw...