Gender Relations in Cameroon: Multidisciplinary Perspectives

General Introduction

v General Introduction Emmanuel Yenshu Vubo Since the question of gender made its way into social science and public debate, it has been the subject of varying interpretations. It has also become the object of political discourses, administrative institutionalization, militant sloganeering from activists and passionate appeals from social movements and the civil society. A veritable intellectual fashion has also developed around the question of gender parallel to the emergence of an autonomous domain worthy of dispassionate scholarship in its own right. However, for a long time this has been still closely associated with ideological preoccupations limited to specific problems as lived by women and militant pronouncements by some female intellectuals who have tended to misconstrue such scholarship as an arm of combat in a war of the sexes. The following remark by Claude Rivière (2000: 85) is telling: Les études féministes depuis une quarantaine d’années ont pris pour cible la domination male, sans pouvoir induire quoi que ce soit à partir d’une thèse inverse, et en amplifiant seulement un projet de dynamique sociale pour les sociétés développées: de quelle manière cette situation peut-elle être modifiée délibérément dans la construction des identités ?/Feminist studies over the past forty years have targeted male domination without exploring the possibility of an argument in the opposite direction. On the contrary, it has rather only blown a vibrant project essentially meant for developed societies out of proportions. How can this situation be deliberately modified in the development of identities? Uncritically following this line of thought, some African intellectuals and activists have thus not hesitated to beg the question by simply transposing western paradigms into the African context, vi the school of thought also “recognized by their tendency to export the debate on women’s rights outside Africa and by their easy option for ideological borrowing”(Toure, Cellou and Diallo 2003: 2). There is more to this than the preoccupation than emancipation, liberation or struggle. This book is based on the premise that social relations constructed around sexual differences are first and foremost social constructs that must be studied from a social science perspective. These are specific to socio-historical context and are multidimensional, touching on a variety of dimensions of social life. The seven contributions to this book therefore treat the evolving African situation – and the case of Cameroon - as unique and several aspects of the question as worthy of independent study although they are interrelated. Four of the studies are from an anthropological perspective, two from language studies or “sciences du language” as the French would have it, one from legal studies and one from economics. Apart from the first paper which provides a general orientation on an anthropological approach to the question, each chapter is devoted to a specific domain: education and cognitive development, association life, place in the rural economy, widowhood practices, entrepreneurship and gender relations in the early period of German colonial rule in Cameroon (that which is often considered one of pacification). The diversity of issues treated here highlights some basic facts about gender that are often overlooked: - The general socially embedded nature of gender relations. In other words, gender is pervasive in nature and is reflected in all domains and dimensions of the social fabric. As such, it should not be taken in isolation but as a total social fact as Marcel Mauss would have it; - The pervasive nature of gender in the social fabric. Gender is not an autonomous sphere of its own but one that cuts across social life in general and is at the very heart of social life itself; - Gender cannot be extricated from its societal context in which it is couched and within the different spheres (economy, politics, social life, culture…) that are more or less autonomous. As such, the purposively selected studies are very much about how gender is vii constructed in several spheres rather than being a specific sphere itself. All the studies have the preoccupation of symmetry or equilibrium both as a reality as opposed to the observed dissymmetry in social science studies (Ferréol et al. 1995: 221) and a socially desirable goal. The first study by Yenshu Vubo strikes a balance between the two as both an intellectual and a practical preoccupation that can be pursued in a complementary manner. In the first instance he partially follows the path proposed by...