Collecting Practices in Bandjoun, Cameroon: Thinking about Collecting as a Research Paradigm

All photos by author, except where otherwise noted

The purpose of my article is to inquire about the way that different kinds of image and object collections can construct social memory and articulate and express social and interpersonal relationships, dissent, and conflict. I will examine this topic through research carried out in the Bamileke kingdom of Bandjoun, West Cameroon, since 2002 (Fig. 1). The issues involved are to some extent analogous to those concerning the transmission of written texts: continuity and discontinuity; translations, rewritings, and transformations; political selections and deliberate omissions (Forty and Kuchler 1999). Nevertheless, things are not texts, and we must remain sensitive to the difference between them. In spite of a widespread stereotype that African societies do not preserve material culture, in the Grassfields, the West Cameroon highlands, we can identify several collecting practices animated by different interests, motivations, and aims. In fact, the modern Western museum is only one among many different ways of collecting and “making worlds” through the order given by the collection (Pomian 1978, Bargna 2013).

The assumption that is the starting point of my article is that collecting is not a Western prerogative or the consequence of colonial domination, but a bundle of different, widespread, transcultural practices of shaping and representing reality. Collections are forms of concrete thinking operating through things, in ways that are always locally diversified. Proceeding in this way, I try to distance myself from the cultural stereotype of the “museum collection” and consider the collection in terms of what Wittgenstein called a “family resemblance”: that is, a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all. That said, we must also specify that resemblances are not in the things themselves; rather, they emerge from an act of comparison which is always oriented and located somewhere, in an individual and collective collection experience, and in a theoretical and methodological background and goal. Therefore, in spite of all, the museum largely remains our starting point for two main reasons: firstly, because the “museum” is also found in Bandjoun; and secondly, because we can use the museum stereotype as a conventional prototype for identifying the similarities and differences that compose the always open range of possibilities that we call “collection.” To be clear, in considering the museum as a stereotypical prototype, I do not ignore the fact that the concept of the museum and its definition change over time and that every history written in terms of continuity is a retrospective illusion or an ideological projection. I shall proceed, therefore, from what is most similar to the concept of the museum, and then gradually turn towards other collecting practices, trying at the same time to expand the use of the collection as a heuristic paradigm of research.

STRUGGLES SURROUNDING THE KINGDOM MUSEUM

The first case that I will consider is that of the kingdom museum (Fig. 2): namely, a “collection” explicitly presented as a “museum” by the legitimate possessor—the public figure of the fo (king) who inherits and holds the collection, but who is not the owner—and the curator who is delegated to manage it.

The royal treasury is the subject of special care. Many objects kept inside the museum have a sacred aura, because they are charged with ke, or “force,” a power which places them in the sacred (Maillard 1984:131–71). The possession of certain objects (such as stools and drinking horns) and their measured exhibition enable the exercise of authority through the ke they convey. In particular, the acquisition of degrees of notability and the exercise of the rights attached to them is bound to the possession of certain objects. They do not simply attest to the power in place in a symbolic way, but they make it effective (Warnier 2009): their possession legitimates usurpation, while their loss undermines the established power (Maillard 1984:86). If the official ideology explicitly states that the transmission of power takes place through ascription (from father to chosen son), what happens in reality (given the conflict between fathers and sons, and between brothers) is that the heir, according...