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I Preface Grassfields Research Encounters: One Person’s Anthropologist is Only in the Womb Francis B. Nyamnjoh This book is a timely gesture of restitution by one of the foremost ethnographic historians of the Cameroon Grassfields. It is the crowning moment of a journey rich in encounters and mutual shaping, between a scholar and the people and places he came to know and cherish for forty years. The book is distilled from intellectual curiosities and conversions kindled and fuelled by relationships forged and entertained across different countries (France, USA, UK, Nigeria and Cameroon) and within different regions in Cameroon. It is a book I am pleased to be associated with. Jean-Pierre Warnier’s ethnological encounter with Mankon as field location was not initially planned, negotiated or made by personal choice. Nor were his subsequent returns to continue his research, expanded to include the political, material and economic history, linguistics and archaeology of the entire Grassfields region. Circumstances and a series of chance encounters brought him to the region, and have stimulated his intellectual and social engagements with Mankon, the Grassfields and Cameroon for 40 years. In his introduction to this impressive seminal collection of essays produced and perfected in the course of these encounters, Warnier provides a snippet view of the forces and individuals that influenced the turn taken by his research curiosities and interests, and that tells us why he has come to cherish anthropological research not as analyses of a given people, but rather, as analyses of an anthropologist’s interactions with given subjects and groups. Indeed, circumstances beyond his control brought Jean-Pierre Warnier and Mankon together. First, his scanty finances as a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania excluded his contemplation of field sites in Oceania and Asia, and with the Americas the preserve of North American anthropologists, he was left with Africa as the option. Even then, his choice of Ivory Coast was turned down by his assigned supervisor – Professor Igor Kopytoff –, who, writes Warnier, “…directed me to Cameroon where Ngwa’fo, king of Mankon, had informed Elizabeth Chilver, a historian from Oxford, of his wish to have an anthropologist conduct some research in his kingdom.” So Jean-Pierre Warnier found himself in Mankon in May 1971, at the beginning of a series of encounters and mutually beneficial interactions between him, individuals and groups in the kingdom of Mankon. The power of circumstances shaped his view of research from the outset, as a process that consists in putting an individual in a given situation and then looking at what happens. In his perspective, “encounters with other subjects provide the impetus and the orientation of the research,” and the richer these encounters, the greater the impetus and orientation to one’s research. In December 2009 Fo Angwafo III celebrated his 50 years as king, exactly 38 years after Jean-Pierre Warnier was made to answer his request to Sally Chilver for an anthropologist to document the ways of his kingdom. This was an occasion the planning of which Warnier had followed up closely, and which he attended, along with two filmmakers from the University of Vienna, working for Austrian television, II Cameroon Grassfields Civilization as he sought to document the event as the crowning event of his 38 years of ethnological encounters with Mankon. In his autobiography published to coincide with the jubilee, Fo Angwafo III acknowledged JeanPierre Warnier, and the role he had played as the king’s courtyard in placing the things and achievements of the palace on the radar of scholarly attention and recognition: I am grateful for this collaboration on the cultural heritage of Mankon, just as I am grateful to all those anthropologists, historians and others who have never relented in their documentation of ways and encounters with others. Amongst these, I am particularly thankful to Jean-Pierre Warnier, a French anthropologist and historian who has written extensively on various aspects of Mankon since the 1970s, and who has always sent copies of his writings to the palace, where he is known as Sangto’ – the Palace Courtyard – a title I gave in 1974 in recognition of his achievements for Mankon. My acknowledgement also goes to Mafo Sangto’ Jacqueline Leroy, his wife at the time, for her two detailed books and a number of articles on the Mankon language. It is pleasing to know that they have remained committed and active in their study of and interaction with Mankon, inspiring our own scholars to rise to the challenge of...

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