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1 Introduction 1. Forty years of research in the making Take a human subject. Put him in contact with other subjects in a given situation. If he plays the interactive game, something will happen. What kind of thing? No one can predict. It is said that one of Napoleon’s generals asked him how to win a battle. As usual, the Emperor gave a curt reply: “Get involved and see what happens.” In principle, an anthropologist stands at the opposite of the military. However, they have one thing in common: if they get involved in a situation, something is bound to happen. In the case of the anthropologist, he will get to meet people, interact and observe. Then he will construct what happens as an anthropological topic. Except that, in the particular case, the observer and the observed are to some extent one and the same person. The anthropologist does not analyse a given people. He analyses his interactions with given subjects and groups. This is, it seems to me, how anthropology constituted itself as a particular academic endeavour, even if this is not the usual way to put it. If I am right, anthropology has been a haphazard and unpredictable venture because the scenario of the encounter has never been written in advance. Since anthropology defined itself as a professional pursuit, and until recently, anthropologists have been prone to keeping fieldwork in the straight jacket of standard textbook methods. But this is just pretence. As D. Fassin (2000) suggests contra O. Mannoni (1950) and J. Carothers (1954), there is nothing pre-determined in the encounter of different subjectivities that will dictate the patterns it will assume. This is true of the anthropological encounter. In other words, the notions of field of enquiry and fieldwork cannot be disconnected from the personal engagement of the researcher. This is, in my view, one of the basic differences between the sociological tradition and the anthropological one in Western countries, even if their ambitions are the same, that is, to produce some kind of educated, if not scientific, discourse on society and social processes. In this introduction, I propose to explain what it is that took place once I engaged into the local Grassfields situation. I do not entertain much illusion concerning the accuracy of such a belated reconstruction. However, what seems important in my view is not so much the autobiographical exactitude (however commendable) of such an endeavour, than the conclusions that may be drawn from this sort of experience, namely that the ethnologist is in possession of a multipurpose research tool upon which he may adjust all kinds of extensions or contraptions for more specialised purposes. This single, versatile, tool is nothing less that his own subjectivity. This point was made clear as early as the mid-1960s by Georges Devereux (1967), a psychoanalyst and anthropologist. His contribution has been a major turning point in the methodology and the epistemology of the social sciences, laying the foundations for a reflexive approach in anthropology. I endorse it wholeheartedly. In other words, this introduction constitutes a re-interpretation or a deciphering of the forty years of research I have so far spent in or around the Cameroon Grassfields. In May 1971, I set foot for the first time in Cameroon and, for that matter, in Africa. I was coming from Philadelphia in the United-States where I was reading anthropology at the graduate school of the University of Pennsylvania. The air temperature was about the same on both sides of the Atlantic. As far as all the rest was concerned, the contrast was utterly striking. What I remember is a feeling of confusion. This feeling became an 2 Introduction - 1. Forty years of research in the making enduring dimension of my life in Cameroon. It has never disappeared to this day although I tried hard to contain it by implementing all the methodological trappings of standard field research one may find in textbooks such as the most useful Notes and Queries in Anthropology. So much so that my successive enquiries in the field appear to me as so many, more or less successful or unsuccessful, attempts to find some kind of order, some kind of criteria to sort out and arrange the huge mass of new perceptions. At face value, I seldom knew if I should consider them as relevant to my research and therefore as worthy of my scholarly attention. Some of them, like the gesture of spraying raffia wine, accomplished by the...

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