Lela In Bali

"Lela in Bali tells the story of an annual festival of eighteenth-century kingdoms in Northern Cameroon that was swept up in the migrations of marauding slave-raiders during the nineteenth century and carried south towards the coast. Lela was transformed first into a mounted durbar, like those of the Muslim states, before evolving in tandem with the German colonial project into a festival of arms. Reinterpreted by missionaries and post-colonial Cameroonians, Lela has become one of the most important of Cameroonian festivals and a crucial marker of identity within the state, Richard Fardon's reconstruction of two hundred years of history is an essential contribution not only to Cameroonian studies but also to the broader understanding of the evolution of African cultures."--BOOK JACKET.

Lela in Bali tells the story of an annual festival of eighteenth-century kingdoms in Northern Cameroon that was swept up in the migrations of marauding slave-raiders during the nineteenth century and carried south towards the coast. Lela was transformed first into a mounted durbar, like those of the Muslim states, before evolving in tandem with the German colonial project into a festival of arms. Reinterpreted by missionaries and post-colonial Cameroonians, Lela has become one of the most important of Cameroonian festivals and a crucial marker of identity within the state. Richard Fardon’s recuperation of two hundred years of history is an essential contribution not only to Cameroonian studies but also to the broader understanding of the evolution of African cultures.

Collects almost five hundred entries that cover the African response to spirituality, taboos, ethics, sacred space, and objects.

This book offers a critique of the all pervasive Western notion that other communities often live in a timeless present. Who Needs the Past? provides first-hand evidence of the interest non-Western, non-academic communities have in the past.

Tiger in an African palace collects eight essays about kinship and belonging that Richard Fardon wrote to complement his monographs on West Africa. The essays extend those book-length descriptions by pursuing their wider implications for theory in social anthropology: exploring the relationship between comparison and historical reconstruction, and questioning the fit between personal, ethnic and cosmopolitan identities in contemporary West African nations. In an Introduction written specially for this Langaa collection, Richard Fardon retraces the career-long development of his preoccupation with concepts of identification and transformation, and their relevance to understanding West African societies comparatively and historically.

Traditional African musical forms have long been accepted as fundamental to the emergence of blues and jazz. Yet there has been little effort at compiling recorded evidence to document their development. This discography brings together hundreds of recordings that trace in detail the evolution of the African American musical experience, from early wax cylinder recordings made in West Africa to voodoo rituals from the Carribean Basin to the songs of former slaves in the American South.

Cameroon is a country endowed with a variety of climates and agricultural environments, numerous minerals, substantial forests, and a dynamic population. It is a country that should be a leader of Africa. Instead, we find a country almost paralyzed by corruption and poor management, a country with a low life expectancy and serious health problems, and a country from which the most talented and highly educated members of the population are emigrating in large numbers. Although Cameroon has made economic progress since independence, it has not been able to change the dependent nature of its economy. The economic situation combined with the dismal record of its political history, indicate that prospects for political stability, justice, and prosperity are dimmer than they have been for most of the country's independent existence. The fourth edition of the Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Cameroon has been updated to reflect advances in the study of Cameroon's history as well as to provide coverage of the years since the last edition. It relates the turbulent history of Cameroon through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and over 600 cross-referenced dictionary entries on significant persons, events, places, organizations, and other aspects of Cameroon history from the earliest times to the present.

This book explores the relevance of classical ideas in the anthropology of time tothe way we understand history, participate in the events around us, and experienceour lives. Time is not just an abstract principle we live by or a local cultural construct: it is shaped, punctuated, organized, and suffered in complex ways by real people negotiating their lives and relations with others. Space may be opened up for politics, violence or revolutionary change within the framework of ceremonial markers of social time: holy days, festivals and carnivals. People create and recreate patterns in the way they imagine the past, present and future at such moments, through material objects, language, symbolic action and bodily experience. The rhythms of social life, including periodic episodes of sacred or special time, interact with 'historical events' in strange ways. They are fundamental not only to the human condition but to the making andremembering of history, as well as to what we recognize as the unexpected or abnormal. The Qualities of Time brings anthropologists and archaeologists together in a new conversation about the 'patterns' of our understanding and experience of time. The authors reflect on how we should interpret evidence about the distant past, andhow far the structuring of social time is a human universal. They also consider whether anthropology itself has been so oriented to the present it has still to develop ways of dealing with temporality. The interactions of time-structures, ceremonials, and specific historical events, including violence inspired by the millennium, are interrogated. The experience of individuals who feel the times are for them 'out of joint' is also examined. By combining socio-cultural, philosophical and historical approaches, thisthought-provoking book moves anthropological debates about time's qualities wellbeyond existing studies.This book explores the relevance of classical ideas in the anthropology of time toth