Department of social anthropology seminar with Nicolas Argenti

The Department of Social Anthropology has the pleasure to invite you to a seminar with Nicolas Argenti from the Department of Anthropology, Brunel University. He will present the following paper:

"Things of the ground. Children's medicine, motherhood and memory in the Cameroon Grassfields"

Abstract
Soon after birth, infants in the Cameroon Grassfields chiefdom of Oku are submitted by their parents to rites known generically as ‘children’s medicine’. Ostensibly performed to protect infants from harm and illness, the rites are in fact fraught with tension: they embrace contradictory perspectives regarding the social role of the mother and belie the normative ideal extolling her as a figure of nurture and protection. The article argues that, beyond their overt purpose and symbolism as rites of passage, the rites evoke collective memories of child abductions and contemporary anxieties regarding the anticipated departure of older children and adolescents into foster care or migrant labour. Going beyond a classic tripartite model, the article takes a long-term view that sees life-crisis rituals as a form of collective memory that bears witness to social tensions that cannot be resolved – in this case the contradictions inherent within the hallowed image of the mother and the compromised nature of parental love.

Bionote
Since 1990 Argenti has carried out research on youth and childhood, social hierarchy, and collective memories of slavery and political violence in the Grassfields of Cameroon. Argenti received his doctorate from University College London in 1996 on a thesis examining the exclusion of young people from both local hierarchies and national elite structures, focusing on young people and children's use of dance, art production and other embodied practices to confront their social subordination and their periodic subjection to state-sponsored violence. A major monograph, The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields (University of Chicago Press 2007), examines the historical development of youth as a political force in the Cameroon Grassfields, focusing on collective memories of political violence to which young people have been subjected since the era of the slave trade.

In 1997-1998, Argenti carried out postdoctoral research in Southern Sri Lanka, examining the changing role of healing performances amongst children and young soldiers in a context of political violence. In 2002 he co-edited a book on youth in Africa with Alex de Waal that brings together the Issue Papers prepared for the Pan African Forum on the Future of Children in Africa, jointly held by UNICEF and the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Cairo in May 2001.

Argenti has continued his investigation into historical memory in Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission, a book co-edited with Katharina Schramm on the relationship between violence and memory which brings together case studies from round the world, including Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Central and South America, and Africa (Berghahn Books 2010). His ethnographic research has recently focused on fosterage in Cameroon (Argenti 2010 and 2011).

All interested are welcome!

Best regards
BSAS Comittee