Masks and Staffs

<p> The Cameroon Grassfields home to three ethnic groups - Grassfields societies Mbororo and Hausa - provide a valuable case study for the anthropological examination of identity politics and interethnic relations. In the midst of the political liberalization of Cameroon in the late 1990s and 2000s local responses to political and legal changes took the form of a series of performative and discursive expressions of ethnicity. Confrontational encounters stimulated by economic and political rivalry as well as socially integrative processes transformed collective self-understanding in Cameroon in conjunction with recent global discourses on human minority and indigenous rights. The book provides a vital contribution to the study of ethnicity conflict and social change in the anthropology of Africa.</p>