Nicolas Argenti

Things that don't come by the road: Folktales, fosterage, and memories of slavery in the Cameroon grassfields

Oku adults have a straightforward rationalization for the existence of folktales: the frightening cautionary tales of the child-eating monster K∂ηgaaηgu serve to warn children not to go to the fields or to stray too far from the house without their parents. But this rationalization is belied by the fact that adults in this chiefdom of the Cameroon Grassfields do not tell folktales to children. Rather, folktales are most often told by children amongst each other, with no adult involvement, and they are consequently learned by younger children from older ones. This is an unusual situation in West Africa, where the norm is for adults to tell folktales to children. For all we know, adult-to-child storytelling may have been the normal practice in the Grassfields in the past, but if it ever was, this practice has now passed into desuetude, and today adults look with mild scorn on folktales ( f∂ngaanen , ∂mgaanen pl.) and generally remain aloof during storytelling sessions. Storytelling in the Grassfields is therefore a child-structured form of play in Schwartzmans (1978) sense: it is an activity mediated by children without adult input. Prior to the introduction of schooling in the Grassfields, children used to be made to guard the crops against birds and monkeys, an activity that left them to their own devices in the fields for long periods of the day (Argenti 2001; see also Fortes 1938; Raum 1940). In some cases, children actually slept in small shelters that they built in the fields, and they would consequently stay away from their homes and adult supervision for days at a time. It was in this context, away from the censorious gaze of adults, that childrens illicit masking activities developed (Argenti 2001). It may also be in this context that children were able to indulge in prolonged bouts of storytelling without fear of reproof by adults, in whose eyes children should be seen but not heard. Today, children no longer guard the fields, and they have therefore taken to telling their folktales at home.

Laughter Without Borders: Embodied Memory, and Pan-Humanism in a Post-Traumatic Age

Trauma has been argued to facilitate a new global humanism in anthropology, representing a turn in the discipline away from Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s ‘savage slot’ that saw other peoples as objects of difference toward a new empathetic embrace that seeks communion in suffering. This chapter examines the costs of such empathy, highlighting the reductionism involved in depicting social groups as cultures of trauma. It presents two case studies, one from Cameroon and the other from the Aegean island of Chios, to suggest that suffering need not result in trauma, but rather that our common humanity might also be found in the widespread practice of ritual laughter.