Urbanites and Urban Villagers: Comparing 'home' among elite and non-elite Bamileke women's hometown associations.

              Africa 80 (3), 2010 DOI: 10.3366/E0001972010001531
URBANITES AND URBAN VILLAGERS:
COMPARING ‘HOME’ AMONG ELITE
AND NON-ELITE BAMILÉKÉ WOMEN’S
HOMETOWN ASSOCIATIONS
Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg and Tiokou Ndonko
In 1998, when Geschiere and Gugler addressed the politics of primary
patriotism and belonging, multi-partyism and structural adjustment
were still rather recent phenomena in Cameroon. Rural hometowns
were then described as a resource, giving legitimacy to urban male
elites in their endeavour to share the national pie. Identification with
the hometown was (and is) institutionalized in hometown associations.
De-emphasized in 1998 was the liability that hometown identification
could pose to rural–urban migrants in a climate of ‘increasing obsession
with autochthony’ (Geschiere and Gugler 1998: 309). That hometowns
were highlighted only as resources in subsequent work on the political
implications of hometown associations may be due to the neglect of
both non-elite and women’s hometown associations. To understand
how local conceptions of the units of belonging emerge from lived
experience, we need to attend to variation by status and by gender. This
approach fits well with the ethnographic field in Cameroon, since many
hometown associations are sex-segregated, as well as differentiated by
elite and non-elite designations.
This article reveals several ways in which we can reconceptualize
hometown associations and belonging. First, it differentiates among
actors and associations by gender and status. Second, it addresses the
great variety and situationally specific ways Bamiléké women use and
interpret the units of belonging (or what constitutes ‘home’). Third,
it addresses the autochthony debate from the perspective of allogènes
(ethnic strangers), in contrast to a more common focus on autochtones
PAMELA FELDMAN-SAVELSBERG is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of
Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, USA. The author
of Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: threatened reproduction and identity in the Cameroon
Grassfields (University of Michigan Press, 1999), and editor of Collective Memory and
Reproduction in Africa (Edinburgh University Press, 2005), her work focuses on the politics
of reproduction, gender, social networks and rumour. Her current research investigates how
childbearing intersects with the politics of belonging among transnational Bamiléké.
FLAVIEN TIOKOU NDONKO holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Universität Hamburg.
He taught Anthropology at the University of Yaoundé I (1993–2000) before switching to
the Ministry of Health, where he now works for the German–Cameroon Health and AIDS
Programme. Apart from his interest in medical anthropology and project implementation,
he has carried out anthropological research in Europe, focusing mostly on Germans and
their dogs. He has published a book on human excrement and is co-author of a book on
the public health consequences of rumour. He has also published more than ten articles in
different books or international journals, including Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry; Africa
Focus; African Anthropology; Collegium Anthropologicum; Medical Anthropology Quarterly; and
Africa.