Background & Research Interests:
I received my doctorate from University College London in 1996. My thesis, The Material Culture of Power in Oku, North West Province, Cameroon, examined the exclusion of young people from both local hierarchies and national elite structures, focusing on young people and children's use of dance and other performance genres to confront their social subordination and their periodic subjection to state-sponsored violence. In 1997-1998, I 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 I co-edited a book on youth in Africa 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.
My monograph, The Intestines of the State: Youth, Violence and Belated Histories in the Cameroon Grassfields, an ethnography of the development of youth as a political force in the Cameroon Grassfields, came out with the University of Chicago Press in 2007. I have continued my investigation into historical memory in Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission, a book I co-edited 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. This volume is coming out with Berghahn Books in the Autumn of 2009. My ethnographic research has most recently focused on fosterage in Cameroon and I have two articles in press on the subject.
I will be on research leave for the 2009-10 academic year, begining a new research project on social memory in Chios, Greece.
Recent Publications:
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2006. 'Remembering the future: slavery, youth and masking in the Cameroon Grassfields,’ Social Anthropology 14(1): 49-70.
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2005. 'Dancing in the borderlands: the forbidden masquerades of Oku youth and women (Cameroon)', in F. DeBoeck & A. Honwana (eds), Makers and Breakers: Children and Youth in Postcolonial Africa . Oxford: James Currey, and Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press.
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2004. 'La danse aux frontières: les mascarades interdites des femmes et des jeunes à Oku', in Jean-Francois Bayart and Jean-Pierre Warnier (eds.) Matière à politique. Des corps, des objets, du pouvoir. Paris: Karthala, pp.151-180.
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2002a. Young Africa: Realising the Rights of Children and Youth. Alex de Waal and Nicolas Argenti (eds.) Trenton, NJ and Asmara: Africa World Press.
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2002b. 'Youth in Africa: a major resource for change,' in Young Africa: Realising the Rights of Children and Youth. Alex de Waal and Nicolas Argenti (eds.), Trenton, NJ and Asmara: Africa World Press, pp.123-154.
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2002c. 'People of the chisel: apprenticeship, youth and elites in Oku (Cameroon),' American Ethnologist 29(3): 497-533.
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2001. 'Kesum-body and the Places of the Gods: The politics of children's masking and second-world realities in Oku (Cameroon),' Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 7(1): 67-94. [ PDF ]
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1999a. Is this how I looked when I first got here? Pottery and practice in the Cameroon Grassfields. British Museum Occasional Paper 132. London: Trustees of the British Museum.
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1999b. 'Ephemeral monuments, memory and royal sempiternity in a Grassfields kingdom.' In The Art of Forgetting. Adrian Forty and Susanne Küchler (eds.). London: Berg. Pp. 21-52.
- 1998. 'Air youth: performance, violence and the state in Cameroon,' Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(4):753-782 [PDF].
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