Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs

Front matter

Threatened Reproduction and

Identity in the Cameroon Grassfields M

Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii Pronunciation Guide xix Cast of Characters xxl

Introduction: Fertility and the Politics of Identity in Cameroon 1 Chapter 1. The Short-lived Marriage of a King’s Wife:

Paulette’s “Plugged Fertility” and Blocked Mobility 15 Chapter 2. Being Bangangté: Social Organization

Preface

This book about women’s fear of infertility in an area renowned for its fecundity was inspired by the overwhelming concerns of the people I worked with during fifteen months of anthropological fieldwork in 1983, 1986, and 1997 in Bangangté, a Bamiléké kingdom of about 60,000 residents in the highland Grassfields of Cameroon. Despite a high birthrate in the area (the average woman bore more than six children during her reproductive years), Bangangté women were preoccupied with threats to their reproductive health. The threats that worried them so included biological infertility as well as social and supernatural impediments to good marriage, bringing a pregnancy to term, and socializing offspring to further reproduce a Bangangteé life-style. Individuals were worried about the conception, birth, and survival of their own children and were anxious about the decreasing population and number of births in the royal family. What is more, women used these complaints in their everyday negotiations with kin and with neighbors about what it means to be a woman, what it means to be Bangangté, and how Bangangté people can survive and get ahead in the economic and political upheavals that have rocked Africa over the past fifteen years.

Birth and fertility are not solely “natural” or “biological” events, but are also social processes with culturally and historically specific meanings. The rural African women at the center of my research revealed for me a core of shared images of procreation and social reproduction, centered on cooking. They also demonstrated to me that not all Bangangté worry about reproduction in the same way or to the same extent. Their concerns are shaped by the multiple and changing hierarchies within Bangangté society, including both the formal rankings centered around palace life and the educational and economic mobility within the modern Cameroonian state. These dimensions of social differentiation affect the beliefs about health and society, the potential consequences of infertility, and the experience of physical and social vulnerability. The complex meanings of infertility for the lives of Bangangté women can only be understood through a combination of symbolic, historic, and political-economic analysis. Real-

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor xii / Preface izing these interconnections for the case at hand has convinced me that medical anthropology needs to be firmly grounded in a holistic, multidimensional sociocultural anthropology.

My interest in rural Bangangté beliefs regarding health, illness, and reproduction was stimulated both by key ideas from anthropological literature and by previous research experience. Studies of gender awakened my curiosity in the varying relevance of gender categories for organizing social life in diverse cultures and in how women’s experience of recent social change differs from men’s. Medical anthropological literature on therapeutic management, combined with my Peace Corps experience in 1980-81 as a female health worker in southern Cameroon, led me to inquire how change in women’s status has affected their perception and experiences of illness and health care. Data collected in 1983 during preliminary fieldwork centered in Maham, an outlying village of Bangangté chiefdom, indicated that different groups of Bangangté villagers disagreed about the causes of medical misfortunes and appropriate strategies to deal with these afflictions. These beliefs appeared to have changed through time, in association with specific social, political, and economic contexts. In accounts of recent Bangangté witchcraft afflictions, women were most often cited as both causes and victims of witchcraft. The disturbance of human reproduction was a prominent theme both in these witchcraft stories and in everyday conversation. Archival research in 1984, 1985, and 1987 indicated that depressed fertility was represented as a problem throughout the past century by diverse groups of Europeans and Africans competing for Grassfields labor and allegiance.

Representations of reproductive illness thus emerged as a theme of central interest to present-day Bangangté women as well as to diverse actors with divergent interests over time. My research reflects this intense involvement in both present and past. For the entire twelve months of my 1986 fieldwork I lived in the royal compound of Bangangté, using this as a base for participant observation at the palace, in the surrounding quarter and two additional villages, in Bangangté town and at numerous health-care institutions, indigenous and biomedical, in Ndé Division. Almost as soon as I had asked mfen (paramount chief or king of Bangangté) Njiké Pokam for permission to live near the royal compound, he and his wives assigned me the fictive kinship status of younger sister to one of the mfen’s many wives, in this case his white wife, the daughter of French missionaries born and raised in Cameroon. I was invited to reside within the two wives’ quarters of the palace grounds as the mfen’s visiting sister-in-law.

For the first four months I shared the two-room mud kitchen-house of Louise, the second queen. For the next eight months I lived in my own 4 x 4 meter hut in, the first queen’s quarter. Since I did not have my own

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Preface / xiii kitchen, I ate with my “sister” and her cowife Jeanne in their shared kitchen, informal meeting place of the entire palace population. As my friendship with the elderly Che’elou developed until she became recognized as my “grandmother,” I occasionally ate with her. Living in the two women’s quarters and eating at the royal wives’ hearths was a unique chance to observe firsthand health beliefs and practices in everyday life, and patterns of alliance and accusation among cowives in disputes regarding fertility. I also chose the royal compound as the main research site because there the interweaving of religious and secular activities and of traditional king-centered and modern nation-state authority were most apparent.

Bangangté reactions to me and my presence, while always generous and tolerant, were as varied as the individuals involved and changed through time as we got to know different things about one another and to present ourselves accordingly. The royal wives at first described formal hierarchy in the royal compound as if it were the most important aspect of their daily interactions with their cowives. Only later were patterns of rivalry and alliance revealed, often crosscutting these formal hierarchies. Both royal wives and village women gave me schoolbook descriptions of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth for months before I discovered the extent of the belief and fear that other women, especially cowives, could steal one’s fetus. As time passed, informants’ trust and willingness to confide in me increased. More importantly, the sorts of things they told me changed as their perceptions of my role and personality, and thus the kind of impression they wanted to make on me, developed. For example, after my husband’s first visit to Bangangté, some avenues of communication were closed, and more were opened. As the royal wives’ impressions of me changed from “runaway childless wife” to “good wife waiting for her husband,” they confided more to me about childbirth, sexuality in marital relations, and their cowives’ alleged extramarital consorts, and less to me about their own consorts.

The effect of differences in informants’ perceptions of my role as fieldworker upon the data gathered became very clear when I began doing structured interviews with women in two different field sites. I conducted 42 interviews lasting between 40 and 75 minutes with 16 women living in two hamlets near the royal compound and with 26 women in the distant village of Bantoum. I had lived among the women of Ntanleme and Batela’ (two communities near the palace) for 10 months, engaging them in conversation but not conducting formal interviews or ostentatiously taking notes. They largely resisted my attempts to interview them, to change the relation from one of neighbors to one of interrogator/interrogated, over which they had less control. Both informants and myself as

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor xiv / Preface fieldworker experienced a conflict about my two roles of participant and observer. In Bantoum, by contrast, I had accompanied a female community development agent to the village several times over a period of eight months before I came to stay for two weeks to interview women. These women always perceived me as “stranger” and “worker” conducting a community study to help women. They were eager to be interviewed and to present their particular views of village and family relations.

My research with Bangangté women continued throughout the 12 months of fieldwork. I used French and Bangangté languages, the latter often with a younger neighbor of the interviewee as interpreter although I also managed by myself. I conducted research on health-care practitioners in segments, parallel to my work with Bangangté women.

My observations and interviews in biomedical institutions were concentrated in the first third of the fieldwork stay. As with village women, my relation to biomedical staff of all levels in the two hospitals and four clinics studied changed through time. For example, doctors who at first called popular healers “worthless” on later encounters told me about referring patients to indigenous practitioners. As their impressions of me changed from someone wanting to “weed out charlatanism” to a relative “sympathizer with traditional medicine,” they gave me more differentiated information on their relations with popular healers. I returned to these biomedical institutions toward the end of the fieldwork to collect 53 written questionnaires from personnel in each division and of each status from each institution. The 20-item questionnaires asked informants to identify and rank major local health problems, discuss their familiarity with fertility and sterility cases, and discuss their attitudes toward indigenous medicine.

During the second third of my fieldwork I concentrated on the study of indigenous healing, interviewing seven indigenous practitioners (five herbal and spiritual healers, one spirit medium, and one diviner) and observing their treatments and interaction with clients. I also studied one healers’ association and interviewed civil servants on their attitudes toward popular healing.

Toward the end of my fieldwork I aimed to collect the direct words of the next generation of Bangangté parents. Two hundred thirty schoolchildren, from primary school through the last year of high school, wrote essays on any one of the following four topics: family planning and the importance of children; monogamy and polygyny; therapeutic choice for women suffering from sterility; and advantages and disadvantages of indigenous medicine and biomedicine. The schoolchildren received their essay assignments through the cooperation of their regular teachers, some of whom I knew personally and some of whom were introduced to me by my “sister” from the royal compound, a lycée teacher herself.

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Preface / xv

The data presented in this book are as unchanged from their original sources as possible. In my translations of French and Bangangté quotations I have tried to be true to original nuance. To protect individuals’ anonymity, I have changed the names of all informants except kings, who are public figures, and the king’s French wife, who has become a celebrity after being the subject of a television documentary. I have used French first-name pseudonyms for all informants who are habitually addressed with their given French names. For the mostly older informants who are commonly addressed with their ndap (praise names indicating a parent’s village of origin), I have retained the original ndap.

I returned to Bangangté in 1997, visiting with the widows, orphans, and successor to mfen Njiké Pokam. The issues revealed during my 1986 fieldwork were apparent in even sharper contour in 1997. A decade of economic crisis left women, and men, feeling physically and socially vulnerable. Exchange networks among kin between urban and rural areas were even more important, but there was less wealth to distribute, and patterns of flow were often disrupted. Being Bangangté was a resource for survival in economically troubled times, but could also be a liability in the national political arena. The meanings of ethnicity, gender, and fertility remained prominent topics of local debate.

A final note on language and terminology: Bangangté people call their language Medumba. For simplicity, I refer to Medumba in the text as Bangangté or Bangangté language. I have simplified the spelling of Bangangté words in the text, but in the glossary I have included the orthography currently used by CEPOM, a local Bangangté organization that gives summer sessions in reading and writing Medumba to Bangangté children and adults.

I have struggled with the most appropriate terminology for types of health care in a pluralistic setting. The health planning literature describes two types of health care with the words traditional and modern. When using these terms, I refer to the statements and attitudes of health planners. When discussing popular forms of healing indigenous to Bangangté and the Grassfields, I follow the most common Bangangté practice by referring to “indigenous” healing. In so doing, I hope not to offend some Cameroonian intellectuals who associate this word with the French term indigène and its connotations of colonial oppression. When referring to the kind of healing practiced in hospitals and clinics, I prefer the term biomedical to Bangangté common usage of modern. With this eclectic approach I hope to avoid the implication that, in contrast to biomedicine, indigenous healing in contemporary Bangangté is “unmodern” or anachronistic.

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Acknowledgments

Of the many persons and institutions to whom I am indebted, I can formally thank only some by name.

I thank the following institutions that provided funds for field and archival research: the Sigma Xi Foundation for Scientific Research and the Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, for preliminary fieldwork in 1983, the National Science Foundation (Graduate Fellowship) for archival research in summer 1984, the U.S. Department of Education Fulbright Dissertation Research Program in 1986 fieldwork in Cameroon, and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for archival work in 1985 and 1987. Iam grateful for several Faculty Development Endowment grants and for funds from the Dean’s Discretionary Account of Carleton College to facilitate writing, preparation of the final manuscript, and my 1997 return to the field.

In Cameroon, I thank the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research (MESRES) and the local authorities of Bangangté for institutional support and research permission. In this context I am especially grateful to Dr. Jean Nya Ngatchou, Dr. Paul N. Nkwi, Jean-Calvin Boog of Bangangte, the late mfen Njiké Pokam François, and the current mfen Nji Monluh Seidou Pokam. For collaboration and encouragement in professional aspects of the work, I thank Prof. Jean Mfoulou, Prof. Augustin Akoudou, Dr. Alain Froment, Mme Marie-Guy Froment, Dr. Flavien Tiokou Ndonko, and Annette and Dr. Wim Thijs. Many other Cameroonians and expatriates, including the staff of USIS-Yaoundé, helped at various stages of the work. I am grateful to the director and staff of the Institut de Formation et de Recherche Demographique and of OCISCA for their generous aid and discussions during my 1997 trip, as well as to the Ndonko family for sustaining food and intellectual exchange.

None of this work could have been accomplished without the patient and generous hospitality of the people of Bangangté. My heartfelt gratitude goes to Mlle Adrienne Keyete (Bangangté), Mme Emilienne Tondji (Bantoum), Dr. Jean-Claude Kwechi and his wife (Bantoum), and especially the wives of the late mfen Njiké Pokam. My adopted grandmother

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor xviii / Acknowledgments

Che’elou, mothers Nda’gou and Nyombab, and sister Nteshun among them deserve special recognition.

In Europe, the personnel of numerous archives allowed me access to crucial records on the history of Bangangté society and its health-care institutions. I especially value the help of Hartmut Miller and Herr Junker of the Staatsarchiv Bremen; Herr Steinberg of the Handelskammer, Bremen; Mme Jourdan of the Archives Techniques du Service de Santé de la France Outre-Mer, Marseille; J. F. Maurel of the Archives Nationales; Marie-Christine Held of the Département évangélique français d’action apostolique (DEFAP), Paris; and Claude Tardits for the gift of his personal archives on Bangangté.

Writing the thesis on which this book is based was improved by exchanges with numerous colleagues. I am particularly grateful to committee members Gillian Feeley-Harnik, David Cohen, and Emily Martin for valuable comments on the thesis as a whole. Eugenia Shanklin and Doris Blank gave valuable comments on specific chapters. The invaluable intellectual and personal encouragement of Gillian Feeley-Harnik throughout fieldwork and write-up deserves my deepest thanks.

Chapter 3 is revised from an article originally published in American Ethnologist 22, no. 3 (1995): 483-501, and is reprinted by permission of the American Anthropological Association. Chapter 4 is revised from an article originally published in Social Science and Medicine 39, no. 4 (1994): 463-74, and is reprinted by permission of Elsevier Science. Other portions of the book have been presented at various colloquiums and conferences. In each case, and in the process of transforming a thesis into a book, I benefited from participants’ or anonymous reviewers’ comments, as well as from the valuable suggestions of Don Brenneis, Michael Herzfeld, Alma Gottlieb, Marcia Inhorn, Ivan Karp, Corrinne Kratz, Jessica Kuper, Joachim Savelsberg, and my knowledgeable and incredibly goodhumored editor at the University of Michigan Press, Susan Whitlock.

My American and German families continued their undaunting encouragement throughout this endeavor, and some made special contributions to the illustrations. Joachim Savelsberg took many of the photos and did measurements for the map of the royal compound. Heinrich Savelsberg prepared this detailed map. Susanne Savelsberg drew the remaining maps and diagrams.

As Tangun and member of the society of nobles of Bangangté, my husband Joachim Savelsberg secured my position as royal sister-in-law Nteshun at the palace in Bangangté generally. With his patience, wit, and insight, he enlivened my life and work on three continents. Our daughters Anna and Rebecca jumped for joy when I finished the last chapter. To all three, I am eternally grateful.

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Pronunciation Guide

The Bangangté language (Medumba) is a tonal language; rising and falling tones make a difference in the meaning of words. Accent marks on Bangangté words indicate tones.

The glottal stop (what English speakers would have to do to pronounce “a ark”), a common consonant in Bangangté, is indicated with an apostrophe. Nasals (e.g., “ng” or “mb”) are part of the consonant blends, not separate syllables.

ng asinngaka is pronounced as in looking nt asin Nfeshun is pronounced as in and mf asinmfi is usually pronounced mf, but is pronounced my in mfen (sounds like mvuhn)

The Bangangté language has many vowels that do not appear in spoken English. These are written with phonetic characters, according to the CEPOM orthography, in the glossary, and with simplified Latin letters in the body of the text.

a written ain the text is pronounced between “ah” and “aw” similar to “awl”

ə written e in the text is pronounced “uh” as in “the”

€ written e in the text is pronounced “eh” as in “head”

o written o in the text is an “open o” similar to “Noah” (but one syllable)

a written uin the text is similar to “u” in the French “tu”

In addition to these vowels, the consonant c in the CEPOM orthography is pronounced “ch” as in “cherry.”

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Cast of Characters

The following people appear frequently in the story of this book. A complete list of kings of the Bangangté dynasty appears as an appendix.

The Kings Mfen François Njiké Pokam (reigned 1974-87) Mfen Nji Monluh Seidou Pokam (reigned 1987-present) Wives of Mfen Njiké Pokam In the first queen’s quarter Josette (the mabengoup, or first queen) Paulette (an unfortunate newlywed who fled the palace in 1986) Claude (daughter of French missionaries) Che’elou (eldest woman in the royal compound in 1986; had been the mfen’s nursemaid) Marguerite (seamstress, secretary of the village tontine or rotating credit association) Jeanne (friend of Claude) Sanke (mother of Nji Monluh Seidou Pokam) In the second queen’s quarter Louise (the nzwikam, or second queen) Rebecca (often Marguerite’s rival) Corinne (married mfen Njiké Pokam around the same time as Paulette) The Healers Felix Nana Mfen Meshinke’ (elderly subchief of Bantoum)

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Introduction

Fertility and reproductive health are intimate, physical matters. They are also deeply gendered, social matters, involving men and women and eliciting intense interest from the surrounding kin, community, and state. This book is an anthropological study of procreation imagery and of women’s concerns with reproduction in Africa. It is about the symbolic language of food and fertility that expresses women’s fears of infertility in a specific locale. It is also, more generally, about gender, modernity, and struggles over cultural identity.

These broad connections lead us away from single-hypothesis explanations in medical anthropology, while underscoring the relevance of medical anthropology to other anthropological specializations. Such insights regarding the mutually constituted nature of social life and idioms of affliction, however, remain empty polemic when separated from rich ethnography. The message of this book is therefore grounded in a particular setting, the Bamiléké kingdom of Bangangté in the west-central African country of Cameroon.

Bangangté is one of the five most prominent of some hundred Bamiléké kingdoms in the lush, densely populated highland Grassfields region spanning the West and Northwest Provinces of Cameroon. Over nine decades it has provided both food and personnel (laborers, merchants, taxi drivers, and scholars) for the development of Cameroon’s cities and agribusinesses. But back home, “au village” or “in the village” (as Bamiléké refer to the kingdoms, towns, and hamlets of the Western Province), this agricultural and demographic wealth is lost in a cloud of existential worries and a rhetoric of complaint.

The people of Bangangte, especially Bangangté women, seem preoccupied with threats to their reproductive health. I first arrived in Bangangté planning to do research on medical pluralism, to explore how Bangangté patients and health professionals managed! the enormous variety of indigenous and cosmopolitan health-care alternatives. During the

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

1980s, the people I lived with and visited instead told me hair-raising stories of babies stolen from their mothers’ wombs, of plugged fallopian tubes, and of infant deaths. They lamented that the royal household had too few children. Their concerns about their own ability to have descendants, and the future of their kingdom in the face of population decline, seemed paradoxical. Standard demographic indicators suggested that the Bamiléké people are among those with the highest birthrate in Cameroon.” What was it about the meaning rural Bangangté women gave to their experiences that led them to be so anxious about infertility? As I investigated women’s expressions about infertility and threats to procreation I discovered indigenous conceptions of fertility and vitality linked to a strong king (mfen in the local language; referred to as fon throughout the English-speaking Western Grassfields),> of illness, vulnerability and decline exacerbated by the loss of political autonomy, and of the close relation among cooking, feeding, and procreation in Bangangté cosmology.

Using the same idioms of food, cooking, and provisioning to talk about both phenomena, Bangangté cosmology links women’s human reproduction and royal social reproduction. But royal social reproduction does not occur smoothly; the position of Grassfields kingdoms in relation to the Cameroonian state is currently in flux. The particularities of Bangangté highlight the ways that women’s complaints about the apparently physical matters of fertility are conditioned by and also comment upon political, social, and economic change. This message emerges from a specific setting but applies broadly to societies as diverse as the Gambia (Bledsoe 1997), Egypt (Inhorn 1994a, 1996), Madagascar (Feeley-Harnik 1995), Benin (Sargent 1982, 1989), Congo (formerly Zaire) (Devisch 1993), China (Greenhalgh 1994; L. Handwerker 1995), Italy (Kertzer 1993), the United States (Becker 1994; Sandelowski 1993), or England (Strathern 1992).

Fertility and Infertility Studies: Demography and Phenomenology

This focus on complex connections is gaining ever greater attention in work on fertility in anthropological demography, and on infertility in medical anthropology. Building upon insights from social theory regarding agency and structure (Giddens 1976), and from feminist anthropology regarding the politics of reproduction (Handwerker 1990; Rapp and Ginsburg 1991), Susan Greenhalgh has called for a multidisciplinary “political economy of fertility” (1990, 1995). Her approach draws heavily on anthropological concepts and methodology to examine the relation among fertility, gender, and “the political-economic dimensions of social and cultural

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor organization” (1990:95), of which gender itself is a “pervasive force” (1995:24). Demographers working in Africa are ever more mindful of social, cultural, and economic change, largely in an attempt to explain the relative (and anomalous) stability of high fertility in sub-Saharan Africa. The Caldwells suggest that, in many sub-Saharan African societies, belief in the efficacy of ancestors to dispense fortune and misfortune and the importance of extended kin relations support high fertility (Caldwell and Caldwell 1987). Frank and McNicoll describe high fertility as a strategy women use to ensure access to land and labor within the context of marriage, bridewealth, inheritance, and land tenure institutions (1987:11). Economic insecurity may erode these social institutions as well as eroding women’s motivations to maintain a strategy of high fertility (Price 1996). In a study of contraceptive use in the Gambia, Bledsoe finds that, surprisingly, reproductive mishaps (e.g., miscarriages, stillbirths) are often followed by periods of contraceptive use (1997). This look at anomalous cases of subfertility and contraception “out of place and time” uncovered previously uncharted territories of women’s knowledge regarding their bodies, reproductive capacity, and aging. What is it about the meaning and experience of these reproductive mishaps for individual women that leads to these aggregate results of higher contraceptive use? The insights of work in medical anthropology on the meaning of infertility point toward an answer, even though most of this literature is based on the experiences of women in low-fertility, high-technology societies.

Studies of infertility in medical anthropology emphasize the effects that infertility has on the lives of infertile men and women. They use infertility as a tool to reveal the dynamics of gender inequality and family life (Inborn 1996), notions of success and failure (Becker 1994), and cultural conceptions of kinship (Modell 1989). Infertility allows anthropologists to examine how people make sense out of unexpected, unfortunate events, manage the fragmentation of experience associated with perinatal loss (Layne 1992) and prenatal diagnosis of disability (e.g., Rapp 1988, 1993), and respond culturally to the “never enough” quality of conception-assisting new reproductive technologies (Sandelowski 1991, 1993).

A Cameroonian Rhetoric of Misfortune

This book builds upon these two bodies of work by examining how a rhetoric of misfortune and a culturally specific symbolism of procreation are tied to socially structured experience. It investigates how women use infertility symbolically to comment on their lives and how they struggle, through an idiom of infertility, to find a language that gives meaning and makes comprehensible the ways their lives are affected by social change.

Feldman-Savelsberg, Pamela Lou. Plundered Kitchens, Empty Wombs: Threatened Reproduction and Identity In the Cameroon Grassfields. E-book, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999, https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.16324. Downloaded on behalf of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

These women enact concepts of personhood, social status, and cultural identity through their tales of reproductive threats and through their quest for fertility. In so doing, they draw upon a symbolic repertoire of procreation imagery focused on metaphors of the kitchen and cooking. These metaphors, elements of which are common to several central and east African societies (de Boeck 1995; de Heusch 1980; Devisch 1993; Douglas 1966; Richards 1956; Weiss 1996), include visions of sex as heat; the womb as hearth or cooking pot; ova, sperm, and blood as ingredients; gestation as cooking and stirring the pot; and birth as serving a meal. The imagery of marriage refers to the kitchen, simultaneously a physical and metaphoric locale that draws the wife inside the husband’s village, kin group, and compound. The term for marriage is cooking inside, as the wife’s marital duties are to grow crops and cook food for her family while metaphorically “cooking” babies within the bounds of the nuptial kitchen.