Collecting practices in Bandjoun, Cameroon: Thinking about collecting as a research paradigm

Collecting is not a western prerogative but a bundle of different widespread trans-cultural practices of shaping and representing reality: a form of concrete thinking operating through things, in ways that are always locally diversified. The case study of the little town of Bandjoun (West Cameroon) shows us a great variety of collecting practices through which people, groups and authorities, are attempting to strategically position themselves in a changing world. The creation of visualscapes and related narratives offer them the means to precariously arrange past and present, private and public sphere, politics and market, “traditional” culture and global art. Furthermore Bandjoun offers us the possibility to rethink the “collection” as a paradigm both at the level of the ethnographic research and at that of the practices in the field.