Il faut donner à manger aux gens. Pratiche culturali dell'alimentazione in Camerun /Food Cultural Practices in Cameroon

Food practices in Cameroon raise the question of the relationships between tradition and modernity, the local and the global, showing how deep, food and culture are embedded in politics, in the multiple power relationships and governance practices which are scattered throughout everyday life, both in the rural areas of Grassfields and in the urban space of Douala. Food experience is not just a matter of language: if food can be used as a political device, it is because it inscribes power relationships into the body: taste and disgust trace borders and frontiers, impose exclusions, define belongings and then allow to discriminate, to distinguish, and to rank people inside each social group in terms of good and bad taste. If food is often an instrument and metaphor for politics, it is also because it implies a necessary relationship between the outside and the inside, a handling of transformations, through the processes of ingestion, digestion, assimilation and evacuation: food raises the political question of borders and boundaries of what goes in and what comes out, and the ways to regulate these transits. Seen from this perspective, the Cameroon foodscape appears as a dangerous and competitive space in which the struggle between les gros et les petit ventres (big and little stomachs) is fought: if one is deficient in something it is because someone else has eaten him. Food brings people together, but also divides them; it involves not only conviviality, but predatory violence, unequal distributions, competitive consumption and gifts that poison social relationships, creating debt and dependency. Around the food are played the fundamental questions of life and death in all their material and imaginary aspects