Circulating loss: Snakes, melancholy, and the affective memory of trauma in Grassfields birth rites

Abstract

Trying to accommodate the puzzling coexistence of two formulations of human conception and reproduction in a Cameroon Grassfields polity, the article assesses birth rites both as a symbolic-synchronic process stressing human agency, and as a set of practices of embodied social memory emphasizing the status and the agentive potency of a nonhuman entity. Building on the ethnography and drawing inspiration from the literature on trauma and affect, the article suggests that birth rites re-enact experiences of separation, attempt at mastering experiences of loss, and produce melancholic subjects. In this process, humans and nonhuman entities are active agents as both are endowed with feelings and have the capacity to mediate/move affective states, thus constituting the loci through which (traumatic) memories are transmitted and remain alive in the Cameroon Grassfields today. In conclusion, the article points out to the potential of certain aspects of a dominant variant of affect theory while also bringing out some of its limitations and weaknesses and the need to complement it with concepts that it usually excludes from its scope of analysis as antithetical to its premises.