Ethnicité et nouveaux mouvements sociaux au Cameroun

Abstract

The institutionalization of new social movements (NSM) in Africa has provided a relevant field of study to social and political anthropology that helps to understand collective mobilizations in a context of democratization. It is about understanding the significant expressions of African new social movements by being nevertheless careful about Western-centric approaches in the study of mobilizations. The main idea here is that the anthropology of mobilizations in Sub-Saharan Africa should consider ethnicity as cultural technology that structure the formation and the action of new social movements. This study particularly focuses on Cameroon, a Central African country with many new social movements whose collective action cannot be understood if their ethnic dimension is not considered. Two main conclusions of this study are: the formation of new social movements based on the ethnicity from the pre-colonial period to the post-colonial period and the preponderance of the ethnic discourses over the nationalist ones in social mobilizations.