L'espace, indicateur historique, révélateur structural : l'exemple bamoum (Cameroun)

Space as an Historical and Structural Key : the Example of the Bamoum Country (Cameroun) The task of historical reconstitution which continues in Africa must make use of all possible forms of information. Apart from the oral traditions, often rich but almost always placing before us certain presumptions, it is appropriate to make the greatest possible use of an analysis of the implantation into the soil of the constituent elements of society. Such analyses are customary in anthropology, rarely however going beyond the scale of the villages though they could be extended to the entire political sphere of a society. Investigations conducted in Bamoum country, beginning with the positions of all the descendence groups, have permitted the reconstitution of all the processes of the society's development since the foundation of the kingdom, probably in the 16th century, until the first decades of the 20th century and brought to the surface the homological relations between the state and the subordinate entities which are not discernible at the level of discourse. History and structure are thus illuminated by means of concrete data which, moreover, may be used either to invallidate or substantiate the oral traditons.Tardits Claude. L'espace, indicateur historique, révélateur structural : l'exemple bamoum (Cameroun). In: Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations. 40ᵉ année, N. 6, 1985. pp. 1261-1287