Arts, Visual History and the Mores: Typifying Palace Relics and Sculptures of the Grass field Region of Cameroon

The broad perspectives of the tradition and culture of the grass-field region of Cameroon as perceived through palace relics or artifacts and sculptures, embody much more than visual history and a synoptic recapitulation of the cosmology of the people. Often appreciated basically from their face values, palace artifacts serve as historiography and associated material for the representation of societal lore and mores. This is to say artifacts are more or less historical/ literary, as well as archeological representations begging for a critical attention beyond their surface fascination. In essence, grass field palace arts underscore the crucial place of signs and symbols in the articulation of cultural and traditional practices that characterize a people in space and time. Through the compact and systematic use of codes, the extensive and intensive zoomorphic symbols effectively capture the values and beliefs embedded in the politically stratified cultural systems. This paper is thus premised on the hypothetical assumption that grass field palace artifacts, together with their precast motifs, recapitulate the collective world views of the people. The objects and their associated paraphernalia speak to the dynamism of their cultural insights. In this regards, the pictographic representations do not only define the depth and scope of the people’s public informative medium, but also point to the hidden power of the indigenous knowledge systems. Significantly, this paper underpins both the value and the need to formulate policies for the protection and preservation of the complex practices and depth of indigenous systems. Our analyses are anchored against the theories of structural functionalism as propounded by Bronislaw Malinowski and also the theory of social semiotics by Hodge and Kress