The current collection of articles grew out of a panel, entitled “Reconsidering the Grassfields,” that Jonathan Fine and I co-chaired at the Sixteenth ACASA Triennial Symposium on African Art held at the Brooklyn Museum in 2014. The panel sought to bring together scholars working on any facet of the arts in the Grassfields, an area of Cameroon comprising largely the Northwest and West Regions. Originally referencing this area's terrain, the term “Grassfields” was early on extended to connote the shared cultural heritage of the numerous groups located there.
As it turned out, all of the papers presented on the panel focused on matters of cultural heritage and collecting practices. This should have come as no great surprise. The area is notable for the extraordinary number of museums established there within the last two decades. The establishment of these museums has been supported by outside NGOs, although they certainly also respond...