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The purpose of my article is to inquire about the way that different kinds of image and object collections can construct social memory and articulate and express social and interpersonal relationships, dissent, and conflict. I will examine this topic through research carried out in the Bamileke kingdom of Bandjoun, West Cameroon, since 2002 (Fig. 1). The issues involved are to some extent analogous to those concerning the transmission of written texts: continuity and discontinuity; translations, rewritings, and transformations; political selections and deliberate omissions (Forty and Kuchler 1999). Nevertheless, things are not texts, and we must remain sensitive to the difference between them. In spite of a widespread stereotype that African societies do not preserve material culture, in the Grassfields, the West Cameroon highlands, we can identify several collecting practices animated by different interests, motivations, and aims. In fact,...