The Figure of Grassfields “cadet”. Contribution to the History of an Anthropological Concept

‪This article returns to the genesis and progressive development of the anthropological category of cadet in Grassfields chiefdoms. This retrospective examination shows a definition framework always in step with the times, successively established in the wake of the debates—political, scientific and societal—that marked the discipline. Abandoning the twin notion of “young,” permanently deprived of real heuristic value, this knowledge project attached to the cadet takes part in the history of anthropology and Africanism. The almost exclusive attention paid to the older/younger couple here proceeds from a broad reassessment of the tools allowing to think about the economic and political nature of the societies observed from the angle of domination and conflict. This retrospective also reveals how ethnography, in the sense of plural knowledge developed in a culturally circumscribed area, constitutes, beyond belonging and specialization, a corpus in its own right, one and indivisible.‪