This chapter concerns the constitution of Annang society and the intersections of corporate and individual modes of identification. It outlines the key elements of Annang personhood in relation to lineage, initiation and conceptions of the soul. It links the genealogy of shape-shifting beliefs and a shifting symbolic landscape to gendered and generational tensions wrought by a succession of changes from yams to slaves, and from slaves to palm oil, in local modes of production during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Finally, the chapter examines the relationship between Christianity and colonialism in patterns of conquest and conversion within Annang society at the turn of the twentieth century.

POWER AND PERSONHOOD

Identities in Annang society are conceived in intimate and intersecting relationships between people, place and the past. Personhood concerns ancestral relationships within the lineage, relationships with cohorts through initiation, and relationships with the natural world through animal affinities. Annang selfhood is therefore internally constituted of various external elements. These three main components, which are changing and contingent, configure social and political identities, shape conceptions of agency and explanation and, crucially in Annang beliefs, they configure a further aspect of the self, power.