Abstract
The Mankon kingdom is located in the mountains of western Cameroon (the Grassfields). Although like many other African kingdoms it has since the 1980s been experiencing a revitalisation, the king is fully aware of all of the practices that have structured life in the kingdom for at least the past three centuries. His body contains substances that have been transformed into ancestral substances of life during offerings to his deceased ancestors, which he distributes to the entire kingdom. He thus embodies a pot‐king, a receptacle of the kingdom's life substances. The sensorimotor conduct and the material culture implemented by the monarch and his subjects lend themselves to a Foucauldian analysis in terms of subjectivising governmentality. The work of Foucault, formulated in the west, proves to be extremely relevant in shedding light on the microphysics of power in this kingdom. It also suggests the possibility of new comparative studies of such practices, which are hardly verbalised, and which constitute the essential aspects of devices of subjection and subjectivisation.
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