RT Article
T1 Christianity and the Ewe nation: German pietist missionaries, Ewe converts and the politics of culture
JF Journal of religion in Africa
VO 32
IS 2
SP 196
OP 199
A1 Meyer, Birgit 1960-
LA English
YR 2002
UL https://ixtheo.de/Record/1642957593
AB Focusing on the mid-nineteenth-century encounters between missionaries from the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft (NMG) and the Ewe, this essay shows that the NMG employed a romanistic, Herderian notion of culture and nationhood to establish order and impose power, and sought to prevent Ewe converts from adopting Western influences in their own way. Through an analysis of the NMG's attitude to language and the nation, its linguistic and ethnographic studies, which were devoted to turning "scattered Ewe tribes" into one people, and the education of Ewe mission workers in Westheim (Germany), it is argued that, rather than denying African converts their "own culture", attempts were made to lock them up in it. Missionary cultural politics, the essay argues, thrived on a paradoxical coexistence of appeals made to both the new notion of the nation as a marker of "civilisation" and an "authentic" state of being. Thus, the NMG used the notion of the nation as a means to exert power, to assert the superiority of the West and to control converts' exposure to foreign ideas. (J Relig Afr/DÜI)
K1 Stamm : Ethnologie
K1 Volk
K1 Ewe : Volk
K1 Christentum
K1 Sprache
K1 Missionar
K1 Kolonialismus
K1 Nation
K1 Nationenbildung
K1 Kulturpolitik
K1 Kulturkontakt
K1 Togo
K1 Deutschland