Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

CHRISTIANITY AND THE EWE NATION: GERMAN PIETIST MISSIONARIES, EWE CONVERTS AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE

CHRISTIANITY AND THE EWE NATION: GERMAN PIETIST MISSIONARIES, EWE CONVERTS AND THE POLITICS OF... <jats:sec><jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>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 romanticist, 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.</jats:p> </jats:sec> http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of Religion in Africa Brill

CHRISTIANITY AND THE EWE NATION: GERMAN PIETIST MISSIONARIES, EWE CONVERTS AND THE POLITICS OF CULTURE

Meyer, Birgit
Journal of Religion in Africa , Volume 32 (2): 167 – Jan 1, 2002
Download PDF
33 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/brill/christianity-and-the-ewe-nation-german-pietist-missionaries-ewe-ue1vRfNINw

References (2)

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© 2002 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0022-4200
eISSN
1570-0666
DOI
10.1163/157006602320292906
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

<jats:sec><jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>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 romanticist, 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.</jats:p> </jats:sec>

Journal

Journal of Religion in Africa – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 2002

There are no references for this article.