Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter

Angebote / Angebote:

Greene gives the reader a vivid sense of the Anlo encounter withwestern thought and Christian beliefs... and the resulting erasures, transferences, adaptations, and alterations in their perceptions of place, space, and thebody." -- Emmanuel Akyeampong Sandra E. Greenereconstructs a vivid and convincing portrait of the human and physical environmentof the 19th-century Anlo-Ewe people of Ghana and brings history and memory intocontemporary context. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork, early European accounts, and missionary archives and publications, Greene shows how ideas from outside forcedsacred and spiritual meanings associated with particular bodies of water, burialsites, sacred towns, and the human body itself to change in favor of more scientificand regulatory views. Anlo responses to these colonial ideas involved considerableresistance, and, over time, the Anlo began to attribute selective, varied, and oftencontradictory meanings to the body and the spaces they inhabited. Despite thesemultiple meanings, Greene shows that the Anlo were successful in forging a consensuson how to manage their identity, environment, and community.