Book Description
"This is a fascinating work that analyzes the colonial encounter through a nuanced examination of the realm of cognition and belief." --Emmanuel Akyeampong "Greene's work is an original, wide-ranging, and engaging scholarly contribution to the literature on colonialism and religious change in sub-Saharan Africa. . . . Greene sheds light on the process of cultural interaction in a way which does not diminish African capacity and resiliency while acknowledging the power of Europeans to shape local discourse." --John H. Hanson
About the Author
Sandra E. Greene is Associate Professor of African History at Cornell University. She is author of Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe and is working on a book on religion in the Atlantic slave trade. She is past-president of the African Studies Association.
Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana FROM THE PUBLISHER
Sandra E. Greene reconstructs a vivid and convincing portrait of the human and physical environment of the 19th-century Anlo-Ewe people of Ghana and brings history and memory into contemporary context. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork, early European accounts, and missionary archives and publications, Greene shows how ideas from outside forced sacred and spiritual meanings associated with particular bodies of water, burial sites, sacred towns, and the human body itself to change in favor of more scientific and regulatory views. Anlo responses to these colonial ideas involved considerable resistance, and, over time, the Anlo began to attribute selective, varied, and often contradictory meanings to the body and the spaces they inhabited. Despite these multiple meanings, Greene shows that the Anlo were successful in forging a consensus on how to manage their identity, environment, and community.
Art & Photography
Book Info
