Missionary practices: German -speaking missionaries between the home committee and colonial environment in the Gold Coast (West Africa), 1828--1895.

This research investigates the practices of German-speaking missionaries of the Basel Mission on the Gold Coast (Ghana), West Africa, in the nineteenth century. Practices are defined as the different aspects of attitudes or discourse that express the mode of response in the colonial environment. In a limited sense, the term excludes questions of religious education and civilization. Rather, it refers to discourse and actions that reflect the missionaries' ethnographical and cultural perceptions and symbolisms concerning power relationships with the local inhabitants, and questions about cross-national alliances between the mission and the colonial governments. The primary focus is on Andreas Riis, Rosine Widmann and the local recruit, Carl Reindorf. Concerning methodology, I used a structuralist approach relying strongly on Tzvetan Todorov's The Conquest of America. His concept of signs helps one to identify and analyze the internal structures, contradictions and events, i.e., the aesthetic and binary rhetoric of colonial relationships for possible meanings. The dissertation fills an important gap in the field of German studies by shifting the center of gravity of anthropological researches on missionaries or German missionaries, in particular from southern and eastern Africa and China, to a region in West Africa. In addition, it seeks to make sense of the particularities of German colonialism in terms of the notion of cross-national alliances. In recalling Todorov's perception of history, this dissertation helps us to reflect upon ourselves, to discover resemblances as well as differences with the missionary questions. The conclusion suggests that cultural background and race mattered in determining power relations but that gender did not make any difference at all.Ph.D.Cultural anthropologyGerman literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsPhilosophy, Religion and TheologyReligionSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124295/2/3137925.pd