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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Missionary societies as sites of knowledge
| Panel |
70. Trading Places: Knowledge Production and Transfer between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa - the Missionary Context
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| Paper ID | 303 |
| Author(s) |
Harries, Patrick
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Knowledge about Africa is generally associated with the secularisation of
universities and with the democratisation of these institutions after World War
II. In this presentation I concentrate on Missionary Societies as sites for the
accumulation of knowledge about Africa in the years before universities came to dominate this ground. Missionaries brought to Africa by their vocation applied to the new continent a range of practices and ideas. Through these systems of knowledge, missionaries and their peers made sense of the world in which they lived. In Africa they dominated various fields of learning well into the twentieth century. These stretched from botony to zoology (including
ornithology and entomology); from geology to meteorology and, perhaps most importantly, from linguistics to ethnology and medical science.
In the presentation I concentrate on the contribution of missionaries to the
sciences in Africa. The presentation is also concerned with the ways in which
Africans contributed to these systems of knowledge and with the ways in which they were empowered by these ideas and practices.
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