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3 Placing and Spacing the Dead Prior to the mid-nineteenth century, Anlo perceptions of their built environment1 were based on the notion that their homes, the physical layout of their villages and towns, and the placing and spacing of the dead served many purposes and had multiple meanings. Houses provided shelter and comfort and symbolized one’s social status.But they also constituted one of the sites where living family members maintained spiritual connections with the dead. They contained shrines and charms to protect the residents from harm. They represented for most born in these houses the spiritual center of their social lives. The priorities that informed Anlo ways of organizing their towns and villages were also based on both practical and religious concerns, through which the physical and the spiritual were so intertwined as to be inseparable. Access to drinking water and good agricultural land and the desirability of having a large household whose members were close at hand in®uenced Anlo settlement patterns. But efforts to maintain one’s health and wealth within the many homes and towns and villages of Anlo also in®uenced the way the residents used their houses and spatially organized their communities. The Anlo believed that by burying the aged in the ®oors of their own homes,by building one’s house on the foundation of an ancestor’s dwelling, by establishing the boundaries of towns and villages and then disposing the bodies of those who died in war at the edge of settlements in shallow graves, they could maintain relations with the dead, who in turn were able to in®uence both the physical and spiritual health of their families and communities. By the late nineteenth century, however, the Anlo’s understanding of their built environment and its interconnected spiritual and material characteristics had come under serious attack. In their ever-expanding network of schools and churches, the Bremen missionaries encouraged their parishioners to understand the physical as something quite distinct from the spiritual. If constructed for and by true Christians, homes, cemeteries, and places of worship represented the re¤ning power of the religion because it encouraged believers to renew not only their inner spirits but also their surrounding physical environment. But such places had no spiritual signi¤cance beyond the symbolic. The Bremen missionaries rejected completely the notion that 61 the location of one’s home or the graves of one’s relatives could have a direct impact on the spiritual and physical health of the living. To them, the Anlo’s built environment—insofar as it was deeply in®uenced by “idolatry and heathenism”—was a direct re®ection of the darkness in spirit that also characterized their indigenous religion. Both were primitive. Both were physically and spiritually unhealthy. Comments like the following made by a number of missionaries between 1872 and 1907 were typical: If you climb onto the roof of our house to take a look at Keta, the impression is no different from the view you get when you examine a . . . village. Straight rows of houses, an even-ness in the lay-out and decent streets on which you could walk with some pleasure are out of the question. You have to be glad if only a path leads to every front door; and you don’t see anything of cleanliness and order either.2 [In] the notorious Anglo-ga . . . the streets (or more precisely the paths) are so narrow that the thatch roofs of the houses very often meet.3 One cannot pass another on these streets shoulder to shoulder, but must pass by sideways. Fearful children or women often turn their heads to face the wall or suddenly turn around and run hastily away when they meet a white man in such a street. . . . [Only after we left this place] could we breathe more easily after the long stay in the humid and unhealthy atmosphere of the con¤ned town.4 The shrines for the idols tend to be the worst in the village . . . [as] idolatry and heathenism pull the human spirit deeper and deeper into the depths . . . allowing no higher thoughts of wonderful accomplishments.5 Not all Bremen missionaries viewed the Anlo built environment and the beliefs that in®uenced its organization in these terms,6 but the vast majority did. More important, this majority was able to take comfort in the fact that they were not alone in their views.7 In 1875, when Britain began administering Anlo as part of...

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