In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Conclusion Explaining Cultural Adaptation and Epistemological Abandonment In 1985, David William Cohen challenged historians of Africa to do more than chart the history of Africa in terms of its responses to large world processes . They should also concentrate at least equally on exploring those intimate areas of social life within African communities that shifted and changed in response to local forces,changes which then intersected with the large structural forces to create social histories particular to the communities studied.1 Many responded to Cohen’s challenge. Countless studies have documented the ways in which local concerns have so entangled global processes that only by focusing on this entanglement can one truly understand the power and the limits of both the global and the local. Those historians who have taken this approach, however, have tended to emphasize the local alone. They have demonstrated the extent to which local communities created their own modernities . They have documented how these communities have drawn upon selective aspects of the West and their own past beliefs, rede¤ning them according to largely local concerns and interests and then using them to structure everyday life. This approach has helped counter the notion that the West so dominated African societies that previous ways of knowing and operating were rendered irrelevant and useless for modern times. But insofar as these studies also tend to acknowledge only implicitly the power of the colonizing West to profoundly in®uence signi¤cant aspects of African societies, they fail to address certain questions critical to our understanding of why individuals and communities managed “the modern” as they did. This study has addressed this questions by not only documenting the full range of ways that colonized Africans managed their colonial encounter with the West, from creatively adapting the old to selectively embracing Western epistemologies; it has also sought to explain why certain modernities developed among the Anlo as they did. It has shown, for example, that despite all the exhortations and initiatives launched by missionary groups and British colonial of¤cers, most in Anlo (Christian and non-Christian, illiterate, semiliterate , and some among the highly literate) have continued to believe in the notion that many different spiritual forces exist in the world (forces other than those de¤ned as God) and that these forces act and can be in®uenced in ways that affect the lives of the living. The majority of Anlo resident in the 132 area still offer libations to their ancestors. They still pray to those spiritual forces that they believe can in®uence their destiny. Those with limited formal education, whether Christian or traditional believers, continue to believe in the power of a deceased individual’s spirit to harm that person’s living spouse. And while most have stopped erecting separate men’s and women’s bathhouses because they no longer accept the notion that men and sacred objects are disempowered when exposed even visually to the menses produced by women’s bodies, I discovered in 1996 that this belief, in modi¤ed form, still in®uences how some handle certain situations. In that year, I was told about a recent incident in which a thief—caught in the act of stealing—was apprehended by a crowd and forced to drink water recovered from the rinsing of menstrual cloths. Why this response? Those who caught the man decided that the only way to prevent any further stealing on his part was to render him harmless spiritually so that he would be unable to pursue his criminal activities . By forcing him to drink the water containing menstrual blood rather than simply viewing a menstrual cloth, members of the community acted on their belief that the spiritual content of the body was vulnerable to external intervention. These beliefs and practices are not simply retentions, however. They are indeed adaptations. Libations offered to ancestors are no longer offered on so regular a basis as they were in the past. They now tend to be con¤ned to special occasions. Where one buries the dead (for those who still believe in reincarnation) is in®uenced not only by this belief but also by a concern to inter the deceased in a location that will not contaminate the water supply. Menstrual blood affects men only when ingested; it no longer affects them when they merely see it. Equally signi¤cant is the fact that while some older beliefs and practices have been modi¤ed or abbreviated, others have undergone more profound change. Among many...

Share