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DFG-Centre for Advanced Studies Imaginaria of Force

Photo: Creative Commons/YaYapas

Prof. Dr. Birgit Meyer

Photo: Pooyan Tamimi Arab

Curriculum

Birgit Meyer is professor of religious studies at Utrecht University. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she studies religion from a material and postcolonial angle, seeking to synthesize grounded fieldwork and theoretical reflection in a multidisciplinary setting. A central concern of her research is a better understanding of the changing, diverse manifestations of religion in our time. She has written extensively on mission and colonialism in Africa; modernity and conversion; the rise of Pentecostal churches in the neoliberal era; the relationship between media, religion, and identity; heritage making; material religion; and the public role of religion in 21st-century West-Africa and Northern Europe. Her research in Ghana is embedded in her interest in broader conceptual issues related to the multiple manifestations of religion in the past and present, the coexistence of people from diverse religious, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, and the implications of colonial entanglements in our time. Characteristic of her work is her engagement with the corporeal, material, and political-aesthetic dimensions of religion from an anthropological perspective. This approach is at the core of the research program Religious Matters in an Entangled World (https://religiousmatters.nl/) directed by her since 2017. Visual culture and religious artefacts play a central role in her work. Recently she embarked on a collaborative project on the study of colonial missionary collections of ethnographic and other items kept in museums in Germany and the Netherlands.

Publications (selection)

Research project: Imaginaries of Forces in Colonial and Postcolonial Interfaces: the Legba-Dzoka Collection in the Übersee-Museum Bremen

Religion, however defined, involves the use of tangible forms to evoke a sense of and connect with another reality, which is perceived as beyond the ordinary or transcendent by those involved. In colonial encounters between indigenous populations and Western traders, administrators, missionaries and anthropologists, such forms received much attention under the heading of ‘fetish’ and ‘idol’. Taken to museums in Europe, such artefacts eventually have been recast as ‘power objects’. I understand such artefacts as situated in colonial and postcolonial interfaces of colliding Imaginaries of Force. What makes such artefacts powerful? Which forces are involved according to the different – missionary, Western-rational, indigenous - cosmologies and epistemologies in which these artefacts are framed? Where do connections with such forces lead? How to move beyond a superficial notion as ‘power object’ by taking seriously the idea of a force inhabiting an artefact? The background of my project in Hamburg is the transregional and multidisciplinary Legba-Dzoka research project which studies and tracks the provenance of a missionary collection of artefacts from the Ewe (Southern Ghana and Togo) which includes ‘legba’ figures and ‘dzokawo’ (‘amulets’) kept in the Übersee-Museum for more than 120 years. So far, I have conducted research on the alienating represenations of these artefacts in their trajectory from Westafrika to Bremen on the level of terms. My fellowship in Hamburg will allow me to concentrate on the material semantics of force that pertain to ‘legba’ figures and ‘dzokawo’, as well as to the colonial and Christian concepts as ‘idol’, fetish’, ‘magic’ into which these artefacts have been hijacked. In this way, I aim to contribute to extend the idea of Imaginaries of Force to a critical exploration of the postcolonial configurations of which ‘legba’ figures and ‘dzokawo’ are part, and which they may help us unpack from the vector of force.