Suchergebnisse

In the summer 2010 a small group of Namibians visited Denmark in order to present and disseminate knowledge of the so-called Bushman culture in an experimental archaeological park outside Copenhagen. The staging of the event was in many ways similar to the kind of display that has been termed "human zoo"or "live ethnographic exhibition", so popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but there were also significant differences to be found. The discourse of cultural and racial authenticity that informed the live ethnographic exhibitions a hundred years ago was also called upon in the performances in 2010. However, the political and to a certain extent the exhibition contexts were different, as were the possibilities of appropriating long-lasting and pervasive ideas of "Bushman-ness"to various political ends. In this article, the effects of the recent recurrence of this practice of live ethnographic exhibitions are analysed through concepts such as authenticity and coevalness and their wider political potentialities are discussed.

The article has a double objective: to emphasize the diversity of the roles and career opportunities that foreign missionary activities could provide for female missionaries, and to show how converts spawned by these missionary endeavours used their new religious affiliation and faith to actively change their worldly positions and possibilities. The analyses are based on published and unpublished material from the tiny Scandinavian mission society 'Den Frie Østafrikanske Mission', that worked in Natal and Zululand in present day South Africa from 1889-1899.