From idol to art : African 'objects with power' : a challenge for missionaries, anthropologists and museum curators

After his theological studies, Harrie Leyten (1935) worked as a missionary in Ghana for ten years. He studied social anthropology at Oxford University and became Africa curator of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam in 1975, and taught at the University of Amsterdam and the Reinwardt Academy in Amsterdam. His thesis has become a reflection of his long career. In it, he deals with questions such as: how have (mostly European and American) anthropologists viewed objects with power since Tyler's theory of Animism in the 19th century? How have African anthropologists in the past decades reacted to these views? The same questions are put with regard to (mostly European) missionaries who have been active in Africa since the middle of the 19th century: how have they viewed (in their perception: pagan) objects with power? How have African theologians in the past decades reacted to these views? Throughout the thesis emphasis is laid on the way material culture has been described and interpreted in books on (traditional) African art. The differences between ethnographies from the colonial era and those of more recent times are amplified.