ABSTRACT
Through her examination of Leipzig missionary, Bruno Gutmann, and his early twentieth-century work among the Chagga at Kilimanjaro and writings on religion and ethnography, Wetjen demonstrates how the Leipzig missions opposed the shift to industrialized modernism and were a laboratory for alternative, traditionally based conceptions of modern social order around the First World War. To make this case, she mines Gutmann’s ethnographic and theological writings and exposes how the extensive late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Protestant press and publication networks helped engender far-reaching knowledge transfer at the hands of missionaries. Missionary reports, scholarly monographs, and theological treatises not only transmitted knowledge about Africa into European pietistic and neo-Lutheran circles but also exploited this knowledge in a discourse that revolved around the importance of religion and especially Christianity in modernity. Wetjen argues that missionary scholarship intersected with discourses of modernity and helped shape a reconfiguration of church and society in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic. Her chapter shows that the mission field acted as a “mission laboratory” in which alternative conceptions of societal order and proposed ideas for a reconfiguration of modern Christian ways of life were invented and tested.
