Prof. Dr. Patrick Harries

Professor Patrick Harries is South African and Swiss. He graduated from the University of Cape Town where he taught from 1980 to 2000. He received his PhD from the School of African and Oriental Studies (SOAS), University of London (1983). In 2000 he was called to the University of Basel where he is holding the chair for African History. In Basel he helped to establish the Centre for African Studies. He has been a visiting professor or fellow at the Universities of Lausanne, the Humboldt-University in Berlin, the University of Wisconsin in Madison and Cambridge University. Patrick Harries has published numerous articles and book chapters on African history and historical methodology as well as two books, “Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant Labourers in Mozambique and South Africa, c.1860-1910” (Portsmouth, N.H.,1994) and “Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in Southeast Africa” (Oxford/Harare/Athens,OH). His main areas of interest are labour, slavery, knowledge and missionaries in African history.

The Secular and the Spiritual: Missionary Intellectuals and New Knowledge
Vortrag von Prof. Dr. Patrick Harries, 30. September 2011, 18:15 Uhr, Lichtenberg-Kolleg/ Historische Sternwarte

Patrick Harries will look at the long conversation between missionaries and native intellectuals in Africa. He will assess the contribution their learning made to systems of knowledge that came to be qualified as ‘universal’ – or simply ‘western’. Anthropologists have long been critical of missionaries. Indeed, missionaries often arrived in Africa with ready-made understandings of the natural and human environment to which they had been brought by their vocation. But through their collaboration with native informants and assistants, and in conjunction with their intellectual peers in the colonies and at home, many missionaries developed new ways of understanding their situation, and in the process they brought African ways of ordering and understanding the human and natural environment to the attention of the world.

Der englischsprachige, öffentliche Vortrag „The Secular and the Spiritual: Missionary Intellectuals and New Knowledge“ ist Teil des dreitägigen Workshops „Missionarinnen und Missionare als Akteure der Transformation und des Transfers: Außereuropäische Kontaktzonen und ihre europäischen Resonanzräume (1860-1940)“, zu dem das Lichtenberg-Kolleg und das Seminar für Mittlere und Neuere Geschichte der Universität Göttingen eingeladen haben.