Genealogies, Family Secrets, and a Curious Ethnologist in West Africa
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| Free Admission |
| Ground Floor, Hall 3 |
| Part of: Lecture series Family Matters |
Prof. Dr. Carola Lentz, Seniorforschungsprofessorin für Ethnologie an der Johannes Gutenburg-Universität Mainz, ehemalige Präsidentin des Goethe-Instituts.
Family trees, family secrets, and a curious ethnologist in West Africa. Almost four decades ago, Carola Lentz was welcomed into a large Ghanaian family. As in many African families, educational paths and professional careers, places of residence, and lifestyles have diverged greatly over time. This makes the memory of common ancestors and regular visits to the village of origin even more important for the cohesion of the extended family. However, the younger, educated generation has different expectations of a good family history than their rural relatives. The remembered family past is therefore controversial, and some things are marked as “secrets” by some. Memory practices and their media are also new. Memorial services are replacing
ancestral sacrifices. Drawn family trees, ancestral tables, and photo albums supplement oral narratives. The lecture explores these changes and the conflicts that accompany them. Family history, it concludes, can not only unite but also divide.
Carola Lentz is an anthropologist and senior research professor at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Her work focuses on ethnicity and nationalism, colonialism and decolonisation, state and family politics of memory, educational biographies and the middle classes in the Global South.
After initial field work in South America, Carola Lentz has conducted research in West Africa for the past forty years. In one of her current book projects, she is tracing her ancestral roots and studying family networks in Germany and Ghana. A second project studies the biographies, social affiliations and self-images of four generations of educated men and their families from North-Western Ghana. She received the Melville J. Herskovits Prize in 2014 for her book Land, Mobility and Belonging in West Africa.
Carola Lentz was president of the Goethe-Institut from 2020 to 2024. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.