Karla Poewe (born 1941) is an anthropologist and historian. She is the author of ten academic books and fifty peer reviewed articles in international journals. [1] Currently Poewe is Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada and Adjunct Research Professor at Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, England. She is married to Irving Hexham.
Born 1941 in Königsberg, East Prussia, Poewe became a refugee at the age of three after 189 Lancaster bombers from No. 5 Group of the British RAF dropped 480 tons of bombs on the city centre. [2] Her family was moved to a small estate in Poland, staying several weeks before being moved again. Almost six months later they found themselves in the vicinity of Dresden just in time for the bombing. From Dresden they were moved to Plauen in Saxony and eventually spent three years in Werdau before walking over 250 miles, after the death of Poewe's father, to cross into the British Zone near Göttingen. From there they went to the small town of Buxtehude. Poewe's memories of this period were published as Childhood in Germany during World War II (1988). [3]
Poewe worked as an air hostess with Trans-Canada Airlines before entering the University of Toronto where she won several prestigious scholarships. [4] Originally planning to study medicine, she switched to Anthropology. After completing her B.A. she enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of New Mexico where Harry Basehart was her thesis supervisor. Poewe studied for a while with John Middleton at New York University and learned Swahili and Bemba at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The fieldwork for her Ph.D. thesis was carried out in Zambia. [5]
After the completion of her thesis she taught for a year at the University of Toronto before moving to the University of Lethbridge in Alberta. [4] She then carried out further fieldwork funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in Namibia. [4] During this time she published her first book, Matrilineal Ideology (1981), [6] followed by Reflections of a Woman Anthropologist (1982). This book, which helped pioneer a new genre of anthropological writing, was, at the publisher's insistence, published under the pseudonym Manda Cesara. [7]
After Poewe married Irving Hexham the two co-authored Understanding Cults and New Religions (1986) and New Religions as Global Cultures (1997). Poewe began fieldwork in South Africa where she studied the rise of Charismatic Christian Churches and the relationship of their members to apartheid. This ground-breaking work resulted in an International Conference held at the University of Calgary in 1993 on the topic of Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture, [8] which led to the publication of a book with the same title. [9]
Poewe's fieldwork in South Africa came to an end in 1989 when a close friend, the Rt. Rev. Londa Shembe, leader of one branch of the Zulu African Independent Church amaNazaretha, was assassinated and two other friends were also murdered. These tragedies led Poewe to redirect her research interests to looking at the role of missionaries in the areas of Africa where she had studied. The fall of the Berlin Wall enabled her to freely access the archives of the Berlin Mission Society. While working in these archives in 1995 she discovered a large amount of material dealing with conflicts between members of the Berlin Mission and National Socialists. [10]
This material provided the basis for a new project concerning the role of religions in the rise of National Socialism which took almost ten years to complete and resulted in her latest book, New Religions and the Nazis (2006). [11] Currently Poewe is studying the treatment of German refugees following the end of World War II and is interested in the impact of defeat on the defeated. [12]
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The Völkisch movement was a German ethno-nationalist movement active from the late 19th century through to the Nazi era, with remnants in the Federal Republic of Germany afterwards. Erected on the idea of "blood and soil", inspired by the one-body-metaphor, and by the idea of naturally grown communities in unity, it was characterized by organicism, racialism, populism, agrarianism, romantic nationalism and – as a consequence of a growing exclusive and ethnic connotation – by antisemitism from the 1900s onward. Völkisch nationalists generally considered the Jews to be an "alien people" who belonged to a different Volk from the Germans.
Eric Robert Wolf was an anthropologist, best known for his studies of peasants, Latin America, and his advocacy of Marxist perspectives within anthropology.
Victor Witter Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals, and rites of passage. His work, along with that of Clifford Geertz and others, is often referred to as symbolic and interpretive anthropology.
Günther Bornkamm was a German New Testament scholar belonging to the school of Rudolf Bultmann and a Professor of New Testament at the University of Heidelberg. Under Adolf Hitler, he opposed the nazification of the Protestant churches and their unification into the movement of the 'German Christians'. His post-war fame as a scholar rested on his effort to separate fiction from facts in his reconstruction of Jesus' life and in his subsequent treatment of the gospel of Matthew. His brother was the ecclesiastical historian and Luther scholar Heinrich Bornkamm.
Irving R. Hexham is an English-Canadian academic who has published twenty-three books and numerous articles, chapters, and book reviews. Currently, he is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, married to Karla Poewe who is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Calgary, and the father of two children. He holds dual British and Canadian citizenship.
David Murray Schneider was an American cultural anthropologist, best known for his studies of kinship and as a major proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology.
Robert Francis Murphy was an American anthropologist and professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City, from the early 1960s to 1990. His field work included studies of the Munduruku (Mundurucu) people of the Amazon and the Tuareg people of the Sahara.
Kashikishi is a town on the south-eastern shore of Lake Mweru in the Luapula Province of Zambia. It lies just north of the district headquarters Nchelenge, and close enough for them to be considered twin towns; they are sometimes referred to as Nchelenge–Kashikishi.
Cathy A. Small is a cultural anthropologist and an emeriti professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University. She specializes in culture change, migration, and transnational studies with an emphasis on East Asia and the Pacific. In 2002, Small conducted a participant observation study of American university students and published her findings under the name Rebekah Nathan.
Eleanor Burke Leacock was an anthropologist and social theorist who made major contributions to the study of egalitarian societies, the evolution of the status of women in society, Marxism, and the feminist movement.
Jakob Wilhelm Hauer was a German Indologist and religious studies writer. He was the founder of the German Faith Movement.
Eleanor Kathleen Gough Aberle was a British anthropologist and feminist who was known for her work in South Asia and South-East Asia. As a part of her doctorate work, she did field research in Malabar district from 1947 to 1949. She did further research in Tanjore district from 1950 to 1953 and again in 1976, and in Vietnam in 1976 and 1982. In addition, some of her work included campaigning for: nuclear disarmament, the civil rights movement, women's rights, the third world and the end of the Vietnam War. She was known for her Marxist leanings and was on an FBI watchlist.
Irving Goldman was an American anthropologist. He is known for his acute ability to reconstruct the worldviews and systems of thought of the indigenous peoples whose lives and thought he analysed in several major works, some now regarded as classics in the field of anthropology.
The Rhodes-Livingstone Institute (RLI) was the first local anthropological research facility in Africa; it was founded in 1937 under the initial directorship of Godfrey Wilson. It is located a few miles outside Lusaka. Designed to allow for easier study of the local cultures of Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, it became the base of operations for a number of leading anthropologists of the time.
Social anthropology is the study of patterns of behaviour in human societies and cultures. It is the dominant constituent of anthropology throughout the United Kingdom and much of Europe, where it is distinguished from cultural anthropology. In the United States, social anthropology is commonly subsumed within cultural anthropology or sociocultural anthropology.
Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America is a folkloric and anthropological study of the Wiccan and wider Pagan community in the United States. It was written by the American anthropologist and folklorist Sabina Magliocco of California State University, Northridge and first published in 2004 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. It was released as a part of a series of academic books titled 'Contemporary Ethnography', edited by the anthropologists Kirin Narayan of the University of Wisconsin and Paul Stoller of West Chester University.
Erika Eichhorn Bourguignon was an Austrian-born American anthropologist known primarily for her work on possession trance and other altered states of consciousness. She was “considered the premier anthropological authority on trance, possession, and altered states of consciousness” and "one of the founders of the field of anthropology of consciousness." She was born in Vienna, Austria, but left with her parents in 1938. After receiving a B.A. from Queens College in 1945, she began graduate studies at Northwestern University, working there under Melville J. Herskovits and Alfred Irving Hallowell. She did field research among the Chippewa in Wisconsin and in Haiti (1947–48).
At the outbreak of World War II, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) had some 1700 members in Nazi Germany, divided into three provinces: Eastern, Lower and Upper Germany. Nazi leaders had some admiration for the discipline of the Jesuit order, but opposed its principles. Of the 152 Jesuits murdered by the Nazis across Europe, 27 died in captivity or its results, and 43 in the concentration camps.
Iviyo loFakazi bakaKristu is an evangelical and charismatic movement within the Anglican Church of Southern Africa.
Ernst Karl Alwin Hans Dammann was a German Africanist. With Walter Markov, he was one of the founders of African Studies in the DDR, and as a student of Carl Meinhof and the successor of Diedrich Hermann Westermann, was part of the "second wave" of German Africanists. A prodigious scholar of African languages and a one-time missionary in Tanga, Tanzania, he was an early member of the Nazi party, and his scientific work was criticized as imbued with racist ideology.
