Desire and Death

The book makes a significant contribution to anthropological discussions of culture and history, and uses important archival and ethnographic sources about the Chagga of Kilimanjaro. The author examines the encounter between the Chagga socio-cultural order and a German lutheran mission. The careful consideration of that encounter offers a compelling counter-example to the seminal work on British missionizing that has thus far dominated missionary studies in Africa. The author takes the historically derived cultural categories into the contemporary ethnographic context characterized by material and moral crisis and the event of AIDS.