Religion – Nature – Imperialism: Negotiations of Worldviews and Protestant Mission in Cameroon’s Ecosystems between the 1880s and 1930s

• Applicant: Dr. Diana Lunkwitz
• Subject Area: Protestant Theology
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 547245787

Based on the work of the Protestant mission in Cameroon between the 1880s and 1930s, the project aims to connect the history of mission and religion with the history of environment and commerce. The goal is to investigate a threefold research gap on the connectivity of ecosystems and the missionaries’ worldviews, of ecosystemically changed worldviews and the study of religion, and of nature-human imaginations and the further development of constructions of race and systems of economic liberalism.The main research interest therefore subdivides into the following key research questions: (A) How were imaginations of religion, nature, mission, and humanity conceptualised both by the locals and the missionaries? (B) How were the missionaries’ worldviews and theologies negotiated in Cameroonian ecosystems and power asymmetries? What dynamics can be identified with regard to the dichotomy of wilderness and cultivated nature? (C) What significance did the conceptualisations of the employees of missionary societies have for the historiography of religion? (especially on Islam, witchcraft, magic, and secret societies) (D) What translocal and inter-imperial impact did these reshaped worldviews have on debates in theology, the history of religion, the production of knowledge in science, and on socio-political debates? How were the worldviews of missionaries who worked in Cameroon (not) received in order to initialise, stabilise, or counteract liberal structures in theology, the study of religion, politics, and science? This includes an examination of world-making and globality in the historiography of religions in Africa, with a simultaneous analysis of exclusion patterns in the transcontinental entanglements.First, the study shall be conducted on the basis of archival material from the Basel Mission Society, the German Baptist Mission, and the American United Presbyterian Mission. Next, it will be pursued with oral data resulting from interviews with local experts in Cameroon. The working hypothesis is that during colonial rule in Cameroon, first the missionaries’ worldviews and then strategies by which religion was studied were renegotiated in connectivities and interrelations within the ecosystems. Finally, these transformations contributed to the development of a conditio humana to legitimise the domination of the entire biosphere. The research project intends to elaborate and interpret the reconceptualisations of human and religion in their ecosystemic conditions. Interdependencies with African agency will therefore also be exposed for subsequent studies in religio-environmental history.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants