Imagine you spend so much time in another country you ingrain yourself into the local community. When you return home, that home has become alien to you. That is the experience of Ama Boakyewa, a LBCC anthropology professor who undertook fieldwork in Ghana and learned to integrate herself into the community while researching a centuries old shrine with great importance to Ghanaian culture.
“You have to make the strange familiar, in order to live in a place, in order to absorb a place directly…Whatever was strange when I first went into the field became very familiar by the time I left, in fact, I didn’t even want to leave Ghana, I was so comfortable,” said Ama Boakyewa.
As part of her anthropology education, Boakyewa undertook fieldwork in Ghana, a country in West Africa which she was familiar with after having both visited and learned the language before her field work.
“It helped the fact that I had traveled to Ghana several times before my fieldwork, I had already known the culture, I knew people there, I knew the protocol,” said Boakyewa.
“That’s probably the most important thing, you have to know the protocol,” she added.
Boakyewa studied two subcultures for her fieldwork, the more populous Akan culture, and the less populace Guan, each of which have their own language.
Boakyewa spent all of 2008 within Ghana, spending eight weeks beforehand in intensive language training.
“After that one year, I felt I was more Ghanaian than I was American… that’s what happens to anthropologists,” Boakyewa said.
The type of experience that Boakyewa referred to is known as “culture shock” and occurs when entering another culture, and then again when returning to your own culture.
“In Ghana you don’t waste water, because it’s very precious,” said Boakyewa, describing a small example of culture shock she experienced after noticing she had become more aware of water being left running and wasted.
Boakyewa spoke of how much more centered on family the Ghanaian culture in Larteh was compared to back home in the United States, where our lives are much more “compartmentalized.”
While living in Ghana, she lived in a compound with about 20 other people at any given time and took public transportation to get around, usually in crowded minivans called “trotos.”
“I had no running water, no working toilet or shower… I took my bucket baths in a concrete shower room outside with privacy provided. I had to walk to the outside toilet which needed another bucket of water for flushing. This was a communal toilet,” Boakyewa said.
Boakyewa spent her fieldwork in Larteh, a town in eastern Ghana home to the Akonedi Shrine, a traditional shrine from the 1800s.
“It was extremely popular. Presidents of the country had come to the shrine for healing, for work, for consultation,” Boakyewa said.
Much of Boakyewa’s fieldwork consisted of interviewing the different families within the town of Larteh, gaining contacts and building trust between her and the people of the town.
Her research also focused on the priests and healers of the Akonedi Shrine and its religious significance to the people of Larteh and Ghana itself.
When interviewing these priests and healers, Boakyewa would ask for them to tell their life story, learning of their lives from the very beginning to the present.
She even visited at least three funerals of priests, with funerals being an important ritual in the culture of Ghana which links back to how much Ghanaian culture is focused on family compared to the United States.
Boakyewa first found interest in the field of anthropology when she began working part-time at the African Burial Ground Project (ABGP) in New York City. At the time she was still working full-time as a system’s station master at the railroad company, Amtrak.
After leaving the ABGP in 1996, she decided to return to Indiana and complete her undergraduate degree in Pan-African studies at the University of Louisville then immediately went into a PhD program in Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington.
Boakyewa now teaches several anthropology classes on LAC, including cultural anthropology and even a class on Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion.