A processual perspective on utopia as a lived social project: the case of a Ghanaian ‘Christian Town’

Abstract

ABSTRACT How can we understand the concept of utopia when looking at a religious social utopia in practice? To unpack this question, the article retraces the motif of the ‘Christian Town’ or ‘Salem’ in the Apenkwa congregation of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana through more than a century of narratives and practices. Drawing on historical and ethnographic data, the article demonstrates how the utopian religious ideal can function as a powerful symbol for the self-identification of a religious group in practice. It shows how this motif is perpetuated by actors across different cultural and religious backgrounds and over several generations. Most significantly, it shows that all this is quite independent of the ‘success’ or ‘failure’ of the utopian social project itself. Based on these observations, the paper proposes to theorize utopia, in the case of lived social utopias, as both a vision and a process.