Cati Coe, Dilemmas of Culture in Schools: Youth, Nationalism, and the Transformation of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, November 2005. Cati Coe's Dilemmas of Culture in Schools sets out to interrogate the many ways in which has been locally delineated, naturalized, and subsequently transformed in relation to the Ghanaian state. Central to the production of Ghana's identity, the book argues, has been the role the state's educational apparatus has played in fostering an ideological landscape in which differences-ethnic and religious, regional and classbased-are subsumed under the totalizing auspices of a national As such, Coe locates her study in the schools of Akuapem, a quasi-suburban area about thirty miles northeast of Accra; significantly, it also happens to be a region distinguished by its long history of involvement with both Christianity and education. By focusing on Akuapem schools as a primary site in the engendering of what she calls a divided modernity, Coe is able ascertain the specific trajectories of notions of (sans quotation marks) as they are appropriated by the state and then filtered back to its citizens through pedagogies which, she asserts, oftentimes produce meanings of opposed to those originally intended by the state. As Ghana (like much of West Africa) has experienced a proliferation of discourses-charismatic Christianity and neoliberalism chief among them-which may or may not challenge the hegemonies of state institutions, the ways in which is taught, learned, and experienced becomes the terrain on which, Coe's study presupposes, the efficacy of its nationalist programs can be gauged. The book is comprised of two main parts, the first of which is concerned with sketching a genealogy of the concept of national culture as it was initially promulgated in schools founded by Basel missionaries and then, later, as the project was taken up by Ghana's nascent postcolonial government. Coe's analysis of the former venture-the missionary attempt to generate a sense of nationhood within a solidified British colony-marks a significant contribution to the literature surrounding these issues. Against those who would assume beforehand the complicity of Christian missions in laying the groundwork for colonial administrators, Coe's historiography serves as a powerful reminder that not all missionaries to Africa-differentiated as they were by origin, denominational theology, class, and philosophy-were alike, and so neither were their agendas. Arriving in 1828, the Basel missionaries (hailing from Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark) placed a heavy emphasis on one's personal devotion and relationship with Christ and, in line with their Pietist roots, saw the establishment of separate Christian communities as integral to the success of their labors. Toward this end, they set about establishing boarding schools whose pupils consisted primarily of children from powerful families-who perceived schooling both as a way of attaining European power and of coming under the mission's patronage-along with a sizable number of slave children whose freedom the missionaries needed to buy before enrolling them in their classes. If in this respect it resembled many other missionary projects, what most distinguished the Basel mission was the value it attributed to forms of indigenous culture. Influenced by romantic nationalists such as Johann Gottfried von Herder-who thought that human groups could be understood only as a reflection of their particular Volksgeist-the Basel missionaries believed that primitives abroad, like European peasants back home, retained the core elements of a nation's genius, which in Europe had been supposedly lost in the midst of rapid modernization. Thus viewing societal evolution through a negative teleology of decline, the missionaries were committed to preserving those aspects of which would, perhaps paradoxically, serve to demarcate it from that of the imperial powers while on the other hand enabling the establishment of a distinctly African Christian community (34). …