Walter E. A. Van Beek

WALTER E. A. VAN BEEK {[email protected]}) holds the chair of Anthropology of Religion at Tilburg University and is Senior Researcher at the African Studies Centre, Leiden. He has done extensive fieldwork in West Africa, i.e. among the Dogon of Mali and the Kapsiki of North Cameroon, on which he has published widely. Recently his monograph on Kapiki religion appeared at Oxford UP: The Dancing Dead; Ritual and Religion among the Kapsiki/Higi of North Cameroon and Northeastern Nigeria, 2012. As ‘participant expert’ of Mormonism he has published a series of articles on LDS Mormonism in Europe, specifically in the Netherlands, in Dialogue and the International Journal of Mormon Studies. As a former stake president he is now high priest group leader and the proud grandfather of eleven grandchildren.

Ethnization and Accommodation: Dutch Mormons in Twenty-first-century Europe

Articles/Essays – Volume 29, No. 1

Alongside Utrecht’s largest canal, the nineteenth-century Neo-Gothic Martinuschurch dominates the centuries-old waterfront houses. Far be neath its glistening spire, the little entrance square, with a statue of the warrior saint Martinus at the center, bristles…

Mormon Europeans or European Mormons? An “Afro-European” View on Religious Colonization

Articles/Essays – Volume 38, No. 4

Mormon history is part of the colonization history of the American West; and the LDS Church, as a major player in that process, still bears a colonization imprint in many ways. The colonizing days are over now, and the Church is part of a major political presence in the world, no longer the colonized, but rather the colonizer. In this article, I argue that the Utah-based modern Church has replicated the same colonization process on its membership abroad to which it was once subjected.

The Temple and the Sacred: Dutch Temple Experiences

Articles/Essays – Volume 45, No. 4

Dialogue 47.1 (Spring 2012): 104–123
First, the history of the temple project will be shown from the Dutch perspective, with a discussion of some of the observable effects on the Dutch saints, one of them being a large drop in temple attendance.