One 1 July 2025 Birgit Meyer gave a lecture titled “Translating Spirit” at the The Center for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective at Erlangen University, which she summarized in a short essay on the center’s blog, published on 30 9 2025).   Meyer’s lecture and essay are based on her longstanding participation in the Legba-Dzoka project, which researches the provenance and possible future of a set of spiritual artifacts taken from the Ewe-speaking area around 1900 to the precursor of the Übersee-Museum Bremen. In approaching these displaced matters, the question of translation arises as a huge issue:  without translating, communication about and comparison of the spiritual practices occurring around dzokawo would not be possible, yet translating is tricky at the same time as colonial categories still linger on. You can read the essay here: