The dissertation is an anthropological study utilizing oral narrative, archival history, and sociological methods to examine the question of how the Anlo-Ewe people experience the divine and how these perceived human-divine relations affect 1) formation of identity, 2) community relationships, and 3) vocational selection and decision-making processes. The secondary question of the study explores the effects of globalization, technological advancement, and Christianization on 'traditional' Anlo-Ewe practices and community dynamics in southeastern Ghana. How the Anlo-Ewe spirit world influences, engages, and interconnects its practitioners is determined through examining the functions and structure of the Anlo-Ewe cosmological order; identifying the religio-social role of artists, mediums, diviners, and priestesses as spirit messengers; and interpreting the process and outcome of practitioners experiencing vodu, or divinity, individually and communally. Research was compiled from: court records, colonial documents, first-hand narratives and secondary resources; experiential data gathered from interviews with Christian and Anlo-Ewe Vodu practitioners; attendance at private initiation and community rites, public ceremonies, religious services, and funerals; and living at family compounds in Klikor, Nogokpo and Denu and at a shrine for priestesses-in-training in Ghana's Ketu South District.

Findings show that indigenous practices are decreasing as western forms of Christian-influenced education are becoming more readily prescribed and available to school-age children. Anlo-Ewe services, community rites, and priestly schedules are being amended to match increasing global material access, technological advancement, and community expectations of the shifting perspectives of time. Constructions of identity, vocational and marital selection, and community relationships are likewise struggling between models of intra-community, or extended familial responsibility, and models based on the nuclear family or self-interest as primary, often shifting from localized expectations of economic and social interrelationship to a more protracted conception of personhood involving individualization, accusations of witchcraft, and capitalist models of success. The Vodu pantheon has adapted and transformed to match social experience: times of community upheaval invite greater numbers of personalized spirits adopted for individual means above collective purposes. Experiential elements of bodily engagement with divinity (vodu), via dreams, divination, possession, community ceremony and initiation, remain vital to the stability of local community practices and perceptions of social cohesiveness.