Benedikt Pontzen is an anthropologist working on religions in West Africa. He has conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork and historiographic research in Ghana since the early 2000s and learned to communicate in Asante Twi in the process. In his work, he focuses on lived Islam, so-called “African Traditional Religion”, religious diversity, and religious encounters. His research interests include the ethnography and historiography of West Africa, especially of Asante, the anthropology of religion, and theory from the South.
He has earned his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin in 2014 with a thesis on lived Islam among Muslims in Asante. As a postdoc, he has been working at the Dahlem Research School, the Bayreuth International Graduate School of African Studies, the Institute of African Studies at the University of Bayreuth, and the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient. He was affiliated with the Center for Global Islamic Studies at the University of Florida from 2018–2019 in the “Islam in Africa in a Global Context” project, working on “Contemporary Ways of Being Muslim.”
He is the author of Islam in a Zongo (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and of several articles which have been published in edited volumes and journals including Africa, Islamic Africa, and The Journal of Religion in Africa.