Pentecostalism in a rural context: dynamics of religion and development in Southwest Ethiopia

Pentecostal Christianity originated as an urban movement in America, and as it spread to Africa it was initially taken up most enthusiastically in towns and capital cities. In Ethiopia the Pentecostal movement largely started in towns, but is increasingly being taken up by rural communities. This paper will explore why rural Ethiopian communities are attracted to Pentecostalism, and how it impacts on their social, cultural and economic practices. In particular, I consider the developmental consequences of Pentecostalism, and how Pentecostal beliefs and practices encourage or block processes of change that are generally termed “development”. As part of this I will explore the theory of development – of what constitutes “good change” – that is implicit in Pentecostal philosophy and that is generally known as “transformational development”. I will show how this notion of change is significantly different to notions of change prevalent in the secular development world in that they emphasize transformations of subjectivity and social relations first, then leading to economic transformation, rather than focusing solely on the economic, as is apparent in the work of many secular development NGOs

Techniques of happiness: moving toward and away from the good life in a rural Ethiopian community

This article seeks to tease apart some of the different factors and cultural practices that lead toward and away from happiness in particular social and cultural contexts. It considers happiness as experienced in the community of Masho in the Gamo Highlands of southwest Ethiopia at two different points in time. It starts by exploring the traditional Gamo concept of happiness and the way that happiness was experienced in the mid-1990s mainly as peaceful sociality and nonreflexive present-time consciousness. It then charts the move toward a more market-based socio-economic reality that has taken place over the last twenty years and shows how the concomitant decrease in peaceful sociality and increase in inequality has led to a decrease in happiness of most people. However, it then considers the way that conversion to Pentecostal Christianity has created new avenues of happiness by bringing about a radical transformation of the self and by deeply reconfiguring emotional lives. In charting the way that happiness shifts from being imbued in the social fabric to being more about deep interior spaces, this article argues that happiness is configured differently in different social and cultural contexts and that different experiences of happiness are fundamentally linked to different experiences of the self

The Global South at the UN: using international politics to re-vision the global

This article argues that the countries of the global South have defined themselves in a globally-positioned way since the 1960s - long before the current wave of neoliberal globalization or academic thinking about the ‘global South’. This is shown by tracing the history of the formation of the global South as a political bloc in the form of the Group of Seventy Seven, or G77, and in their aspirations and negotiations at the United Nations. The article explores how the G77 acts in the global political system, and how it tries to act on the global political system in order to produce a particular vision of the global. This is done through an analysis of some of the G77’s proposals of how to restructure the global order, including the NIEO and more recently in the UN’s Financing for Development conferences. The South’s vision of the global with stark disparities between North and South and their proposals to ameliorate the situation, is contrasted with a newly emerging Northern vision of the global which seeks to dissolve North and South into a neutral, holistic vision in which power and inequality is not salient

Who are the D’ache? And who are the Gamo? Confusions of ethnicity in Ethiopia’s southern Highlands

The Gamo Highlands of southwest Ethiopia are home to a large number of related communities. Most well known are those in the northern parts of the highlands, such as Dorze, Doko and Ochollo, who are often taken as exemplars of a more general ‘Gamo’ culture and language. However, towards the south of the highlands both the culture and the language are very different. In communities such as Balta, Sorba and Zargulla, the majority of people speak a language that is not intelligible by northern ‘Gamo’ speakers and follow a cultural tradition that is significantly different from the northern halak’a initiations. Confusingly though, they refer to themselves and their language as Gamo. And they maintain that the northerners are not Gamo, but D’ache. This paper sets out new information about these southern communities based on fieldwork in Balta and the surrounding area. It presents new ethnography regarding the southern ‘Gamo’ culture and compares it to cultural forms in the northern areas. The paper then also attempts to explain the evolution of Gamo and D’ache cultures and identities from a historical perspective. In doing so it questions just who is ‘Gamo’ and considers quite what this term means

Mission, development, and ‘reverse mission’ in Europe-Africa religious relations

This chapter reviews some of the religious links between Europe and Africa, focusing on the Christian religion. It first discusses the spread of Christianity from Europe to Africa in the colonial context and then brings the situation up to date with a review of certain ongoing relationships between European and African Christians, particularly through the activities of European missionaries and faith-based development NGOs. It also explores the contemporary phenomenon of ‘reverse mission,’ in which African missionaries seek to re-Christianize a secularized Europe in the context of increasing migration from Africa to Europe

North-South negotiations about financing for development: state, society and market in the global age

In contemporary global politics different actors seek to create contrasting world orders through the existing mechanisms of global deliberation and policy-making. This article draws on the anthropology of policy to elucidate some of the different potential world orders that are being discussed today. Developing the concept of ‘policy vision’, the article seeks to bring into focus the different policy visions currently being proposed by the countries of the North and those of the South in global policy negotiations at the United Nations. To do this it critically scrutinizes the divergent North-South positions in the negotiations leading up to the 2015 UN Financing for Development conference in Addis Abeba and draws out their divergent visions of alternative world orders. The conclusion sets these alternative world orders within Dani Rodrik’s ‘political trilemma of the global economy’ and considers their implications for the future of state, society and market in the global age