Mapping Decision-Making: The Case of Tigrayan Women’s Contraceptive Use

Two reoccurring development presumptions found in international as well as national policies on gender and education formed the starting point for my doctoral research project in north-western Tigray, Ethiopia (Mjaaland 2013). The first assumes a causal link between education and women’s empowerment (as in the case of Millennium Development Goal 3). The second is based on the frequently quoted argument that educated women will have fewer children and, therefore, that educating girls will caus..

Co-photographing in North-western Tigray, Ethiopia

The argument in this article, which starts from the assertion that anthropological research is always dependent on cross-cultural collaboration – whether acknowledged or not – is based on my experience from north-western Tigray, North-Ethiopia as a photographic artist and photographing anthropologist. The photographic portraits that resulted from Tigrayan people taking control over their own self-representation in a process of “co-photographing” made me “see” the subtle socio-cultural dynamics of layering communication mediated through exposure and containment, visibility and invisibility. My interpretation of their self-assertive strategy in the photographic situation resonates with Kiven Strohm’s (2012) emphasis on responding to the research participants’ assertion or affirmation of equality in cross-cultural collaborative research relationships as opposed to presuming inequality. However, Western ethical guidelines that require the anonymization of participants, and which makes it difficult to acknowledge people’s contributions to our research, reaffirm, rather than challenge this presumed inequality between the researcher and the researched.ResumeResume

Ane suqhʼ ile. I keep quiet. Focusing on womenʻs agency in western Tigray, North-Ethiopia

"Ane suqh' ile. I keep quiet," women in Tigray, in North-Ethiopia often say, and implicitly under-communicate what they actually do. However, even if women seem to be culturally confined within the limits of a normative gender identity, compliance and under-communication are precisely strategies that make agency possible without arousing too much social sanction. This thesis explores how Tigrayan women are able to negotiate space for agency beyond the norm within the confines of a culturally sanctioned gender identity. My curiosity about women’s agency was initially aroused by the apparent fact that a significant number of Tigrayan women participated as fighters in the revolutionary struggle against the military regime Derg in Ethiopia (1975-1991). Tigrayan women’s participation in TPLF – Tigray People’s Liberation Front, and the struggle against the military regime in Ethiopia coincides with their Eritrean sisters’ fight for a liberated Eritrea (1961-1991), and the two armies comprised at some point, of as much as 30 % women. Their participation was a pronounced break with traditional gender norms. Women in Tigray joined the liberation army in order to liberate the Tigrayan people, and equally important, due to the revolutionary promise of gender equality. Nevertheless, even though the Tigrayan revolution represented a possibility to escape traditional gender roles, the fighter-women seemed to comply with cultural norms and under-communicate their participation as soon as they were demobilised. Women’s initial participation had been a strong expression of agency beyond an ideal gender norm that has emphasised female passivity and submissiveness. Thus my question is; was women’s agency quenched as a result of the re-establishment of the traditional sexual division of labour, which seemed to occur on the return to normality after the TPLF based coalition EPRDF had overthrown the Derg? I have therefore explored whether the fighter women’s retreat represents mere resignation in the face of traditionalism, or if there are other strategic considerations in play. Through their life-stories I also trace civilian women's strategies over time in a socio-historical context that comprises of wars, famine, and poverty. Tigrayan women's agency is in my opinion, not adequately addressed within a 'tradition versus modernity' framework, but must instead be understood up against the general need for flexibility and mobility in extremely pressured circumstances. My discussion on agency is likewise concerned with how autonomy is perceived, and how individuality is structurally inscribed in the Tigrayan context. The fieldwork was conducted in western Tigray from December 2001 to November 2002. However, I have known the area as a photographer since 1993. The photographs in this thesis are important to contextualise my research visually, and as a narrative strategy to represent empirical reality differently than text. This potential is in my opinion, far from fully exploited in contemporary social anthropological research, not least due to the apparent lack of analysis within the anthropological discipline itself, of visual representations. Photographic practice likewise tends to blur the considered necessary divide between the researcher and the researched, because what is observed is triggered by this very relationship. However, this interfering position established me as an actor in my own right, and consequently made me question the hegemony of participatory observation as the ideal method for reaching anthropological knowledge

Whose Authority? The Religious Conditioning of Decision-Making in the Context of Right to Reproductive Choice in North-Western Tigray, Ethiopia / Sous l’autorité de qui ? Le conditionnement religieux de la prise de décision dans le contexte du droit au choix en matière de reproduction dans le Nord-Ouest du Tigré

The discussion in this article takes as point of departure the common assumption that committed religiosity hinders contraceptive use and abortion as the person would be obliged to comply with what is perceived as God’s will and give birth to the number of children He gives. However, among the women (aged 18-75) who were included in this ethnographic study in one rural and one semi-urban area in Asgede Tsimbla Wereda in north-western Tigray in North-Ethiopia, there existed considerable confusion and opposing opinions about what the Orthodox Christian Church’s official stand on contraceptive use actually is. Even priests were not in agreement on the issue when asked individually. Furthermore, the interpretive indeterminacy in the common-sense understanding of the transition between God’s power and the person’s control, as reflected in the concept of 'ïddïl (fate/destiny), points to the uncertainty entailed when attempting to define how religion conditions decision-making. Considered significant in women’s narrative accounts when legitimisation of contraceptive use is at issue, are the agentive negotiations involved when moving authority, in a discursive sense, away from the church and the field of religion to the field of science where the government backs women’s reproductive choice as a right. In the current context where the public health system provides a range of reproductive options for free, this discursive move allows women reproductive choices that are not over-determined by religion.Sous l’autorité de qui ? Le conditionnement religieux de la prise de décision dans le contexte du droit au choix en matière de reproduction dans le nord-ouest du Tigré – L’analyse développée dans cet article procède de l’hypothèse couramment admise selon laquelle une fervente religiosité entraverait le recours aux pratiques contraceptives et à l’avortement car la personne serait tenue de respecter la volonté divine et d’engendrer le nombre d’enfants décidé par Dieu. Cependant, parmi les femmes (âgées entre 18 et 75 ans) sur lesquelles a porté cette étude ethnographique menée dans une zone rurale et semi -urbaine du woreda de Asgede Tsimbla, situé dans le nord-ouest du Tigré en Éthiopie, une grande confusion et des opinions contraires existent quant à la position officielle de l’Église orthodoxe éthiopienne sur la contraception. Les prêtres eux-mêmes étaient en désaccord sur cette question lors des entretiens menés individuellement. En outre, l’indétermination perceptible dans la compréhension populaire de la transition entre le pouvoir divin et le contrôle personnel, telle qu’elle apparaît dans le concept de 'ïddïl (sort/destinée), met l’accent sur la difficulté à appréhender de quelle façon la religion conditionne le processus de décision. La légitimation de la contraception dans les récits de certaines femmes invite à étudier l’agentivité en jeu lors du déplacement de l’autorité – au sens discursif du terme – de l’église et du champ religieux vers celle de la science, sous laquelle le gouvernement se place lorsqu’il soutient le droit des femmes en matière de reproduction. Dans le contexte actuel où le système de santé public propose un éventail étendu de moyens de contraception gratuits, ce déplacement discursif offre aux femmes la possibilité de faire des choix en matière de reproduction qui ne sont pas surdéterminés par la religion.Mjaaland Thera. Whose Authority? The Religious Conditioning of Decision-Making in the Context of Right to Reproductive Choice in North-Western Tigray, Ethiopia / Sous l’autorité de qui ? Le conditionnement religieux de la prise de décision dans le contexte du droit au choix en matière de reproduction dans le Nord-Ouest du Tigré. In: Annales d'Ethiopie. Volume 30, année 2015. pp. 153-173

At the frontiers of change? Women and girls’ pursuit of education in north-western Tigray, Ethiopia

The main objective for this anthropological study has been to investigate gendered processes of social reproduction and change from the perspective of women in the historical and socio-cultural context of north-western Tigray, in North-Ethiopia. The historical point of departure for this study is the Tigrayan liberation struggle from the mid-1970s, and through the 1980s, against the Ethiopian military regime, Derg, where female fighters in Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), had – together with civil women – been involved in forging their own revolution within the revolution for women’s emancipation and equality. Education, which during the struggle was one important tool in the fight to overthrow an oppressive regime, was also perceived as an important means to build a new society afterwards based on social, economic and political reform. Education has therefore continued to be important after the TPLF-based EPRDF (Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front) seized power in Ethiopia in May 1991 – in its pursuit of development and to become a middle-income country by the first half of the 2020s. It is from this perspective, together with the fact that new educational opportunities have opened up – not least for girls and women – who, historically, have occupied a marginal position in Ethiopian education, that education is defined as a ‘site’ where gendered processes of social reproduction and change could be operationalised and studied. The ethnographic enquiry, which spans three generations of Tigrayan women having lived through three different regimes with different political ideologies – including different possibilities in education – has been based on open-ended research foci where women’s and girls’ agency, their decision-making strategies and negotiations of power vis-à-vis different authorities are central. Women’s agency has, furthermore, been explored in the context of local understandings of gender, where the importance of guarding the ‘distinction’ between femaleness and maleness, is central. Based on the ethnographic data from Tigray, the intention has also been to contribute to theory-building on the issue of change by suggesting a modification of Pierre Bourdieu’s generative principle of habitus in his theory of practice. It is the limited space afforded agency that can venture beyond the structural conditioning of habitus, and the limited possibility for change evolving from diverging and non-compliant practice itself that has informed this theoretical discussion. While inspired by feminist appropriations of Bourdieu’s conceptual framework together with feminist understandings of embodiment, I have also drawn on Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Misches’s analytical perspective on agency, which incorporates both repetitive aspects of social practice and the re-structuring impact of projecting ones imagination into the future, like Tigrayan female and male students in the present context do. The use of ‘frontiers’ as an analytical concept is further based on the presumption that conflicting perceptions and interests surface in the conjuncture between processes of social reproduction and change as well as between intersecting and possibly contradictory fields – that there are struggles and negotiations at stake that might, or might not, be confrontational – but that nevertheless goes beyond unquestioned submission to the practical sense that habitus generates in Bourdieu’s theory of practice. The complexity of contemporary processes in Tigray, reminds us that change, in spite of the forward-moving thrust of prevailing development discourse, is rarely a linear process in practice, and suggests, furthermore, that scrutinising power in gender relations continue to be important even with gender sensitive laws and policies in place, as in Ethiopia today