Whatever Happened to Respect? Values and Change in a Southwest Ethiopian (Aari) Community

Based on 22 months of fieldwork in highland southwestern Ethiopia, this thesis focuses on the role of values in processes of social change. The thesis thus joins current efforts to move beyond seeing values exclusively as factors of social reproduction. Extending earlier research, I argue that it is not only the adoption of new values that can lead to profound change. Established values can be powerful drivers of change, too: The desire to realize their values more fully can motivate people to take up new and substantially different forms of practice. At the same time, what promises a fuller realization of one value may turn out to undermine another, and this can motivate further change. My theoretical argument emerges from an ethnographic analysis of change in Dell, a rural Aari community in Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region. The starting point of this analysis is the people of Dell’s frequent lament about a change for the worse in the social life of their community. On their account, feasting and everyday hospitality are on the wane, neighbours hardly visit each other anymore, there is less unity and affection among kin, and greed, envy and selfishness are on the rise. Summarily, Dell people discuss these changes as a decline of ‘respect’ (Aari’af: bonshmi, Amharic: keber). To explain this decline as well as to understand how people cope with it, this thesis examines the recent history of Dell. The first part of the thesis shows that the decline of respect has been an effect of attempts to better realize established values through new cultural means. First, since the late 1990s, almost two thirds of the population have become evangelical Christians. Motivated by a quest for blessings, conversion came at the cost of respect: it is only by abstaining from numerous practices which previously mediated respect that God’s blessing can be secured. Second, over the past decade, Dell people have embarked on a quest for economic development. Motivated by a long-standing concern with building ‘name’ through wealth, the pursuit of development requires shifting resources from kinship and commensality – which afford respect – to modern forms of wealth – which do not. In the second part of the thesis, I examine two responses to the decline of respect, both of which constitute attempts to revive a more respectful mode of sociality. I discuss the Evangelicals’ current struggle to mobilize Christianity as a way to confine people’s feverish quest for development and the antagonisms that are its result. And I analyse the recent emergence of an Ethiopian Orthodox community in Dell as an attempt to rebuild relations centred on commensality. Primarily a contribution to the anthropology of values and the study of change, this thesis also engages with debates about Christian individualism, economic development as an ethical project, the relation between evangelical Christianity and economic development, and dis/continuity in conversion to Orthodox Christianity

Respectable conviviality: Orthodox Christianity as a solution to value conflicts in southern Ethiopia

This article explains the recent emergence of Orthodox Christianity in a majoritarian Evangelical Protestant community in southern Ethiopia. Examining conversion motives and forms of religious engagement, I show that Orthodoxy is attractive to erstwhile followers of traditional practice because it affords them the solution to a value conflict. Joining an institutionalized 'religion' associated with national elites, converts attain the respectability formerly denied them by Evangelicals. And since Orthodoxy is less puritan than local Evangelicalism, conversion does not come at the expense of conviviality. An ethnographic discussion of this process of value harmonization provides the basis for a conceptual contribution to anthropological value theory, while also offering new insights for the debate about different modalities of Christian change

The Grace in Hierarchy Seniors, God, and the Sources of Life in Southern Ethiopia

Why is hierarchy often surrounded by ambivalence? This article contributes to current debates about the goods and the ills of social hierarchy by drawing attention to the double-edged role of grace in hierarchical relations. Taking the Aari of southern Ethiopia as my example, I show how a conception of seniors as founts of grace entails a social life marked both by intense love and frequent conflict. Conversion to Christianity flattens social hierarchies by relocating the source of grace from seniors to God. As humility replaces seniors' demands to be honoured for dispensing grace, social life becomes less conflictual but also less engaging and affectionate. This shows that different conceptions of grace entail different forms of sociality and that grace can help explain the ambivalence of hierarchy

From Feasting to Accumulation: Modes of Value Realisation and Radical Cultural Change in Southern Ethiopia

How is it conceivable that people of their own accord radically transform their way of life? Examining a south Ethiopian people's shift from a life centred on feasting to one aimed at wealth accumulation, this article contributes new insights on the mechanisms of cultural change. Complementing Joel Robbins' recent work on the topic, I suggest that next to the adoption of new values, radical change can also result from people's attempts to more fully realise established values through new practices. I show how Aari embraced accumulation as a new means for realising a long-standing cultural value, and how this undermined their capacity to realise other values they care about. This reveals that changes in the modes of value realisation can have far-reaching consequences, and that visions of the good can be drivers of change

Belief-Inclusive Research Does Strategically "Bracketing Out" a Researcher's (Religious) Beliefs and Doubts Limit Access to Ethnographic Data?

This article outlines a methodological posture that I consciously adopted during recent ethnographic fieldwork. I call this methodological posture “belief-inclusive research” (BIR), and I see it as a complementary contrast to existing methodological frameworks that suggest the bracketing out of a researcher’s own beliefs. I offer BIR as a distinctive methodological posture for ethnographers who work in and with religious contexts. I demonstrate that the long-standing tradition of bracketing out questions of metaphysical truth during the writing-up phases of anthropology seems to have also impacted the fieldwork phase. I explore the ways that some degree of shared belief—which, crucially, I do not limit to doctrinal beliefs—between researcher and informants has the potential to widen a researcher’s access to certain types of data. In highlighting that the long-standing practice of bracketing has limited a researcher’s access to some kinds of data and in offering BIR as a new methodological posture, this article lays the groundwork for anthropology to construct new conceptual spaces that actively encourage a researcher to include their own (religious) beliefs and doubts in the midst of fieldwork

Belief-Inclusive Research Does Strategically Bracketing Out a Researcher's (Religious) Beliefs and Doubts Limit Access to Ethnographic Data?

This article outlines a methodological posture that I consciously adopted during recent ethnographic fieldwork. I call this methodological posture belief-inclusive research (BIR), and I see it as a complementary contrast to existing methodological frameworks that suggest the bracketing out of a researcher's own beliefs. I offer BIR as a distinctive methodological posture for ethnographers who work in and with religious contexts. I demonstrate that the long-standing tradition of bracketing out questions of metaphysical truth during the writing-up phases of anthropology seems to have also impacted the fieldwork phase. I explore the ways that some degree of shared belief-which, crucially, I do not limit to doctrinal beliefs-between researcher and informants has the potential to widen a researcher's access to certain types of data. In highlighting that the long-standing practice of bracketing has limited a researcher's access to some kinds of data and in offering BIR as a new methodological posture, this article lays the groundwork for anthropology to construct new conceptual spaces that actively encourage a researcher to include their own (religious) beliefs and doubts in the midst of fieldwork