Donald L. Donham

The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia: Essays in History and Social Anthropology

Part I. The making of an imperial state: 1. Old Abyssinia and the new Ethiopian empire: themes in social history Donald Donham Part II. Renegotiating power and authority: 2. Nekemte and Addis Abeba: dilemmas of provincial rule Alessandro Triulzi 3. From ritual kings to Ethiopian landlords in Maale Donald Donham 4. Institutionalizing a fringe periphery: Dassanetch-Amhara relations Uri Almagor Part III. Reorienting kinship and identity: 5. Lifelines: exchange marriage among the Gumuz Wendy James 6. A problem of domination at the periphery: the Kwegu and the Mursi David Turton Part IV. Expanding tribute and trade: 7. Coffee in centre-periphery relations: Gedeo in the early twentieth century Charles W. McCellan 8. Vicious cycles: ivory, slaves, and arms on the new Maji frontier Peter P. Garretson 9. On the Nilotic frontier: imperial Ethiopia in the southern Sudan, 1898-1936 Douglas H. Johnson Epilogue Wendy James.

Violence in a time of liberation : murder and ethnicity at a South African gold mine, 1994

Contents List of Figures Photographic Essay: List of Plates Preface Groups at Cinderella in 1994 Local Timeline in Relation to the Democratic Transition Introduction 1: Picturing a South African Gold Mine 2: White Stories 3: Ways of Dying 4: Good Friday at Cinderella 5: Freeing Workers and Erasing History 6: Unionization from Above 7: Motives for Murder 8: The Aftermath Conclusion Postscript: Doing Fieldwork at the End of Apartheid

On Being "First": Making History by Two's in Southern Ethiopia

Southern Ethiopia is a structuralist’s delight. Here are dozens of cultural groups, many small, in historical interaction for millennia, all different in one way or another, but all resembling one another as well. Had his personal history been different, Lévi-Strauss might well have made Ethiopia his laboratory, and most of his structuralist points would have emerged as clearly as in South America. Structuralist insights are important, but here I would like to argue for an ultimately different approach that attempts to look at cultural variation in the context of regional historical processes. If one takes the example of dual organization, Lévi-Strauss seized upon it because dualism epitomized for him the logically simplest and most sociologically elegant way of institutionalizing the principle of reciprocity: all of society is divided into As and Bs, and the continuance of social life depends upon the give-and-take between these two. In this way, Lévi-Strauss soared from the details of obscure South American ethnography to the most fundamental assumptions about sociality and “the structure of the human mind.” My own bent is to stay closer to the ground and to attempt to base comparison in the contours of regional histories. The immediate difficulty that one faces is, of course, that we know so little, in fact, about the long-term history of southern Ethiopia. What we do know is that the Ethiopian highlands were a center of proliferation of extremely ancient languages and cultures. The family of Afro-Asiatic languages includes Semitic, Cushitic, Omotic, Berber, Chadic, and Ancient Egyptian. Of

A note on space in the Ethiopian revolution

There have been two major approaches to spatial analysis in social and cultural anthropology. The first insists that distance is culturally categorised, that a persons experience of space is relative to particular ways of dividing and conceptualising spa- tial relations. The second approach, most often associated with central-place theory, takes the opposite tack. Distance, in this view, has certain universal predicates; for example, the inherent difficulty of transporting goods with a simple technology means that markets in agrarian societies have a limited set of recurrent features- no matter how space is locally encoded. These two modes of analysis are often taken as mutually exclusive ways of proceeding. In this article it is suggested that neither can be neglected if large-scale transformations like social revolutions are to be understood in their complexity. In the course of developing a pioneering study of the role of peasants in revolutions Eric Wolf offered the beginnings of a general theory. After sum- marising some of his hypotheses, the author confronts them with data from the Ethiopian revolution as it unfolded during 1975 in an area called Maale.

Mode of Production

Karl Marxs notion of modes of production is one of the enduring contributions of his work. During the 1970s and 1980s, anthropologists, historians, and philosophers engaged in a far-ranging debate about Marxs concept. This article outlines the legacy of these discussions. It defines forces and relations of production and describes how the first may be thought to determine the second in the creation of distinctive ways or modes of producing social life.

Modes of Production

Marxist social theory is often thought of as ‘materialist’ and ‘determinist.’ Just how misleading this characterization can be emerged principally in the 1970s in a wide-ranging conversation about modes of production. This article attempts to summarize the lasting contribution of this intervention by reviewing what modes of production are, how they are structured, and why they change over world history.