Steven Kaplan

Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity

For over five hundred years, since the great age of exploration, Western Christians have visited, traded with, conquered and colonized large parts of the non-Western world. In virtually every case this contact has been accompanied by an attempt to spread Christianity. This volume explores the manner in which Western missionary Christianity has been shaped and transformed through contact with the peoples of Peru, Mexico, Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China, and Japan. Indigenous Responses to Western Christianity demonstrates how local populations, who initially encountered Christianity as a mixture of religion, culture, politics, ethics and technology, selected those elements they felt suited their needs. The conversion of the local population, the volume shows, was usually accompanied by a significant indigenization of Christianity. Through the detailed examination and comparison of events in a range of countries and cultures, this book points provides a deeper understanding of mission history and the dynamics of Christianitys expansion. The encounter with Western Christianity is vital to the history of contact between Western and non-Western civilizations. Western Christians have visited, traded with, conquered and colonized large parts of the non-Western world for over five hundred years, and their migration has almost always been accompanied by an attempt to create new Christians in new lands. Just as indigenous people have been converted however, so too has Christianity become variously indigenized. Local populations initially encounter a Christian package of religion, culture, politics, ethics and technology. This volume illustrates the ways in which peoples have selected elements of this package to suit their specific needs, and so explores the myriad transformations missionary Christianity has undergone through contact with the peoples of Peru, Mexico, Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, China and Japan. Contributing are Erik Cohen (University of Jerusalem), Yochanan Bar Yafe Szeminski ?, John F. Howes ?, D. Dennis Hudson ?, Daniel H. Bays (University of Kansas), and Eric Van Young (University of California, San Diego). The chapters are linked by their attempt to overcome conventional regional and disciplinary barriers in order to achieve a deeper understanding of mission history and the dynamics of the expansion of Christianity. A remarkable work, this volume will pave the way for entirely new approaches to a particularly complex and demanding subject.

Themes and methods in the study of conversion in Ethiopia: a review essay

Although conversion is one of the major themes in the religious and cultural history of Ethiopia, it has yet to benefit from extensive and systematic comparative discussion. For generations, scholars have worked to deepen our understanding of conversion to both Orthodox Christianity and Islam in the Ethiopian highlands. Recent works, moreover, are noteworthy for their efforts to expand our knowledge of both regions and groups hitherto neglected. Modern Islam, Evangelical Christianity and the religious histories of the peoples of Southern Ethiopia are only a few of the topics that have benefited from scholarship during the past decade. We are, therefore, in an unprecedented position to offer a review of research which, while by no means comprehensive, at least offers broader coverage than was previously possible.

What goes around, comes around: rotating credit associations among Ethiopian women in Israel

This article looks at how working-class Ethiopian women, who have migrated to Israel, have sought empowerment and economic control through the establishment of rotating credit associations known as iqqub. In the changing world of Ethiopian Israeli women, iqqub associations and their specific cultural manifestations constitute a highly meaningful experience, whose building-blocks incorporate the financial, the social, the ritualistic, and the symbolic. It is a complex mechanism of tradition and renewal: its existence challenges paternalistic assumptions regarding the status of Ethiopian immigrants vis-à-vis the state and its institutions and the experience of Ethiopian Israeli women specifically. As we shall demonstrate, the iqqub serves as a generative focus for gender relations and the dramatic changes that have affected them. Ethnographic examination of the iqqub and its internal discourse expands our understanding of the dynamics of change among the groups cultural, gender, and power relations.

Tama Galut Etiopiya: The Ethiopian Exile Is Over

Kaplan points out that although the Ethiopian-Israeli community is by far the most discussed of all Ethiopian expatriate groups, relatively little has been written about Ethiopian Israelis that places them in the larger context of the Ethiopian diaspora, or even treats them as a diaspora community. Ethiopian Israelis are unusual in that their presence in Israel is predicated on a narrative that reverses the one found in other Ethiopian diaspora communities. Whether in migration stories, rituals, or transnational practices, it is primarily the millennia of life in Ethiopia that are represented as a diasporic experience, while their very recent arrival in Israel is portrayed as a return home. Kaplan analyzes different facets of Ethiopian-Israeli cultural life and seeks to demonstrate the connections between the narrative they have chosen and their need to establish their credentials as bona fide Jews in the Jewish state.

Vital Information at Your Fingertips: The Ethiopian Yellow Pages as a Cultural Document

In the last decade of the twentieth century, Yellow Pages, the well-known business directories that effectively advertise services in fairly standardized formats, have been published by entrepreneurs for various ethnic communities, including Ethiopians. This essay reads the Ethiopian Yellow Pages (EYP), published for the Washington, DC, area, as a cultural document, interpreting it as a text in which issues of identity and community are represented by and for members of the Ethiopian community. The essay provides a detailed overview of the EYP in its thirteenth edition, covering the year 2006/2007, surveying its structure; its target area; and the wide array of services, venues, and institutions that advertise in its pages. The discussion concludes that the EYP is much more than an instrument for providing information and access to services: It both captures the mundane aspects of life in America and highlights the specific features of an ethnically distinct immigrant populations journey of cultural creativity, which reverberates in both their new and their old homelands. (January 2009)

The Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the Holy Land

ABSTRACT The Ethiopian Orthodox Tawahedo Church community has had a presence in the Holy Land for at least several hundred years. Throughout most of this period it was composed of a small ecclesiastical corps of monastic clergy who sought to protect the national church’s rights at various holy places in the region of Christianity’s birth. Only in the twentieth century, were these clergy joined by lay people. In this paper, I discuss the way the type of food served at church celebrations and the rhythm of fasts and feasts emphasize the shared national origins of the small diaspora. At the same time, where people sit when eating, and in what order they are served, expresses distinctions within the ranks of the clergy, between clergy and lay people, between men and women, and between Ethiopians and their former compatriots from Eritrea.

Fils d'Abraham. Les Falashas@@@The Two Zions. Reminiscences of Jerusalem and Ethiopia

Part 1 The first Zion: Jerusalem the university of Jerusalem Hebrew and its revival return to Jerusalem. Part 2 The second Zion: from Jerusalem to Eritrea Eritrea under British military administration back to Ethiopa Emperor Haile Sellassie. Epilogue. Index.

Hagiographies and the History of Medieval Ethiopia

The hagiographic literature of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church may be divided into two major categories: the translated lives of the saints and martyrs of the early Christian church and the lives of local saints. The essentially foreign works, which constitute the first of these groups, will be of only peripheral concern in this paper. While books such as Barlaam and Joasaph, The Life of St. George , and The Conflict of Severus did serve as models for the traditions dealing with local saints, they are of little interest to the student of Ethiopian history. The most interesting of these local hagiographies are those about saints who lived between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. These traditions, which recount the lives of some kings and many monastic leaders, are of great importance for the reconstruction of the history of medieval Ethiopia. As Conti Rossini has written, The more I preoccupy myself with the history of Ethiopia, the more I realize the importance of the study of local traditions. Only when we are a little more informed of these traditions with their accounts of the movements of peoples, with the advent (even if sometimes legendary) of successive chiefs, will we have an accurate idea of the history of Ethiopia. However, while specialists in Ethiopian literature and history have long realized the potential value of these gadlāt (singular: gadl ) as sources for the study of Ethiopian history, the tendency towards idealization displayed in these works, as well as their abundant miracles and anachronisms, have left historians uncertain as to how to extract reliable information from them.