To Live with Others

Essays on Cultural Neighborhood in Southern Ethiopia

Edited by: Echi Christina Gabbert, Sophia Thubauville. With a preface by: Günther Schlee. With an introduction by: Echi Christina Gabbert. With contributions by: Susanne Epple, Echi Christina Gabbert, Felix Girke, Yvan Houtteman, Shauna LaTosky, Jean Lydall, Yukio Miyawaki, Louren Nakali, Nicole Poissonnier, Toru Sagawa, Graziano Savà, Ivo Strecker, Sophia Thubauville, Gebre Yntiso. Series edited by: Thomas Bierschenk, Anna-Maria Brandstetter, Raimund Kastenholz, Matthias Krings, Carola Lentz.

Series: MBA Mainzer Beiträge zur Afrikaforschung Volume 27

Cultural neighborhood is a community across ethnic boundaries that provides safety and nurtures belonging. It embraces enmity and amity, supports cultural diversity, heightens knowledge and facilitates resilience. Cultural neighborhood is place, sentiment and narration, flexible and yet full of rules.

Cultural neighbors are aware of and interested in each other, they face each other, get used to each other and develop intimate acquaintance of each other’s differences and similarities through time, effort and creativity.

To Live with Others focuses on modalities of change and ongoing negotiation of contact phenomena among several groups in southern Ethiopia with a special interest on neighborly interaction. The volume also is an initial attempt to further develop the notion of cultural neighborhood. In thirteen essays the authors show how members of neighboring groups of southern Ethiopia position themselves while bring­ing their rules, sentiments, economies, rituals, desires and stories together. By looking at modalities of people, who live as direct, more distant or even temporary if not ephemeral neighbors it becomes ap­parent how knowledge about each other is challenged and formed continuously with all facets that human relationships might contain.

The examples presented in this volume can also contribute to a better understanding of a global cultural neighborhood where conflict and peace are immanent, yet where mutual knowledge and respect prevail.

CONTENTS

Günther Schlee: Preface

Echi Christina Gabbert: Introduction

Ivo Strecker: Modalities of cultural neighborhood – A view from Hamar

Susanne Epple: Culture, contact, and identity – The multiethnic composition of the Bashada of southern Ethiopia

Felix Girke: Bondfriendship in the cultural neighborhood – Dyadic ties and their public appreciation in South Omo

Toru Sagawa: Local potential for peace – Trans-ethnic cross-cutting ties among the Daasanech and their neighbors

Yvan Houtteman: Murder as a marker of ethnicity – Ideas and practices concerning homicide among the Daasanech

Echi Christina Gabbert: Mountains for each other – Some insights into Arbore–Wata Wando relationships

Yukio Miyawaki: The interethnic relationship between the Hor and Tsamakko

Graziano Savà / Sophia Thubauville: The Ongota – A branch of the Maale? The heterogeneity of the Ongota lexicon as the result of cultural contact

Nicole Poissonnier: Favourite enemies – The case of the Konso

Sophia Thubauville: Amity through intermarriage – Some outcomes of a workshop on inter-marriage between the Maale, Aari and Banna people of southern Ethiopia

Gebre Yntiso: Language contact and its consequences in Aari

Shauna LaTosky / Louren Nakali: The realities of reality TV in a Nyangatom village

Jean Lydall: The paternalistic neighbor – A tale of the demise of cherished traditions

Under these links you will find further social-anthropological studies of Ethiopian cultures and of the ethnology of neighborhood:

Accompanying material:

• Anthropology as Homage (ISBN 978-3-89645-842-1)
• Die Wandernde ist eine Kuh (ISBN 978-3-89645-822-3)
• Heilige Stadt – Stadt der Heiligen (ISBN 978-3-89645-824-7)
• Predicaments of Mursi (Mun) Women in Ethiopia’s Changing World (ISBN 978-3-89645-833-9)
• Surmic Languages and Cultures (ISBN 978-3-89645-131-6)
• The Bashada of Southern Ethiopia (ISBN 978-3-89645-825-4)
• The Dhaasanac Language (ISBN 978-3-89645-064-7)

Cross-reference:

• Ethiopian Constitutional and Legal Development (ISBN 978-3-89645-407-2)
• Ethiopian Constitutional and Legal Development (ISBN 978-3-89645-408-9)
• Fremde Nachbarn (ISBN 978-3-89645-818-6)
• Rechtspluralismus in Äthiopien (ISBN 978-3-89645-624-3)
• Social Organization of the !Kõ Bushmen (ISBN 978-3-927620-57-5)
• Southern African Khoisan Kinship Systems (ISBN 978-3-89645-874-2)

© 2024 by Rüdiger Köppe Verlag – www.koeppe.de

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