The Wheel of Autonomy by Felix Girke

Author:Felix Girke [Girke, Felix]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Language Arts & Disciplines, Rhetoric
ISBN: 9781785339516
Google: W_1TDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2018-08-17T05:22:12+00:00

The Rhetorical Evocation of a Region

It is remarkable how certain services, features or material objects can become iconic for a group and its role in the narratives of South Omo. When a Kara elder blesses a household by expertly spraying a fine mist of atomized coffee from his mouth, the chances are that he will designate the coffee as ‘Aari coffee’, regardless of where the coffee husks were actually acquired.3 Such a behaviour is no mere liturgy, but encapsulates a narrative. It nostalgically evokes the (good) old times when Aari people travelled on foot to Kara country leading donkeys loaded with coffee to exchange for the locally available salty soil called muutsi.4 The invocation also regretfully comments on the (bad) present times in which the cultural neighbourhood has deteriorated through the ‘great transformation’ engendered by the increasing presence of administration and market (compare Girke 2010).

In terms of sociality, intimacy and community, size does matter. Consider Donham’s perspective of the regional particularities: ‘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’ (2000: 21). Even without thorough documentation and a comparison to prove the special status of the South Omo region in containing extreme cultural and ethnic diversity in a small area, as evidenced by the size of the various populations and their territories (Schlee 2008: 38f), a positive argument can be made: looking around them, the Kara recognize several neighbouring populations as part of the region, as extant elements of a social landscape. This landscape has a horizon beyond which it gets very difficult (and really largely irrelevant) to make out any details. This (changeable) horizon has been established over time by means of individual journeys, trade routes, warfare and intermarriage, a community of discourse and experience – in brief, through Donham’s ‘historical interaction’. For this social landscape, which is not only a cognitive but also an affective anchor for members of the various groups that are entwined in this way, the term ‘cultural neighbourhood’ has been introduced (compare Beidelman 1964: 34).

Beyond the indicated mutual familiarity and mutual imagination, this notion serves to highlight how much the cultural and linguistic diversity of South Omo is appreciated not only by the tourists in their land-cruisers and the itinerant anthropologists, but also by many of its inhabitants. Many local people love travelling the region, and I have found numerous interlocutors highly interested in and very knowledgeable about their neighbours’ customs and multilingual to a surprising degree. The delight in other people(s), who are in so many ways just the same, but different, comes out very strongly in storytelling about bondfriendship, and the travels, exchanges and adventures it involves (Girke 2010).

This is what the term ‘cultural neighbourhood’ is intended to evoke. But this use of ‘neighbourhood’ does not fully align with other usages. As an example, the contributors to the volume by Konings and Foeken (2006) apply the notion quite

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