Browsing by Subject "Ethiopia"

This dissertation examines the politics of industry and industrialization in Ethiopia. I analyze how multinational alcohol companies and the Ethiopian state are brewing development, meaning spurring the creation of industrial linkages through the production, distribution, sale, and consumption of commercial beer as well as their corresponding socio-cultural consequences as the Ethiopian people respond to such processes. An ethnography at the nidus of corporate supply and value chain management and the state’s industrialization policy, the following pages examine how state and companies are making industry to meet the developmentalist goals of an Ethiopian ruling party and the needs of capital, respectively, albeit not without local collaboration and resistance.

This dissertation examines photographic representations of Ethiopian identity. It focuses on Emperor Haile Selassie I as a recuperative figure in Pan-African contexts, images by court photographer and later London studio portraitist Shemelis Desta, and contemporary works created by Ethiopian artists in the diaspora one generation after the Derg’s collapse. Exploring visual processes that concern, inform, and confront the practices of photographers working at the intersection of ethnic identity and nationalism, this dissertation scrutinizes Ethiopian artists’ views of the importance of their work to their country and to the African diaspora in conjunction with opposing historical narratives adopted by Black nationalists, and alternatively, white imperialists in the early twentieth century.

This dissertation excavates historical fragments, moments, and broader patterns of humanitarian connection between West Germany and the wider world, and specifically to Nigeria-Biafra and Ethiopia, from the 1960s to the 1980s. It brings them together under the sign of global humanitarianism, but it does not tally them to an uplifting account or cautionary tale about humanitarianism’s rise and fall. Engaging history transnationally, beyond the Cold War, and outside the bounds of former empires, each chapter works micro-historically outward from specific places and conjunctures in order, first, to analyze the logics and effects of humanitarian aid, activism, and intervention in concrete circumstances; second, to assert West Germany’s changing placement in the postcolonial world; and third, to show how humanitarian concerns were tied to and impacted some of the key political issues of European and African history in the later twentieth century, including nationalisms and civil wars, student activisms, refugee migrations, child malnutrition, capitalist-socialist economic development, novel media forms, Holocaust memories, and new African diasporas. To define and explain the interrelation of the humanitarian and the political, this dissertation uses the concept of “moral politics.” By examining archival, visual, and oral-historical sources that shed light on West German, Nigerian-Biafran, and Ethiopian pasts from oblique angles, this dissertation pushes the study of twentieth-century global history beyond masternarratives of the Cold War and colonial imperialism. It also highlights people, ideas, and processes that defined an era when the faint futures of our present and the distant echoes of an earlier age were in dynamic tension.

Perhaps second only to coffee, Ethiopia is best known worldwide for its long-distance runners. Since the 1960s, the country has indeed won countless Olympic medals and major marathons. However, the persisting explanatory rhetoric for East African running dominance relies on deterministic understandings of race, genetics, and environment. Little attention has been paid to the dimensions of labor, culture, and gender at work. This dissertation is the first in-depth ethnographic study of young Ethiopian women seeking a career in long distance running.

Based on two years of fieldwork in Addis Ababa and surrounding areas, domestic trips to competitions and training camps around Ethiopia, an internship at an international sports agency based in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and travel to competitions around the world, the dissertation investigates the transnational networks of people and corporations that female runners move within and across as they navigate a global athletics market. Foregrounding gender, body politics, and global capitalism, my project revises the biology-centered concept of “running economy” into a multi-faceted sociocultural analytic for exploring how aspiring runners strive to make monetary value. How, I ask, can we look at running economy more holistically?

In underlining the social and cultural dimensions of running economy and centering the perspectives of women who exist within the transnational economy of running, we can see how Ethiopian women contest commonsense understandings of how this global athletics economy functions – and make their own moral judgements about what a more just economy would look like. Even as some of them drastically improve their lives by running, and remain hopeful while reaching for success, they find ways to cause frictions and disrupt hegemonic flows of ideas and money. By listening to how they politicize their training as labor, and by hearing their demands and desires, I argue that Ethiopian women runners expose many of the failed opportunities that capitalist structures and ideology espouse and urge us to rethink how we could better structure transnational economies.

The environment affects our health, livelihoods, and the social and political institutions within which we interact. Indeed, nearly a quarter of the global disease burden is attributed to environmental factors, and many of these factors are exacerbated by global climate change. Thus, the central research question of this dissertation is: How do people cope with and adapt to uncertainty, complexity, and change of environmental and health conditions? Specifically, I ask how institutional factors, risk aversion, and behaviors affect environmental health outcomes. I further assess the role of social capital in climate adaptation, and specifically compare individual and collective adaptation. I then analyze how policy develops accounting for both adaptation to the effects of climate and mitigation of climate-changing emissions. In order to empirically test the relationships between these variables at multiple levels, I combine multiple methods, including semi-structured interviews, surveys, and field experiments, along with health and water quality data. This dissertation uses the case of Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous nation, which has a large rural population and is considered very vulnerable to climate change. My fieldwork included interviews and institutional data collection at the national level, and a three-year study (2012-2014) of approximately 400 households in 20 villages in the Ethiopian Rift Valley. I evaluate the theoretical relationships between households, communities, and government in the process of adaptation to environmental stresses. Through my analyses, I demonstrate that water source choice varies by individual risk aversion and institutional context, which ultimately has implications for environmental health outcomes. I show that qualitative measures of trust predict cooperation in adaptation, consistent with social capital theory, but that measures of trust are negatively related with private adaptation by the individual. Finally, I describe how Ethiopia had some unique characteristics, significantly reinforced by international actors, that led to the development of an extensive climate policy, and yet with some challenges remaining for implementation. These results suggest a potential for adaptation through the interactions among individuals, communities, and government in the search for transformative processes when confronting environmental threats and climate change.