Whatever Happened to Respect? Values and Change in a Southwest Ethiopian (Aari) Community
type: CreativeWork
description: Based on 22 months of fieldwork in highland southwestern Ethiopia, this thesis focuses on the role of values in processes of social change. The thesis thus joins current efforts to move beyond seeing values exclusively as factors of social reproduction. Extending earlier research, I argue that it is not only the adoption of new values that can lead to profound change. Established values can be powerful drivers of change, too: The desire to realize their values more fully can motivate people to take up new and substantially different forms of practice. At the same time, what promises a fuller realization of one value may turn out to undermine another, and this can motivate further change. My theoretical argument emerges from an ethnographic analysis of change in Dell, a rural Aari community in Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region. The starting point of this analysis is the people of Dell’s frequent lament about a change for the worse in the social life of their community. On their account, feasting and everyday hospitality are on the wane, neighbours hardly visit each other anymore, there is less unity and affection among kin, and greed, envy and selfishness are on the rise. Summarily, Dell people discuss these changes as a decline of ‘respect’ (Aari’af: bonshmi, Amharic: keber). To explain this decline as well as to understand how people cope with it, this thesis examines the recent history of Dell. The first part of the thesis shows that the decline of respect has been an effect of attempts to better realize established values through new cultural means. First, since the late 1990s, almost two thirds of the population have become evangelical Christians. Motivated by a quest for blessings, conversion came at the cost of respect: it is only by abstaining from numerous practices which previously mediated respect that God’s blessing can be secured. Second, over the past decade, Dell people have embarked on a quest for economic development. Moti…
abstract: Based on 22 months of fieldwork in highland southwestern Ethiopia, this thesis focuses on the role of values in processes of social change. The thesis thus joins current efforts to move beyond seeing values exclusively as factors of social reproduction. Extending earlier research, I argue that it is not only the adoption of new values that can lead to profound change. Established values can be powerful drivers of change, too: The desire to realize their values more fully can motivate people to take up new and substantially different forms of practice. At the same time, what promises a fuller realization of one value may turn out to undermine another, and this can motivate further change. My theoretical argument emerges from an ethnographic analysis of change in Dell, a rural Aari community in Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region. The starting point of this analysis is the people of Dell’s frequent lament about a change for the worse in the social life of their community. On their account, feasting and everyday hospitality are on the wane, neighbours hardly visit each other anymore, there is less unity and affection among kin, and greed, envy and selfishness are on the rise. Summarily, Dell people discuss these changes as a decline of ‘respect’ (Aari’af: bonshmi, Amharic: keber). To explain this decline as well as to understand how people cope with it, this thesis examines the recent history of Dell. The first part of the thesis shows that the decline of respect has been an effect of attempts to better realize established values through new cultural means. First, since the late 1990s, almost two thirds of the population have become evangelical Christians. Motivated by a quest for blessings, conversion came at the cost of respect: it is only by abstaining from numerous practices which previously mediated respect that God’s blessing can be secured. Second, over the past decade, Dell people have embarked on a quest for economic development. Moti…
author: Sommerschuh, Julian Jasper
language: en
keywords: Values, Change, Ethiopia, Christianity, Development, State, Aari, Respect, Respectability
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/9d799f59-585a-455c-bec1-24e98295619e/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2019-10-15
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:13Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.45917