PROBLEMS OF AFRICAN ETHNOGRPAHIES

 The Case of Oromo Studies

(a Multi-Sited Approach)

______________________

Asafa Tafarra Dibaba

Indiana University

Abstract

The aim of this article is to help examine the problems of African ethnographies as part of the key debates in the folkloric, historical, and anthropological studies of Northeast Africa. It is evident that the nature and limits of the enigmatic Ethiopian “modernity” and “survival” and its place in the Horn as a strategic harbor for competing forces constitute problems for Northeast African ethnographies. Folkloric ethnography is no exception.  Based on a close enquiry of the three works this study shows that transnational critical ethnographies are hampered by the lack of “being there” for compatriot ethnographers to do critical enquiries due to human rights violations, political tensions and insecurities. These problems need careful attention and traverse local and regional discourses. The issues of what strategic adjustments are needed to augment convergent trends in Northeast African Studies and how they evolve on parallel lines in the same regional context with intertwined destinies of the people in the region need careful attention as part of the surge of transnational ethnographies.

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to provoke discussions about the problem of African ethnographies. It focuses on issues that have practical relevance, among other concerns, to evaluating the effects of comparative transnational studies on ethnographic assumptions, descriptions, theorizing, comparison, interpretations of historical connections of anthropology to fieldworks. Thus, the central argument here is that “exit generation” (displaced scholars based in Western academic institutions) have continued conducting “ethnography” at a distance despite geographical and temporal limitations from their social base and physical detachment form the situations of their people. The basic theme of this study is that issues of authenticity and validity are crucial for the “exit generation” set outside the “social matrix” of the problem they study. I argue that “ethnography at a distance” is not an unfailing academic ploy to address social problems without “being there”. Thus, the aim of this paper is to make a modest attempt to critique those three works selected and construct a conceptual framework to deal with such a spatially relocated ethnographic anomaly.¹

The grasp of theories, methods and problems in social sciences and humanities while reading sources on my ongoing PhD project, Ethnography of Resistance Poetics: Salale Oromo Folklore & Resistance Culture, initiated the present project. The discussions in those sources, mainly the Eastern Africa Series, Northeast African Studies, and Journal of Oromo Studies, among others, enabled progression to advanced ethnographic studies and provided an overall understanding of the nature of African Ethnographies for an independent study project. That is, the skills in readings and contextualizing ethnographic problems in some part of the continent are transferable to other regional studies. In my readings, as researching independently with a good critical sense of interrelationships between context, problem, and critiques in writings about Africa is required, I took up the present topic to address the Problems OF African Ethnographies with particular reference to transnational Oromo Studies based in the West. The aim is to help grasp the ethnographic problems as part of the key debates in the social history, folklore study, and anthropology of Northeast Africa discussed in the journals Northeast African Studies and the Journal of Oromo Studies, among others.

For my purpose I discuss three works in the present project. First, a book titled Fighting against the Injustices of the State and Globalization, a comparative history of the Oromo and African American nationalist movements by Asafa Jalata (2002), an Oromo professor who has been in higher education institution(s) in the US for over thirty years. Second, a Journal article titled, “Ethiopia’s Unacknowledged Problem: the Oromo,” by PTW Baxter, an anthropologist from Manchester University, London, and third, “Ethiopia: the “Exit Generation and Future Leaders,” another journal article by David Shinn, adjunct professor at Georgetown and ex-US ambassador to Ethiopia. All the three studies are examined from a transnational view of “multi-sited ethnography” and by taking an intermediate constructionist position. My purpose is to initiate a debate that “ethnographies are made, not found” (Heider 1988:73).

Studying the problem of African ethnographies in general and Oromo ethnography in particular is ethnographic by its nature and involves tools such as interview and (guided) discussions with “exit generation” scholars engaged in “ethnography at a distance”. This is beyond the scope of our purpose. Making an empirically a sense of such an investigation a problem of (Oromo) ethnography requires moving beyond a methodological focus on transnational societal spaces. At least we can theorize two major factors that complicate the nature of the problem: one is “exit generation” scholars have been physically distanced and biographically detached from the homeland but remain emotionally connected; second, there have been tangible products by displaced scholars, handful volumes of academic works and journal articles revealing the intensity, extensity, scope, and impact of the connectedness. The nineteen volumes of the Journal of Oromo Studies published so far, not to mention books and other publications in scientific journals, exemplify the latter ethnographic problem. How can such ontologically rich and theoretically sound academic works be possible, devoid of ethnographic efforts or by mere heuristic methods and processes?  Or, is “ethnography at a distance” possible?²

Multi-sited Ethnography”/ “Rashomon Effect” Enigma

To discuss the problem of ethnography as a method is to make its limitations more visible.³ The ethnographic data may provide rich contextual information regarding the source (individual or group) and the social world it came from and also have ontological and epistemological implications. For example, whether the ethnographer’s interpretation of the data is what it means to those who provided the data is the problem of representativeness or generalizability. The reliability or validity of the data is also relative. That is, the lines drawn are thin and transparent between logical positivism (empiricism) and subjective metaphorical meaning-dependence, marking a positivist-constructionist debate in anthropology (Heider 1988:73; Hegelund 2005:650).

Another problem of ethnography is that once its findings are displaced from their sources, from the everyday activities of the subjects and became part of disciplinary discourse, they tend to conflict with the production of authorized knowledge and resist the ethnographer's theoretical self-consciousness. That is to say, the data as local knowledge and the interpretation and analysis of it as an institutionalized textual practice are not readily malleable. Hence, in this paper these three concepts are crucial: “exit generation” (Shinn 2003), i.e., victims of the “push-and-pull” power ploy in Ethiopia and the “brain-drain process,” “multi-sited ethnography” (Marcus 1995), ethnography beyond single-site location influenced by macro-constructions of larger social order, and “Rashomon effect” (Hieder 1988), i.e., the effect of subjectivity of perception and recollection on what is seen as a social reality (usually is conflicting). These concepts are used to demonstrate the fluidity of traditional (and contemporary?) space-bounded ethnography to challenge the state of current African ethnographies. My assumption is that most critical African ethnographers are detached physically from “being there” in the field while Africanist ethnographers can “be there” but may misrepresent the reality or take fabrications by government officials to face-value as they work under constant surveillance of the hosting countries. 

The practice of “multi-sited ethnography” is used to examine closely the transnational ethnographic enquiries into social, political and cultural activities beyond the temporal and geographical locations. Multi-sited ethnography has become a research agenda focusing on “mobile and multiply situated” contexts (Marcus 1995:102). Where ethnographic fieldwork is impossible for political reasons, and where time, place and resources militate against taking actual ethnographic ventures for over a long time, integrated research methods (Fitzgerlad 2006), ethnographic collaboration (Matsutake 2009), or individual ethnographic efforts by the ethnographer and smuggling the data (as I did for my PhD project in 2010) would be a worthwhile task. The nature of an “exit generation” ethnographer’s  interpersonal relationships with those left behind, also better referred to as a “crucial migrant-left behind nexus” (Toyota et al., 2007), makes it doubtful the plausibility of all fieldworker to report truth and the authentic simply by virtue of entitlement to conduct fieldwork. Put another way, “there is a shared reality, true, but differing truths may indeed be said about it,” hence the concept Rashomon Effect (Heider  1988:90).

“Multi-sited Ethnography” as a Method

From the multi-sited perspective (Marcus 1995), the Malinowskian method of relocating ethnography within a natural and fundamentally ‘other’ cultural system which the ethnographer is supposed to experience and understand by living with and living like the people studied is critiqued. By this method, the traditional view of the notion of field as an ethnographic setting, also considered as territorially bounded and supposedly homogenous unit of analysis is implausible. In conceptual terms, an “ethnographic field” is “relational” and “unsited” but the outcome of an interactive trans-local (pluri-local) connectedness. Thus, ‘multi-sited ethnography’ is an approach introduced by George Marcus on the 1995 Annual Review of Anthropology. It was an alternative approach to the conventional ethnography of a relatively long term stay in a field, considered as a container of a particular set of social relations studied and possibly compared with other contents elsewhere and “generalized into area, regional, or, most optimistically, universal knowledge” (Falzon 2009:1).

Marcus argued that multi-sited ethnography defines as its objective the study of social phenomena that cannot be accounted for by focusing on a single site. Hence, the ‘world system’ seen previously as a “framework within which the local was contextualized or compared” now becomes “integral to and embedded in multi-sited objects of study”. Thus, the word and the world both spatially and temporally separate are studied transnationally beyond a fixed location (ibid).  

For the multi-sited ethnographer, the social field is characterized by “a set of multiple interlocking networks of social relationships through which ideas, practices, and resources are unequally exchanged, organized, and transformed” (Boccagni 2010).  Within that field, however, efforts to keep in touch at a distance with the significant relational back home are not without difficulty and to restore something similar to the physical co-presence beyond what is memorable is impossible. The assumption is that societal spaces are irreducible to a single territorial space with respect to migration (ibid). As long as migrants’ significant others live also far away, migrants’ life spaces involve pluri-locally situated transnational networks which require the close understanding of diverse forms of transnational communication and interactions between migrants and their homeland.

In “exit generation,” by Shinn’s standard ethnography, unlike Asafa Jalata’s transnational ethnography, the concern is more with the larger portion of scholars forced to leave the country in dissatisfaction or in a vague desire to move and to survive than to “seek opportunities”. However, Shinn’s ethnographic data come from partial representative subjects and the migrant victims in Northern America or Europe are not involved. By David Shinn’s (2003) notion of “exit generation,” “the young, educated Ethiopians are seeking opportunities outside the country” is rather a reductionist view as Asafa’s and Baxter’s critical analyses of the problem clearly show in this study. In what follows the aim is to theorize that  multi-sited ethnography is at work by expatriates and most Ethiopian scholars, Oromo in particular, who chose “exit” to “exist and voice” but not chiefly to seek opportunity unlike a lesser portion of migrants who came to the West through DV lotteries and other means for economic reasons in the main than political.

PTW Baxter: “The Oromo, Ethiopia’s Unacknowledged Problem”

The basic problems, one would rightly argue, in Ethiopian ethnographies across time and space are significantly similar. PTW Baxter (1978) focuses on the problem of the Oromo which is a “major and central one in the Ethiopian Empire ever since it was created by Minilik in the last two decades of the nineteenth century” (p283).⁴ The same ethnographic problem, namely, subjugation and lack of the right to self-determination, has been discussed for over two decades by Oromo scholars living in exile and joined together mainly under Oromo Studies Association (OSA) in the West. Thus Asafa (2003) is right to claim that “the Oromo people are still under political slavery and denied the freedom of organization, association and expression” (p141) which Baxter had already stated it as “Until the final days of the Empire Oromo was denied any official status and it was not permissible to publish, preach, teach or broadcast in any Oromo dialect” (Baxter 1978:288). In this regard, what Oromo scholars in exile have been analyzing as ethnographic problems using a (comparative) historical  method in conjunction with a “multi-sighted ethnography” (or “ethnography at a distance”) as a method is no less commensurate with what Baxter and others claimed twenty five years back as a the Oromo social reality.

Baxter states that he worked among Arssi and Borana Oromo and came up with a conclusion that just as the presence of poor white in the old American South or in South Africa do little to diminish black awareness of white dominance, to the Arsi Oromo a number of Amhara peasants were abused and exploited by government in their own homelands “were not facts which impinged much on Arssi consciousness” (p289). This is a crucial transnational scenario for a multi-cited ethnographer to legitimize the oppressed Oromo nationalism and rejuvenate the unsuccessful attempts of the Oromo “to change the ethnocratic and colonial character of the Ethiopian state in the 1960’s, 1970’s, and the early 1990’s…without being discouraged by the negative experiences” (Asafa, 2003:142).  

Baxter had described the unjust historical relationship twenty five years back as saying “Much of the history of Ethiopia can be viewed as a struggle between the Amhara and the Oromo…which have so preoccupied historians” (Baxter, p284). Informed by the gada egalitarian system, Baxter argued the Oromo “are brought up to resist authority based on wealth or political position” (p285).

For Baxter, “almost certainly the Oromo are the largest ethnic group in Ethiopia and make up…over half of its population” as Muslims and Christians while the rest maintained traditional religion (p286).⁵ David Shinn puts the figure to less than half as saying “The Oromo are the most numerous ethnic group at about 40 percent of the total population” and that “the Muslim Christian split within their ethnic group” (Shinn 2003:27) is not a problem. Hence, one of Ethiopia’s ethnographic problems was the “fear of Islam and of the Oromo” since the sixteenth century, “which have dominated the political consciousness of the Amhara ruling elite, and the thought of the two in combination has been their recurring nightmare” (p285).The two problems, namely Islam as a rival religion and the Oromo as a potential enemy were haunting the Ethiopian Empire “of which all the members were subjects rather than citizens, but in which almost all the Oromo were colonial subjects” (p286), which is no incongruous with the previous proposition about the Arssi Oromo and the Amhara ethnicity.

Other Oromo ethnographic problems may include the issue of legitimacy of Oromo struggle for the right to self-determination and the historicity of Oromo expansion “approximately coincident in time with (and indeed in part may have been a consequence of) the jihad led by Ahmed Gran in [1528] which, to contemporaries at any rate, appeared likely to destroy the Christian Abyssinian state” (p284). The latter problem makes an important scenario as part of the controversy around Oromo origin theories.⁶

Hence, some of the most pertinent Oromo ethnographic problems include:  the systematic “push and pull” power tricks to force scholars flee their homeland and to distance them physically from their “social base,” and in effect, by lack of “being there,” the “exit generation” who chose “flight” than “fight” came to be trapped in Western media hullaballoos about arrested nationalism and the disorganized struggle of their people, the problem of organizational unity around a clear political ideology and lack of democratic leadership,  the ethnographic problem which David Shinn misplaces in a rather holistic nation-state context.

Within the holistic contexts of ethnography, attributes of individuals, families, households, communities, and societies are studied. However, unlike the long tradition of ethnography where the focus was on a corpus of data, considering the politics of ethnography has become of paramount importance following the critiques by Michael Foucault, Raymond Williams, and Edward Said (Herndel 1991:320). Hence, the ethnographic venture proceeds not only governed by the contextualized empirical reality but also mediated by the "desires, repressions," and (inter)subjectivities of the ethnographer and his subjects by virtue of “being there” and set in a “social base” which they historicize, ritualize, narrate, and perform to make meanings.

If the objective of ethnography is to come to a deeper understanding of how people in particular contexts experience their social and cultural worlds, emic (or participant approach) emphasizes attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and practices of the people as they lived. Hence a research approach that qualifies as a critical ethnography⁷ differs from the descriptive or interpretive one, which is the case with the other two ethnographic studies done by Baxter and Shinn in Ethiopia, almost 40 years apart. In other words, as one can infer from Shinn’s study, descriptive approach is a more detached, objective, value-free orientation to ethnography. However, there is some convergence between critical and descriptive approaches within contemporary ethnography. Critical approaches align themselves with situating research in its social context to consider how knowledge is shaped by the values of human agents and communities, implicated in power differences, and favorable for democratizing relationships and institutions (Brown and Strega 2005; (Berman 1996; Conquergood 1991). The ethnographer is committed to going out and getting close to the activities and everyday life experience of the people who are asked and who ask, who are observed and who observe. That “getting close” requires physical and social proximity to the life practices of the people (Emerson 1995:1-2).

The historical background of each social problem, “exit generation” in the present study, for example, is different and these ethnographic nuances require different ontological and epistemological orientations as to be discussed further in the three papers below.  

Fighting Against the Injustices of the State and Globalization

Asafa states in his prefatory note that the study “grew out of my personal life experience as an Oromo…and my scholarly interests as a critical social scientist” (Asafa 2002: vii). A reviewer of Asafa’s book, Toyin Falola (2002:598), also notes that the study grew out of two distinct backgrounds merged into one: one is the personal and practical experience of the author as an Oromo born and grew up in Africa, and “the second background is academic” (599).  In what follows I try to further interpret the genealogical unfolding of Asafa’s book from his authorial viewpoint.

How is the personal memory practical? Asafa’s source of data to write his book is in part his own memory of the past cultural humiliation he went through at school and his determination to resist the Ethiopian settler colonialism by participating in Oromo national movement (p. vii). By presentist tradition such “images of the past are strategically invented to suit the present needs” (Misztal 2003:50) and to suit into the social context of collective memory. The view that present concerns determine what of the past we remember is a Durkheim’s belief that “every society displays and requires a sense of continuity with the past” (Misztal, ibid.). Asafa’s ‘remembrance of the past’ is part of the collective memories of his people,⁸ the Oromo, as once a free nation “prior to their colonization by Ethiopia and the Great Britain” (Asafa, p57). The responsibility of the social scientist who has never seen his homeland for over thirty-three years or so is to revitalize and reconstruct at a distance those cultural and historical facts for a collectively imagined past is crucial for the unity of the society. Asafa’s rewinding of his memory is self-revealing about his people whose homeland the German Missionary Ludwig Krapf once called “Ormania” in 1840s and the people call their homeland “Biyya Oromo,” or “Oromoland”⁹ later named Oromia by Oromo nationalists (ibid) in the early 1970s.

In Durkheimian perspective, such a shared past is the essential element of the reconstruction of social solidarity. The murderous consequences of the colonial policies against the Oromo (one can note PTW Baxter’s (1978:293) eye-witness accounts among the Arssi Oromo in 1969) rather united (or ought to unite) the people to fight against common enemy and oppression. The impact is far-reaching and a living memory as Asafa recalls it with a deep-seated grudge is daunting. Most Oromos who heroically fought against the Ethiopian colonial oppression were either killed or impoverished and enslaved as their land was expropriated (Asafa, p76ff).¹⁰

The author’s personal experience also intrudes into the second background, i.e., academic, as a solid ground for Asafa’s comparative study of the struggles of the Oromo in Africa and African Americans in the United States. His interest in the sociology and political economy of race relations is intertwined with a rich experience in teaching in the fields of race and ethnicity vis-à-vis globalization. By uniting the practical and academic experience with comparative history, Asafa relocates himself in two worlds of hegemonic state power and capitalist domination and challenges a number of existing theories on state power. His reviewer is right to consider Asafa’s study as an example of "activist sociology" that blends the concerns of the poor and marginalized with those of "ivory tower" concepts and ideas on the basis of solid argument using historical method.

Methodologically speaking, Asafa’s study employs a comparative method by combining a structural approach to global social change with social constructionist model of human agency. In so doing, he discloses the social facts of human agency shoved aside by global studies in favor of the long-term and large-scale global social transformation. To further establish his argument on the basis of more universal concern, Asafa claims that both the Oromo and the African American movements are integral parts of the global projects to humanize and democratize the world and, in the process, to establish “a single standard for humanity” (p5). This requires, according to the author, employing an “interdisciplinary, multidimensional, historical, and comparative methods” and theoretically to integrate findings in social revolutions with closely related studies. Hence, movements of the two peoples, i.e. the Oromo and African Americans, are projects aimed at transforming the colonized African American and Oromo societies by subverting oppressive structures. The study of such movements against deep-rooted colonial systems and legacies relies on building up “convincing narratives of historical process…continuities and changes” (ibid). By taking Asafa’s methodological and theoretical approaches at a face value, one can easily fall prey to erratically conclude that the study is an ethnographic project since the author claims the comparative problem he discusses “requires critical social history that looks at societal issues from the bottom up” (ibid).

When used as a method, an ethnographic bottom-up approach is doing a fieldwork, alternatively participant observation, through living with and living like the people studied with for a year or more. Ethnography as a social science relies heavily on up-close, personal experience and possible participation to make reliable data of quotations, descriptions, and excerpts of documents through historical, observational, and interview methods resulting in one product: narrative description. To put it another way, those “convincing narratives of historical processes” can be fully obtained by participating in the real fight (inter-subjectivity/reflexivity nexus) and/or interviewing and discussing with the survivors, not just by wheeling the threads of ephemeral memory of past events at a distance, remote both in time and place.

 One may be dislocated, put outside context by the oppressive state structure, forced to collaborate or at will. The ethnographic nature of the problem itself forces the ethnographer, being there at the social base, but to dip toe only from the margin which fails to represent the holistic nature of the expanse before him and conclude it warm or cold.  The problem of remembrance of the past is another setback to historical method. Jan Vansina’s (1985:174, 175) study shows reconstructing past experience heavily relies on traditional time reckoning. This includes, ecological time, which is recurrent natural phenomena (season, day/night), extraordinary events or calamities which disrupted life such as war, drought, or epidemic and cultural representations of such sad experiences in the local history of the people. Social events such as harvesting rituals, initiation ceremonies, and public gathering rituals are also used for reckoning time and remembering the past.

Historical (comparative) method requires the use of such primary sources using traditional time reckoning practices and other evidences to research and write accounts of the past. It is also used to reveal the general and the particular in historical phenomena and understand the various historical stages of development of one and the same phenomenon or of two different but contemporaneous phenomena as in the case of Oromo movement and African Americans presented in Asafa’s study. Using comparative historical method, Asafa compares levels and trends of the development of the two movements and examines changes they have undergone. However, it is hard to tell which of the distinct forms of historical comparative method, i.e. comparison and contrast, historical-typological comparison, historical-genetic comparison, and/or comparison, a method which traces the mutual influences of various phenomena, are used in Asafa’s study. Comparison and contrast is used to reveal the characteristics of dissimilar historical issues, and historical-typological comparison explains the similarity of genetically diverse phenomena with reference to identical conditions of genesis and development; whereas, historical-genetic comparison explains the similarity of phenomena with reference to their common origin.

David Shinn: Ethiopia’s “Exit Generation”

David Shinn’s ethnographic method about Ethiopia’s distracted young generation he prefers to call “future group of leaders” did not involve the subjects of the study, i.e., “the youth”. Shinn enumerates sources of his data unanimously as “one senior EPRDF official,” “the dean,” “head of non-governmental organization,” and “an expatriate” who commented about the young generation rather cynically as apolitical, “inward-looking” or introvert, dishonest and corrupt, and “cynical generation” (Shinn, p23).

Based on his discussion of the social problem with people in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, during August and September 2002, Shinn states that people offered a “surprisingly consistent response” about many young Ethiopians leaving “at a curious point in the intellectual development of Ethiopia's future leaders” (p22). Shinn’s notion of “exit generation” is also used to predict “the rising crop of potential leaders” but there is fear that today's youth preferring to stay are rather indeterminate “limbo generation,” as they “don't know what they want…turning to the use of khat [stimulant plant], joining fringe religious groups and some just want to make as much money as they can” (ibid).

According to Meera Sethi, the representative of the International Organization for Migration in Addis Ababa, Shinn notes, “Ethiopia ranked first in Africa in 2002 for losing highly trained professionals to other countries” (Shinn 2002:21), which could be mainly for political reasons. Though he focuses on the impact of the brain drain on the characteristics of Ethiopia's leadership, from David Shinn’s argument one can infer that “highly trained” Ethiopians, and therefore Oromo scholars, live and work in the West with a minimal chance to go back to Ethiopia and having a well-founded fear to do so. The emotional connectedness is, however, revealed in many ways ranging between socioeconomic, political and cultural ties as a result of the information revolution and transnational movements. These connectedness and nervousness about the social fact substantially impact, I argue, the characteristics of African ethnographies in general and the Ethiopian/Oromo Studies in particular which analyze the ethnographic processes of generational change and social transformations.

Methodologically speaking, David Shinn’s analysis of “exit generation” suffers more speculative assumptions and theoretical overtones than empirical data, and unfocused faulty personal judgments about the subjects of the study based on narratives about the subjects from other sources. For example, speaking of the departure of highly educated Ethiopians he calls “potential leaders,” Shinn notes, in recent years “50 percent of Ethiopians who went overseas for training did not return after completing their studies” (p25). No doubt to say this problem puts the work of Ethiopian Ethnographies to a gravitating position but Shinn did not involve them in his study transnationally by interviewing those subjects to give a narrative accounts of themselves, which is a multi-sited ethnographic method.

Among such Shinn’s wishful conclusions are, Ethiopia will not split into a number of ethnic principalities, a greater feeling of "Ethiopian-ness" among nationals, the democratization process continuing on an evolutionary course involving “meaningful opposition parties, and even increase in momentum” (p.29). However he claims “a far more bold assumption” (ibid), Shinn did not do a critical ethnography than descriptive by involving “the youth,”  “the highly educated,” and the “oppositional parties” whom he claims to have a “questionable grass roots support” (p28). There is no voice of the “grassroots” supporters about their parties, nor of “the youth”/the “future leaders,” and the “highly educated” victims of the “push and pull”/the “brain drain” ploys. Nevertheless, the social problem Shinn identified is one of the aching generation’s difficulties and an indicator of ethnographic constraints, which in turn signals anthropologists and social historians to rethink the possibility of transnational African ethnographies.

Concluding Analysis

In the course Problems in African Ethnographies (E510), the focus has been on finding source materials, identifying major debates and reading the sources critically and evaluating the nature of problems the ethnographer discusses. With this general context established, the course’s focus has been to explore particular problems via more local case studies, i.e. West Africa, without losing sight of the bigger picture, as it is implied in the course title, “African Ethnographies”. The readings and film shows have had a predominant focus on contemporary issues of ethnicity and post-colonial states, and a wide range of topics relating to development which may include: class, gender, religion, migration, corruption, slavery, resource control, trade, power, tradition/custom vis-à-vis the transnational trade and globalization politics. In this paper, an attempt has been made to examine closely a critical study of the Oromo situation by an Oromo professor living in the US and two other journal articles by Western scholars.  By the practice of “multi-cited ethnography,” we have argued that the issue of connectedness and transnational ethnographic ventures transcend the limits of both geographical and temporal limitations.

Traditionally, the concern of ethnography has been with examining closely the processes of social structures, functions, and relationships and their effects on the individual consciousness (Cerwonka, 2007:14). By its empirical nature, ethnography focuses on “developing and revising theories concerning social structures, social transformations, cultural negotiations, and ‘friction’” (citing Tsing 2005) and ethnographers do so by examining closely into the social practices, discourses, and institutional structures (ibid). The burden of social and moral responsibility and the guilt conscience felt for failing to be right at the source, at the “social base” to fight the real fight, and impacts of the larger processes such as globalization, modernity, and nationalism overwhelm the “displaced ethnographer”¹¹ put in interfaced local and global forms.  

The lack of personal interaction with informants to create solid “ground” and a tie that enables to relocate the self and recollect the cultural knowledge also leaves the “exit generation” hooked on a comparative (historical) method as an overarching alternative model of addressing the social problem. While informally discussing the “Problem of Oromo Ethnography,” an Oromo professor who belongs to the first “exit generation” assertively told me that he has used so far a (comparative) “historical method”. In this case, admittedly, ethnographic task is a process and ethnographic knowledge is a social construct in an ongoing and reiterative manner. A significant portion of this dynamic nature of ethnography is incorporated into the construction of ethnographic texts and narrative process analyzed through critical social history.

We have realized that David Shinn’s over-optimism can be squared by Baxter’s and Asafa’s fear of the historicity of Ethiopia’s totalitarianism. According to Baxter thirty years back, for “Ethiopia not to disintegrate” or merely “held together by foreign garrisons” its government had to involve the Oromo, which was difficult to see then as the military junta also followed Haile Selassie's conviction and “to grant decentralization was a sign of weakness” (p296). Shinn’s conclusive remarks that “Ethiopia will not split,” “Ethiopia's long history… argues for continuation of a unified country” and the “greater feeling of ‘Ethiopian-ness’” as “democratization process will continue” are at any rate simplistic predictions (p29). Based on the experiences of the Oromo and African American movements, Asafa concludes “the long term and large-scale consequences of the dialectical interplay between oppressive social structure and human agency” are evident (Asafa, p132).

As the African American movement suffered external institutional violence and internal crisis in the 1960s, the Oromo movement has been facing institutional violence of the Ethiopian state and internal difficult situations (Asafa, p133). Hence, both the enslaving and the colonizing agents “interacted within a single capitalist world system” (p134) to create and maintain oppressive state structure and subdue the resistance of the enslaved and the colonized dissident.¹²

Asafa shares Baxter’s doubt stating that though the issue of world peace, social justice, and democracy are the primary global agenda for the intensification of globalization, racialized/ethnicized states oppose multicultural democracy and self-determination (autonomy) and in effect “they may disintegrate like the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia” (Asafa 2003:152), and Ethiopia can be the case in point.¹³ 

Ethiopia is considered strategic in the Northeast Africa also called Horn of Africa. Hence, transnational critical ethnographies¹⁴ are hampered by the lack of “being there” for ‘native’ ethnographers to do critical enquiries due to the tempting human rights violations, political tensions and insecurities. However, the need to examine closely into the questions of political conflicts in the region, the enter-religious encounters, over-simplified (and politicized) notions of Muslim-Christian competition, the various levels of compromises, interactions and trajectories is crucial. The nature and limits of the enigmatic Ethiopian “modernity” and “survival” and its place in the Horn as a strategic harbor for contested events and rival forces, also constitute problems for Northeast African ethnographies.  Those problems need careful attention to address and should navigate through local and global discourses on parallel lines with the local voices and intertwined destinies of the people in the region as part of the transnational ethnographic surge.

Endnotes 

1. East Africa is a broad region represented by a rich ethnographic corpus. What is equally important and applicable is, I pose, examining the nature of Problems of African Ethnographies. There are ‘ethnographic’ ventures taken up by migrant scholars in the diaspora representing “exit generation” and voicing the situation of their people back home through teaching, researching, and publishing a handful of anthropological and ‘ethnographic’ findings in scientific journals and books based in Western institutions. In this paper I consider the choices that the scholars have made in terms of what to study, how to do research, and how to present their findings in the possible way they did.

2. Theorizing the problem is considered essential for other area specialists and for those engaged in comparative and transnational studies. It encourages ethnographers to rethink established debates and paradigms pertaining to the region, addresses issues with comparative implications for scholars of other regions.

3. Examples of problems in the post-colonial African anthropologies have been discussed in ethnographic accounts of the readings and film shows but the problemof the nature of African anthropology /ethnography by displaced scholars has rarely been the object of in-depth description and analysis.

4. See in R. H. Kofi Darkwa’s (1975), Shewa, Menilek and the Ethiopian Empire. Darkwa was the Ghanaian historian of Minilik's reign, who summarizes as ‘perhaps the most sustained and the most bloody War which Menilek undertook’ (pp105-6).

5. See Asafa p61. Oromo cultural identity relates to nature and the existence of a Supreme Being, Waaqa. Of religious distribution in Ethiopia, Shinn (p27) claims (without source) Orthodox Church covers about 40 to 45 percent of the population and Muslims constitute at least 45 percent of the population with about 5 percent ofProtestants. When Baxter was among the Arssi Oromo for twelve months in the 1970s for his research, there were 216 (Orthodox) Churches with priests who had lands and tenants and there were only 59 mosques without land and tenants (p293). For the annual pilgrimage to the tomb of Sheikh Hussen in Bale, Muslims were banned during one epidemic but that of Christian shrine at Qullubbi in Hararghe was allowed because the prayers of Christian pilgrims should diminish the epidemic!

6. One such Oromo origin theory claims the cradle land of the Oromo to be probably in the cool grasslands of southern Ethiopia at Madda Walabu in Bale where they lived as pastoral stockmen.  

7. Critical ethnography questions the traditional separation of theory and method, interpretation and data, subjective and objective, but making mutual contributions to knowledge. From a critical ethnography perspective culture is understood as heterogeneous, conflictual, negotiated, and evolving instead of a unified, cohesive, fixed, and static entity. In contrast with arelativistic view of cultures as different-but-equal, critical ethnography explicitly assumes that cultures are positioned unequally in power relations. Hence, ethnography is shaped by the interests of the researcher, the sponsors of the project, the audience, and the dominant communities. See also Wendy Roth and Jal Mehta, 2002; Lesley Brown and Susan Strega, 2005.

8. When the Arssi Oromo elders recollected nostalgically about the brief period of Italian rule as a time during which they had been free, Baxter notes (p292), it was not because they had enjoyed Italian rule but that they had found it a much less oppressive than that of the Amhara.

9. See Baxter p295. Oromoland encompasses Showa the very heartland of the Ethiopian state. It includes the capital Addis Ababa (Finfinne in Oromo).

10. Asafa’s personal experience of the Oromo resistance is what Baxter witnesses of the Arssi Oromo resistance. Baxter writes “Protests such as 'The Amhara are trying to kill us': 'The Amhara are trying to destroy the Arssi': 'It is better to live like Tigre' (i.e in open revolt as in Eritrea): or 'It would be better to follow Waako' (the leader of a Guerrilla force in Bale” (Baxter, p294).

11. According to Geertz (1973: 5-6) "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun." He maintains “culture to be those webs and the analysis of culture to be "not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning." (quoted in Sanday 1979:533).

12. See Asafa, p147. He describes nationalism as revolutionary when it fosters all forms of social consciousness to dismantle oppressive social relationships. Baxter p295 also believes that nationalism cannot be easily repressed if rooted in common language, shared modes of thought, and feelings nurtured in shared colonial-style unless by “an extremely ruthless, strong and efficient state, such as the Republic of South Africa”.

13. According to David Shinn, referring to the Ethiopian Constitution (1995), the process of multi-cultural democracy is stumbled by the lack of free and fair election in Ethiopia. Meles Zenawi has held the current position since 1995 without term limits and the “Prime Minister is not required to vacate his parliamentary seat (Fasil Nahum 1997). See Shinn, 2003:27.

14. The new anthropology is concerned, among other things, with the study of human groups in motion, which is thought to be more than international; it istransnational’. World systems theory, transnationalism, migration studies go beyond classical push-pull and/or integration concerns, diasporas, and cosmopolitanism. They all posit problems of ethnography, frameworks and scales that invite supra-local understanding and therefore methodology, a multi-sited ethnographic method. See Mintz (1998:117)

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