Research project:
Tulama-Oromo Gadaa organisation
Short description:
The ethnographic case study (Ethiopia, Northeast Africa) aims at
discussing some of the main issues connected to the problem of aging and
status changes bound to different stages of life. The project intends to
shed light on the correlations between age, social organisation, law,
politics, and conflict (resolution) at a wider societal level.
Description:
In the project under concern, an ethnographic case study of the
Tulama-Oromo of Northeast Africa shall serve as a paradigmatic example to
discuss some of the main issues connected to the problem of aging and
status changes bound to different stages of life more generally. The
project intends to shed a light at the correlations between age, social
organization, law, politics and conflict (resolution) at a wider societal
level.
In contrast to individual life-course projections prevalent in many
Western societies, North-east African age organization enables male
individuals to pass as a group of age-mates through a defined sequence of
age grades. The Gadaa organization of the Oromo combines this type of
age-staging with a generational mode of recruitment. A son gets introduced
to a specific set correlated to that of his father and subsequently changes
his status every eight years as a member of his cohort. The son’s set
always remains at an equal distance from his father’s set which
synchronically “moves”, always some distance ahead, through the same life
cycle.
There are, furthermore, timetables: a calendar prescribes the timing of
the change marked every eight years by means of ritual performance thereby
simultaneously setting the individual sets or cohorts into a clearly
identifiable historical frame. A strong tendency of the different versions
of cohort and generation phenomena is the merging that can be observed
within the very same framework of Gadaa age and generation organization.
In the case of the Oromo we are dealing not only with individual aging,
familial cycles, or generalized generation sets, but with a whole
administrative or governmental system based on age-grading and a deep
regard for the generational cycle.
Such an idea requires closer inspection, as it supposes a stronger
juridical and political component attached to the Gadaa organization than
is often suggested in the literature. Recent observations of assembly
activities of the Tulama-Oromo in Central Ethiopia show that their age-
and generation organization becomes increasingly involved in
ethno-nationalist discourses and federal state-political activities. The
working hypothesis that Gadaa organization is to be understood not only as
a form of age-related, intergenerational organization on the family level
but also as an influential “state-like” order on the wider societal level,
shall therefore be tested and validated in empirical field-research in
Ethiopia.
It is planned to combine the observation of Gadaa events, which occur
in fixed, calendar-based time intervals at ritually important places,
with the documentation of extra-assembly, political, as well as law-giving
or conflict-settling activities of individual Gadaa leaders and traditional
authorities. Methods of participant observation shall be combined here with
in-depth interviews with Gadaa leaders, traditional law experts, and
politicians, as well as with “ordinary” class members, and their networks
of companions, friends and relatives be included. Further, more
standardized demographic data concerning age-structures and pyramids,
genealogical data and topographic information shall be collected so as to
complement the participant observation and narrative interview methods.
Bibliographical References:
Nicolas, Andrea (2006): Governance, Ritual and Law: Tulama Oromo Gadaa
Assemblies. In: Siegbert Uhlig (ed.), Proceedings of the XVth International
Conference of Ethiopian Studies, Hamburg 2003, Wiesbaden 2006, 168-176.
Nicolas, Andrea (2013): ‘Like Fathers, like Sons: Age-Staging and
Generational Stumbling Blocks, The Boran Gadaa Experience’ in: Growing Up,
Growing Old: Trajectories of Time and Lives, ed. by Andrea Nicolas and
Ian Flaherty. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, pp. 87-110.