This book offers a comparative study of caste-like stratification and social marginalisation in Ethiopia. Throughout southern Ethiopia craftworkers and hunters are vigorously excluded from mainstream society. As blacksmiths, potters, tanners, woodworkers, weavers and hunters they fulfil important social roles, yet they are widely feared as possessors of occult supernatural powers or despised as impure outcastes. Peripheral People tells the stories of these marginalised groups and sets out their most detailed history and ethnography to date. It also offers a radical new understanding of the reasons for their marginalisation and shatters some of the myths that have dominated scholarly thinking about occupational specialisation in Ethiopia, and in Africa more generally.
Praise
“One of the milestones in the scholarly interest in minorities and marginalization in Ethiopia.”
— Susanne Epple, Associate Professor, Addis Abeba University.
“A path-breaking book”
— Jon Abbink, Professor of African Studies, African Studies Center, Leiden.
“Focusing on the perspectives of the marginalized themselves, this excellent volume presents an ‘alternative and subaltern’ view of the complex interplay between social exclusion and economic and political marginalization in Ethiopia.”
— Alessandro Triulzi, Professor of African History, University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’.