Essence and Contingency in the Construction of Nationhood: Transformations of Identity in Ethiopia and Its Diasporas

Abstract

Exile is experienced as a separation from one’s true place in the world, from that place which provides rootedness and meaning. To become an exile is to be uprooted, set adrift, disconnected. Yet this is not simply to inhabit a dead zone of loss and estrangement, for exile is also a fecund space for elaborating new forms and ways of organizing experience, creating new affiliations, associations, and communities, for developing new identities. As exiles create new diasporan communities, they typically engage in communal reconstructions of their experience and jointly formulate specific forms of identity, based on ethnic, regional, or national affiliations. These formulations employ or take the forms of myths, particularly those related to homeland and return. Mythic constructions explain and order the experience of exile and counterbalance the profound sense of loss that accompanies it. To describe as myths these forms of remembering, of constructing new shared identities, and of formulating particular visions of the future is not necessarily to dismiss them as illegitimate aspirations, false versions of history, or invalid types of identity, but rather to emphasize their social character. Myth should be understood as a semiological system, an organized narrative that gives meaning to events. Myths are not relics of some antique past but mechanisms for organizing experience and reworking the present.