The Ethiopian ”family collective” and child agency

Abstract

Any discussion of the “family collective” and the place of children within it requires an understanding of what constitutes a family and what a child is. Since ”family”, “child” and “agency” are all value-laden notions full of meanings, and vary cross-culturally, they need to be unpacked, and this is one of the things I will be doing throughout this lecture. What is a family? Is there one ideal Ethiopian family collective? Who is the ageless, genderless and culture-neutral “child”? Also, how is the agency of children in the plural differentiated, intersected and dissected by religion, ethnicity, stage of childhood, and social maturity, as well as rural and urban locations? To what extent are the actions of children constrained or enhanced by the family collective and vice versa? Clearly, these are very broad and complex questions, and while I do not attempt to answer them all, I try to approach them from the perspective of my own discipline of geography, largely focusing on rural-urban contrasts, differences and linkages. In so doing, I underline some overlaps, contradictions and peculiarities in the ways in which children exercise agency within families by drawing on (and sometimes inferring from) the limited sociological and anthropological literature on the issue (Hammond 2004, Poluha 2004, 2008, Hamer 1987, Hamer & Hamer 1994), as well as my own research (Abebe 2008). My lecture is organized along the following lines. I begin with problematizing the Ethiopian family collective and present a discussion of families and households, and their diverse structures, forms and functions. Second, I explore the concept of childhood, focusing on how notable lifecycle events, such as birth, name-giving, circumcision, and christening, are infused with notions of agency, particularly ones related to symbolic agency. Finally, I discuss how children experience authority while growing up, and exercise agency to varying degrees and in contexts in which they find themselves. I wish to emphasize from the outset that this attempt is only descriptive and although I give examples whenever possible, this is at the risk of making generalizations about the otherwise ethnically and culturally diverse country of Ethiopia, which, demographically speaking, is also the second most populous nation in sub-Saharan Africa.