Abstract
This study investigates ecocultural discourses and practices among the Gedeo in southern Ethiopia within the contexts of globalizing commodification of nature, successive governmental extractivist and conservationist discourses, and increasingly influential colonial present religious systems. Our analysis illustrates ways in which indigenous Gedeo understandings of reciprocal ecological coexistence are rooted in cultural knowledge, values, and customs. However, competing forms of knowledge introduced in the form of governance, commerce, conservation, and religion have resulted in an in-process shift from traditionally spiritually maintained mutualist human-environment relations to dualist commodified relations, particularly among youth, and dualist expert-reliant conservationist relations emanating from governmental bodies. By examining a traditional meaning system during an explicit process of erasure, the study points to ways local meanings of, and narratives about, ecocultural interactions are produced and communicated within wider contexts of power, and illustrates tensions among traditional, governmental, capitalist, conservationist, and religious environmental ontologies in everyday and institutional practice.
Highlights
Reviewed by: Leah Sprain, University of Colorado Boulder, United States Samantha Senda-Cook, Creighton University, United States
This study investigates ecocultural discourses and practices among the Gedeo in southern Ethiopia within the contexts of globalizing commodification of nature, successive governmental extractivist and conservationist discourses, and increasingly influential colonial present religious systems
Competing forms of knowledge introduced in the form of governance, commerce, conservation, and religion have resulted in an in-process shift from traditionally, spiritually maintained mutualist human–environment relations to dualist commodified relations, among youth, and dualist expert-reliant conservationist relations emanating from governmental bodies
Summary
The Gedeo were, and still are, predominantly engaged in coffee (Coffea arabica) and ensete (Ensete ventricosum) cultivation using their traditional knowledge of environmental management to maintain the ecosystem. By maintaining fertility of the soil and a balance of biodiversity, Gedeo agroforestry supports a large human population on small plots of land (up to 1,300 persons/km2) and, in the recent past, has enabled self-sufficiency in food-security and via cash crop production (Kippie, 2002). The irony is—despite the evergreen landscape and longstanding traditional knowledge of maintaining the fertility of the soil through agroforestry still in place—four districts in the Gedeo Zone are no longer self-sufficient in food. Gedeo agroforestry, in the process of inscription into United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) world heritage sites, is recognized for its multidimensional purposes in maintaining balance between ecosystems and productivity of the land through traditional land management system. The recent development in food insufficiency and increasing environmental degradation calls for a deeper investigation into the changing practices of agroforestry, ecocultural knowledge transmission, and overall human–environment interactions reflected and constituted in local environmental discourses
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