Value-dense indexes and the escalation of a Muslim–Christian conflict

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses an episode of open antagonism and violence that erupted between Orthodox Christians and Muslims in Gondar Ethiopia in 2009. In Gondar, a perceived symbolic attack on the Ark, a holy object with the qualities of the Ark of the Covenant, created an intersubjectively legible and affectively resonant impetus for escalating action. Conventions of Muslim–Christian coexistence appeared to be overturned, resulting in an alternative social (dis)order of open antagonism. I argue that a focus on values, in many cases, can sharpen our understanding of how quantitative change transforms into qualitative change, because such a focus trains our attention on continuous, and changing, fields of affective and conceptual import that frame collective action. Not that values determine action, or that escalations are predictable, but that novel articulations between different values that create new imaginative horizons of action that change the grounds of change. In such periods of escalation, novel courses of action can be framed within, and justified by, conservative value structures. The value relevance of some escalations enables these events to have a lasting, transformative impact.