Richard Pankhurst and Denis Gerard are well known to Ethiopians and those interested in Ethiopia. One of the many publications in their names, is “Ethiopia Photographed: Historic Photographs of the Country and its People Taken between 1967 and 1935” (1996). The book has a brief historical introduction, and it followed by hundreds of photographs spread […]
Margaret Mean is one of Anthropology’s focal early theorists. She has penned a number of books covering issues of childhood, gender, age and aging and sexuality. Amongst her fieldwork, she worked in New Guinea, during the period between WWI and WWII. The resulting book, “Growing Up in New Guinea” (1930) explores the educational process of […]
Ethiopia is a landlocked nation (following the independence of Eritrea in 1993). It is also home to Africa’s second largest population, around 108 million (following Nigeria). It has also been one of Africa’s fastest growing countries economically, for over a decade, often putting up growth numbers on par with China (although starting from a much […]
Ethiopia and its people struggle with food insecurity and recurring drought. What are the pathways to overcome these challenges? Access to land, the establishment of justice, the creation of cooperatives, agricultural input distribution, farmer training, environmental rehabilitation, irrigation infrastructure, building institutional capacity, creating effective governmental structures. These are components of the narrative we hear in […]
Writing anthropological and ethnographic research can be quite challenging. The experiences are so rich that one may not know where to begin and where to end. In “Two Arabs, A Berber and a Jew: Entangled Lives in Morocco” (2016), Lawrence Rosen provides an exemplary model for anyone grappling with these questions. To do so, he […]
In 1990, Ethiopia was on the cusp of a major transition. The military government was on the way out and the EPRDF would come to power in the following year. It was in this year that “Ethiopia: Options for Rural Development” (1990), edited by Siegfried Pausewang, Fantu Cheru, Stefan Brune and Estetu Chole, was published. […]
Dessalegn Rahmato is the leading scholar of land issues in Ethiopia, a subject he has been researching for decades. He has published a large number of works, including The Peasant and the State (2008). One of his earlier books, Agrarian Reform in Ethiopia (1985) covers the land reform of 1975, when Ethiopia made the most […]
The growing, consumption and export of khat (a stimulant) in Ethiopia has rapidly increased in over the last two decades. There is an emerging set of literature that explores khat from a range of perspectives, although the literature has focused on the health impacts and consumption in university settings. The complexity of khat is that […]
For decades, globalization was promoted as a process to increase global prosperity. In 2005, John Ralston Saul published “The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World” to make the case that globalism was on the decline. Many have praised the book as seeing well beyond its time, particularly as the financial crises followed […]
For those interested to gain more skills that are relevant to development and humanitarian activities, this post will list free, online resources. Each includes a brief description. If you have other suggestions of free training options, send me an email and I will add them. I have recommended that you try to make this a habit […]