Peveri undertook about a decade of visits to southern Ethiopia between 2004 and 2015, and upon which she basis the book The Edible Gardens of Ethiopia – An Ethnographic Journey into Beauty and Hunger (2020). This book is published by the University of Arizona Press. In these notes I share a couple of sociological insights from the author:

“A remarkable feature spans across southwestern Ethiopia – namely, that marginalized minorities of craft workers such as potters, tanners, weavers, woodworkers, and blacksmiths, in contrast to the majority among whom they live, are still today totally excluded from planting ensete for fear that they will contaminate the soil. Further support for this peculiar cultural trait is found in Hadiyya where potters (fuga’a), and in general those not belonging to the farming majority (batano, artisans), are denied the privilege of land ownership, and therefore of physically interacting with plants and crops of any kind. Only once during my field work, in January 2006, did I see women potters, at the farthest edge of the garden, helping the women farmers smash the ensete corm. I was told by the owner of the garden, “We let them do this simply because this is a stage that does not require staying close to the proper ensete pulp, and they in fact do not enter into any physical contact with it nor do they touch it with their hands or feet.” When I spoke to one of those potters, she repeated the same story from a different and yet complementary perspective: “I was born here, in Hadiyya, but we are not equal to the Hadiyya people. I do the work of pottery, not the work of ensete.” (p. 70)

“In Hadiyya an increased interest in making money has arisen more recently and was primarily fueled by the arrival from the United States of the first Protestant missionaries. Money has progressively stopped being just money that could be used for specific and limited purposes, but has rather become a polyhedral concept that is good for evoking, and broadly exploiting, the subtext of personal success and promotion of the self. The rhetoric used by Protestant priests while spreading the evangelical message has covered the lion’s share of bending the traditional family-centered ethics toward forms of self interested conduct.” (p. 133)