Product Description: This book, first published to wide acclaim in 1986, traces the story of the way the Ethiopian centre and the peripheral regions of the country affected each other, looking specifically at the expansion of the highland Ethiopian state into the western and southern lowlands from the 1890s to 1974...read more

Product Description: Governance everywhere is concerned with spatial relationships. Modern states "map" local communities, making them legible for the purposes of control. Ethiopia has gone through several stages of "mapping" in its imperial, revolutionary, and postrevolutionary phases...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Is Marxism a reflection of the conceptual system it fights against, rather than a truly comprehensive approach to human history? Drawing on recent work in anthropology, history, and philosophy, Donald Donham confronts this problem in analyzing a radically different social order: the former Maale kingdom of southern Ethiopia...read more

Modernity has become a keyword in a number of recent intellectual discussions. In this book, Donald L. Donham shows that similar debates have long occurred, particularly among peoples located on the margins of world power and wealth. Based on extensive fieldwork in Ethiopia—conducted over a twenty-year period—Marxist Modern provides a cultural history of the Ethiopian revolution that highlights the role of modernist ideas.Moving between the capital, Addis Ababa, and Maale, the home of a small ethnic group in the south, Donham constructs a narrative of upheaval and change, presenting local people's understandings of events, as these echoed with and appropriated stories of other world revolutions. With the help of poststructuralist insights and theories of narrative, Donham locates a recurrent dialectic between modernist Marxism, local Maale traditionalisms, and antimodernist, evangelical Christianity. One of the most consequential outcomes of this interaction—until the late 1980s—was the creation of a more powerful state, one that penetrated peasant communities ever more deeply and pervasively.Combining sophisticated theory with fascinating ethnographic detail, this study contributes to the theory of revolution as well as the study of modernity. In doing so, it seeks to integrate ethnography and history in a new way. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This book is one of the most successful examples in the Africanist literature of placing structures in time. It presents a detailed description of the politics of production in Maale during 1975 against a completed past of Imperial Ethiopian history and an uncertain future of revolutionary socialism...read more