‘The land does not like them’: contesting dispossession in cosmological terms in Mela, south-west Ethiopia
Résumé
The inhabitants of the lower Omo Valley, a lowland area of
southwestern Ethiopia, are facing rapid and unprecedented
changes due to the implementation of a large-scale development
project along the Omo River. The Ethiopian government has
undertaken the establishment of a sugarcane plantation of
massive proportions and plans to make the local agro-pastoralists
into out-growers settled in large, government-designed villages.
This paper compares the discourses of the government on the
value of local livelihoods with the internal discourses of one local
group, the Mela, on the changes affecting the land. It
demonstrates that the government and Mela discourses draw on
radically different cosmologies and engagements with nature.
Whereas the state discourses encapsulate a disenchantment of
the world, Mela discourses stress the importance of propitiating
mythical beings, held as the ‘real custodians’ of the land. In Mela’s
views, their successful engagement with these mythical beings
means that they belong to the land, in contrast to the
government which they see as neglecting these beings and thus
to be doomed to fail in its developmental endeavours. The paper
points towards the relevance of these discourses for Mela’s sense
of agency and autochthonous identity. In the context of an
authoritarian state which bridles at open contestation, these
discourses provide, in Mela minds at least, a means to subvert
state power and to contest its legitimacy and efficiency.
Domaines
Sciences de l'Homme et Société
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