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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | Reconstructing Haberland Reconstructing the Wolaitta: Writing the History and Society of a Former Ethiopian Kingdom |
| Author: | Abbink, Jon |
| Year: | 2006 |
| Periodical: | History in Africa |
| Volume: | 33 |
| Pages: | 1-15 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Ethiopia |
| Subjects: | Wolaita polity historiography History and Exploration Peoples of Africa (Ethnic Groups) |
| About person: | Eike Friedrich Georg Haberland (1924-1992) |
| External link: | http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/history_in_africa/v033/33.1abbink.pdf |
| Abstract: | This paper takes up the methodological issue of combining archived fieldwork notes and contemporary field data in the reconstruction of the recent history of Wolaitta, a former Ethiopian kingdom. The archived data consist of the notes of the German ethnologist Eike Haberland (1924-1992), while the field data are derived from the author's own field research in Wolaitta since 2001. Although Haberland developed fundamentally new insights on southern Ethiopia, the international impact of his work has been limited, partly by his specific ethnohistorical approach, partly because he published almost exclusively in German. One of the questions addressed is why Haberland, despite his large corpus of notes on Wolaitta, never succeeded in writing a monograph on this people, a work he already announced in the late 1950s as 'forthcoming'. The present author argues that Haberland had become aware of the limits of his paradigm of reconstructing cultural history and of the relatively static nature of his organizing concepts. The place of Wolaitta in Ethiopian history was more complex than just an 'intermediate type' between Ethiopian high culture and the small-scale, decentralized indigenous societies of the south. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract] |
