State, Local Society, And the Environment In North Šäwa: The Case Of Mänz Ena Gešé, And Yefat Ena Ţemuga Awrajjas, 1888-1991
| dc.contributor.advisor | Tekalign Woldemariam (PhD) | |
| dc.contributor.author | Emishaw Workie | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2024-12-25T19:51:41Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2024-12-25T19:51:41Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2024-11-01 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation examines the history of interaction between the state and local society in central Ethiopia that had consequences for the natural environment. It also examines the impact of changes in the environment back on the conditions of life of local people and their interactions with the agents and institutions of the state. It is thus essentially a reconstruction of the political economic history a region as it manifested itself in the form of actions and counter actions that had both immediate and cumulative impact on the environment, and ultimately on the lives and livelihoods of people. It is a story of a fairly large chunk of central Ethiopia now called North Šäwa with a focus on Mänz ena Gešé, and Yefat ena Ţemuga awrajjas (sub-provinces). In terms of temporal coverage it extends over a period of nearly a century, from the late 1880s to the 1990s. It investigates how political, economic, and socio-cultural events and processes affected the natural environment and how the altered environment structured and shaped the livelihood of people. The key argument of this work is that unlike the conventional approach to environmental history in which change is abstracted from generic or impersonal dynamics such as demographic expansion, poor technology or poor management of resources, environmental change is as much about human interactions and decisions in specific geographical, social, cultural and political settings. Even though many of the arguments that I will make in this work share quite a lot with what has been said about other parts of the country, there is equally quite a lot that is premised only on what a closer examination of the local scene can offer. Perhaps the most important of this arguments is that behind an obvious story of environmental degradation and deepening poverty, there was quite a lot of conscious effort to limit, contain or mitigate these phenomena. The dissertation is premised on my conviction that a closer examination of the local scene should reveal xiii not only what happened to the environment due to the mistakes, abuses or reckless actions of people or of the "impersonal" outfit that we call the state, but also what people did to curb, contain, overcome or avert threats to the environment and to their own livelihoods. The dissertation documents both of these two components of the human-environment dialectic. It does so at times independently of each other in the interest of continuity of narrative, but seeks to encourage an understanding that balances elements of both escalation and mitigation, or between factors and forces that contributed to the story of decline and demise and those that sought to check and contain adverse forces and rehabilitate and empower people in the wake of those adversities. As an attempt to document and tell a local history human-environment interaction without losing sight of its regional and national context, the work is grounded on a vast amount of information gathered from a diverse array of sources, both primary and secondary, written and oral. Oral sources were collected extensively in the two districts of Mänz ena Gešé, and Yefat ena Ţemuga on which the study focuses and have been immensely useful in bringing out ideas and perspectives that otherwise would have been masked or glossed over. | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://etd.aau.edu.et/handle/123456789/3990 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | Addis Ababa University | |
| dc.subject | Local Society | |
| dc.subject | State | |
| dc.subject | the history of interaction | |
| dc.title | State, Local Society, And the Environment In North Šäwa: The Case Of Mänz Ena Gešé, And Yefat Ena Ţemuga Awrajjas, 1888-1991 | |
| dc.type | Thesis |