ETHNOGRAPHY OF RESISTANCE POETICS: Power and Authority in Salale Oromo Folklore and Resistance Culture (Ethiopia, Northeast Africa)

Abstract

ETHNOGRAPHY OF RESISTANCE POETICS:

Power and Authority in Salale Oromo Folklore

and Resistance Culture

(Ethiopia, Northeast Africa)

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary folkloristic search for resistance poetics in tradition-oriented folklore of the Salale Oromo in central Ethiopia using both a diachronic and a synchronic approach. The Salale are part of the Tulama branch of the Oromo nation who are engaged in a national liberation struggle. Drawing on critical ethnographic methods, this study provides a folkloristic outline of power and authority in the resistance culture of the people based on the data I collected in Salale in 2009 and 2010 through interviews, focus-group discussions, and participatory observations into the notion of “progressive folklore.”

The data shows that the meaning of Salale resistance poetics transcends the ephemeral common understanding of the resistance concept. Here resistance is not used as shorthand just to refer to social protest, peasant rebellion, or more preferably, banditry; it is rather the poetics of emancipatory act. An emancipatory resistance is not simply a strategic plan to change the status quo, oppositional to social change, or a strategy for temporary material gain. In the Salale social world, an emancipatory resistance is rather a spiritual engagement and necessitates a poetics of making, transforming, and escalating the struggle in spirit as in words and praxis. Its end goal is fundamental human freedom and protection for nonhumans from harm.

Methodologically speaking, the data shows that, the notion of resistance poetics is a locally grounded theoretical stance, namely, strategic traditionalism, social banditry, ecopoetic practices, ethnic genres knowledge of verbal art, which constitute the “resistance poetics” and can be modeled into a high level analytical significance of critical ethnography to examine unequal power relations. The notion of “hidden resistance,” I argue, which we often read about in resistance studies is simplistic. It is simplistic because it centers exclusively on “deterministic economism” and “pragmatic resignation” of the subordinate to the dominant class.

Tradition is used as a subversive means of contra-posing cultural domination, political exclusion, and economic exploitation, particularly with respect to land and land resources, in a disempowering situation. An alternative Salale history is constructed from a micro-historical perspective in which folklore functions as a supplement to historical facts and to augment the folkloric models.