Wilderness, wasteland or home? Three ways of imagining the Lower Omo Valley

Abstract

Since the 1960s, the lower Omo Valley of southwestern Ethiopia has been imagined by conservationists as a “wilderness”, in need of urgent protection from the damaging impact of human activity. For state officials it has been an unproductive wasteland, inhabited by violence prone “nomads”, in need of the political control and civilizing influence of the state. For local people it is home, a place from which they derive not only their livelihoods but also their sense of individual and group identity. Both the conservationists’ and the state's ways of imagining the lower Omo are fundamentally pictorial, implying the disengaged standpoint of an external viewer. For local people, it is a “lived” environment, which they perceive and experience in functional rather than formal terms. Since the setting up of the Omo and Mago National Parks in the 1960s and 1970s, conservation, linked to state coercion, has helped to advance the state's project of control and revenue extraction in its southwestern periphery. New opportunities for the state to advance its political objectives in the lower Omo are now emerging, in the shape of hydro-electric dams and commercial plantations, which are not, however, compatible with the conservationists’ goal of wilderness protection. It is suggested that the three ways of imagining the lower Omo identified in the article can be understood as the legitimating ideologies of three competing place-making projects, of unequal power, carried on at three different spatial levels.

Keywords:

• landscape
• place
• conservation
• state building
• Ethiopia

Acknowledgements

This article is one of the outcomes of research project A/H E510590/1, “Landscape, People and Parks”, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom, under its “Landscape and Environment” programme. I am grateful to my colleagues in the project, David Anderson, Marco Bassi, and Graciela Gil-Romera for many helpful ideas and discussions; to Stephen Daniels, Director of the Landscape and Environment Programme, for helping me to understand better the intellectual history of landscape studies; to Chris Hillman, Ludwig Siege and Lakew Berhanu for sharing their knowledge and experience of conservation policy and practice in Ethiopia; to Will Hurd, and Shauna Latosky for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper; to Tim Ingold for his penetrating comments and constructive advice on my use of the term “landscape”; and to my wife, Patricia Turton, for her careful reading and vigilant editing of various versions of the manuscript. I am, of course, responsible for any errors, omissions and misunderstandings that remain.

Notes

1. Schama, Landscape and Memory, 10–12.

2. Robbins, Political Ecology, 5.

3. Adams and Hutton, “People, Parks and Poverty.”

4. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, ch. 9.

5. Cresswell, Place, 7.

6. Hoben, “Paradigms and Politics.”

7. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 254ff., 301; Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness.”

8. Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness” 79.

9. Brown, “Ethiopia's Wildlife Conservation Programme,” 334, emphasis added.

10. Brown, “Ethiopia's Wildlife Conservation Programme,” 334, emphasis added.

11. Stephenson and Mizuno, Recommendations, 1–2.

12. Bolton, Ethiopian Wildlands, 138–9.

13. Stephenson and Mizuno, Recommendations, 41.

14. Neumann, “The Post-War Conservation Boom.”

15. Agriconsulting, Feasibility Study, 60.

16. Turton, “The Mursi and the Elephant Question”; MGM Environmental Solutions Ltd, National Park Rehabilitation in Southern Ethiopia.

17. Now based in South Africa and known as African Parks Network. See its website at: http://www.african–parks.org/ (accessed July 12, 2010).

18. Adams and Hulme, “Conservation and Community,” 14.

19. Barrow and Murphree, “Community Conservation,” 31.

20. The statement announcing its intention to terminate its agreement with the government can be found at: http://www.mursi.org/news-items/african-parks-to-give-up-its-–management-of-the-omo-national-park (accessed March 13, 2010).

21. Adams and Hulme, “Conservation and Community,” 9.

22. Hoben, “Paradigms and Politics,” 1009.

23. Blower, In Ethiopia.

24. Hillman, Compendium.

25. Baumann, Europe of Strangers, 4.

26. Brockington, “Environmentalism in Tanzania”; Neumann, “The Post-War Conservation Boom”; Peluso, “Coercing Conservation.”

27. Johnson, Ideas of Landscape, 15.

28. Almagor, “Institutionalizing a Fringe Periphery.”

29. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed.

30. Turton, “Looking for a Cool Place,” 28.

31. Smith, Ethnic Origins, 28.

32. Ingold, Lines, 77.

33. Turton, “The Politician, the Priest and the Anthropologist,” 15.

34. Robbins, Political Ecology, 152.

35. Scott, Seeing Like a State.

36. Peluso, “Coercing Conservation.”

37. Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, Pastoral Development Policy, 5.

38. Kloos et al., “Problems for Pastoralists in the Lowlands.”

39. “Africa Oil Signs Agreement to Acquire South Omo Block in Ethiopia,” MarketWire June 17, 2010, http://www.ethiomedia.com/absolute/3382.html (accessed July 9, 2010).

40. Homewood, “Policy, Environment and Development,” 129.

41. Daniels, “The Duplicity of Landscape,” 212.

42. Thomas, “The Politics of Vision,” 22.

43. Cosgrove, Social Formation.

44. Thomas, “The Politics of Vision”, 22.

45. Daniels and Cosgrove, “Introduction,” 1.

46. Gibson, Visual Perception.

47. Ingold, “Culture and Perception,” 42.

48. Ingold, “Culture and Perception,”, 44, emphasis in the original.

49. Thomas, “Archaeology, Landscape and Dwelling,” 302.

50. Williams, The Country and the City, 120.

51. Gellner, Thought and Change, 162.

52. Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness”, 80–1.

53. Thomas, “The Politics of Vision,” 26.

54. Thomas, “The Politics of Vision,” 28–9.

55. Thomas, “The Politics of Vision,” 27.

56. Thomas, “The Politics of Vision,” 20.

57. Thomas, “The Politics of Vision,” 27.

58. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, 185.

59. Ingold, “The Temporality of Landscape,” 154.

60. Ingold, “The Temporality of Landscape,” 156.

61. Personal communication, 2009.

62. Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape, 26.

63. Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape, 25.

64. Cresswell, Place, 7.

65. Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape, 26.

66. Bender, “Introduction,” 5–6.

67. Humphrey, “Contested Landscapes,” 55.

68. Easthope, Contemporary Film Theory, 1.

69. Daniels, “The Duplicity of Landscape,” 218.

70. Thomas, “The Politics of Vision,” 29.

71. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 179–80.

72. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 179–80.

73. Appadurai, Modernity at Large 183–4.

74. The story of people being led to their present territory by their cattle is a recurrent theme in the mythico-histories of the peoples of the lower Omo, as it is amongst other East African pastoralists. See, for example, accounts of how the Turkana split from the Jie in Gulliver, “Karamajong Cluster”, Lamphear, “People of the Grey Bull” and Mirzeler, “Oral Tradition of Origin.”

75. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 190.

76. Boone, Political Topographies, ch. 2; Donham “Old Abyssinia.”

77. Brockington, Duffy and Igoe, Nature Unbound, 164–5.

78. Dine, International Trade and Human Rights, 48–9.

79. The quotations are from the website of African Parks Network at http://www.african-parks.org/ and http://www.african-parks.org/apffoundation/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=34&Itemid=72 (accessed July 12, 2010).

80. Ferguson, Global Shadows, 35.

81. It is worth noting that the Chairman and main funder of APF during its early years, and while it was setting up its operations in Ethiopia, was the late Paul van Vlissingen, a retired Dutch businessman who's extensive business interests had included Calor Gas and who therefore had considerable experience negotiating oil and gas exploration contracts with foreign governments.

82. The agreement can be seen at http://www.mursi.org/pdf/apf-omo-agreement.pdf (accessed July 12, 2010)