Food Familiarity and Novelty in a Condition of Socio-economic Transformation in North-Central Ethiopia

Abstract

This article is about ideas and practices concerning production, distribution, preparation and consumption of food among the Argobbā of Ethiopia. It examines how Argobbā consumers have become accustomed to foreign foods and new modes of preparation and distribution of foods; how such changes have also altered the ways in which food has expressed social relations in terms of class, ethnic and gender identity; and looks at food politics and aesthetics and the gendered meanings behind the organisation of Argobbā menus and meals in changing environmental and socio-economic conditions. The article explores the nature of meals, not only how they emphasise and formalise gender difference and how children are socialised within gendered relations embedded in food ways, but also how the organisation of dinner ‘tables’ or plates reflects social differentiation that is loaded with gender meanings. It also analyses the extent to which meals construct social boundaries by focusing on the nature of ritual meals in Argobbā households and by discussing the ways in which cooking and cuisine reflect local, regional and national socio-economic changes resulting from environmental disturbances, reorientation of regional trade routes, and internal and external market exchanges. The article describes the contrasts between plenty and scarcity, tradition and modernity, hunger and satiety, and finally change and continuity.

Introduction

This essay is about ideas and practices concerning production, distribution, preparation and consumption of food among the Muslim Argobbā of Ethiopia. Nowadays, fewer and fewer Argobbā are producing the food items they consume, and many are drawn away from their rural homelands either as merchants or wage labourers. In this essay I examine how Argobbā consumers have become accustomed to foreign foods and new modes of preparation and distribution of food products, and how such transformations have also altered the ways in which food has expressed social relations in terms of class, ethnic and gender identity; I also discuss the material life of cooking and cuisine in changing socio-economic conditions.

The anthropological literature is full of references about the ways in which people find value in food products and how food gives value to social relations.1 It is not my intention to unravel or review all these perspectives and many others not mentioned here, but through a series of discussions geared towards making a broader theoretical point, I aspire instead to describe the social aspects of meals, and the contrasts between plenty and scarcity, tradition and modernity, food familiarity and novelty, hunger and satiety, and finally change and continuity. Using the Argobbā as a case in point the essay thus focuses on the cultural assumptions and social practices through which these identities are achieved and how they inform in turn the production, distribution, preparation and consumption of food; it discusses former and current culinary circumstances of the Argobbā, and in so doing emphasises that the cuisine circumstances of the Argobbā have changed substantially with the reorientation of trading routes through the region, associated with changing political conditions, job opportunities, and the introduction of foreign foods resulting from new internal and external market exchanges.

Argobbā Ecology and Ethnohistory

At present the Argobbā of Ethiopia of north-eastern Šäwa and south-eastern Wällo inhabit a long chain of settlements, some connected to each other, others scattered among Christian Amhara or Muslim Oromo peoples but all flanked by the Muslim'Affar (whom the Argobbā usually and popularly refer to as Adal) along the eastern escarpment slopes that define the edge of the Ethiopian plateau from Menjar in the south to Qallu in the north. Here the Argobbā, who number around 30,000 people, terrace their lands using ox-drawn ploughs, and fully utilise marginal spaces to maximise their agricultural productions along the very edge of cultivable places in the escarpment slopes. Most Argobbā rural settlements receive enough rainfall to produce sorghum, millet, maize, peas, beans, lentils, and čat (Catha edulis) 2 twice a year but they also practise trading and weaving to supplement agricultural earnings. During years of rainfall shortage and intermittent drought, which have been numerous, ‘food availability declines’ were common experiences.

In Argobbā rural settlements such as Bärähät, Mäţäqläya and Rasa, grains such as barley and wheat are staple foods while many also raise some cattle, sheep and goats. Since they largely live on lentils and grain and some slaughtered stock and dairy products, the diet of the Argobbā is high in carbohydrates and fibres and low in protein food items. In the villages and markets Argobbā individuals meet kin, friends, and neighbours, and persons connected through combinations of these ties, and engage in the exchange of food products as hosts and guests, and traders and customers within Muslim traditions.3

The existence of a continuous Argobbā Muslim population stretching from north-eastern Šäwa to south-eastern Wällo suggests that Argobbā settlements of the past were more widespread than their present locations and intermediate points. As a result of the connection that existed between the Argobbā and the Wälasma dynasty and the fortunes of the Muslim sultanates which developed in north-eastern Šäwa between 1270 and 1415, there is evidence indicating that the present Argobbā of Šäwa and Wällo are a remnant population of the Sultanate of Yefat. The fact that Argobbā villages are today situated on hilltops partly suggests that the settlement sites were chosen for defence purposes against the invasion of Ahmed Grañ in the sixteenth century and the subsequent Oromo migration which swept throughout the highlands of the Amhara and the escarpment slopes of the Argobbā and changed the demographic map of Ethiopia. This is perhaps why the Argobbā are at present found interspersed among their Amhara and Oromo neighbours and live contiguous to Adal lands.

The rise of Šäwa during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became a prelude to the Amhara penetration into the escarpment slopes. Under Sahlä Sellasé and his successors the Argobbā rural homelands were incorporated into the expanding Šäwan Kingdom in the nineteenth century. During this same century the erosion of Wälasma authority and Argobbā regional economy was facilitated through state taxation and gradual Christian Amhara settler penetration. The final blow was dealt by the opening of the Djibouti–Addis Ababa railway during the first two decades of the twentieth century, which bypassed trade routes that crossed Argobbā rural settlements, and marginalised and turned them into backwaters. After the 1950s the Argobbā, who had established commercial posts on these trade routes for centuries, began to migrate and reposition themselves in towns and cities along the Däbrä Berhan-Däsé and Nazrét-Manda roads in significant numbers.

In as much as the Oromo population movement and Amhara settler penetration were accompanied by new culinary habits, the arrival of the railway also brought foreign foods that the Argobbā were eventually unable to produce and control by themselves. With Argobbā migration to urban centres their means of livelihood shifted from cultivating to weaving and trading, and alien cooking and cuisine practices gained momentum as a result of contact with commercial food products and processed and pre-packed foods coming from richer markets outside Argobbā village settlements. Indeed the changes of recent years have greatly affected the structure and the function of Argobbā dietary systems and radically transformed Argobbā agriculture and cuisine culture. Yet domestic functions are still centred in the household hearth. There the women cook and transform raw products into nourishing and edible things; there the members of the household gather, eat, and occasionally sleep; and it is there that the children of the household are born and socialised.

Women's Household Work

The hearth, as part of the kitchen (mä'ad bét, literally a house where food is commonly consumed) centred on the earthen oven, is a concept that children, men and women themselves employ in their daily lives. In this sense, the term mä'ad bét implies both the space for food preparation as well as the place for food consumption. The social organisation of Argobbā family and the activities of rural household production and consumption reflect the social meanings of cooking and cuisine through mother and child, husband and wife, and consanguine and affinitive relations. Their relative dominance over and subordination to one another can be seen in the labour invested in cooking, serving and cleaning up.

The Argobbā rural household hearth occupies a central place in the family's economic life, transforming the results of its productive activities into consumable forms, and thus ‘standing’ in between food production and consumption. The hearth transforms the foreign into the domestic, and the strange into the familiar. Similarly, household cooking is the means by which the family internalises the external world. In other words, the structures of cuisine transform products of diverse ecologies and economies into something specially made for Argobbā consumption categories.

The Argobbā hearth defines the rural household not only by daily transforming external production into internal consumption and by way of those who eat together, but also by the fact that it is in the kitchen that the meals are made and consumed, storage is kept, household decisions made, children reared and cared for, neighbours entertained, baths taken, hair dressed and evenings spent. In a word, the hearth is a home. On a daily basis, parent–child kinship terminologies are used to refer to Argobbā family members who share space in the hearth by way of the older generation that feeds and the younger one that is fed.

Food is served in a regular sequence of three main meals, namely morning meal, mid-day meal, and evening meal, with comparatively less emphasis on the mid-day meal. Not all food eaten in Argobbā rural households is part of a meal. There is food people carry with them to eat out in the field, pasture or during a trip, and there is food that by definition does not form part of a meal. It could be a ‘snack’ or ‘treat’ that as an important part of the diet provides some nutritional elements not provided by meals. Daily dishes are served with a series of attendant ceremonies and rituals, no matter how informal the occasion. For example, coffee drinking right after lunch is a lengthy process involving not only drinking, but also incense burning, some snack eating, and much sitting around talking to each other or with neighbours, often whilst women spin cotton and engage in child care.

Meal Manners Matter

The size and composition of each portion of food and the order of scrupulously serving it is highly ritualised, and respect is shown through sharing and the uttering of specific words of request and thanks. When eating meals general rules define the persons who should and should not eat together. In principle men do not eat together with women unless they are ‘familiar’ with each other. Due to Muslim etiquette surrounding formal occasions, and sometimes as part of family routine, Argobbā women eat separately. Women as wives are not only cooks but they also serve food to men first, themselves eating what is left. For example, if the meal is chicken stew, men get breasts, thighs and legs while women and children get necks, wings and skin pieces. Hence rights to consume are distributed differently among the more important and less important members within the community. Thus ladling food begins with older men and ends with children and women. Indeed, a woman derives pleasure and power from her ability to choose when, how and to whom to distribute food and beverages in the rural household economy.4 Her position at the cooking pot controls not only the order of serving but also the quantity and quality of what is served to emphasise the social inequality of those who eat together.

The Argobbā woman's obligation always to have fresh food ready when her husband comes home is of course the source of much conflict. When an angry spouse decides to indulge in a full-fledged, public airing of grievances, the accusations that ‘she has no food ready’ when he is hungry, or that the meal waits while ‘he never comes home’, are heard more often than any other claims. Thus, meals are not only among the most relaxing and enjoyable moments the Argobbā rural family spends together, but they often also become expressions of the conflicts and frustrations endemic to Argobbā family life. Great respect is shown for food, and people bless themselves before and after eating and, as much as possible, refrain from talking or laughing.

During consumption the large majority scoop small pieces of food with three or four of their fingers and always chew, with their mouth closed, along one side of the jaw because chewing on both sides of the jaw is considered gluttony. Hence, their rural homes may lack tables but have table manners. In the Argobba rural communities, these social meals and food exchanges among families and kin are eroding and market exchanges are increasing. Cooked food items, gifts and prestations are no longer only composed of local produce but also of those products acquired through cash-based market transactions. Let me then examine Argobbā cooking and cuisine categories in changing socio-economic conditions.

Constitution of Cuisine

During fieldwork I observed the rules of cuisine that underlay the making of meals through the frequent use of grains, legumes and vegetables. After many meals I learned to group food products within Argobbā cuisine categories. For example, onions (Šenkurt), tomatoes (timatim) and green peppers (qarya) go together, while coffee beans (bunna) and coriander (dimblal) belong with sugar (sukkwar).5 This section is then a discussion of the elements that constitute the categories of Argobbā cuisine and an examination of the grains, legumes, vegetables and few flesh foods most commonly eaten in the Argobbā rural settlements. I begin with grains.

Grains form a characteristic part of Argobbā agricultural crops, and are produced for both consumption and transaction. They occupy a major part of agricultural and domestic work time and define kin relations. In these rural households, sorghum, millet and maize are either heavily and finely ground, sifted and baked or lightly and coarsely ground and baked. Most Argobbā main meals thus consist of enjära (bread) made from these familiar grains, and the heavy carbohydrate content makes them very filling meals. Older people feel that sorghum, millet and maize should always be a part of the diet, but younger families seem accustomed to their absence. For the former the current situation is seen as an unusual and unpleasant condition. For the latter it means adjusting to new food practices.

The importance of sorghum, millet and maize in Argobbā rural household diets varies widely according to economic status. Poor peasant Argobbā families depend heavily on sorghum, millet and maize, while wealthy Argobbā trader families subsist on wheat (sendé), barley (gäbs) and ţéff (Eragrostis abyssinica). Although in trader families lentil stew with sorghum or maize bread pieces is a mark of hard times, there is a qualitative difference between the enjära and lentil stew consumed by poor peasants and that eaten in well-to-do trader families. In the former households, the function of the stew is almost limited to wetting the enjära and hence Argobbā mothers chastise children when they consume too much stew by eating it with as little enjära as possible. In well-to-do trader households, on the other hand, stew acquires a separate status, independent of enjära, whose function is no longer to wet enjära but to accompany it as a better means of consuming stew. This implies that in rich trader households the consumption of enjära decreases with increasing consumption of stew.

The Argobbā are not forthcoming in talking about relative wealth, but one notices that only some rural households have access to wheat or barley food products and that, as observed earlier, the meal of plain lentil stews with sorghum, millet or maize bread pancakes is a mark of hard times. Nonetheless, these three food items and lentil stew dishes form the foundation on which both Argobbā diet and cuisine rest. In fortunate rural households, the potage may be flavoured with chopped onions and a lump of butter. I have frequently shared meals that consist solely of lentil stew, cooked with vegetable oil and water and eaten with sorghum, millet or maize bread, but I have never seen a meal in which there was an insufficient amount of food during serving; rather it is only the full nutritional complement that is sometimes missing.

Inter-household variation is not thus an issue in the cultural construction of menus and meals. For example, a poor Argobbā woman cooking lentil stew and a wealthy trader Argobbā woman whose cooking pot contains some flesh food elements to be eaten with wheat or barley bread are both using the same structure in their cooking; one prepares an impoverished, and the other an enriched, version of the same culturally correct menu and meal. Between these extremes are the middle-income Argobbā rural households, in which dependence on sorghum/millet/maize and wheat/barely is balanced. Seasons of scarcity are, however, marked by both food insufficiency and nutritional deficiency. In other words, in situations of scarcity this may lead to a less nutritional diet for women and children than for men. Here the perception of shortage is probably a reaction to lack of familiar food elements rather than a complete absence of food resources.

Wheat or barley bread is the quintessential symbol of Argobbā reciprocity and household hospitality, and some is always kept on hand to offer to visitors. Wheat and barley flour made into qiţţa are also used as the main ingredients for making porridge (gänfo) dishes which are more commonly consumed during celebrations such as births and weddings; they are also used for breaking the fast during the Ramadan months. Oatmeal is consumed as the main ingredient of a beverage (ajja) that consists of flavourings including honey, sugar or butter. It is always mentioned as a necessary diet of pregnant women and individuals recuperating from all kinds of illnesses.

The production and role of peas, beans and lentils – atär, baqéla and messer – varies widely according to seasons, and around September and October they are eaten fresh. They are ground into flour and mixed with bärbärré (Capiscum frutescens or Capiscum annum) and other spices to prepare thin or thick stews called širo or kekk. During the months of abundance they play a major part in Argobbā diet and are regarded primarily as adding variety to basic food products. The rest of the year, legumes are toasted (qolo) or boiled and toasted (ašuq) as a snack (mäksäs).

Among greens, the onion (qäy šenkurt-Allium cepa and näč šenkurt – Allium ursinum) is the single most important vegetable in Argobba diet.6 In almost every Argobbā rural household, onions are eaten everyday, and the amount used in a meal is dictated by a strong Argobbā cultural preference for onions. Stews, soups, sauces or toppings are made up of finely chopped onions and other vegetable ingredients. While two onion stalks are normally thought to be an appropriate amount for a širo stew that will feed a family of four, chicken stew, consumed very rarely, requires three to four onion stalks. Red pepper (bärbärré – Capiscum frutescens or Capiscum annum), which is prepared through the combination of all kinds of condiments such as azmud (Nigella sativa), kororima (Afromomum angustifolium) and dimblal (Coriandrum sativum), is a prominent seasoning used in cooking and cuisine more often than not. It is not only exclusively culinary but, like paprika, it also adds colour to the flavour of food items. Argobbā men, women and youth may grab raw green pepper (qareya) at will and hack off a piece to eat it along with meals. Argobbā cuisine also frequently uses potatoes (denneč) and vegetables such as tomatoes (timatim – Lycopersicum esculentum) and cabbages (gommän-Brassica oleracea) as thickening agents for stews and soups. Aside from being eaten boiled, baked and roasted in or out of their skins, potatoes are also mashed and fed to infants.

Although the Argobbā of these regions eat a predominantly vegetarian diet, and milk and milk products as well as flesh food fancies are scarce, village life in the Argobbā rural settlements is permeated with the presence of chickens.7 Chicken meat is used for special occasion meals and, normally, it is not eaten on an everyday basis. Indeed, to cook chicken for someone is an open declaration for deepening and formalising relationships. Argobbā meals in which flesh food products are the main ingredient are served at rural households in which a baby is being or has been born. Childbirth, and also illness, are thus occasions for slaughtering livestock and a time for family members and friends to visit new mothers and sick persons. Slaughtering and butchering is done by men while women prepare meat meals from what is given to them. In other words, men slaughter and slice and women stew and spice. Once in a while the Argobbā dry and preserve flesh (qwanţa) inside the house by hanging it on a rope or wire from one corner of the wall to another. By and large, flesh food products play a very peripheral role in most Argobbā meals but a pivotal part in religious rituals and social and ceremonial occasions.

Alimental Alteration of Particular Palates

Argobbā agrarian cosmology is the bulwark of their society. Sorghum harvest rituals, modelled after folk harvest rituals of various times, for example, became the official rituals of the Wälasma dynasty.8 Indeed sorghum symbolism derives from the Wälasma politico-religious leadership founded on a sorghum agriculture that gradually developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These early agrarian leaders were shamans-cum-political leaders whose political powers rested on an ability to use supernatural powers to ensure good crops. Thus, the annual sorghum harvest ritual served to legitimise a local Wälasma leader. For this reason, many Argobbā consider the Wälasma leaders as officiants in sorghum ritual who ensure the blessings of Allāh for the new sorghum crop on behalf of the people. The religious-cum-political and -economic nature of the agrarian rituals of the Wälasma and Argobbā were thus clearly expressed in food festivals and ceremonies. In other words, food and food consumption were an essential part of the polity at the time, and sorghum had begun to represent food in general.

Although other rituals were added over time, the core rituals officiated by the Wälasma leaders all relate to sorghum harvesting. By the early nineteenth century, the ritual had been formalised and was far different from the folk harvest rituals of the Argobbā that were the prototype of the Wälasma harvest ritual. The question of when the sorghum harvest ritual was established becomes more complicated if one examines the content of the Wälasma harvest ritual. The ritual may have originated as two separate rituals, each dedicated to the same God and later combined into one. The combination of these two rituals seems to have taken place only after the nineteenth century.9 Because both the Wälasma and peasant Argobbā rituals are all sorghum harvest rituals and share many essential elements, I confine my discussion to the Wälasma harvest ritual, which is the more important.

This harvest ritual evolved over time. Its earliest mention occurs in various travellers’ accounts.10 The preparation of the harvest ritual starts in Autumn (September to November) when the location of fields are chosen.11 Sorghum for offering during the harvest ritual is grown in these fields with great care to prevent contamination by impurities. The Wälasma and the Argobbā people performed a series of purification rituals in preparation for the autumn ceremony, and the entire process of the ritual lasted one day. Although the duration and details of the ritual have undergone changes, it basically consists of the following two elements: the offering of the new crop of sorghum by the Wälasma and the Argobbā to Allāh, and commensality among the Argobbā in the form of a feast hosted by the people themselves. The most important offerings are products of the new sorghum crop grown in the aforementioned fields, namely sorghum enjära and sorghum qäribo (a grain- based non-alcoholic beverage).12

Sorghum as the item of gift exchange between Allāh and the Argobbā is also closely associated with the way sorghum was used as a medium of exchange in general.13 The strong tradition of a barter system and the use of grains as currency slowed down the development of a cash economy based on metallic currency after its introduction from the highlands.14 Thus, despite market encouragement of a cash economy, the Argobbā continued the barter system using sorghum and other grains, as well as cloth and other goods as items of exchange. Only with the arrival of the Maria Theresa thaller at the beginning of the eighteenth century did cash gradually make inroads into the Argobbā economy.15 The relative percentages of coins and sorghum in the payment of land tax during this period, quoted in Pankhurst,16 marks this gradual shift. Despite the presumed switch from a barter to a cash economy, sorghum as a means of exchange and as a form of tax did not disappear.17

Although there were many reasons for the continuation of sorghum tax, there is no question that the religious, symbolic meaning of sorghum had much to do with it.18 Hence from a cross-cultural perspective, sorghum has a special character as a medium of exchange.19 Salt money (amolé) in nineteenth-century Ethiopia20 or in the highlands of New Guinea,21 for example, was more important for inter-group exchange but had no use or exchange value among one group of people. Sorghum as a medium of exchange differs from salt money in that, in addition to being the most important offering to Allāh, it had both use and exchange value among the Argobbā. Sorghum as a medium of exchange then retains its original religious or, to put it more broadly, cosmological meaning. Argobbā sorghum was exclusively for the Argobbā, who often, because of drought, did not have enough to sell in markets; moreover, sorghum serves as a symbol for Argobbā collective identity. Although the political dimension of sorghum is not the main focus of this paper, I should mention that the cosmological or religious power of sorghum underscores its political power.

Similarly, major transformations in Argobbā consumption patterns were brought by the Oromo migration and Amhara settler penetration. These processes not only created an opening for new food products and nutritional needs, and a reason for abandoning old ones, but were also important in shaping where, when and how foreign foods were integrated into Argobbā cultural consumption and cosmological construction. To understand the Argobbā acceptance of new food products, nutritional niches, changing tastes, and the mechanisms by which new dietary components and patterns became established in their menu and meals I have asked the following questions. First, under what circumstances did the Argobbā accept new food items and change food habits? Second, how did they accommodate new food products and create new consumption patterns endowed with new meanings and social relationships? To answer these questions I used the insider / outsider perspective. The insider perspective ponders the decisions that the Argobbā themselves make regarding dietary choices and structures. Here I considered the determinants of food intake, dietary structure and content, and described economic and symbolic factors influencing tastes and nutritional habits, especially those in the process of transformation. I also emphasised the ways in which particular food products are integrated into everyday life and examined their cultural meanings. The outsider perspective involves the political and commercial forces beyond the Argobbā community's control.

The Christian Amhara penetration into the escarpment and the lowlands in north-eastern Šäwa and southeastern Wällo brought a variety of cultigens and cuisines and introduced an enormous diversity of food crops, ranging from barley and beans to pulses and lentils, that enriched and transformed Argobbā palates and Adal diets. Amhara domination, and the incorporation of the escarpment and the lowlands, involved the stigmatisation of certain produce, such as čat and qäribo, as ‘Muslim’ and hence unfit for consumption by Christians. Thus the highland Christian Amhara speak of the Argobbā as čat eaters, while the lowland Argobbā Muslims call the Amhara ţälla drinkers. The former refers to hallucination and the latter to intoxication. In general, food products are active in the discourse of cultural identity. For example, food items such as enjära marinated with butter (alléţaţo), sausage (qwalima), and barbecued beef (eton), have become types of cuisine associated with the Argobba. Because they eat these ‘Argobbā’ food products in ‘Argobbā’ ways their cuisine differs from that of their neighbours.

Amhara Christians and Argobbā Muslims also find it difficult to eat meat together because of the differing religious rules of slaughtering. In other words, it is forbidden by shari‘a dietary rules to consume flesh foods prepared by non-Muslims because what is forbidden (haram) and permissible (halal) has a lot to do with the manner of the slaughtering. Similarly, there appear to be differences between Argobbā and Amhara perceptions of sweetness. For example, the Argobbā prefer sweet edible things like honey-marinated bread which to Amhara palates is sickly sweet. The Argobbā have a tolerance for high sugar loads especially in tea which among the Amhara, beyond a certain concentration, is commonly thought to be too sweet even for coffee.

Although during the long centuries of resistance to Christian Amhara or Oromo penetration the Argobbā appropriated certain alien culinary customs and in time turned them into symbols of their own ‘indigenous tradition’, other culinary practices were contested as ‘Oromo’ and ‘Amhara’. For example, the Argobbā are not very familiar with Oromo food products such as qinčé (butter based barley), čäčcäbsa (bread mashed in butter) and čekko (flour mashed in butter), and Amhara ways of making bässo (barley based dough) and preparing porridge using pulses such as suf (Carthamus tinctorius), nug (Guizota abyssinica) and tälba (Linum usitatissimum) as sources of vegetable oils. Just as the local cultigen sorghum (zängada) is today defined as the essence of indigenousness, alien and packaged food products such as bakery bread, wheat flour, ruz (rice), basta and mokoroni (to mean pasta and maccaroni) have also been grafted into native Argobbā diet, brought into the rural Argobbā communities from neighbouring towns and cities. This created the circumstances which provoked transformations in food habits as shown by Olmstead in the Gamo highlands.22 Intensive interaction among peoples through trade, warfare, migration and so forth, is a familiar historical picture in any part of the world. Few people have lived in isolated pockets insulated from historical flows of people and goods. An encounter with another culture, directly or indirectly through an exchange of institutional ideas or cultural artifacts in the form of food habits, dress codes, socialisation processes and so forth, often thus prompts people to think about who they are in relation to other peoples.

In this context, global commercial contacts, involving new foreign political and economic pressures, influenced Argobbā consumption patterns. For example, in the case of wheat flour and bakery bread, intrinsic nutritional value and aesthetic properties were of great significance, but so was the dearth of other food products. Such food items were introduced when the Argobbā were already experiencing rural-urban migration and global commercial interaction, and when Argobbā food habits were already, or soon would be, in a process of transformation. When rural Argobbā peasants who had left for towns returned to their native rural homelands, they brought with them new requirements in food preferences and eating habits. Similarly, where food deficits manifested themselves in famine, the hearth increasingly accommodated foodstuffs produced outside its environment and the Argobbā made a number of economic adjustments necessary to maintain a flow of resources sufficient for enabling food purchases from outside the region. The Argobbā have thus shifted and drifted to a diet of several imported foods, products based on staple commodities such as wheat flour, bakery bread, basta and mokoroni, and products with a high value added content through processing and packing.23

With the rising purchasing power of these peasant households, the eating habits that were so homogenous in the past have been altered, changing traditional family food preparation and consumption patterns. The social and economic transformations described above therefore had a considerable impact on this traditional pattern, because of a complete alteration of living and working conditions around which new culinary patterns are organised. In other words, the changing food patterns and preferences relate to a whole variety of past and recent transformations in Argobbā lifestyles and goes far beyond the simple expression of individual family needs and tastes. This, for example, led to the abandonment of home-made grain bread and the increased consumption of bakery bread, which in the past had been rare and confined to festive occasions.

The adoption of such food products is not so much a departure from traditional Argobbā food practices and stable dietary patterns as the new elements allowed the Argobbā to find an alternative pattern of subsistence while the old was still viable. Global influences through commercial contacts had a great impact in the evolution of multivalent eating habits of many Argobbā of the rural homelands. Despite concern for convenience consumables, however, traditional Argobbā food products always retained an important role within Argobba dietary patterns. Argobbā food folkloric sources suggest that such culinary developments did not occur overnight but some decades elapsed between the introduction of these foreign food products and their thorough integration into Argobbā cuisine.

The transition from adoption to enjoyment of the tastes of these food products is probably a function of habituation and cultural coding. Throughout the Argobbā rural homelands people learned to enjoy such food items by combining them with more typical Argobbā food fancies and flavourings, and sometimes by turning them into their own daily dishes. Culinary changes, Mintz argues, develop out of economic necessity or because a food item becomes truly desirable, having been integrated via additional cultural coding into the familiar cuisine.24 Although the acceptance of bakery bread is the result of commercial circuits, for Argobbā newly arrived in towns like Aliyyu Amba, Robi and Kämissé, acceptance of this food type has been internally structured to be part of a snack by the Argobbā on the move without time to eat formal or sociable meals. Argobbā preference for bakery bread is thus associated with time elaboration.

In such environments, bakery bread is, for example, now a regular feature of the morning meal of children and adults. The advent of such food products has enabled family members to eat alone when in the past serving the morning enjära and wäţ from the previous evening's dinner had been a family occasion. Young Argobba individuals, attracted by towns, thus now want to eat processed or already pre-packed food elements such as bakery bread, biscuits, basta, mokoroni, ruz (rice), powdered lentil (širo) and powdered bärbärré, the relishes for which were never cooked by their mothers. Such changes in food habits have led to generational conflicts between parents and children with regards rejection of old food ways and adoption of new dietary desires; consequently they have affected the social relations between elders and youngsters when fathers were unable to provide such foreign food products to sons and daughters due to cash shortage. On the other hand, the purchase of such fully or partially processed food products facilitated Argobbā women's liberation from strenuous dawn-to-dusk work, because the making of traditional food items involves back-breaking labour. Women, therefore, opted for food types that took a shorter amount of time to prepare and cook.

As Argobbā village settlements and communities struggle for ethnic definition and preservation in contemporary times, meals and ways of eating them are still among the symbols by which social relations are named, negotiated, and transformed. That is perhaps why the range of ingredients and repertoire of recipes familiar to Argobbā cooks are likely to limit change to an extent, since the preparation of well-known food products is clearly easier than constant experimentation. The transformation of indigenous cooking and cuisine occurs when an Argobbā mother hesitates over what food items to serve her family, fearful that there is something inadequate in a meal of ‘just’ home-grown food products. Even Argobbā women who have little interaction with outsiders, separated from them by the practice of purdah and religious barriers, learn the lessons of the presence of foreign food products. The familiar world of Argobbā home and hearth and the associated domestic mode of production then comes to seem, in some senses, less real than the unknown and unimaginable lives of strangers who visit the Argobbā rural communities from neighbouring towns or cities and bring in alien culinary practices. It is because of this function of cooking and eating as a means of asserting cultural identity that cuisine features among the important markers of Argobbā ethnicity. The act of cooking food, and thus transforming it, is a means of expressing what a people think of themselves, who they are, where they live, and what their place is in the natural and social world.25

The conflicts expressed and the resolutions sought on the terrain of everyday practice of cooking and cuisine represent nothing less than the restructuring of lives of Argobbā individuals who are moving out of their past as weavers and cultivators and entering into a new and problematic future of a regional, national and global economy as traders and consumers of commercial food products. The Argobbā rural settlements are thus changing due to their integration into a commercial economy beyond their borders. Young Argobbā individuals, attracted by what Illich calls ‘commodity-centred culture’ of towns,26 now want to eat prepacked food products such as bakery bread, wheat flour, vegetable oil, biscuits, candies, basta and mokoroni, the relishes for which were never cooked by their mothers.

The most notable transformation in food distribution an d consumption in the region under consideration since the 1950s has been the shift to wheat flour and wheat bakery bread. This results partly from the vast acceleration of world trade in these commodities, the subsidised exports of large quantities of wheat from North America and Western Europe, and the acquisition of these products in the form of food aid during periods of drought and food shortage, of which there have been several. Such socio-economic conditions made these food products more readily and cheaply available in many markets and altered consumption patterns. As a result there is now a new generation of Argobbā which seeks knowledge of other food items, and responses to these have occurred at the level of local markets. The great increase in the eating of processed or prepacked food inside and outside the rural household is thus having a profound effect on Argobbā social lives. Although such forms of eating may be related to freedom of individual choice, in ‘eating without meals’, to use Mintz's phrase,27 eating has been desocialised.

Food had also become increasingly scarce in most of the Argobbā rural homelands due to famine and intermittent droughts during the last three decades. Many were thus not only in the throes of a growing food crisis, but they also found it impossible to substitute purchased food products for subsistence crops because of shortage of cash and the rise in the price of market staples. Thus during the last few decades, the content and number of meals has undergone substantial transformation. The content of the meals has changed both through the diversity of available food items and the introduction of products with which the Argobbā were previously not acquainted nor had little access to because of cost. Until the 1960s the consumption of, for example, bakery bread was practically non-existent. It then started to become a regular feature and is now part of the morning meal of children of the rural homelands. Such a diversification of food products, as observed earlier, enables Argobbā children to eat alone, nibbling all day. Thus, besides alterations in meal content, there are fundamental commensal changes around the social environment of food. Similarly, peasants in the past ate an early morning breakfast and an early evening supper, but now due to the availability of partially processed food products lunch has become part of the daily meals. The ingredients and condiments of these meals have also changed largely due to local and regional market contacts and exchanges.

Surely, the paradigmatic understandings with which the Argobbā face economic transformation and political confrontation are regenerated in the most casual, informal, and intimate domestic practices, such as cooking and cuisine. Previous Argobbā political experiences are thus assimilated, and the potential for renewed action is created in the discourses that have been awakened at the everyday level, for example through the preparation and eating of meals. In Bourdieu's and Foucault's terms, symbolic political discourses are capable of evoking an entire field of memory and experience that can be given a politicised valence in food practices.28 The locus for the creation and transformation of ideologies can thus be found in everyday discursive practices that may supply vocabularies, formulations and terms of thought to food habits. Since the Argobbā have a keen understanding of their social position and of the economic and political forces that create it, and since the roots of these forces lie in the knowledge of the world which arises from their everyday productive practices, the symbolic and ideological discourse that surrounds the practice of Argobbā cuisine has become an expression of these changes and conflicts. Moreover, as cooking and cuisine themselves combine economic, political, and ideological practices, they are part of the Argobbā domain in which these processes of confrontation and transformation are actually taking place.

The appearance of impoverishment that makes the Argobbā rural settlements seem isolated from the rest of the nation is in fact the very symptom of the ties that bind them to a larger economic relationship. Although Argobbā individuals in the rural communities spend their working lives involved for the most part in subsistence economy, their lives are mostly occupied with reflections on things only money can buy. While they grind sorghum, millet and maize or spin and weave cotton thread fabrics, their thoughts and discourses turn frequently to the deployment of precious town-earned money that can purchase town-produced market goods and food items. Although traditional food products continue to mark special commensal occasions such as religious rituals and life-changing events, the demand for pre-packed edible things which has increased rapidly in the various rural homelands has created a change in culinary culture which has had profound and irreversible dietary consequences as well as distorting economic effects.

The crisis in which the Argobbā find themselves symptomises and embodies the contradictions of peripheral capitalism, to use Hyden's phrase,29 which inevitably causes increasing impoverishment of the rural masses. Migration and the depression of prices for Argobbā peasants’ food crops provide cheap food and cheap labour for the towns, but at the cost of ecological and demographic contradictions that lead to underdevelopment in Argobbā peasant agriculture. Overuse of land resulting in irreparable ecological deterioration and population migration in the rural settlements are among the consequences of such socio-economic conditions. This condition aptly describes the situation in which Argobbā men find themselves as wage labourers. Unable to support themselves on land, more and more Argobbā turn to towns to find work. But the employment they find there is so sporadic, and wages are so low, that they are unable to move their families to towns and become full-time wage-workers. Instead, they live in limbo, suspended between the rural settlements and the urban work places. Since neither economy can fully support the rural household, Argobbā women and children eke out a meagre living from the field, with their monetary needs partially met by men's wages, while they in turn are partially supported by land crops.

In sum, the Argobbā have learned to enjoy such convenience consumables by combining them with more typical Argobbā food products and condiments, and sometimes by turning them into their own daily dishes. For example, partly prepared food products such as powdered Širo and bärbärré that are available in shops or weekly markets are transformed into Argobbā dishes through the addition of home-made spices and flavourings and careful cooking. The act of cooking food, and thus transforming it, is a means of expressing what the Argobbā think of themselves, who they are as Muslims, where they live, and what their place is in the natural and social world of the escarpment, and in the political and economic systems of the Šäwa and Wällo regions of Ethiopia.

Conclusion

The food products consumed in the Argobbā household originate in the rural settlements of the escarpment, or they are brought from outside; they are grown or raised locally, or they are acquired through trade, or with money obtained from commercial interaction in towns. Once they enter the Argobbā household hearth, the structures of cuisine transform these products of diverse ecologies and economies into something that is uniquely Argobbā by composition, a culturally domesticated creation ready for consumption. It is because of this function of cooking and eating as a means of asserting cultural identity that Argobbā cuisine features among the important markers of their ethnicity.

The act of cooking food, and thus transforming it, is a means of expressing what the Argobbā think of themselves as Muslims of the escarpment slopes in these regions of Ethiopia. Whenever the cultural identity of the Argobbā is in question, symbols taken from the realm of their cuisine, eating alléţaţo or eating qwalima, buying dabbo or buying čat, become active in the arenas of ongoing discourse in which questions of cultural identity are confronted. The multiclass and multicultural social world in which the Argobbā find themselves is mirrored in a multiplicity of cuisines; and certain food products, such as wheat flour, bakery bread, basta and mokoroni, become names for these cuisines and the kinds of Argobbā individuals associated with these meals.

This process has both economic and cultural referents; the symbolic associations of food refer not only to the Argobbā and to the patterns of their living in the escarpment, but to the productive process in the physical and social environment. In as much as transformations in production must inevitably alter symbolic associations, changes in the content of the life experience that the Argobbā bring to bear on their understanding of symbols must in turn alter the content of the latter. Whether the beverage is bitter or sweet or the bread is buttered or marinated, the meal desired or detested has to do with Argobbā class and cultural associations, and with the dominant symbols and ideologies current in Argobbā society and the culinary processes by which these symbols and ideologies make their presence felt in the escarpment slopes and lowlands.

Due to the fact that these processes disclose information about cuisine, the Muslim Argobbā etiquette of meals contains a political significance all of its own. The etiquette of the meal reveals both the rural household division of labour and the resultant social rights; not only is the structure reflected by the meal, but it is also reinforced or broken through the political processes contained within its etiquette. The shared meal represents the unity of the Argobbā family that gathers to eat it, but the manner in which it is served and eaten also speaks to the social interactions between household members. Gendered relations are used to place Argobbā household members in separate social categories, each with their own right to claim household resources for their own purposes and to define particular roles in the family's power politics. If cuisine thus reproduces household relations, the flow of food goods between Argobbā households informs the social and symbolic function of meals in the rural settlements.

These movements of labour and products among contemporary peasant Argobbā household families are eroding traditional patterns of cuisine, anonymous market exchanges and foreign food products of which the Argobbā have no control are increasing, and symbols and ideologies are struggling to encompass these transformations through new meanings. The structures of cuisine, discourses about food, and practices of cooking and serving are so immersed in the cultural and material life of the escarpment slopes that they condense a wealth of symbolic and ideological meanings central to Argobbā everyday lives. At present, the Argobbā rural settlements find themselves at an historical ‘moment’ in which conflicting economic situations demand resolution, and the choices to be made are difficult and possible outcomes unclear in the escarpment environment. These choices are by no means only symbolic and ethnic, but lie embedded in complex Argobbā cultural and political practices that organise material life through cooking and cuisine in changing socio-economic conditions.

The Argobbā world of escarpment slopes thus represents men who migrate and women who wait in an environment that is becoming increasingly vulnerable to foreign food products and beverages. If, then, we are to make sense of changing Argobbā cuisine, we need to understand that Argobbā subsistence strategy is inevitably linked to transformations in the regional and national economy, and the erosion of images and practices of Argobbā cooking and cuisine is a product of such forces. Therefore, the structures of Argobbā cuisine are not fixed and immutable, but are in a constant state of transformation.

Notes

1. Early works, such as Robertson-Smith, Lectures which is a systematic account of sacrifice, place great emphasis on the commensality of the shared meal as symbolic of social bonds and as an important aspect of ritual enactments. Fortes, ‘Food in the Domestic Economy’ describes Tallensi food items and domestic relations; Richards, Land, Labour and Diet examines economic aspects of Bemba food products; Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific describes and analyses Trobriand pigs and yams; Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion explains how the Nuer practice of sharing food defines social groups; Firth, ‘Sociological Study of Native Diet’ confirms that indigenous edible things have sociological meanings; and Mead ‘The Changing Significance of Food’ looks at the changing significance of food elements. Similarly, theoretical dimensions of food taboos have been discussed by Douglas, Purity and Danger; Leach, ‘Anthropological Aspects’; Levi-Strauss, ‘The culinary Triangle’ and Tambiah, ‘Animals are Good’. For Turner, Forest of Symbols, food products are highly charged symbols while for Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class, food is an indicator of social inequalities and social competition that can mask authority, hierarchy and power relations. Caplan, Feasts, Fasts, Famine and, I would add ‘for feeling’, Appadurai, ‘Dietary Improvisation’ have also captured the imagination of modern ethnographers.

2. For a recent work on čat (Catha edulis) – a small tree or shrub, whose young leaves, stem tips, and tender bark are chewed for their stimulating effect – see Cassanelli, ‘Qat’ and the rich list of references at the end of his article.

3. From early on we know the Argobbā as Muslim traders whose entire ethos is defined by Islamic beliefs, permeating all aspects of life and providing ideological support for trading activities and religious sanction for dietary rules. Indeed the Argobbā are Muslim in both the religious and ethnic sense, and Islam with all its shari'a-based constituencies and distinctions between edible (halal) and non-edible (haram) foods is thus deep rooted and well understood by Argobbā Muslims.

4. In developing the concept of ‘power in the domestic domain’, I was stimulated by the use by Netting, Smallholders, Householders, in a very different context, of the concept of power and gender in the rural household.

5. The ordering of the elements of cuisine is an aspect of the material act of cooking and a tool that allows the combination of raw ingredients and preparation for consumption. The fact that Argobbā cuisine involves use of such a socio-cultural definition thus reveals the close connection between diet and cuisine, the cultural ordering of food products, and cooking. The rules of a specific cuisine, distilled as they are from the ‘sedimentation’ of thousands of past meals, are then distinctly tailored to fit the material fabric of the society in question. When these conditions change as, for example, with the growing scarcity of relishes and increasing presence of foreign food products in the Argobbā rural settlements, the rules of cuisine must in turn be adjusted to conform to the norm of the new conditions. Cuisine, as is argued in Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class, 63–64, does not passively follow behind material practice; however, people also deploy resources and make choices according to needs and desires that have been culturally determined.

6. For a comprehensive analysis of the importance of this vegetable in African markets and diets, see Clark, Onions Are My Husband.

7. Here chickens are being discussed in terms of their place in the diet, despite significant differences in their roles in Argobbā cuisine. Fowl flesh food products are softer and tastier than animal meats but they are also cheaper to sacrifice and serve to guests.

8. Even the current version contains elements derived from the folk cosmology of these early periods.

9. Various Wälasma leaders collected the sorghum crop from different parts of the Argobbā rural homelands for offerings. The religious act of following the orders of Allāh who gave sorghum seeds to humans and offering to Him their harvest in return involved the political act of collecting the sorghum crop from Argobbā peasants.

10. See for example: Pearce, Life and Adventures, 201; Harris, Highlands of Aethiopia, 146; Rochet d'Hericourt, Second Voyage, 87.

11. In the harvest ritual, the Wälasma and the Argobbā offer the new crops of sorghum from the various fields. If the various fields chosen for the ritual are a symbolic representation of the Argobbā rural homelands as a whole, then the distinction between the types of rituals is inconsequential, at least on a conceptual level, although it is significant from the perspective of the Argobbā themselves. Throughout the Argobbā rural homelands, a number of valleys, ponds, mountains, hills, and rocks function as sūf sacred places where supernatural powers are thought to reside and receive commensal rituals.

12. Sorghum and sorghum products such as bread and qäribo have been the food and beverage for commensality between the Argobbā and Allāh, on the one hand, and among the Argobbā, on the other. The two essential components of most Argobbā rituals and festivals are those involving offerings to Allāh, and the feast with the host and the guests. Although other food items are also used, sorghum and sorghum products are indispensable for both.

13. Cash currency and sorghum present a significant problem for students of symbolism. Objects do not cry out with a specific meaning, but rather actors assign meanings to symbolic objects. Yet the basic cultural framework restricts the actors who are not altogether free to assign cultural meanings to, in this case, sorghum and cash economy.

14. Pankhurst, Introduction to the Economic History, 23–25 and Primitive Money, 31–33.

15. Pankhurst, ‘The Maria Theresa Thaler’, 18.

16. Pankhurst, Economic History of Ethiopia, 121.

17. Pankhurst, A Social History of Ethiopia, 96. In the case of the Argobbā, the pervasiveness with which sorghum agriculture and an agrarian image came to represent their rural homelands is well illustrated in the ‘tenant-lord’ relationship between the Argobbā peasants and Wälasma landowners, although this relationship is more a reflection of consumption and dissemination of agrarianism than of its construction. Indeed, the sorghum tax which was based on the putative yield of sorghum then symbolised an important expression of wealth and power of the Wälasma landowners.

18. Not only ritual but the notion of ‘belief’, too, was originally linked to economics. Pouillon discusses belief (la croyance) under the heading of ‘economic obligations’: see Pouillon, ‘Remarks on the Verb “To Believe”’ Many other contemporary French scholars follow this line, including Belmont, ‘Superstition and Popular religion’ and Herrenschmidt, ‘Sacrifice’ both in Izard ed., Between Belief and Transgression.

19. Precious objects, money and quasi-money are all mediums of exchange, but they all change hands. In many societies, precious goods originate as a medium of exchange between deities and humans, thereby assigning religious meaning to these goods and to ‘economic’ transactions.

20. Pankhurst, Primitive Money, 14.

21. Godelier, Perspectives in Marxist Anthropology, 51.

22. Olmstead, Women Between Two Worlds, 65.

23. These adjustments have been made with as little apparent discomfort as that undergone in earlier decades by consumers in the industrialised world, where a continuity of supply of exotic food products has come to be seen as a matter of material and social enrichment by the majority of those involved in such consumption.

24. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, 69.

25. Firth, ‘Sociological Study of Native Diet’, 17.

26. Illich, Toward a History of Needs, 23.

27. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, p.28.

28. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 55; Foucault, L'Archeologie, 29.

29. Hyden, ‘Beyond Intensification’, 418.