Reception of the site> research> Research plans> Margins and peripheries, roads and networks : the processes of building of the areas of the Ethiopian State from the XIIIth century to our days
Margins and peripheries, roads and networks : the processes of building of the areas of the Ethiopian State from the XIIIth century to our days
ACI "Space and Territories". Plan financed over three years by the Ministry of Research (2003-2006)
Search party : Claire Bosc Tiesse (historian, NATIONAL CENTRE FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH, Donatecarcenter.com-Aix) additional co-ordinator ; Mary-Laura Derat (historian, NATIONAL CENTRE FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH, Donatecarcenter.com-Paris) co-ordinator ; Éloi Ficquet (anthropologist, EHESS) ; Hervé Pennec (historian, Donatecarcenter.com-AIX) ; Sabine Planel (geographer, PRODIG, Research pole for the organisation and the broadcasting of geographical information) ; Dimitri Toubkis (historian, Donatecarcenter.com-PARIS) ; Anaïs Wion (historian, Donatecarcenter.com-PARIS).
The objective of this plan is to establish a historical geography of the Ethiopian regions, to locate their territory and the evolution of this one on a long length, to exhume the traces of the history of these regions as centres in itself and not only peripheries to be dominated or won. In return, we will also study, when it is possible, speech was worked out in regions in comparison with central power. This programme also aims at studying more precisely another type of element which draws a space, at the same time as its borders : networks which construct the space of the State and the roads which cross it, allowing to create a common culture.
These regional notions which structure some political speeches today or more particularly self-defining are buildings. These speeches historicistes are not those of the historian, of the geographer or of the anthropologist who currently have to fill up one of the lacunas of researches in human and social sciences on Éthiopie.
To try to surround what is the Ethiopian State in its territorial acceptance, to define the structure of the one who gave federalist as an empire and today as a State, it is necessary to understand him in his apprehension of the space. It is necessary to hire trans-historical and trans-regional comparative studies to reconsider what the official speech of Christian power to the conquest of a territory saw as margins, intervals to fill, and that was not necessarily no man' s land.
It is therefore at a job of dislocation, of déconstruction of the Ethiopian territory in the space and in the time that we want to get down. To accomplish this plan, no track can be neglected : it is necessary to have recourse as well to the geographical analysis, which allows to identify the current organisation of the space, that in the historical analysis which gives an essential diachronic perspective, without neglecting the political and social anthropology which analyses current stakes of these questions. The team which we took up is therefore multidisciplinary, all the more so as each in his practice implements methods recovering from various disciplines for reflexion which exceeds the simple frame of history, of history of art, of anthropology or of geography.
Centralised State or State federalist, the centralising ideology always works in current political life, with sometimes extensions in the historical analysis, driving regions and/or ethnic groups to assert identity defined in link, that he is of opposition or more complex, with central power. That is why it is particularly urgent today that human sciences ask the question of the reality of an Ethiopian "empire" , asserted by the « kings of kings » since more than a millennium.
Calling into question the unique ladder which considers the constituting regions of the Christian Ethiopian State only from the point of view of the conqueror, our plan aims at studying the peripheral regions in the central space, not as margins but since clean centres. It is so a question of emphasising the huge complexity of the Ethiopian space, by replacing regions in a progressive dimension. Therefore, the question of the policies of integration of territories in a national space will not be neglected, but it will not be able to be the only optics. In the geography of places, we will stack a geography of networks. For example, the study of networks of royal churches is a tool to draw the geopolitical strategy of Ethiopian power, aiming at marking its presence in the space, including in newly won regions.
But these networks which work as routes for the sovereigns and their court making stage close to the royal churches determine reports which are not those of the centre in relation to a periphery, they create another geography of areas. In this interlacing between religious networks and royal networks, are added networks maintained by the men of letters across the transmission chains of knowledge and constituted by the copyists and the artisans, or today by the schools. Taking control of the Ethiopian kingdom, these networks of knowledge and of know-how, which is so much stories of the vitality of cultural and economic exchanges inside the kingdom, in spite of distance and difficulties of the relief, also construct the politico religious space and introduce another face.
The analysis will concern mainly three emblematic geographical zones of the report between centres and integrated peripheries or not in empire : Lasta, Godjam, and what it would be possible to call by simplifying the Big South, without wanting to conceal thereabouts the complexity of this southern space so much coveted by the Christian State and in that it is not possible to allocate fixed name. The region of Lasta represents a particularly interesting case, as much as it changed status in the course of studied period, passing of a central position to a marginal position in the Ethiopian space. This evolution is political first of all : dynastic change intervened at the end of the XIIIth century drew away the fall of the sovereigns zagwé and with her the drop in status of their region-capital : Lasta. It is then necessary to wait for the XVIIth century to have more reliable information on this territory which establishes itself as the bastion of a political and religious opposition to central power. This very particular position within the Ethiopian space is all the more interesting as it raises questions of identity. Zagwé is reputed as being of sovereigns agaw (populations of couchitique language), distinguishing itself from their precursors just as their successors who belonged to groups of Semitic language. It is therefore necessary to wonder about the process of integration of this territory in Christian kingdom and in predominant culture.
Nothing of Lasta is practically known. In the course of the reign of Zagwé (XITH - XIIITH centuries), native to the region, and more precisely to Bugna, it seems that the political capital of the kingdom was installed there, and it is readily located in Lalibala, a monumental site sheltering a group of rock churches founded by the eponymous king at the beginning of the XIIIth century. This location has been able never to be proved on the ground : some traces of secular activity were discerned in Lalibala, without its being possible to conclude from it in the permanent presence of a sovereign and of his court. One of the first tasks would therefore be to investigate place on the memory of places, interested not only in the site of Lalibala, but also in Bugna, which enters the titulature of several dignitaries of the court in the XIIIth century. He is of course no way to construct a political geography of XITH - XIIITH centuries from this information, but rather a geography of memory which, déconstruite, could bring new research tracks for this period.
Beyond "key" , so key there is, it is necessary to be interested in the religious establishments of Lasta. He makes no doubt which the establishment of churches and of monasteries allowed to exercise a territorial control and to forge a cultural identity, factor of unit of the kingdom around the Christian sovereign. And yet if inventories were accomplished, these remain incomplete this day. So, on twenty-nine churches listed in Lasta, ten were never visited. A job of inventory and of cartography is therefore obvious to establish accurately the ecclesiastical geography of Lasta, by differentiating religious foundations under royal auspices of others. By giving to this inquiry a historical perspective, they will have then a reliable tool to périodiser and to measure the level of intervention of central power in the region.
In the XVIIth century then in the XVIIIth century, this region rebels periodically against royal power. Lasta acquires however an autonomy which it remains to define. Participant of a regional self-defining building, pictures are then created there, in a style distinctly distinct from the one who predominates in Gondar, the royal capital of epoch, and who puts the kings in picture zagwé linked to the big holy Ethiopians. It is currently necessary to list these writings to replace them in their context and to date them to include this production better and which historical speech it transports.
Godjam or rather all zone included in the south of the lake Tana, in the curl of Abbay, represents another space occupying a particular place in the Ethiopian kingdom. Completely peripheral space in the XIIIth century and until the XVth century, the file of the history of this region is to resume entirely. It is a question access of gathering all mention of the governments of this region in royal columns, hagiographies of the holy places, but also by using sources until then neglected : the margins of manuscripts kept in the monasteries where is recorded all that related to their history and to the interference of the nondenominational authorities. This information allows to give a picture of the evolution of the Christianization in time and in the space of this zone, across the establishment of renowned but neglected monastic establishments and of the history of the relations of Godjam to central power.
At the end of the XVth century and at the beginning of the XVIth century, the queens melt in Godjam of the royal churches and establish in the region of rival networks, stakes which marks then the writing and the rewriting of texts to assert the anteriority of the authority of each of the antagonistic on the region. Anyhow, Ethiopian power decides to turn more resolutely to this space and to control it much more efficiently than it had made it before. These tries to sit a domination in the Western periphery of the kingdom anticipates the displacement of its geopolitical centre in the second half of the XVIth century since the royal camps settle there and on the oriental perimetres of the lake Tana then in Gondar, about sixty kilometres more north of the lake, for next two centuries. The place of Godjam in the shape of the kingdom changes then : near the region-capital, there seems to remain a separate entity, very linked to the king who names his governor since XVth, often among his fellows, and at the same time delicate to control.
A last space, in the particularly vague and unstable outlines, will hold our attention. It is about the region which, in the written sources of XIVTH - XVTH centuries, is indicated as Damot, representing an independent State of the particularly powerful Christian kingdom since he would have, during time, not only resisted Christian conquest, but also exercised his authority over neighbouring Muslim sultanates.
The location of Damot makes the object of all speculations on behalf of the researchers. If they are held in current toponymy, a mount Damot in Wolaita is found and populations on place involve this ancient kingdom resisting Christianity, as though this crossed resistance justified some autonomy in relation to the Ethiopian national State. However, the contact between this State and the Christian kingdom which took place in the XIVth century lets think that Damot had then a very northern extension, going perhaps up to the north of Choa. In columns of the XVIIth century, just as in geographies worked out by the missionaries Jesuits at the same time, Damot indicates a region which this time is north of Abbay. It is therefore necessary to make the history of this space, always more or less in the margin of the Christian State, to determine which reality it recuperates according to period to which they refer.
Moreover, this space is crossed by roads and networks which testify a circulation of the men, property and ideas. But only some plots appear from it : by places, churches founded in the XIVth - XVth centuries by Christian sovereigns were spotted, in which are kept of the illuminated manuscripts to which style is very close to royal manuscripts. More recently, it was possible to be interested in the network of cities installed by the national State or in school network. But it remains to do an exhaustive stocktaking of all these elements, interested at the same time in the presence of royal cities, of manuscripts there guèze or in amharique and by including a diachronic perspective. Difficulty will then be to find the means to represent cartographiquement these areas borders of which are probably unstable and that are crossed by roads and networks which do all not work in the same period.
In the same rubric :
- The natural sacred sites : The “conservation of biodiversity” as source of economic and social stakes (studies of case in the Benin, Burkina Faso and Togo)
- Ethiopian historiographic traditions in epoch of numerical
- Computer processing of the phenomena of consanguinity in anthropology and in history : an integrated approach
- Society, local powers and sustainable development from cities to Africa
- Archives BREUIL. Between European prehistory and africanisme, an intellectual and institutional world in the XXth century
- CORNAFRIQUE : Write the history of the Horn of Africa (XIIIth - XXIth centuries) : texts, networks and societies
- SYSAV : Systems of knowledges and of training
- AFRICAUSES : Africain Reasons. Mobilisations, international brokerage and struggles on legitimate forms of the government of Africa
- VIOLAFRIQUE : Conflicts and ordinary structural acts of violence. Comparative and interdisciplinary approach in eight Africain cities
- FRONTAFRIQUE : absurdity or rooting ? New approaches of the historicité of Africain borders
- PUBLISLAM : Religious public Areas. States, societies and Islam in Western Africa
