An Intangible Knowledge of Landscape: Creating People and Politically Charged Places in Northern Ethiopia

Abstract

This paper explores how intangible knowledge creates politically and ideologically charged landscapes in peasant communities in Eastern Tigray, northern highland Ethiopia. Tigrayans hold a strict binary perception of gender that is partly constituted in technological and spatial practices that are used to create rural farming landscapes of farmhouses, fields, fences, paths, wells, and churches. Despite the importance of pottery and iron tools to rural household economies, the intangible knowledge and skills associated with the production of these crafts are perceived as immoral and dangerous to people and/or village material resources. Furthermore, in practicing their skills and using their knowledge, potters and smiths transgress normative gendered technological and spatial practices when they extract resources and produce products in craft-specific mines and workshops. In short, smiths behave “like women” and potters “like men.” Places produced by potters and smiths on the village landscape also become locations where social differences between farmers and artisans are routinely negotiated and expressed in acts of violence and/or denigration. It is suggested that intangible knowledge (or ignorance) of crafting skills, their non-normative gendered technological and spatial inscription on the landscape, create and are rendered meaningful by local ideologies that legitimate social inequities. This conclusion challenges models of political landscapes that emphasize elite control of resources and of powerful legitimating ideologies that bolster social inequities. In the example presented, non-elite people also develop powerful ideologies and politically charged landscapes that create and reproduce social inequities in the routine practice of daily life.