Abstract
This chapter analyses the interlacing of migration, national belonging, and familial ties across Ethiopia and Eritrea, a context where the process of defining nation-state borders can be observed in the making. The independence of Eritrea and the war of 1998–2000 both determined new criteria for defining nationalities and citizenship rights and introduced the idea of impassable boundaries, making many families “transnational”, which has had significant consequences for intimate relationships. By focusing on the children of mixed couples, this chapter explores how their incoherent biographical paths challenge monolithic representations of national identity, but, at the same time, produce and reproduce nationalistic belonging; ultimately, the chapter aims to highlight the affective, symbolic and practical connections of kinship and nationalism. Moreover, for people in-between, these connections and the new possibilities of handling family networks open innovative ways of global and local mobility through which new futures may be invented. Kinship, citizenship and mobility create an interplay made up of strategic and arduous choices, fortuitous and forced positions, and opposed and conflicting options, suggesting to reflect on individuals and their actions. Nevertheless, while the category of choice is usually linked to a process of liberation from constraining social and family roles, in a context crossed by irreconcilable differences, it seems rather a cause of suffering, because of the losses felt each time.
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Notes
- 1.
Eritrea and Ethiopia are characterized by the coexistence of a variety of languages, religions, and ethnic groups. My investigation is focused on Tigrinya-speaking people from the highlands who constitute a relatively homogenous group, sharing religion (Orthodox Christianity) and historical and cultural elements (e.g. land tenure systems, political structures, kinship organizations). They are the largest in number, as well as the community in power. Together with other Semitic-speaking Eritrean and the Ethiopian Highlands inhabitants, they are collectively called Habesha (Abyssinian).
- 2.
The interlacement between alternative ways of family making and the transnational mobility emerges also from marriages arranged for migration purposes, which are spread among the Ethiopians and the Eritrean refugees in Ethiopia as well as elsewhere. Cf. Costantini and Massa 2016.
- 3.
Personal names are fictitious and biographical details are omitted or changed.
- 4.
Agame is the name of a sub-region of Tigray along the border with Eritrea. The term refers to a stereotyped image of migrants thought of as poor, dirty, traditionalist manual workers from the countryside who move to the modern town.
- 5.
The multiplication of borders has produced a new global system of differentiation of rights that moulds spaces and daily life on both sides of their edges (Berg and Ehin 2006; Vacchiano 2011). In the anthropological debate, the terms boundary, border, and frontier are used by different authors to define areas of reflection that partly conflict and partly overlap with each other. Here I follow terminology suggested by Fassin (2011), in which borders represent territorial limits defining political entities, such as states, and legal subjects, such as citizens. Boundaries are understood in Barth’s perspective (1969), as social constructs that build symbolic differences and generate national, ethnic, and cultural identities.
- 6.
I refer to the critical and reflexive perspective on kinship studies developed by Schneider (1968, 1984), according to which family configurations, intended by modernist anthropology as a cultural expression of natural facts, are seen as historically and locally variable symbolic constructions. By analyzing the practices of situated subjects, the focus has gradually been placed on personal choices, in a shift of interest from structure to the individual, and on the role of ‘relatedness’ in the construction of family ties (Carsten 2000).
- 7.
I collected these ethnographic materials during a year of fieldwork (Jan. 2013–Feb. 2014) carried out for my PhD program at the University of Bergamo. Nevertheless, the analysis I offer is enhanced by research undertaken, as a member of the Italian Ethnological Mission in Tigray, since 2007 in Tigray.
- 8.
The domestic preparation of coffee involves an elaborated ceremony and is an important moment for commonality.
- 9.
Highland kingdoms and dynasties have often based their legitimacy on lineage ties with the mythical figure of Menelik I, considered the son of the Queen of Sheba and the biblical King Solomon, and the founder of the state tradition and of the genealogical bond with the Jewish-Christian tradition (Calchi Novati 1994). At village level, land and political powers were distributed according with patrilineal lineages on which a segmentary system of alliances was based (Smidt 2007).
- 10.
In the past, geographical bonds were a more salient source of identity for highlanders than ethnic and clan affiliations. The political mobilization of ‘ethnicity’ is a relatively recent phenomenon, which started during the 1960s among the student movements. In the following decades, ethnic separatist movements, political actors and politicized scholars have played a key role in the projecting into the past the contemporary forms of ethnic consciousness (cfr. Tronvoll 2009).
- 11.
The myth of origin of this tradition dates back to the Axum kingdom, established in the first millennium B.C. by Emperor Menelik I, and is supported by numerous historians and by the so-called ‘Greater Ethiopia’ thesis. A different historical interpretation has been offered by scholars who interpret the Ethiopian state as a recent construction, dating back to territorial annexations during the nineteenth century.
- 12.
At the beginning, the borderline marked the edge of the Italian colony, then was dissolved with the fascist conquest of Ethiopia (1936–1941). Next, it outlined the border between the Ethiopian Empire and the British military protectorate (1941–1951) and subsequently between the Empire and the so-called Autonomous Federal Region of Eritrea (1952–1962). Finally, with Ethiopia’s annexation of Eritrea, the political border became an internal frontier.
- 13.
In Eritrea, the EPLF established a single-party government named PFDJ. In Ethiopia, political leadership was assumed by the EPRDF, a coalition chaired by the TPLF and composed of the opposition fronts arouse during the dictatorship.
- 14.
At the end of the 1990s about a quarter of the population was estimated to live abroad (Al-Ali et al. 2001). Political violence and the material precariousness occurring during the liberation war led to a massive migration to Sudan, Ethiopia and Western countries, establishing the transnational character of the Eritrean nation-building process (Bernal 2004; Hepner 2009; Kibreab 1996; Riggan 2013a).
- 15.
The decision to go beyond patrilineality and to evade the international practice of restricting voting rights to residents was linked with the need, which emerged during the guerrilla, to broaden the human and economic resources for fighting the huge Ethiopian enemy (Iyob 2000).
- 16.
A relevant exception were the thousands of Ethiopians citizens who under the Derg had governmental and military positions, and who after Eritrean independence were expelled together with their families.
- 17.
- 18.
Amiche is the epithet by which people from Eritrean born in Ethiopia and repatriated in Eritrea are commonly called. Showing an implicit but remarkable postcolonial irony, people explain this nickname referring to the Automotive Manufacturing Company of Ethiopia (AMCE), a company whose vehicle parts were manufactured in Italy and assembled in Ethiopia. Like AMCE vehicles, amiches have parts (i.e. parents) that come from one country (the Italian colony of Eritrea) and are assembled in another (Ethiopia).
- 19.
Compulsory national service was introduced with the goal of transmitting the values of the Eritrean revolution to the new generations and to pursue a self-reliant development. According to the official proclamation, all Eritreans aged between 18 and 40 years have to serve 6 months of military training and 12 months of military or civilian services. However, after the outbreak of the war with Ethiopia and the introduction of the so called ‘Warsay-ykaelo development campaign’, national service has become unlimited for the vast majority of conscripts and implicate military and civil duties (cfr. Hepner and O’Kane 2009; Müller 2008).
- 20.
In Ethiopia, there are 86,010 Eritrean refugees registered (UNHCR 2013), who are mostly allocated across four camps in Tigray. Since 2010, refugees meeting specific criteria have had the right to reside outside the camps and to attend university.
- 21.
The humanitarian corridors across the border have been closed in 2009 due to the Eritrean closure towards international organizations. Since then the migration routes are partly self-arranged, and pass through Sudan.
- 22.
Focusing on the relationships between the whole and its parts, kinship studies have contributed to considering dichotomies such as individual-social role and inner-outer self, as universal oppositions, and this has been recently questioned by anthropological attention to the Self (i.e. Rosaldo 1984). Since kinship is a relational language, however, the Self is always defined (and defines itself) as the alter of an alter ego (Solinas 1996) and cannot be considered as preexisting and independent of the relations and the roles in which it is embedded and that build his/her concrete manifestation (Cutolo 2010).
- 23.
Unleavened sour dough flat bread made from teff or other cereals and eaten with every meal.
- 24.
Regarding the link between kinship and other domains of knowledge, I refer to Strathern’s analysis of the influences of genetic and reproductive technologies in the Euro-American ideas on relatedness (Strathern 2005). Changes in the ways of building and conceiving family ties has suggested emphasizing the relationship between conceptualisations and practices of kinship and the knowledge that comes from other, seemingly separate, domains.
- 25.
Following Ong (1999, 2003), I consider citizenship as an ongoing process, taking shape through the interactions between the nation-states governmental powers, that mould values, speech and behavior on the basis of specific ideas of nationality, on the one hand, and the individuals, who continually create expressions and alternative notions of what being a citizen means, on the other. Far from being a homogeneous category, various understandings, perspectives and experiences of citizenship emerge even within a single state, according to different and unequal positions occupied by individuals and groups in the local and transnational networks of power.
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Massa, A. (2017). Rethinking Kinship, Mobility and Citizenship across the Ethiopian-Eritrean Boundaries. In: Decimo, F., Gribaldo, A. (eds) Boundaries within: Nation, Kinship and Identity among Migrants and Minorities. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53331-5_7
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