A Response: Doro Fänta: Creativity vs. Adaptation in the Ethiopian Diaspora

Invoking the common dish doro fänta ("substitute chicken stew"), served without either its traditional chicken or hard-boiled egg, as a metaphor for cultural and economic change since the Ethiopian revolution began, this short response to the volume's essays queries whether doro fänta is a metaphor for expressive invention or an adaptation of structure without substance. Following comments on a number of the essays appearing in this volume, the discussion suggests that their subject matter is more complex than the Ethiopian homeland study to which the notion of creative incorporation was originally applied. The paper ends with a brief case study of Ethiopian cooking and cuisine as aesthetic knowledge of identity and as a domain in which market forces have encouraged deviations from historical structures of taste, meaning, and processing of food. (8 February 2009)