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14: Drinking Ethiopia
- University Press of Colorado
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243 Biographical sketch. Ron Reminick, a psychological anthropologist, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1973. He has conducted research in Jamaica, Brazil, India, Appalachia, and the inner city of Cleveland, Ohio. He has been studying about and researching in Ethiopia for more than forty years. Hisoriginalfieldwork,conductedinEthiopiaduringthelate1960s,focusedon gender identity and ritual symbolism. His two-year Fulbright in the mid-1990s involved contributing to the M.A. program at Addis Ababa University, and with the assistance of his graduate students he conducted four major research projects. In 2005 with a Senior Scholar’s Fulbright grant, Reminick advised on a social science curriculum and developed workshops on grant writing and research methods at Bahir Dar University. At present, Reminick is beginning researchontribalhealersoftheWesternGhatsofsouthernIndia,withageneral focus on cosmology and intention. He is working with two of his co-directors at Cleveland State University’s Center on Healing Across Cultures to develop a cross-cultural study of traditional healing in South India, Belize, Ethiopia, and North American Appalachia. C h a p t e r F o u r t e e n Ronald Reminick Drinking Ethiopia Ronald Reminick 244 Ethiopia: The Land and the Food Resources Forty million years ago the earth in the Horn of Eastern Africa cleaved and allowed lava, steam, and bedrock to burst to the surface. The gradual process of lava and volcanic rock oozing to the surface built up the highlands, ranging in elevation from 6,000 to more than 15,000 feet (1,800 to 4,500 meters). When this process ceased, it left a rich wide-ranging plateau suitable for highly productive farming. Ethiopia today is about the size of Texas and New Mexico combined. In Ethiopia for millennia the ancestors of humanity have hunted game and gathered fruits, nuts, roots, and edible vegetation. This was the original way of life of our ancestors. Recent finds by paleoanthropologists have found evidence of humanity’s ancestors as old as 5 million years, which strongly suggests that the northern Awash River Valley of the Ethiopian Great Rift, now a hot dry desert, is the homeland of us all. About 7,000 years ago, Semitic peoples from the Arabian Peninsula crossed the Straits of Bab el Mandeb and settled in the highlands, often called Abyssinia. They brought with them many of the cultigens that have become the diet of the Abyssinian peoples. Among these peoples were the Agau. They made major contributions to highland food products. The genius of ancestral Agau culture is primarily responsible for central highland Ethiopia ranking as one of the world’s important centers of the origin of cultivated plants, along with China and India. Although the Agau adopted elements of Sudanic agriculture from the pre-Nilotes to the west, they continually experimented with wild plants and developed new cultigens that now make up the bulk of the Ethiopian agricultural complex. These include cereal grains such as eleusine, or finger millet (Eleusine coracana), which spread widely through East and South Africa and to India, and t’eff1 (Eragrostis abyssinica), which spread to a limited extent into the eastern Sudan. Barley and wheat are also popular, but they were, by and large, developed in South Arabia. The root crop ensete (Ensete edulis), or false banana, is the staple in southwest Ethiopia, especially among the Gurage people. Both the leaves and the oil pressed from the seeds of garden cress (Lepidum sativum) are consumed. The Agau also developed condiments including coffee (Coffea arabica); fenugreek (Trigonella foenumgraecum); ch’at or qat, also called Arab tea (Catha edulis), which is a mild alkaloid stimulant; and vegetable mustard (Brassica carinata). We must also credit the Agau for developing oil and dye plants such as castor (Ricinus communie), nug (Guizotia abyssinica), and safflower (Carthamus tinctorius), used both for its oil and as a dye. Cattle, sheep, goats, and the ubiquitous chicken were likely obtained from the Nubians and pre-Nilotes approximately 5,000 years ago, along with donkeys and horses that they later bred to produce the sure-footed mule. These cultigens and domestic animals provide [44.193.11.123] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:01 GMT) Drinking Ethiopia 245 the basis for Ethiopian cuisine, which in modern times has been supplemented by foods imported from all over the world. Frederick Simoons (1960) itemizes the highland food plants in contemporary Ethiopia, including ensete, t’eff, wheat, barley, sorghum, finger millet, pearl millet, oats, rye, maize, lentils and other legumes, and root crops, including the potato and...