Suffering under God's Environment: A Vertical Study of the Predicament of Peasants in North-Central Ethiopia (review)

Book Reviews 209 Minor details such as incorrect spellings ("Isaak" is spelled "Ishaak"), language usage (I do not favor usage of the word "tribe" when referring to African peoples nor the word "exotic" when referring to Africa) and, most important, hyperbole (life during the colonial era is described as being "poor, nasty, brutish, and short"—p. 9) also detract from the author 's arguments. Sometimes the discussion is simply wrong and seemingly based on second-hand stories. Citing the well-known torrid temperature of Djibouti, for example, the author makes the strange claim that "beggars do not ask for money; they ask for water." (p. xviii) A final critique is directed more toward the publisher than the author . Although I realize that books have tremendously risen in price during the decades of the 1970s and the 1980s, I find the publisher's asking price of $39.95 a little out of line for a hardcover book of only 90 pages (114 if one counts six appendices—most of which are of a dubious value—a short bibliography, and a brief index). Peter J. Schraeder Loyola University, Chicago Note 1.See Peter J. Schraeder, "Crystal Anniversary Reflections on the Nascent Field of Djiboutian Studies," A Current Bibliography on African Affairs 23, no. 3 (1992): 227-47. 2.For an annotated summary of over 400 works, see Peter J. Schraeder, Djibouti (Clio Press: Oxford, England; Santa Barbara, California; and Denver, Colorado, 1991). Suffering under God's Environment: A Vertical Study of the Predicament ofPeasants in North-Central Ethiopia Mesfin Wolde-Mariam Berne: The African Mountains Association and Geografica Bernensia, 1991. 220 pp. + xi. This book is the result of a rural survey conducted by one of Ethiopia's most visible and outspoken academics. Mesfin Wolde-Mariam, a geogra- 220 Book Reviews pher, carried out the survey and analysis of north-central Ethiopia (Southern Wello and Northern Shewa) over a five-year period (198691 ). Its publication coincides with at least four other major rural studies of the same regional rural economy. One of these is a joint project of the Norwegian Ministry of Cooperation and the Institute of Development Research of Addis Ababa University and another is a project of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). They also complement important individual research in southern Wallo in the mid-1980s by Dessalegn Rahmato and Alemneh Dejene. Results of these studies are just now becoming available as northern Ethiopia has again become a focus for development work after several years of political insecurity and long-term neglect by government investment planners.1 Mesfin's organizational premise for the book is obvious to those who have worked on rural development or rural history of Ethiopia: the absence of systematic and accurate data on the rural environment and rural economy. To this, Mesfin adds an argument that the role of altitude had been a primary but under researched determinate of human settlement and its response to crises in food production (thus the "vertical study" allusion in his title). The core of Mesfin's field research and the basis for the numerous tables and quantitative measures presented throughout the book was a set of questionnaires administered by a group of twelfth-grade graduates to 1,425 households in 285 villages in 34 weredas. To resolve the "numerous questions that needed clarification ," Mesfin followed up his survey with a series of conferences with groups of 10 to 20 peasants. Though we learn little about the content of the questionnaires themselves, or the methods of field collection used by the enumerators, the tables and figures indicate that they included questions about perceptions of the physical environment, household income , labor, and demography. While the author has obviously spent a great deal of effort to compile and present quantitative data, as a study of rural economy and society, Suffering under God's Environment remains a fundamentally idiosyncratic view rather than a body of baseline data. Mesfin argues that an important goal of his data collection was peasant perceptions of environmental change and land use (p. 7). Throughout the book, however, there is a disturbing trend to conflate perceptions with normative behavior and actual practice, or to mistake farmers' confusion over a...