The Stranger at the Feast

Front matter

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This research was made possible by an ESRC studentship PTA-031-2006-00143 and by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF CHRISTIANITY Edited by Joel Robbins 1. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter, by Webb Keane 2. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church, by Matthew Engelke 3. Reason to Believe: Cultural Agency in Latin American Evangelicalism, by David Smilde

Contents

Map vi Note on Amharic Pronunciation and Transliteration vii Acknowledgments viii Introduction 1 1. A History of Mediation 22 2. Fasting, Bodies, and the Calendar 37 3. Proliferations of Mediators 56 4. Blood, Silver, and Coftee: The Material Histories of Sanctity and Slavery 72 5. The Buda Crisis 86 6. Concrete, Bones, and Feasts 103 7. Echoes of the Host 119 8. The Media Landscape 131 9. The Knowledge of the World 144 Conclusion 156 Reference List 159

Zege

Peninsula Mehal Zege Giyorgis + Betre Yiganda Tekle Maryam Haymanot tro Afaf Ura Kidanet.

Introduction

A RITUAL REGIME I: PROHIBITION AND THE CONNECTION OF THINGS

On the Zege peninsula it is forbidden to plough the land or to keep cattle or horses. The prohibition dates from a covenant (kidan) made between God and a wandering monk named Abune Betre Maryam sometime in the fourteenth century.’ The covenant states that so long as nobody cuts trees, ploughs the land, or keeps large animals, God will provide the people of Zege with a living and protect them from natural disasters and wild animal attacks. As a result, Zege is covered by a dense coffee forest, in marked contrast to the arable and ploughlands that dominate most of northern Ethiopia. Nine church-monasteries maintain the prohibition on ploughing to this day, and residents of Zege (known as Zegeña) state clearly that the forest is tangible evidence of their continued observance of the covenant.’

The prohibition makes Zege ecologically unique as well as sacred. Forests have a long association with churches in Ethiopia (Tsehai 2008). They connote the Garden of Eden, and the fact that they are unploughed marks them apart from the curse of Adam, to eat bread “by the sweat of your brow” (Genesis 3:19). Forests also provide shade and shelter for the church, lending seclusion and modesty in the same way that clothes shelter the naked human body (Orlowska 2015). Images of shelter and seclusion predominate. And yet this same forest has made Zege an important node in long-distance trade routes and, for a significant period, an importer of slaves (Abdussamad 1997, Tihut 2009).

The prohibition of ploughing and the existence of the coffee forest, therefore, do not isolate Zege from the surrounding farmlands. Quite the opposite, they create interdependence, where inhabitants of the peninsula need a market to sell their coffee and fruit and obtain food staples. Moreover, as the church-monasteries have gained fame as sites of blessing, they have attracted pilgrims, kings, and lately foreign tourists to visit in search of blessing, political legitimacy, and historical experience. What initially appears as an isolating move, the prohibition of ploughing and the growth of the forest, turns out to create a dense web of spiritual and earthly connections. This close, seemingly paradoxical relationship between prohibition and interconnection lies at the heart of this book and, I argue, of contemporary socioreligious practice in Zege.

This book takes prohibition as a starting point for understanding the religious life of Orthodox Christians in Zege. I want to highlight how prohibitions create lasting, material states of affairs (such as the existence of the forest in Zege), but also how they build meaningful distinctions into the fabric of social life: here, between the forest, where ploughing is prohibited, and the surrounding farmlands, where it is not. The prohibition of ploughing is only one example of a religious regime in which eating, work, and sexuality are continuously subject to various fasts, avoidance rules, and periodic proscriptions. And yet prohibition is always accompanied by mediation: if refusing to plough creates a distinction between forestland and farmland, it also enables a relationship with God, via the intervention of the saint who made the original divine compact.

This is a place that has seen massive political upheaval since 1974: the fall of the emperor and rise of the socialist Derg; the land reforms that stripped the church of most of its holdings and deeply impacted local class relations; and the rise in 1991 of the secular-federal Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) government, which has rendered the Orthodox Church constitutionally equal to Islam and Protestantism, while reimagining Ethiopia along ethnic lines under the aegis of the developmental state (Clapham 2017, Donham 2002). And yet these developments have not seen a breakdown of the prohibitions and practices that organized religious-economic life in Zege. Rather, such practices have been reorganized and in some cases reemphasized in line with constantly developing local understandings of the proper arrangement of power and blessing. This proper arrangement revolves around the observance of prohibitions and the importance of mediators.

Alongside the emphasis placed on the religious protection of the forest, Orthodox Christians in Zege highlight the importance of fasting, of priestly and saintly intermediaries between humans and God, and of the protection and seclusion of ritual objects and spaces, in what amounts to a general theory of mediation. This theory explicitly opposes secular, modern, Protestant practices of leveling and breaking down distinctions with the properly Orthodox regulation and mediation of boundaries, whether these be the boundaries between humans and God, the distinction between the Orthodox community and other peoples, or the interface between a human body and the world.

This boundary work, based on prohibitions and their mediation, produces something approaching a total framework for social life: what I term a ritual regime. We have already seen how the prohibition of ploughing ties work, labor, and the environment to the work of the church-monasteries. In this and the following chapters it will become clear that the Orthodox calendar and its timetable of fasting and feasting incorporate human bodies into a structured religious life-world at a very basic experiential level, so that the daily life of the body and its rhythms becomes hard to separate from the calendrical rhythm of Orthodox ritual.

At times it appears that Orthodox life in Zege is totally bound up in this regime, and almost entirely defined by the remarkable continuity of practice engendered by the fasts and other forms of prohibition. But we will also see that this encompassing ritual regime is never total, and that it coexists with unorthodox practices and ideas of impressive diversity. To pick one example, it is common knowledge in Zege that poor and landless men often cut down trees to sell as firewood, violating the church’s edict of protection and threatening the health of the forest as a whole (Tihut 2009: 63). They do so out of a sheer and immediate need that is impossible to square with the dominant narrative of the sacred forest, and the depth of such contradictions will become clear in chapters 4 and 5. We will also see that the structure of political authority in Zege has undergone significant transformation in recent decades, but that core principles of prohibition and mediation remain intact or even enhanced.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND ORTHODOXY

To speak of a kind of religious system built from pervasive, structured practices of prohibition and mediation puts this ethnography on quite a different footing from existing work in the anthropology of Christianity. Much of that work has taken as its theme the search for directness and immediacy in the religious practices of global Protestant and Pentecostal churches, while making efforts to trace the development of distinctly Protestant-modern ideologies of interiority and sincerity (e.g., Engelke 2007, Keane 2007, Bielo 2011). Even works that focus on mediation and the use of media show how intermediaries between humans and God become effaced in the search for direct, nonmediated, instant communication (Mazzarella 2004, Meyer 2011, Eisenlohr 2012). From such a perspective, intermediaries such as saints and priests may appear as obstructions to clear and sincere religious communication, while the observance of fasts and prohibitions looks like unthinking (and therefore insincere) deference to tradition.

Indeed, this is a criticism I have heard Protestants in Ethiopia make of Orthodox Christians: that Orthodox Christians do not read the Bible for themselves, but only follow rules and priests. My Orthodox friends in Zege respond that Protestants show arrogance in denying the need for intercession, and say that not following the fasts is tantamount to having no religion at all. Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia do not efface the medium, but valorize and sanctify it.

It has often been noted that the anthropology of Christianity has been weighted heavily toward the study of Protestantism and Pentecostalism, due in part to the predominance of these churches in the places that anthropologists traditionally study (Hann 2007, Hann & Goltz 2010). Orthodox churches have seemed to lack that global scope, and it has not been obvious how to locate them within conversations about the anthropology of Christianity. The Orthodox affirmation of mediation is to some extent articulated as a response to Protestantism. But I want to avoid the assumption that Protestantism represents a modernizing, globalizing, rationalizing force, while Orthodoxy is simply reactionary, taking refuge in tradition, ritual, and institutional authority. It seems more useful to ask what are the starting premises from which Orthodox Christians in Zege approach the contemporary world.

One way to begin is to consider some of the distinctive ways that Orthodox Christians understand materiality and the relationship between God and the tangible world. Anthropologists of Christianity have tended to define Christianity’s driving problem, following Hegel, as the difficulty of making the divine present in a fallen world, or of accessing that which is present but intangible (Cannell 2006: 14-15). What Engelke (2007) calls the “problem of presence” is taken to begin from absence: we cannot see or feel God, so we must somehow make him present.

I would suggest that Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity begins from the opposite problem: the boundary between God and humans is insufficiently stable (as are the boundaries of human bodies in general). There is a prevailing sense that divinity unbound is a profound physical danger to humans—those who enter the sanctum of a church while in an impure state are likely to be struck down or become sick; a thief who attempts to steal a sacred object may become frozen to the spot.

A large number of Orthodox practices in Zege concern themselves either with the boundaries of the holy, as in the seclusion of ritual objects, or with the boundaries of bodies, as with restrictions around menstruation and bleeding. Prohibitive practices also mark out certain times as inappropriate for particular activities such as eating meat or working the fields. The boundary between God and humans, in all their physicality, is never totally closed, but is subject to careful and ongoing management.

God can seem less like an absence than an overwhelming presence. This goes along with a distinctive theory of materiality and mediation common to many Orthodox churches: the potential sanctity of all matter, including flesh (Hanganu 2010). Painted icons can be true points of contact with saints, and holy water, imbued with divine power, is a regular part of daily practice. As Engelhardt (forthcoming) puts it, “The mediatic nature of Orthodox Christianity is sensible everywhere—in the materials and prototypes of icons; the sacred language, script, and chant notation of service books; the intercessory power of saints; the bodies and voices of clergy; the architectural acoustics of churches; the Eucharist; and, ultimately, in Christ as the hypostatic union of God and humanity? Things, substances, and sensations can be not just ethically charged, in Keane's (2014) terms, but divinely charged.

But the potential sanctity of matter is subject to close regulation, and is understood to be granted from the top down. This is especially the case in Ethiopian Orthodoxy. Emanations of divine power on earth are due solely to God’s grace (sega). The principal and perhaps only way for humans to access grace is through the seven sacraments (mistirat, “mysteries” or “secrets”): baptism, confirmation, matrimony, communion, unction of the sick, confession, and holy orders. Only clergy, empowered by the sacrament of holy orders, may perform these, and only bishops may ordain priests (Boylston 2017).

The use of holy water is not included among the sacraments, but in practice water is almost always made holy through the prayers of the clergy—that is, it is enabled by holy orders. In those cases where divine power irrupts in the world without the intervention of the clergy, it is usually through angelic action, as in Zege when the whole of Lake Tana becomes holy on the annual day of the Archangel Raphael. God’s power, therefore, can be anywhere, but by the same token is subject to hierarchical mediation. Prohibition, mediation, and hierarchy, then, indicate a practical theory of matter, spirit, and authority. Mediation between humans and God is not simply an act of reaching out, but has a regulatory and restrictive function, which is most clearly evident in the practice of the Eucharist.

A RITUAL REGIME II: PURITY AND TIME

According to Orthodox doctrine, the Eucharist is fully transubstantial: through the performance of the liturgy and by divine grace, bread and wine become the actual body and blood of God. This is the one point in Orthodox life when Christians and God come into direct contact. It may come as a surprise, then, to learn that most Orthodox Christians do not take the Eucharist throughout most of their adult lives. This is because of concerns about purity, and especially the assumption that sexually mature adults are generally not in a fit state for communion.’ The actual transformation of the Eucharist demands stringent regulations to preserve the purity of the host: communicants must fast completely for eighteen hours beforehand and abstain from sexual activity; they must have no open wounds or flowing mucus; menstruating and postpartum women may not enter the church building at all; and, I have been told, you must not take Communion if a fly has entered your mouth by accident. After taking Communion, you must not speak or spit or work or wash or blow on a fire or otherwise open the border between your body and the world.

These prohibitions have spatial correlates: Orthodox churches are divided into three concentric areas separated by walls: the inner holy of holies (meqdes or qiddiste qiddusan), accessible only to priests and deacons and home to the tabot, on which the Eucharist is consecrated; around this the qiddist, in which the liturgy is performed and communion is given; and outside of this, the qiné mahlét, where votive hymns are sung. Men and women must enter by separate doors and remain in separate areas at all times while within the church. Outside of this is the churchyard, an open space surrounded by a wall of its own.

The practical result is that, during any liturgical service, people will arrange themselves in a concentric pattern according to the degree of prohibitions they are in accord with: celebrants in the middle; then those in a state to take communion; then, outside the walls, large numbers of people attending the liturgy and performing prostrations but not actually entering the church building. Outside the churchyard wall, passers-by may stop to kiss the church gate and cross themselves. As was the case with the Zege forest, the existence of a prohibition creates a specific geographical arrangement among people and the environment. Note, however, one distinction whose importance will become clear: while the prohibition of ploughing is permanent, the Eucharistic prohibitions are temporary and rhythmical—fasting and purity are required at certain times and places and for certain actions, but are understood to be part of wider social and biological temporalities. If there is a time and place for abstinence, there are other times and places for feasting and the reproduction of life.

Eucharistic restrictions coexist with a raft of prohibitions derived from Leviticus, which have tremendous importance across Orthodox Ethiopia. Orthodox Christians may not eat pork or shellfish; men must be circumcised; boys must be baptized after forty days and girls after eighty, and until that time the mother may not enter church space because, as was repeatedly explained to me, of her bleeding.* The strong gendering of these prohibitions is evident; female reproductive bodies emerge as a special concern in a manner not unusual among patriarchal societies (Hannig 2014). Nonetheless and as we will see, this should not lead us to assume that women are entirely excluded from discourses and practices of holiness.

An important point about prohibitions is that you do not need to know the reasoning behind them in order to maintain them. In a casual situation I asked a group of friends, including some sons of priests, why boys were baptized after forty days and girls after eighty. A lively debate ensued: one man said that Jesus had been baptized after forty days; another said that girls gestate for five days longer than boys, though he could not say how this had become a forty-day differential; another suggested that girls were baptized after eighty because Mary had spent eighty days in exile in Egypt. I then asked a woman, who told me that her son and daughter had spent the same amount of time in the womb, and so she was unconvinced by those arguments. She was also unimpressed by the idea that women bleed longer after giving birth to girls. Finally, we all went to ask Abba Som; the local expert in exegesis, who explained that Jesus had been baptized at thirty years old, because Adam was thirty years old when he came to the world. The split between forty and eighty days for baptism was because Adam entered the Garden of Eden forty days after his creation, and Eve after eighty.°

All of my interlocutors agreed that the forty-eighty rule was important, though most were open about the fact that they were unsure exactly why it existed. But there is something to be learned from the form of their guesses: each assumed that there must be some parallel or archetype in the biblical story, and that the baptism rule would be explained by virtue of its formal resemblance to that archetype—rather than using a causal deduction. This is an example of what Mary Douglas (1999: 27) in her work on Leviticus calls “the analogical mode of reasoning,” in which “what is true is so by virtue of its compliance with a microcosm of the world and of society; to be convincing, what is true must chime with justice; it looks to match microcosm with macrocosm in ever-expanding series?”

The prominence of analogical reasoning in esoteric traditions within Ethiopian Orthodoxy has been remarked on by both Young (1977) and Mercier (1997). The latter points to the numerological and symbolic work of authors of magico-religious scrolls as evidence of a “Hellenistic” theory of associations in which formal patterns are understood to reflect the nature of authority in the universe (cf. Lloyd 1996). I would suggest that logical systems based on analogy stretch much wider and deeper into Ethiopian Orthodox practical culture than either author has suggested, and that analogy is the mechanism by which everyday practice comes to be associated with the authority of church tradition. Here my approach is informed by Descola (2013), who proposes that “analogism” is the organizing ontological schema for a large portion of the world’s societies. The implications of Descola’s argument are too broad for this book to pursue in full, but I have drawn freely on his ideas, especially concerning the ways in which analogistic thought tends to produce totalizing models of the social cosmos.

Formal resemblances, rules based on analogy, and prohibitions share this quality: they can be understood by their logic of dividing and organizing the world, and can be maintained, without further exegetical investigation.* This is not to say that Ethiopian Orthodox Christians do not reflect on their practices, or that they do not care about the intention behind religious action. They certainly do. But prohibitions and analogical rules can continue to do their work without such examination (see Fortes 1966: 11, Bloch 2005).

In addition to the prohibitions derived from Leviticus, and perhaps most importantly, Orthodox Christians follow a calendar of fasts. Officially, there are seven major fasts (Fritsch 2001); minimally, you must avoid meat, animal products, and sexual activity on Wednesdays and Fridays, and throughout Lent. Most people avoid any food or water for a certain period of time on fasting days (usually until the liturgy has finished), and those who attend church must abstain from food and water completely. But there are in total more than 250 fasting days in the year, and it is expected that clergy will keep to these, while for lay Christians observance of the noncompulsory fasts will be largely a matter of “conscience and reputation” (Ephraim 2013: 81). The fasts are the core of Ethiopian Orthodox practice, and regarded by most Christians in Zege as the main point of distinction between Orthodox Christians and others.

The fasts are extensive and regular enough that prohibitions become a part of the everyday experience of having a body: even nonfasting days become meaningful by opposition to fasting days. In this way temporary, rhythmic prohibitions become a way of maintaining and managing one’s bodily state of being. But prohibitions also come to define boundaries of the collective.

The clearest example is the prohibition on Christians eating Muslim meat and vice versa (Ficquet 2006). I learned this after attending a wedding in the local Muslim community, which is based in Afaf town and the area to the south around Fure Maryam church (see map). Many Christians attended and were fed vegetarian dishes. I temporarily forgot that I had, through my practices and associations, marked myself as a Christian, and had some of the main meat dish. A friend of mine approached me that evening and told me that I had done a bad thing and people were talking: the meat had been blessed in the name of Allah, and now if I were to enter church I would certainly become extremely unwell. In the general mood of conviviality I had let my guard down. Later when asking Muslim friends what they would do in Christian festivals, they said that they would always visit people and eat nonmeat food and drink nonalcoholic drink, and that Christians would always be sure to have these on hand. The importance of neighborly hospitality, however, coexisted with an equally important prohibition. The rules, then, may draw a sharp distinction between collectives at one level (that of meat, because meat must be divinely blessed when it is prepared), while allowing relations at another level (that of visiting and hospitality) (see Dulin 2016).

The Amharic term for prohibition or taboo, newir, has a range of important applications not obviously associated with Orthodox doctrine. Incest is newir, traditionally tracing relations back seven generations (Hoben 1973), although three generations are often considered sufficient. Also prohibited according to Abba Som is marriage between God-kin, who are “just like blood relations” But equally newir is marriage between a “clean” (nesuh) or “proper” (chewa) person and a descendant of potters, weavers, Muslims, slaves, or Weyto (a marginalized ethnic group associated with hunting and canoe-making). Slave descent, in particular, is a point of deep division, as will become clear in the following chapters. Often respondents have described marriage prohibitions in terms of food prohibitions: weavers were thought to have been Muslims and so to follow the wrong fasts and eat the wrong meat; Weyto are widely denigrated as pagan eaters of hippopotamus flesh. As one friend told me, many chewa people would also refuse to share a table with descendants of slaves, even though these divisions are not usually publicly acknowledged; this could make seating at weddings a tricky procedure, though he stated that this was more true of his father’s generation, and that he felt his own peers were more relaxed. This was a young man who had several close friends rumored to be of slave descent, but who nonetheless described the idea of marrying a slave as deeply newir. As is often the case with Muslim neighbors, friendship and cooperation are one thing; eating together and marriage quite another. But prohibitions or stigmas around sharing substance vary in their severity: while Christians may share vegetables but not meat with Muslims, they are supposed to throw away any cup or plate that has been used by a Weyto.”°

Finally, cannibalism is profoundly newir, but turns out also to relate to marriage prohibitions. The idiom of the cannibal in Zege is the buda, an evil spirit that inhabits certain people and magically feeds on the flesh of others. As we will see in great detail, the idiom of buda is in fact closely associated with those marginal groups with whom marriage is also newir.

It would be possible to write a whole book dissecting the logic principles by which marriage and food prohibitions relate to classes of people, things, and spirits. But it is important to recognize that prohibitions do not just map out, describe, and impose order on socioreligious classifications: they also enforce and bring them into being as ongoing states of affairs. Marriage prohibitions, for example, create two de facto and unequal endogamous classes in Zege; to be chewa is to define the terms of prohibition. While this is rarely acknowledged, it has an extremely durable effect on social relations. These marriage prohibitions coexist, in an incommensurable way, with fasting and dietary prohibitions, which include all Orthodox Christians (including all slave descendants) within the same code of practice. It is one thing to deduce the logics behind prohibitions (whether they relate to blood or to ideas of proximity and distance, for example) and quite another to understand how prohibitions create durable relations of inclusion and exclusion within a society.

Prohibitions can organize relations between human groups, between the genders, between humans and God, and between bodies and the environment. They can become operative at certain times and in certain places and situations, and they lend a certain sense that life itself has a structure, and has certain kinds of difference imbued into it. These differences always possess a moral quality: to threaten them becomes an act of pollution. For Orthodox Christians in Zege, prohibitions are explicitly mechanisms by which humans demonstrate control over desire and pride. At the same time they draw distinctions between “proper,” “clean? chewa people who refuse improper desires and connections and other people who do not. And yet, as the example of interreligious hospitality shows, the distinctions that prohibitions create are always capable of being mediated. Indeed, that mediation may be part of the process of prohibition itself.

The anthropological tradition offers a wealth of resources for thinking about prohibition; ambivalence around sex, death, and eating animals seems to be a human universal. Anthropologists have tended to focus on the symbolic and logical orders that underlie prohibition, in a manner that is, explicitly or implicitly, structuralist: treating prohibitions as basically synchronic and concerned with symbolic order and classification. Even Valeri (2000), who is critical of “intellectualist” approaches, still devotes most of his wide-ranging analysis to the logical patterns that underlie taboo practices.

This tradition, most famously represented by Lévi-Strauss (e.g., 1964, 1966) and Douglas (1966), considers prohibition at its heart as part of the human quest to classify and order the world and to render anomalies and contradictions manageable. This work is foundational: there is no doubt that prohibitions produce clear binary distinctions (fasting/nonfasting, sacred/profane, Christian/non-Christian, human/animal, or human/God) from which logical orders can be built. But there is cause for dissatisfaction with models that would interpret prohibition in purely structural-conceptual terms. As Lambek (1992), Gell (1996), Valeri (2000: 95), Descola (2013), and others have pointed out, matters of identity and difference are not just taxonomic exercises; they are produced in everyday acts of practical and ethical identification and distinction.”

We have seen that prohibitions on ploughing actively shape the living environment in Zege, as well as set the temporal and spatial conditions in which labor and consumption may take place. Prohibitions create ways of being in time and ways of being with others: they make ongoing states as well as conceptual oppositions. This state-maintaining capacity is largely a result of the negative nature of prohibitions. Not doing something (eating meat, ploughing the land) is not so much a clearly definable action as an open-ended state of being. Abstaining from something has a different temporal quality than doing something: there are an infinite number of things I am not doing right now (household chores, reading fiction, retraining as a chemical engineer), but my not doing them only becomes salient when I might do them, or I want to do them, or other people around me are doing them.” In Ethiopia, it may not be clear whether I am fasting or simply between meals, until we sit down to eat together.”

Michael Lambek (1992: 246) discusses this definition-by-negation with regard to Malagasy taboo: “Self-identity or self knowledge is predicated not on substance, but on that which the other is not? Lambek (1992: 253-55) goes on to show how this not doing becomes an embodied status, a “continuously vibrant” moral condition. He draws on Fortes’s (1966: 16) account of taboos as a kind of living rule set, where “eating lends itself uniquely to the imposition of rules.” Because food is a regular, intimate, and recurring need, food prohibitions must be continuously reaffirmed through practice.

The idea of taboo as making states of being is perhaps most pronounced in Gell (1996: 137): “Taboos on eating, on killing, on sexual intercourse, on looking at, touching, etc., together circumscribe a ‘hole’ in the texture of shareable intersubjective reality which, privileged with respect to a specific individual, constitutes his soul or ego or personality. Taboo does more than express the self: it constitutes the self” (cited in Valeri 2000: 98). Likewise in Zege, to keep the fasts is to be an Orthodox Christian; to refuse marriage to slaves is to be chewa. But in the case of marriage, a profound asymmetry is present: only the “proper” get to constitute themselves in this way, as observers of prohibition. The definition of social reality itself is deeply one-sided.