Peripheral People: The Excluded Minorities of Ethopia

In southern Ethiopia, there are craftworkers and hunters who are vigorously excluded from mainstream society. As blacksmiths, potters, tanners, woodworkers, weavers, and hunters of wild animals, they fulfill important roles in society, yet many of them are considered by local people to be not "real people." They are feared as purveyors of evil and supernatural powers. Despised as outcasts, they face discrimination across the whole social, political, and economic spectrum. The marginalization of these groups is not new or localized and occurs in both the towns and the countryside of Ethiopia and across Africa. This book has three main aims. First, it provides the most detailed history and ethnography of these groups to date. With comparative data about fourteen different ethnic groups in southern Ethiopia, many of which have never been documented before, it offers new information about the lives of the people who "live on the edge." Second, it offers a radically new understanding of these groups and the marginalization they face. Peripheral People shatters some of the myths about them that have dominated scholarly approaches and provides a new framework for understanding occupational marginalization in Ethiopia and Africa generally. And third, it considers how the plight of marginalized groups might be alleviated, both by their own efforts and by the interventions of governments and NGOs.