Negotiating Identity: Politics of Identification among the Borana, Gabra and Garri around the Oromo-Somali boundary in Southern Ethiopia (Synopsis of a PhD Dissertation)

Abstract

Background Identity negotiation has a limited scope constrained by pre-existing memories of identification and political and economic circumstances. It is often motivated by the contexts in which the individuals and the collectivities find themselves in, especially under the condition of rapid socio-political change. Presumed common ancestry, history, language, religion and custom can be considered the raw materials of identity construction (Nagel 1994; Cornell 1996; Schlee 2007). They either inform or constrain the processes of identification of an individual or collectivity. However, since the publication of Barth’s (1969) seminal book, Ethnic groups and boundaries, the focus of investigation of the scholars of ethnicity and identity has changed from the totality of the ‘objective’ features of a group or groups to a selection of the actors’ most significant features in a given situation. In the same line of argument, in this thesis, I attempted to show how the ethnic actors negotiate and (re)construct their identity by selectively emphasizing and de-emphasizing the raw materials of identification in different contexts within the given options. Actors use the most relevant identity markers at a certain moment, which could be inversed in another situation. They strategically and inventively ‘remember’ or ‘forget’ the markers of identification. However, not all the groups and individuals have equal raw materials of identifications, nor can they all be used strategically and selectively in the construction of identity. Even though a lot of calculations, negotiations and selection of raw-materials of identification – and even (re)construction and invention – have been taken into account in the choice making processes, the construction of identity is not arbitrary. Identity constructions ‘never occur in a vacuum’ (Cornell and Hartmann 1998: 197). The research on which the thesis is based was designed as a response to the