The Stranger at the Feast: Prohibition and Mediation in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community

Tom Boylston

Open Access Published by University of California Press 2018

The Stranger at the Feast

Prohibition and Mediation in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community

Tom Boylston

Volume 23 in the series The Anthropology of Christianity

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780520968974

Overview
Contents

About this book

At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

The Stranger at the Feast is a pathbreaking ethnographic study of one of the world’s oldest and least-understood religious traditions. Based on long-term ethnographic research on the Zege peninsula in northern Ethiopia, the author tells the story of how people have understood large-scale religious change by following local transformations in hospitality, ritual prohibition, and feeding practices. Ethiopia has undergone radical upheaval in the transition from the imperial era of Haile Selassie to the modern secular state, but the secularization of the state has been met with the widespread revival of popular religious practice. For Orthodox Christians in Zege, everything that matters about religion comes back to how one eats and fasts with others. Boylston shows how practices of feeding and avoidance have remained central even as their meaning and purpose has dramatically changed: from a means of marking class distinctions within Orthodox society, to a marker of the difference between Orthodox Christians and other religions within the contemporary Ethiopian state.

Author / Editor information

Boylston Tom :

Tom Boylston is a lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Edinburgh.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Note on Amharic Pronunciation and Transliteration Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	viii
Introduction Open Access Download PDF	1
1. A History of Mediation Open Access Download PDF	22
2. Fasting, Bodies, and the Calendar Open Access Download PDF	37
3. Proliferations of Mediators Open Access Download PDF	56
4. Blood, Silver, and Coffee: The Material Histories of Sanctity and Slavery Open Access Download PDF	72
5. The Buda Crisis Open Access Download PDF	86
6. Concrete, Bones, and Feasts Open Access Download PDF	103
7. Echoes of the Host Open Access Download PDF	119
8. The Media Landscape Open Access Download PDF	131
9. The Knowledge of the World Open Access Download PDF	144
Conclusion Open Access Download PDF	156
Reference List Open Access Download PDF	159
Index Open Access Download PDF	173

Language: English
Publisher: University of California Press
Pages
- Main content: 194

eBook

Published: January 12, 2018
ISBN: 9780520968974