Body, Material Culture and Gender among the Gumuz and Dats’in (Ethiopia)

Abstract

This text attempts to analyze some of the mechanisms through which women are constructed in a “doubly subaltern” position (with respect to the men in their own group and also within the group’s subaltern position with respect to other neighboring groups) in two oral societies living in the Northeast Ethiopian Metema region, next to the border with Sudan: the Gumuz and the Dars’in societies. I state that women’s subaltern character is associated to relational forms of identity, which is constructed through the body and material culture, so we can reasonably expect to find: 1) the existence of material culture and body marking elements that can be identified as “technologies of the self”, and 2) that such bodily and material elements appear both on men and on women’s bodies, but that their presence doubles, or multiplies itself in the latter’s case. After briefly developing the concept of “relational identity” and placing the Gumuz and Dats’in in their respective historical contexts, this text analyses the role of color beads in the inscription of the group on women’s bodies.