Comparing Cultures in Southern Ethiopia: From Ethnography to Generative Explanation

This special issue of Northeast African Studies is an exercise in comparative ethnography and theoretical exploration. It starts with the following question: Why is there such remarkable regional diversity in the cultural traditions and modes of life in the societies of southern Ethiopia, and with what kind of theoretical and ethnographic understanding can we explain it? The question has often been posed as to what extent these small-scale societies with their notable linguistic commonalities (being of the Omotic, Cushitic, and Surmic language families and thus per group suggesting a common “origin”) have shared social and economic traits, political institutions, ideologies, and ritual complexes, and what has generated their paths of differentiation. Apart from evoking fascinating ethnographic questions, this issue also raises theoretical problems, of wider significance outside the Ethiopian ethnographic context, related to structural comparison, societal change, and the import of underlying ecological and socioeconomic factors or processes that fuel cultural differentiation. Regional comparison is a well-established research tradition in anthropology and has many forms. There is the school of statistical comparison and correlation, going back to the now largely ignored work of Harold Driver and his group (Driver 1973; Jorgensen 1974), and which is partly continued in the electronic journal World Cultures and in the large number of studies of the Human Relations Areas Files at Yale University. The work of