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A Journey to the Tribal Omo Region of Ethiopa
Nicholas Dima
Published: 2007/12/01
Abstract
Ethnologists are rapidly being deprived of the opportunity to study communities untouched by modernity. Although it is presented in the form of a travelogue, the author of this paper, a geographer, has provided us with an up-to-date (2007) intriguing picture of a tribal society in southern Ethiopia. The portrayal realistically catches something of a hitherto largely isolated tribal society’s reaction in its early contacts with modernizing cultures. Christoph von Fuehrerheimendorf, the late University of London anthropologist known for his studies of the Nagas as they experienced the same forces in the 1930s, once observed that ethnologists were entering a very difficult period of time, when there would soon be no truly “primitive” societies, untouched by modernity, left to study. This paper may be said to reflect the same sentiments.
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