It's been a while...

I went to Jamaica, Ethiopia and now I'm back with no plans to do much until next year. Well, that's a lie. My big plan is to write more and more often, hopefully toying around with dissertation-related ideas on this here blog. At the moment I am working up a presentation that I gave in Jamaica on the Ethiopian World Federation's water harvesting project in Shashemene, Ethiopia.

My argument is that, in the face of being denied access to citizenship, the EWF's project (and existence as an indigenous NGO within the country) acts as a means of engaging with citizenship in an alternate way. Granted, the irony being that acting as an NGO--a predominantly foreign position within Ethiopia--the EWF's project further integrates the Rastafari into the surrounding community. What is interesting to me is how there seems to be a growing understanding within Shashemene of the Rastafari as occupying a space that's not quite foreign and not quite Ethiopian. All this means that I get to use "liminality"--one of my favourite 25 cent words.