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Chapters: Kebra Nagast, Culture of Ethiopia, Ethiopian Calendar, Lip Plate, Ethiopian Philosophy, Women in Ethiopia, Amba Geshen, Fetha Negest, Wehni, Shotel, Harlem Shake, Afromet, Senterej, Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, Coffee Ceremony, Enkutatash, Habesha Name, Public Holidays in Ethiopia, Gadaa, Ethiopian Suit, Ethiopian Studies, Ethiopian Coffee Dress, Lalibela Cross, Konso People, National Archives and Library of Ethiopia, Sagwora, Blood Is Not Fresh Water, Ethiopian Binding, Vandella, Horse Name. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 98. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: The Kebra Nagast (var. Kebra Negast, Ge'ez , , ), or the Book of the Glory of Kings, is an account written in Ge'ez of the origins of the Solomonic line of the Emperors of Ethiopia. The text, in its existing form, is at least seven hundred years old, and is considered by many Ethiopian Christians and Rastafarians to be an inspired and a reliable account. Not only does it contain an account of how the Queen of Sheba met Solomon, and about how the Ark of the Covenant came to Ethiopia with Menelik I, but contains an account of the conversion of the Ethiopians from the worship of the sun, moon, and stars to that of the "Lord God of Israel". As Edward Ullendorff explained in the 1967 Schweich Lectures, "The Kebra Nagast is not merely a literary work, but -- as the Old Testament to the Hebrews or the Qur'an to the Arabs -- it is the repository of Ethiopian national and religious feelings." The Kebra Nagast is divided into 117 chapters, and even after a single reading one can see that it is clearly a composite work; Ullendorff describes its narrative "a gigantic conflation of legendary cycles." The document is presented in the form of a debate by the 318 "orthodox fathers" of the First Council of Nicaea. These fathers pose ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=1378283 ... Read more

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The Jews (Falasha) of northwestern Ethiopia are a unique example of a Jewish group living within an ancient, non-Western, predominantly Christian society. Hagar Salamon presents the first in-depth study of this group, called the "Hyena people" by their non-Jewish neighbors. Based on more than 100 interviews with Ethiopian immigrants now living in Israel, Salamon's book explores the Ethiopia within as seen through the lens of individual memories and expressed through ongoing dialogues. It is an ethnography of the fantasies and fears that divide groups and, in particular, Jews and non-Jews.
Recurring patterns can be seen in Salamon's interviews, which thematically touch on religious disputations, purity and impurity, the concept of blood, slavery and conversion, supernatural powers, and the metaphors of clay vessels, water, and fire.
The Hyena People helps unravel the complex nature of religious coexistence in Ethiopia and also provides important new tools for analyzing and evaluating inter-religious, interethnic, and especially Jewish-Christian relations in a variety of cultural and historical contexts. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Some White Washing
I really appreciate the author getting this information out of our modern history and plight.But I have the opinion the author should have exercised more caution not to manipulate the wording which can change the whole character and concept of the stories.Being a Beta-Israel or "Falasha" of direct Ethiopian heritage I found it annoying that the author uses the eurocentric term"Jew" to describe our people instead of "Hebrew" which are those Ethiopians who practice the ancestral rituals of the Semitic/Judaic faith. We were never "Jews" in Ethiopia, only Hebrews. or whatever the local people considered us to be based on their misunderstanding the strict doctrines of our faith.Though in some circles the word FaIasha connotes something negative, at least I know better of it's origin.

Well-done, but incomplete
Excellent academic account of Ethiopian Jewish-Christian rivalry in native Ethiopia. The author has conducted "exit"-style interviews, anthro style, with Ethiopian Jewish emigrees to Israel, once settled in the Holy Land, about their experiences with Christian neighbors back in Ethiopia. The info gleaned is priceless, unsettling, and invited as many questions as answers. The profundity of the Ethiopian Jewish experience is something Global Jewry is only beginning to grasp (caught up earlier, unfortunately, in a "are you *really* Jewish game", perhaps a (unnecessary) defensive formation towards a potentially more legitimate (strictly Old Testament) African Jewish experience?). This book makes a credible and substantive contribution towards this new realization.
My only critique of the book is in the author's somewhat cliched "academic" response to the Beta Israel's spiritual beliefs. Like most Western textual analysis, the author downplays any claims to legitimacy in the Beta Israel's "animistic" or "superstitious" beliefs, choosing instead to explain them away with rational pseudo-psychological explanations. Sometimes these explanations are plausible; sometimes they seem more like a desperate attempt to "colonize" or "own" the Beta Israel's experience by virtue of being able to dissect and explain it. At these junctures in the book, I think it would have been more appropriate of the author to simply let the stories speak for themselves, and let the reader draw their own conclusions.

That said, it is still an excellent book and I'm glad the author did the no doubt difficult work of compiling these stories. Hopefully, we will see more work like this before the generation that was part of this Exodus passes.
Ethiopian-inspired Cooking, Vegetarian Specialties

good, but academic
This book was fascinating. Unfortuanetly, it is written in a highly academic style, making it a bit dry. I found the first couple of chapters slow, buit then it got more interesting, with great quotes, really getting into the subject of what it was like ot be a Jew in Ethiopia. ... Read more

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Discovering the real world presents unique evidence on healthworkers’ career choices in Ethiopia. It shows that challengeslike health workers’ limited willingness to work in a rural area,as well as their likelihood to migrate abroad vary substantially andare correlated with rural background, motivation, and job satisfaction. ... Read more

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The Spectral Body: Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó analyses some of the films made by Academy Award winner Hungarian filmmaker István Szabó to establish an interpretative matrix disclosing the root of haunting effects in the visual and the narrative levels of the diegeses. By combining two distinct and often incongruous lines of psychoanalytic thought (by Nicolas Abraham and Jacques Lacan), Zoltán Dragon argues that these films are fuelled by the work of a phantom on all levels, hiding the secrets of the family history of the characters and producing uncanny visual scenarios to make the act of hiding even more effective. The book brings the reader into the realm of thephantom textgenerating the film texts and crypt screens of the oeuvre, and investigates the causes of undiscussible and painful secrets that propel some pivotal characters to reappear in subsequent films, apparently driven by a compulsion to continue their narration, failing to finish their stories even when they appear to be successful. The Spectral Body: Aspects of the Cinematic Oeuvre of István Szabó introduces a visual reinterpretation of Abraham s phantom theory that opens up possibilities for an alternative way of studying film.I first saw this work in the form of a full and detailed draft. I was impressed by the boldness of the ideas, the attempt to integrate and work with different theoretical positions and the quite extraordinary reading of the films of István Szabó. There was clearly a powerful and creative and original intelligence at work. A further draft accomplished one important thing that had been missing from the first one the direct analysis of the visual material and its contribution to the overall narrative and theoretical framework.The work employs a psychoanalytic framework with some key concepts such asthe phantomdrawn from the work of Torok and Abraham. This theory is fairly well known but it has not, to my knowledge, been used in any extensive way in the analysis of film texts before. Zoltan also makes reference to Freud and uses some Lacanian ideas in his analysis at the level of the visual. These multiple theoretical references are not inconsistent; they are finely judged and are most productive. Theory is never used as a grid to be imposed on the material. There is a fine balance between theory and textual analysis that is hard to achieve, but it is successful here.I think that the position that Zoltan Dragon has forged for himself and from which he writes, is a highly original and interesting one. He has been most successful in developing his framework in relation to Szabó s oeuvre which he knows in the greatest detail. His readings of that oeuvre are rich and powerful and will provoke considerable debate in the world of film studies and also of psychoanalytical studies.Parveen Adams, Core Teaching Faculty, London Consortium ... Read more

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Terraced agricultural landscapes in Africa are remarkable feats of human engineering and social organization, enabling the conservation of soil and water and the cultivation of food. Indigenous terraced landscapes are all the more valuable because they have been produced by the people themselves and maintained for several hundred years, evidencing a valuable degree of sustainability. Yet until this book, there have been few accounts of how such landscapes in Africa are produced and maintained over time. Taking a period of approximately a hundred years, Living Terraces is both an ethnography and history of the terraces of Konso in southern Ethiopia. It traces the way Konso agriculture and landscape has been produced and managed in close relationship with broader changes in Konso political and cultural lives. In shedding new light on the relationships between landscapes, livelihoods, culture and development, the book demonstrates the embeddedness of social institutions in areas of social, cultural, religious and political life, showing that social institutions cannot easily be abstracted, replicated or used instrumentally for development purposes. The result is a call for an approach to social institutions, so vital to development, which centralizes a study of culture, history and power in the analysis. Elizabeth E. Watson is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Africa: An Encyclopedia for Students, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 4005 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Based on the scholarship in the acclaimed Encyclopedia of Africa, this work presents Africa, from Egypt to Cape Town and from prehistoric times to the present day. This set spans many disciplines, covering animals, foods, holidays and festivals, tribal groups, ecology, music and art, trade and economy, geography, religion, folklore, and fossil and skeletal discoveries. ... Read more

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Chapters: Ethiopian Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, Ministry of Defense. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 17. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Ministry of Culture and Tourism (Ethiopia) -The Ministry is run by a Minister and two state Ministers. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism is responsible for developing and promoting tourism in Ethiopia but most recently it has been embroiled in a Major International scandal surrounding the Celebration of the Ethiopia Millennium in 2007. Despite written promises to reimburse participants for travel and expenses, as well as paying the hosting and production costs, in order to improve Ethiopia's poor international image at their own expense,, officials from the Ministry simply refused to honor these commitments, citing poverty. Mohamouda Ahmed Gaas at one point stated that Sheik Mohammed Al Amoudi had promised, but later failed to pay a portion of the hosting cost to the Ministry, as well as many other reasons for not paying. During the visit to Ethiopia, the 37 contestants were paraded around state-owned enterprises who were all promoted as lead sponsors and were even received by the President of Ethiopia H.E. Girma Wolde-Giorgis, and also visited the African Union Headquarters, in Addis Ababa. For two years the UK based organiser had been pressing the Ministry and various Officials of the Government of Ethiopia to pay them for the service obtained by Mohamouda Ahmed Gaas , the Ethiopian State Minister for Culture and Tourism representing the Ministry but the Ministry and Government of Ethiopia have simply refused to pay a single penny of the costs to the company .since November 2007. The winners were never paid their prizes, nor were any of the technical crew ev...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=21462792 ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Junior Worldmark Encyclopedia of Foods and Recipes of the World, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 1100 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Provides comprehensive coverage of the foods and recipes of approximately 75 cultural groups from more than 60 countries. Entries provide 10-15 recipes for each group and include data on the agriculture and dietary habits of each group as well as an overview of each group's nutrition and health. ... Read more

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Culture can never be the solution to the extreme poverty, but it can play a gearing effect which controls the overall system of the strategies, particularly in rural areas where poor communities are dependent on social resources and cultural inputs. From all these, the interrelationship of culture and poverty in Ethiopia is not a new phenomena; the history of the country tell us that Ethiopians have been suffering from a range of deprivations and poverty has been a way of life for a large segment of the population for a very long period of time. Hence,this analysis duly brings down the interrelationship between culture and poverty related issues in the social environment, and it would assist interventionist, local peoples, academicians to critically analyze cultural variables, redefine cultural challenges, and ultimately helping to create conditions in which poverty reduction strategies achieve their visions. ... Read more