In a remote part of southern Ethiopia there is a small farming community which has two forms of politico-ritual organisation. One is based on animal sacrifices and the other is based on initiations. The same people participate in both these systems. However, over the course of the past century or so the two systems have undergone very different types of change. The sacrificial system has retained more or less the same overall form although its practices have become less frequent and less elaborated; whereas the initiatory system, in contrast, has undergone a fairly radical transformation so that the form of the initiations is now quite different from how it was a hundred years ago. All the external factors are the same, indeed it is the very same people carrying out both these practices, so why do the two systems change in such different ways?

This ethnographic puzzle provides us with an opportunity to try to understand cultural change. The unusual situation of two cultural systems changing in different ways in the same circumstances will force us to tease apart the mechanisms that bring about change. We will need to look at causality, at individual action, at systemic organisation and at communal decision-making. These, then, are some of the issues that this book will address as it seeks to formulate a model of cultural change that will allow us to comprehend this unusual Ethiopian ethnography.

Anthropological approaches to change

Anthropological approaches to cultural change can be broadly divided into two camps.