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Peasantries and Elites without Urbanism: the Civilization of Ethiopia1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Frederick C. Gamst
Frederick C. Gamst
Affiliation:
Rice University
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Extract

Agricultural or nonindustrial civilization is customarily defined by social scientists in terms of urbanism and a dual social organization. Such a definition is not recent and, like many other concepts in Western thought, can be traced back to the Greeks, to Strabo for example, if one wishes to do so. Another way of considering the definition is in terms of two complementary societal components, neither existing without the other. One component is an elite in an urban setting with an elaborate high culture or Great Tradition based on literacy, and the second is a large rural peasantry with a Little Tradition or illiterate folk manifestation of the Great Tradition. However, civilization with its elite and peasants is also found when cities are absent, as in Mayan Mesoamerica; nonexistent or not vital, as in early Dynastic Egypt; or atrophied into uninhabitable ruins, as in Ethiopia. Indeed, cities were neither numerous nor large throughout the time of Bronze Age civilizations. Cities and civilizations are thus not always related. As shown above, the latter may exist without the former, and in preliterate western Africa urbanism existed without civilization.

Type
Urban and Non-urban Tradition (Africa)
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , October 1970 , pp. 373 - 392
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1970

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References

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41 Horvath, ‘Towns in Ethiopia’, p. 45.

42 Pankhurst, ‘Notes on the Demographic History’.

43 Many of the estimates are not of population but of the number of houses in a community. Pankhurst multiplies the number of houses by an average 6.5 persons. My fieldwork in parts of northcentral Ethiopia indicates that 5 to 5.5 persons per dwelling would be a more accurate figure for these areas. Thus, many of the populations reckoned by Pankhurst may actually have been lower. Additionally, as Pankhurst notes for Ifag and elsewhere (‘Notes on the Demographic History’, pp. 60, 62), populations given under certain place names may include that of the surrounding countryside. Thus, the Qemant Agäw community of Čelga listed in Pankhurst's study with estimated populations of 2,000 to 3,000 (ibid., p. 62) has always been a dispersed ‘neighborhood’ (see Murdock, George P., Social Structure (New York, 1949), p. 80Google Scholar) rather than a nucleated village. Maps of Ethiopia are replete with names of ‘villages’ which upon first-hand inspection turn out to be communities very widely dispersed across the countryside. For example, the major Qemant community of Kärkär, a neighborhood, today has a population of about 6,000 but does not even remotely rank as an urban center because it is so dispersed as to defy walking across it in one day. Thus many populated places noted by travelers may be names of neighborhoods and not of villages. These comments on inhabitants per dwelling and the nature of the neighborhood, then, further reduce any evidence for concentrations of population greater than that of villages, which one might try to find in Pankhurst's demographic survey.

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