AFRI4001
LING3003
One of the Many Faces of Ethiopia: An Ethnographic Study on the Urban Lifestyle in Contemporary Ethiopia
Ethiopia, as a state located in the horn of Africa, has a history of more than 3000 years. With rich and diverse cultures of human civilization, each year this country attracts tons of expeditions and tourists all over the world. Through the fieldtrip, we saw different sides of the country. It’s traditional: people in remote villages maintain primordial ways of living; it’s modern: downtown areas of Addis Ababa present the modernized side of the country and western foods are widely enjoyed in the capital city; it’s undeveloped, in most of the areas we visited outside Addis Ababa; it’s prosperous, in many crowded districts of big cities. Amazed by and interested in the combination of tradition and modernity in the country, we were trying to study Ethiopia from this perspective. There are three elements which in our opinions could well represent people’s lifestyles: music, dressing and food. Aside from existing literature, we mainly collected our data from our stays in Ethiopia and also from the interviews with people at universities. Here, we would like to thank Dr. Facil Tesfaye, Mr. Girum Mezmur, local students from Addis Ababa for their contributions and kindly providing the information for this project. This paper will analyze the three bespoke themes and examine how modernity overlaps tradition in contemporary urban Ethiopia.
