All tagged ethiopia
Ethiopia, one of the oldest Christian countries on the Horn of Africa, remains one of the few places in the world where parchment manuscripts are still produced and allows scholars to historically trace textual transmission. As the technology of mass print production competes with this ancient practice, this photo essay considers how church communities preserve manuscript production and protect its sacred value in liturgical practices.
Alexandra Antohin uses the material analogy of the Ethiopian tabot to explore alternative dispositions to waiting and indeterminacy. She explores how ‘moving foundations’ of the home and church facilitate conditions of sustaining instability. This thought-provoking discussion considers how dilemmas of displacement and the manipulation of time during crises, such as urban resettlement, can revise sociocultural assumptions about the march of time as moving fast and forward.
Museum-ification of churches in Ethiopia, Russia and the U.S. establishes active reference points for new forms of public engagement. Antohin draws upon her experience of these sites as well as contextualization theory to explore how religious media are included in the interpretative space of ‘church-museums’. She suggests that in Ethiopia, where tourism is still a new industry, multiple subjectivities and modes of interpretation may emerge through the display and reception of religious media in a public context.
A set of reflections on the author’s training in visual and material culture at University College London and how that facilitated insights regarding her ethnographic study of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
