Media enable a (re)imagining of new political subjectivities at a time when old conceptions of belonging and citizenship are constantly being contested. While allowing for greater democratization of the public sphere in which individuals can now express opinions and engage in conversations, the lack or difficulty of regulation is causing the rise or reification of political communities based on narrow and exclusivist understandings of identity. People are empowered and regaining a voice but are at the same time divided, through misleading information, indoctrination, as well as narrow and constraining debates. In Ethiopia, as elsewhere, digital media more than others offer the lens through which to interrogate local and diasporic narratives about history, memory, historiography, nation-building, and national identity. Debates over such issues as ownership and belonging (native versus immigrant) are part of a broader—at times raging—conversation about being, becoming, and belonging in a nation that is changing in ways that are simultaneously liberating and disempowering. This chapter uses social media discussions, from home and in the diaspora, on Ethiopia to explore questions of history, politics, and belonging in the age of intolerant nativism and contested globalization.

A Brief Note on Methodology

A study of an intensely polarized media environment, social media in particular pose their own challenges. This, to some extent, has to do with how one chooses which issues, narratives, social media sites, and personalities to explore, as well as and why these choices have been made. Any attempt to produce knowledge on such a complicated and constantly evolving subject requires methodological rigor in the collection and analysis of data. The research for this chapter begins with the following hypotheses: that Ethiopia's social media sphere (that is, social media discussions on Ethiopia from within and without) is considerably diverse; that it is constantly evolving; and that it is increasingly polarized. These evolving features of the social media landscape are reflective in many ways of a similar development within other domains of the Ethiopian media sphere.

My sampling strategy was developed accordingly to show the complexity and dynamism of Ethiopian, specifically diaspora-based, social media on the one hand and its growing polarization on the other. I used Facebook as the principal social media platform where the vast majority of online conversations on Ethiopia occur. I also engaged Twitter, which is another, albeit less common, platform for Ethiopian online conversations.

This chapter presents a reflection on the important contribution skilled artisans offer towards a better understanding of historic textiles and their manufacture, by focusing on a discussion about the braiding textile technique known today as sprang. Briefly put, scholars who research and write about textiles benefit significantly when they interact with people who create textiles. Avoiding this step can result in misrecognition, and a less-than-robust understanding of the textile and its context, if key aspects of construction and identification, details that are not always apparent through inspection, are missed. By exploring the reconstruction, and therefore the construction of a textile, researchers may gain insights into new diagnostic markers, as, for instance, aspects that might seem merely decorative to the non-specialist may be revealed, by the reconstruction, to be structural devices of shaping, short cuts, repairs, or mistakes by the maker. Going beyond these essential technical details of textile construction, reconstruction can reveal diverse aspects of daily life, particularly the necessary skills, space and equipment required to construct a certain textile. In short, collaboration between historical textile researchers and skilled textile reconstruction artisans, in this case in the study of sprang-construction textiles, opens doors to insights not always available through the inspection and study of textile samples alone.

The chapter begins with a brief overview of the techniques, history and geographical distribution of sprang-created textiles. It then moves on to discuss some of the insights I have gained through the act of creating replicas of historic textile items in conjunction with American and European museums, based on items from their collections that have been identified as having been produced using the sprang technique. In doing this, I will give examples of where my understanding of decorative options and structure changed dramatically as my work on a particular piece progressed, suggesting some of the insights that textile reproduction can offer to textile studies. Finally, I will discuss the importance of delivering workshops and lectures, the opportunities for collegiality these offer and the benefit some textile professionals might derive from attending them.

Three concepts organize the preceding papers that make up The Global Ethiopian Diaspora: migrations, connections, and belongings. This book, through its thirteen substantive chapters organized into three sections, offers a critical interrogation of each of these analytical frameworks. Although the issues covered here represent different thematic and theoretical orientations, not to mention their varied temporal and spatial foci, they are all woven together in a web of relationships to tell a complicated story of a modern human condition. This is a condition in which Ethiopians coming from all walks of life are engaged in a global process of mobility that unsettles existing assumptions about what is to be a migrant and a diaspora. Existing notions of culture, belonging, politics, identity, citizenship, and economy are not only destabilized but also rearticulated to capture the complexity, multiplicity, and fungibility of social reality. As such, the thirteen chapters inform and enrich each other, weaving a richly nuanced and deeply dynamic analysis of the multifaceted and plural experiences of Ethiopian migrants globally. The story is therefore a collection of multiple, intensely interconnected stories.

Amsale Alemu's “Exhuming the Narrative: Imagining Prince Alemayehu in the Ethiopian Diaspora” tells the fascinating yet heart-wrenching story of a mid-nineteenth-century Ethiopian prince, whose death at the age of eighteen could be said to have begun a painful but enriching conversation about exile, displacement, adoption, and historical restitution. His short life and the narratives around it, both hegemonic and subaltern, have engendered a perspective or perspectives to interrogate notions of belonging, agency, or lack thereof, and liminality. His past and his complicated experience spanning three worlds generated a narrative that many of his fellow modern Ethiopians summon to articulate their encounter with migration, exile, displacement, and adjustment. Alemu's chapter ties seamlessly with those that grapple with themes she raises, including adoption, repatriation, bifocality, and liminality. The final chapter in this collection, Kassaye Berhanu-Mac Donald's “Between Worlds: Ethiopian Adoptee Identity,” is a discussion, or rather a personal account, of suspended belongings and the in-betweenness that many migrants and members of diasporic communities must negotiate. As an adoptee herself, the author tells an inside story of dislocation through adoption at an early age but also because of her “exilic” existence for lack of a sense of rootedness.

Introduction

For a number of years now Ethiopia has had one of the highest emigration and asylum-seeking rates of all the countries in Africa. This has resulted in the emergence of a vibrant Ethiopian global diaspora. Every year, an estimated six hundred thousand Ethiopians migrate to major destination countries in the Middle East, Europe, the US, South Africa, and Australia. About 70 percent of Ethiopian migrants to international destinations comprise young men and women aged between sixteen and twenty-two, who undertake risky journeys over land and sea to reach African, Middle Eastern, and European destinations. While low-skilled young men from villages tend to disproportionately migrate southward to South Africa, the less educated young women migrate to Middle Eastern and Gulf countries for domestic work. But those who travel northward to Europe are a mixture of young men and women, whether educated or less educated, from both rural and urban areas of the country. International migration is also accompanied by a wide range of return migrations and circulation between Ethiopia and international destinations.

Structural, social, familial, and individual conditions drive youth emigration from Ethiopia. However, these categories of factors are interrelated, overlap, and often causal. They are therefore analytic categories rather than distinctive typologies. We need to move beyond a simplistic and deterministic push-pull model of migration if we want to study the specific challenges of young people in Ethiopia and the intermediate conditions that generate migration aspirations, decisions, and sustain continued migrations overtime. This would shed more light on the complex migration patterns and mass migratory exits of the youth from Ethiopia. There are different levels that inform the decision to migrate. Some young people are desperate due to challenging personal, political, and economic conditions and take dangerous overland journeys to destinations where they seek asylum or stay clandestinely. Others take safer paths, such as travelling for education and through family connections to leave the country both voluntarily and legally. In between there is formal labor mobility to Gulf States through the facilitation of overseas employment agencies. The divide between forced and voluntary migration is therefore not a binary opposition but a continuum and a matter of degree, and migrants leave for mixed reasons using mixed methods.

Sir Walter Dundas of that ilk (1562–1636) was a politically prominent laird who represented Linlithgowshire numerous times in parliament, served as its sheriff and was convener of the county's commissioners of the peace. He was also a diligent manager of his estates. His surviving estate records, while sometimes frustratingly fragmentary, contain a wealth of material that sheds light on how agriculture was overseen on a lowland Scottish estate in the early seventeenth century.

Dundas's lands, spread across five neighbouring parishes (Abercorn, Dalmeny, Linlithgow, Livingston and Kirkliston), included some of the best arable land in Scotland. Previous research has shown that, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the mains of Dundas (the farmland directly worked for the laird) was intensively cultivated, with an unusually high proportion of wheat grown alongside oats and bere, as well as significant quantities of legumes, the nitrogen-fixing properties of which permitted even more intensive cultivation. That intensity is demonstrated by the fact that around 85 per cent of the mains was under cultivation every year. Only a relatively small proportion of that land (c.30 per cent) was designated as outfield, and even that was relatively intensively cultivated with more than half of it under crops, compared to the norm of around one-third. The estate has been the subject of detailed research, largely focused on the period from the middle of the seventeenth century onwards, so an examination of earlier records has the potential to provide further insights into a period of Scottish agricultural history that remains largely unexplored.

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This study is based on a number of surviving estate records which suggest that, by the early seventeenth century, cultivation on the mains of Dundas was already a highly-organised operation. Its detailed records comprehend a whole range of activities including the sowing, harvesting, storage and disbursement of crops, as well as expenditure on labour, infrastructure and equipment. While there are few long sequences of any particular type of record, those that are preserved give a strong impression of systematic record-keeping. The extent to which this was typical for its time has yet to be clearly established, although there is no particular reason to suppose that Dundas was unique.

Lödöse museum is situated on the west coast of Sweden, a few miles north of Gothenburg. During the twelfth century Lödöse was the site of one of the first medieval towns in Sweden. Archaeologists have uncovered more than half a million objects during the past century, making Lödöse one of the richest sites in Sweden when it comes to medieval finds. Most of the finds are common items from everyday life, but after nearly a millennium in the muddy soil, they are not so common anymore. They now tell the story of the people who lived before us. Runic messages with warnings, promises of friendship and love, give life to the past. Names carved into tools tell us who once used and cherished the items a long time ago (Fig. 11.1).

Lödöse Museum also holds a vast collection of organic materials from medieval Sweden, dating from AD 1000 to 1350. In this collection there are approximately 1,700 registered textile finds, ranging from coarse packing textile to the finest cloth and silk lining. One of those finds is a nalbound mitten from the thirteenth century (Fig. 11.2). The mitten was found in 1972 alongside a house wall in the centre of Lödöse, approximately two metres underground. It is made in two different stitches, one of which is not certainly identified, and the other identified as the Asle stitch. The mitten is very well preserved, with only minor damage.

This nalbound mitten was the centre of attention and the starting point for a course called ‘From wool to mitten’, carried out at Lödöse museum during 2017. The course was open to the public and arranged by Lödöse museum in collaboration with ‘Vinterverkstan’, a small Swedish handicraft supply company. Liselotte Ohrling holds a Master's degree in archaeology and works as a museum teacher at Lödöse museum. She teaches skills such as medieval dancing, spinning and nalbinding. ‘Vinterverkstan’ is run by Anna Josefsson. Through ‘Vinterverkstan’, she supplies craft materials and training courses in nalbinding, spinning and other crafts.

This chapter examines farming in the old counties of Stirling and Clackmannan with some contiguous areas of Perthshire but excluding the Highland area around Ben Lomond. It includes the carselands of the Forth Valley, the Ochils and parts of the Fintry Hills. Variations in ecology throughout this region, compounded by differences in tenure, communications, capitalisation and other human factors, contributed to a wide range of farming economies. Change accelerated in all zones in the 1750s but was certainly not new. Whilst recognising that there were many barriers to change – including climate and warfare – the emphasis here is on specific and local changes and the impediments hindering decisive transformation. We are rightly warned against using the ‘argument from example’ to overstate the changes before 1750. So this chapter asks: ‘What were the signs of change before 1750?’ The answers suggest that we also need to avoid dismissing earlier changes as merely preparatory for ‘real’ change later.

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Contemporaries divided the region into carse, dryfield and muir. The carse – below about 30m, beside the River Forth – and the dryfield (between carse and muir) were the main arable zones. Above 100m or so was primarily pastoral, though arable was found to c.350m. ‘The Crucks of the Forth are worth an Earldom in the North’, was a ‘Common saying’ in 1706, underlining the fertility of the eastern carselands. But the carse clay had some sandier areas, some wet meadows and areas of raised peat bog and salt grass. West of Stirling, with higher rainfall and later harvests, very similar soils produced lower-quality grains, and there was more emphasis on dairying. The dryfield soils varied from sandy to heavy clays, and were also of very variable aspect and slope. There were bogs and woodlands, and the zone was intersected by streams. Perhaps half the dryfield was pasture, rocks or braes, or covered with whins (gorse) or broom. The hill pastures were also a mosaic. For example, Sheriffmuir provided common grazing for the farms of Strathallan but also peat, turf, limestone, heather and rushes for thatch, essential resources for farms on the lower ground. Above the head dykes of the muir, herds named around forty features – peat workings, lime kilns, standing stones, streams; and the head dykes were themselves being pushed up, onto former muir, before 1750.