Book
Land tenure among the Amhara of Ethiopia: the dynamics of cognatic descent
University of Chicago Press • (4) • Published In 1973 • Pages: xiv, 273
By: Hoben, Allan.
AbstractBrief abstract written by HRAF anthropologists who have done the subject indexing for the document
This is a study of the relationship among descent, status and land rights in the Amhara land-tenure system. All Amhara have a right to cultivate a piece of land through their membership in a cognatic descent group whose apical ancestor was the area's first landholder. Rights are usually allotted to newly established nuclear households by the designated manager, or FEJ, of a landholding descent group segment. More powerful and prestigious persons can lay claim to large tracts of land by demonstrating their connection to an ancestor whose share had never been realized. If successful, such claims cause a reconfiguration in the reckoning of descent and land rights. Hoben argues that the structural ambiguities of the Amhara cognatic descent-based land-tenure system allowed for far more social mobility than the more stratified system of feudal Europe, with which it is compared; a 1968 Ahmara uprising against land reform supports this assertion.
- SubjectsDocument-level OCM identifiers given by the anthropology subject indexers at HRAF
- Real property
- Acquisition and relinquishment of property
- Manipulative mobility
- Household
- Rule of descent
- Kindreds and ramages
- cultureCulture name from the Outline of World Cultures (OWC)
- Amhara
- HRAF PubDateThe date HRAF published the document
- 1998
- RegionThe area the document pertains to
- Africa
- Sub RegionThe more specific area the document pertains to, which is located within the Region
- Eastern Africa
- Document TypeMay include journal articles, essays, collections of essays, monographs, or chapters/parts of monographs
- Book
- Evaluation
- Creator TypeThe type of person writing the document, e.g. Ethnographer, Missionary, Archaeologist, Folklorist, Linguist, Indigenous Person, and so on.
- Ethnologist
- Document Rating A ranking done by HRAF anthropologists based on the strength of the source material on a scale of 1 to 5, as follows: 1 - poor; 2 - fair; 3 - good, useful data, but not uniformly excellent; 4 - excellent secondary data; 5 - excellent primary data.
- 5: Excellent Primary Data
- AnalystThe HRAF anthropologist who subject indexed the document and prepared other materials for the eHRAF culture/tradition collection
- Ian Skoggard ; 1996
- Field DateThe date the researcher conducted the fieldwork or archival research that produced the document
- 1960-61, 1968-70
- Coverage DateThe date or dates that the information in the document pertains to
- 1930-1970
- Coverage PlaceLocation of the research culture or tradition (often a smaller unit such as a band, community, or archaeological site)
- Dega Damot District, Gojjam Province, Ethiopia
- NotesAdditional notes
- Allan Hoben
- Includes bibliographical references (p. 259-266)
- LCCNLibrary of Congress Control Number
- 72097666
- LCSHLibrary of Congress Subject Headings
- Amhara (African people)