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The Meaning of Place in a World of Movement: Lessons from Long-term Field Research in Southern Ethiopia
University of Oxford david.turton{at}qeh.ox.ac.uk
This article examines the link between people and place through a study of the ‘spatial practices’ of a small group of southern Ethiopian agro-pastoralists, the Mursi. Based upon fieldwork stretching over the past 35 years, I argue that there has been a huge change in the way the Mursi collectively imagine the world and their place within it. They have been ‘localized’, by being drawn into the ‘spatial practices’ of the Ethiopian state, and ‘marginalized’, by becoming dependent on values, norms and technologies which lie beyond their own means of production and control. I conclude that to understand how a sense of place becomes bound up with a person's social and individual identity, we must treat place, not as a stage for social activity but as a ‘product’ of it. Such an understanding of the link between people and place helps us to appreciate that displacement is not just about the loss of place, but also about the struggle to make a place in the world, where meaningful action and shared understanding is possible.
MS received June 2004; revised MS received March 2005
1. This is a revised version of the annual Elizabeth Colson Lecture, sponsored by the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC), Oxford University, and delivered at Rhodes House, Oxford, on 12 May 2004. I am grateful to Professor Stephen Castles and my former colleagues at the RSC for their invitation, and to two anonymous readers for the Journal of Refugee Studies for their perceptive and helpful comments. The field research upon which the article is based was carried out at various times between 1969 and 2001 and was supported by grants from the (then) Social Science Research Council (UK), the Royal Geographical Society, the Tweedie Exploration Fellowship Committee of the University of Edinburgh, the Hayter Committee of the University of Manchester, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.
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