Religious change and the remaking of boundaries among Muslim afar pastoralists

Abstract

The faith of Islam is a common defining element for the identity of the Afar people who inhabit a large dryland area including the northeastern part of Ethiopia, the southern part of Eritrea, and large parts of Djibouti. The 1.4 million Afar of Ethiopia live within the arid Afar region of Ethiopia, one of nine administrative regions, and depend predominantly on mobile pastoralism for their survival (Central Statistical Authority 2008). Since the middle of the twentieth century they have been faced with accelerating socio-political and ecological changes that have challenged their livelihood system substantially. In a situation of high pastoral vulnerability and massive (geo-) politically and economically motivated interventions of national and international actors in the peripheral rural dryland areas of the Afar region, processes of social and territorial boundary-work have become important strategies of pastoral adaptation. The key question of this chapter deals with the significance of religious change within these overlapping processes of discursive and practical boundary work that are currently taking place.