In 1960, women in southern Ethiopia's rural Konso district faced a violent campaign by local men to eradicate leather clothing following a ban imposed by the local governor, Tesfaye Hailu. Tesfaye, a man of the northern Amhara ethnic group, banned leather clothes along with bead necklaces and arm bracelets as part of imperial Ethiopia's “modernization,” which was influenced by disparate sources, including the United States. Tesfaye saw women's attire as “backward” and “unhygienic” and as obstructing modernization; its elimination was a means to improve Konso culture and help the empire join the community of modern nations. The “culture” of “the Other” has often been cast as impeding “modernity” and requiring elimination or change, particularly the practices of women, from genital cutting in eastern Africa to veiling among Muslim women in the Middle East and Europe (Hodgson Reference Hodgson2009; Masquelier Reference Masquelier and Masquelier2005; Merry Reference Merry2009a). So it was with the widespread, politicized transition to cotton clothing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century eastern Africa. The target was clothing worn by all women in Konso and made by women in the low-status category of “Xauta,” sometimes referred to as a “caste.” Leather skirts signaled important stages in women's lives, and became extensions of individual women's tastes, experiences, and identities. Women today recall the violence and punishments of the campaign, including being chased, beaten, imprisoned, and fined, and even having their skirts forcibly removed at home and in public. They offer contradictory explanations of who initiated the ban and the reasons for it, but they remember clearly the local men involved in eradication efforts.

The eradication campaign had immediate effects: it changed women's attire and reduced the numbers of Xauta women leatherworkers, who today make mainly utilitarian mats and bags. More significant, I will argue, was how the violence became insinuated in everyday social relationships and cultural knowledge in Konso. The campaign attacked the social position of women, whose adornment was officially labeled premodern and became subject to the dictates of men, who were conditionally empowered through imperial modernization. Leatherworkers and other Xauta people experienced declines in their status after occupations that were previously “polluted” within regional cultural logics became “unhygienic.” By the end of the twentieth century, leatherworking had become the most despised Xauta occupation. Bonds among women of all backgrounds that had been materialized through leather clothing were reconfigured into a more rigid, “caste-like” system of relationships. These changes were amplified by the order to wear cotton clothes; male farmers, of the hereditary group known as “Etenta” that dominated Konso social and religious life, grew cotton, and some learned weaving, profiting from the new demand and partially displacing Xauta men from another “polluted” occupation.

Xauta and Etenta, like minorities and farmers elsewhere in southern Ethiopia and in societies as far west as Senegal, have sometimes been referred to as “castes” or “caste-like” groups (e.g., Pankhurst Reference Pankhurst, Freeman and Pankhurst2001; Dilley Reference Dilley2004). Scholars have used these terms to convey notions of pollution associated with hereditary minorities and purity associated with those controlling political and religious realms, the enunciation of pollution and purity in inherited occupational exclusions and separate roles in rituals, and to support their assertions that group endogamy and ascription block mobility between categories and explain group persistence. In Konso, Etenta have historically controlled land, governance, and religion, while Xauta occupations have included blacksmithing, making pottery, weaving, trading, and leatherworking, the latter done mostly by women. In the twentieth century, Etenta denied Xauta access to farmlands, restricted where they could live, forbade their intermarriage and commensality, barred them from public meeting grounds, and excluded them from communal rituals except for specific polluted acts. They also selectively conscripted them to fight in Ethiopia's wars, and targeted them with violence, especially during political upheaval. Rather than “castes,” however, I refer to Xauta and Etenta as “hereditary status groups,” because I want to avoid assumptions of unchanging composition, definitions, and relationships; these are emergent categories involving notions of descent and complex symbolic associations that people are continuously reworking.Footnote ³

During fieldwork in 2001 and 2002, it became clear to me that the categories Xauta and Etenta have undergone substantial shifts over the last century. In Ethiopia today, for example, Xauta face new resentments for their perceived success in liberalized markets, and their livelihoods are challenged as impoverished Etenta adopt Xauta occupations and identities hoping to improve their own lives (Ellison Reference Ellison2009). I refer to these relationships as “emergent hegemonies”: they involve new relations of inequality that people generate using novel information and opportunities that also rework older, commonsense understandings of “proper” behaviors and social hierarchies.Footnote ⁴ Although in the 1970s the socialist government banned “caste prejudices,” and the current constitution forbids discrimination, people have continually recreated such practices and their logics in new forms.Footnote ⁵ The emergent hegemonies of current economic and political liberalization involve relations of inequality that people reshaped in part through the violence of earlier decades, such as during the leather clothing ban.

Parallels between the experiences of women and Xauta following the ban and those of Tesfaye Hailu, who himself later faced violence during Ethiopia's socialist revolution, help bring into focus the intimate violence of political and economic change. Praised by superiors for his modernization and development work, Tesfaye was rapidly promoted and ultimately reached parliament. During the revolution in 1974, however, socialists identified him with a “feudal” empire that obstructed the country's modernization. He was imprisoned and beaten, his irreplaceable personal belongings were taken, and his family relationships shattered. Like the women targeted by his modernization efforts, his experiences of this violence were deeply personal, and they continue to shape his life and relationships today. When I visited Tesfaye, his modest and well-kept home reminded me of busts of deposed emperor Haile Selassie in storage at the national museum in Addis Ababa: toppled long ago, but present in an utterly transformed state. As we discussed his time in Konso, illustrated with the few documents and photographs that survived the socialist purge of his belongings, Tesfaye seemed unaware of the violence women experienced following the leather clothing ban. Instead, he remembers his service to Ethiopia's modernization and Konso's development, prematurely ended by a pointless and violent revolution that left him physically abused and his identity and relationships completely changed.

Tesfaye and the women of Konso were targets of state-sanctioned attacks on behaviors categorized as backward, and on those who practiced them, in order to bring about desired social and political transformations. The utopian goals of development and modernity—analogous to the different goals of liberalization today—were understood as larger than the individuals involved. Some categories of people, and individuals defined as belonging to them, were seen to be obstructing these goals and they therefore became objects that had to be changed or eliminated, including through violence. As Veena Das (Reference Das2007) has shown in India, the violence of political and economic change is more subtle and long-term than the moments of immediate aggression. Women in Konso and Tesfaye offer overlapping perspectives on their subjection to seemingly arbitrary exercises of power, unrestrained and at the discretion of an authority, akin to Giorgio Agamben's “zone of indistinguishability between law and life” (1998: 59). Like intimate-partner violence, it occurred in mundane, personal places and had significant and long-lasting effects on people's identities, social relationships, and cultural knowledge.

As the opening quotations suggest, women in Konso and Tesfaye do not refer to a single “event,” in the common use of the term, offering shards of information that can be reassembled to reveal a whole. Instead, they recall their experiences with diverse interactions and confrontations, and they do so by reflecting on the struggles that occurred as inseparable from what resulted—in their personal lives, in their views of society, and in ongoing changes in social categories, statuses, and relationships (Stoler Reference Stoler2002: 203; Donham Reference Donham, Bay and Donham2006: 28–29).Footnote ⁶ To Tesfaye, the cultural meanings of leather clothing were irrelevant in the national imperative to modernize; yet memories like Kalle's are common among women in Konso, and they disrupt Tesfaye's perspective. Eliminating “harmful customs” was part of the broader “egalitarian promise of modernity” that, in practice, created new forms of exclusion and transformed hierarchies in diverse locations (Briggs Reference Briggs2001: 686; Anderson Reference Anderson and Stoler2006). Konso women's memories provide a window into the conditions of their existence within, and their exclusion from, the modernizing Ethiopian state. Yet there is also great variation in what the women recall.

Political Economy and Intimate Violence

Through an examination of these memories I argue that the violence of political and economic change is a form of intimate violence, which has its most enduring if least-examined effects in people's subjectivity, social relationships, and cultural knowledge (Das Reference Das2007: 8; Stoler Reference Stoler2002: 210; and see Das et al. Reference Das, Kleinman, Ramphele and Reynolds2000). Those effects are more than immediate and mechanistic; they develop through a range of interactions, from moments of extreme aggression to shifting undercurrents of hostility in everyday, gendered interactions taking place over years or decades (Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois Reference Scheper-Hughes, Bourgois, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois2004: 1–2). The considerable scholarship on violence in recent years has paid relatively little attention to the effects of violence in “the recesses of everyday life, within local communities, kinship networks, and families” (Das Reference Das2008: 293)—the terrain of intimate violence. My focus here is on such intimate violence, with “its potential to both disrupt the ordinary and become part of the ordinary” (Das Reference Das2008: 295; Reference Das2007), and through which people “reweave their lives” (Shaw Reference Shaw2007: 67).

The concept of “intimate violence” often refers to domestic abuse, specifically rape and sexual assault, but it also includes a range of violence among people sharing close personal relationships, from bullying and harassment to physical and emotional torture.Footnote ⁷ Intimate violence implies coercion and the exercise of force in unequal interpersonal relationships, and the targets most often know the perpetrators, although the events are also entangled in various aspects of broad cultural and socio-political contexts.Footnote ⁸ Intimate violence has lasting psychological and cultural effects, and its reverberations in people's subjectivity, including their notions of self and how they live their day-to-day lives, can continue long after the parties separate. Building on these understandings, I use the concept here to refer to violence at the intersections of political and economic forces and people's “intimate” realms (Stoler Reference Stoler2002; Reference Stoler and Stoler2006), their personal relationships and understandings of themselves, and their social categories and cultural knowledge. The violence I describe here stemmed from a kind of terror initiated to assert control, change behavior, and redefine hierarchies. It was carried out among neighbors and took place on community paths, in village markets, and in the sanctuary of people's homes. The violations were personal: they threatened bodily integrity and objects that were extensions of the self.

This ethnographic account puts into motion models of structural violence and biopolitics that are sometimes used to interpret such violence. Structural violence concerns the “social machinery of oppression” (Farmer Reference Farmer2004: 307) that is exerted through “historically entrenched” political-economic patterns by people occupying unequal social positions (Bourgois Reference Bourgois, Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois2004: 426). In Konso, as state agents intervened in people's lives, one could chart the processes by which people were pitted against others in hierarchically opposed social-structural positions, such as Xauta and Etenta, women and men, and “Konso” and “Ethiopians.”

Banning leather clothing and imprisoning and maltreating political opponents can also be viewed through the prism of biopolitics, “the regulation of populations through techniques of knowledge and intervention” (Fassin Reference Fassin2009: 54), “in which life and politics become one” (Agamben Reference Agamben and Heller-Roazen1998: 149). Agamben's work has been particularly influential in considerations of biopolitics. It addressed the violence inflicted on Jewish people in the Holocaust, as people who could be killed with impunity but not “sacrificed,” who were subtracted from both human and divine law in what Agamben calls the “sovereign ban” (1998: 82–83). In his analysis, the Nazi state included Jews by virtue of their exclusion from categories of humans with rights, denying them legitimacy while making them objects of state attention. Yet critics have found Agamben's contributions weakened by his imprecise uses of history to serve theoretical concepts (Mazower Reference Mazower2008: 32), by a lack of detail on the workings of his concepts (Lancaster Reference Lancaster, Collins, di Leonardo and Williams2008: 60), and, most important for thinking about Konso, by his insufficient attentions to the complexity of cultural, social, and political relations (Comaroff Reference Comaroff2007: 208–10; Ong Reference Ong2006: 22–23).

In sympathy with Agamben's critics, I view modernization and the leather clothing ban as but one important moment in the continuous reshaping of social relations and cultural knowledge involving men and women, Xauta and Etenta, Konso and the Ethiopian state—social categories used to build structural models. People of particular groups were included in modernization by the possibility of violent exclusion, to borrow Agamben's framing. “Konso” people, who had been viewed as “Other” in the “Solomonic” Amhara empire since their nineteenth-century subjugation, became newly “uncivilized” in the state's modernization.Footnote ⁹ Xauta and their occupations, long viewed by Etenta as polluted, encountered new meanings of “filth” in the modern language of hygiene. Women, who had lower status than men in political, ritual, and descent realms, came to signify the premodern in relation to men and the state. Violence could be used against people because they belonged to these categories of gender, ethnicity, and hereditary status, but the categories themselves were emergent. Through the events of 1960, people further reconfigured relations that had been continuously transformed in the past, and the intimate violence of political and economic change reverberated in emergent hegemonies largely unknown to imperial modernizers. This process of change is my concern in this article: the manifestations of violence in people's ongoing transformations of intimate relationships (Das Reference Das2007: 75) and of their social and cultural categories whose connections to governance are fortuitous.

Imperial Modernization and The Greater Good

Ethiopia's modernization is widely viewed as having been a means to extend imperial rule (Bahru Reference Zewde2000: 201–3; Marcus Reference Marcus2002: 155). In the era of the Bretton Woods Conference (1944), which spawned the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), later called the World Bank, postwar rebuilding in Europe and economic transformation in the United States showcased modernization through infrastructure development. In Ethiopia, this “American era” (Bahru Reference Zewde2000: 186) brought U.S. military support and U.S. and IBRD projects for infrastructure building and education. Ethiopia's emperor Haile Selassie, who cultivated an image as a pan-African leader, was aware of calls for development in neighboring colonies seeking independence from Europe. Aside from the potential benefits of development for Ethiopia, he also sought to allay growing criticisms of his failures to deliver in these areas, failures that led to a coup attempt in 1960. In southern Ethiopia, modernization meant replacing imperial clients—who enacted imperial rule in what amounted to fiefs—with a system of bureaucratic administration. By the 1950s, Haile Selassie was replacing urban and provincial clients with modernizers, and provincial administrators in turn appointed educated men like Tesfaye to lower-level posts. These people collected taxes rather than tribute, to pay for such things as clean water, new schools, infrastructure, and public health measures.

Education was promoted for poverty reduction and development, but it also enhanced a sense of northern uniqueness and nationalist cosmopolitanism among students who became “the governing elite” (ibid.: 203). Most of the very few with access to education were northerners. In 1959, 55 percent of the country's 4,200 secondary school and college students were Amhara, the emperor's ethnic group, which they interpreted as “self-evident justification of their political superiority” (Levine Reference Levine1972: 115).Footnote ¹⁰ Msmaku Asrat, who worked in the administration in the 1950s, writes of an “idyllic” time for students heading toward professions in the empire (2003: 72). He recalls Canadian Jesuit teachers using Canadian school supplies, and reading classics in Western literature that “fired our imaginations, facilitated our learning of English and were an easy and early introduction to Western culture” (44–45). Comprehensive elementary education included geography lessons that situated stories of the empire's three thousand-year history in a 1950s global spatiotemporal frame. As one student said at the time, praising an American teacher, “When we came [to school], we were Tigreans, Gallas, Amharas, and so forth. Now, thanks to the director, we leave as Ethiopians, and as alumni of this school” (Levine Reference Levine1972: 293).

Through an emphasis on hygiene, northern students cultivated an ethics of modern selfhood, which contrasted with a view of southerners as unclean and obstructing the empire's modern potential. “Hygiene” is a culturally situated phenomenon, with “dirt” as an offense against order whose elimination represents a creative act (Douglas Reference Douglas2002). In the mid-twentieth century, hygiene was also a highly mobile signifier of “modernity.” From the United States to the Philippines, and from Australia to Mandate Palestine, colonizers and dominant classes promoted hygiene while constructing national, modern selves in contradistinction to racialized “Others” (Anderson Reference Anderson and Stoler2006; Hirsch Reference Hirsch2008; Hoy Reference Hoy1995). Msmaku recalls the centrality of hygiene in his education: “Students were periodically checked for hygiene, to see if they washed properly, if their fingernails were clean or if they had lice in their hair. If they had shoes (very few students had shoes then) they were checked to see if their socks were clean. Every week … students were taken to Filwoha (thermal baths) about three miles south of the school to have free baths. There were yearly eye-exams and most students were treated for trachoma. UNICEF also distributed powdered milk once or twice a week and all students were forced to drink it” (2003: 47). Msmaku and his peers also told “ethnic jokes about the ‘foolishness’ of the Galla,” lumping together people of diverse social and cultural backgrounds in the south and southwest, such as little-known Konso (2003: 61). To northerners, as Donald Donham explains, “Galla” denoted southerners who were assumed to lack agriculture and live in the wilderness, but more important were implications that “Galla were pagans” and “were uncivilized” (Reference Donham, Donham and James2002: 12–13).Footnote ¹¹

Modernizers, sharing these views, entered rural peripheries like Konso with a range of motivations, including a sense of obligation to Ethiopia and of belonging to a modern era, and a desire to put their knowledge to use and to better their own lives. Some, like Msmaku, came from Addis Ababa. Others, like Tesfaye, belonged to a network of Amhara spread across Ethiopia since the nineteenth-century imperial expansion. Tesfaye was born in the mid-1930s in rural Gamo Gofa province to an Amhara family who had moved south in the 1920s to serve the empire. These children of northerners cultivated Amhara identities while living among imperial subjects they viewed as culturally and linguistically “Other.” They asserted political control over imperial peripheries, assisted by local students and Protestant Christians, men and women who had come to identify with the empire and/or ideals of modernity (e.g., Olmstead Reference Olmstead1997).

Often southern subjects resented northerners as occupiers, fief-holders, and “neftenya,” a name for armed northerners during imperial expansion later extended to include more recent northern settlers. Tesfaye explains that his father, Hailu, followed a paternal uncle who had been sent to a southern town “to stabilize and make peace” and to work as an administrator. Hailu was granted land in a nearby town, where he worked as a judge and later met and married a woman whose father was also Amhara. While traveling between two southern towns, Hailu's uncle was “assassinated” by local Dorze people. “The Dorze,” says Tesfaye, “hated the Amharas,” whom they viewed as occupiers. Other Amhara, with the blessing or at the instigation of government officials, caught and hanged twenty-eight people “to avenge the murder.”

In the 1950s, Tesfaye found work in a district administrative center because he had completed seven years of school, in contrast to the four or five years of his co-applicants.Footnote ¹² After two years, he was appointed head of a municipality, the first of a rapid series of promotions. With an improved standard of living—his salary increased from 30 to 120 birrFootnote ¹³—and his status as a young modernizer, he married a woman from a more prominent Amhara family. He attracted attention for implementing projects in piped water, road construction, public health, and education, and in 1959 the governor of Gamo Gofa, Dajjazmach Aymoro Selassie Abebe, praised Tesfaye's work in a letter to the province's districts and subdistricts.Footnote ¹⁴ When Konso's governor retired in 1959, Aymoro Selassie appointed Tesfaye to replace him.Footnote ¹⁵ As Tesfaye understands it, the governor was removed under the “pretext” of his age because he had been in Konso for decades and “the people were highly oppressed.” The area was widely viewed as “backward,” Tesfaye recalls, and “there was no development at all.” Government people in Konso initially ignored Tesfaye due to his youth—he was in his twenties—and because of the entrenched patronage system. After a few months of learning the area and establishing connections Tesfaye replaced all existing staff, including the police. “It was my system,” he explains. “They would not cooperate with me. Their mentality was not in line with mine.”

The Gendered Lives of Leather Clothing

The politics of gender and identity are enacted in part through clothing, in eastern Africa as elsewhere (e.g., Allman Reference Allman2004; Hendrickson Reference Hendrickson1996), and the change from leather to cotton is a case in point. Men often adopted cotton clothes associated with economic and political mobility, Christianity or Islam, and modern “cleanliness,” a process that sometimes shaped women's choices through extant and emerging gender hegemonies. Kaguru men in 1890s German East Africa adopted cotton clothes that were increasingly available through trade with the coast; Christian missionaries debated these adoptions as possible encroachments on European culture while also barring Kaguru women from, among other things, wearing “only a loincloth” (Beidelman Reference Beidelman1982: 134–35). Elder men in early-twentieth-century central Kenya who viewed leather clothes as “their biography,” as conveying “their moral and material accomplishments,” referred to the “unrecognizable” purchased cotton clothes of wageworkers and Christians, who were constructing new identities (Peterson Reference Peterson2004: 78). Other Kenyan men protected “morality” by barring women from wearing “Western” (i.e., cotton) clothes (Hay Reference Hay and Allman2004; Shadle Reference Shadle2006). In southern Ethiopia in the 1950s, cotton-wearing Borana men “vaguely” remembered wearing leather capes, while their wives, sisters, mothers, and daughters became targets of government and missionary campaigns to eliminate leather clothes (Hallpike Reference Hallpike2008: 147).

Konso men today sometimes wear short cotton trousers called komfa, the same name for the skirt taken from Kalle in 1960. These shorts were previously made from goatskins, yet men do not lament that loss. In the late 1960s men told ethnographer Christopher Hallpike that cotton “has always been the prerogative of men” (ibid.), and he thought men were “beginning to adopt the Amhara attitude that nakedness is shameful” (Reference Hallpike1972: 152). Hallpike once posited a structural/symbolic association of leather with women and cotton with men, “along the lines of a nature/culture opposition,” until learning that once men had also worn leather. Like some other authors, he now sees a “relative conservatism of the women” (2008: 147). Gender essentialisms aside, these oppositions are productive for thinking about clothing and the politics of gender and identity in Konso, for, as Hallpike notes, men weave while women work hides and produce leather clothes. We can add to this that Etenta grow cotton, and, since the 1960s, weave, while Xauta are butchers and (women) leatherworkers.

Beyond retaining leather clothing under duress, due to conservatism, or as resistance, women across eastern Africa often viewed such adornment as extensions of their selves that marked and shaped their relationships with others. Among Pokot women in Kenya, leather belts (lötökyö) associated with childbirth carried complex and mutable meanings of agnatic descent; of a woman's status and agency as mother, wife, co-wife, and in-law; and of a child's connection to their mother (Bianco Reference Bianco1991).Footnote ¹⁹ Samburu and Maasai women wore similar belts (ibid.: 771; Straight Reference Straight2007: 86). These belts were “public versions of the self” whose decorations could represent “a public version of an individual woman's procreative history” (ibid.: 770, 773). Among Datooga women in Tanzania, leather skirts also have strong associations with marriage and fertility and they assert women's identities and social positions vis-à-vis men (Blystad Reference Blystad, Moore, Sanders and Kaare2004: 199). In these examples and others, leather clothing carried a woman's “essence,” expressing her fertility, social position, and personal history, or even creating links with divinities (e.g., Straight Reference Straight2007: 62–66).

Women in Konso understood leather skirts as expressions of personal status and experience, and they made them into personalized objects through decoration, such as by sewing on cowry shells and/or glass beads. Knowing about the ban, I was initially surprised that many women still have leather skirts tucked away in their houses. In part they keep them for ceremonial uses such as in dances tied to the agricultural calendar. An ever-diminishing number retain their skirts to be dressed in them for burial, once a common practice.Footnote ²⁰ Women are also proud of their skirts. They become animated with a range of emotions when they recall them, describe what it was like to wear them, and discuss the eradication campaign. Leather skirts signified a woman's individual life achievements and broader acknowledgment of them, and they displayed a woman's unique assertion of herself in her roles. A leather skirt, in this way, became a “biographical object” (Hoskins Reference Hoskins1998), imbued with the qualities of the woman who wore it, and as such it became an “inalienable” extension of her self.

Today in Konso, the word uwa refers to all skirts and uwa qolata—“leather skirts”—refers to those worn before 1960. Women wore at least four different types of leather skirts with different societal meanings and personal associations, and an adult married woman often had more than one kind. The most common was the komfa. These three-piece skirts were worn by women and unmarried girls, and a newly married woman would take one when moving to her husband's home. “When I was first married, I only had a komfa,” explains Kalle, who wore hers to her new husband's household in a different village. While describing her komfa and what it was like to wear it, she paused and said, to my surprise, “I have one,” and sent her young granddaughter scampering into her house to fetch it. When the girl returned with the skirt, Kalle held it to her waist and paraded with it, and she and the girl laughed.Footnote ²¹ Women and girls could also wear a two-piece shoola before marriage. During another interview, a woman in Purquta overheard me discussing the shoola with a leatherworker and invited me to her house where she brought out her skirt, which she had not touched in years. She posed and swayed with it around her waist, and laughed while describing how she used to wear it.

In association with childbirth, women wore a third type of skirt called a koora, which was important in a woman's sokata—her coming out after postpartum seclusion—and signified her social status (Ellison Reference Ellison2009: 88). “You wore it at the time you gave birth,” explains Kallaja, a widow in the village of Dokatu. “You stayed for a month in the house, and when you finished that you could go out but you had to wear the koora for three or five days. That indicated that you had finished the time in the house.” Some koora were plain while others were decorated elaborately with beads and cowry shells. Like Pokot women's lötökyö belts, koora in Konso are quintessentially women's objects that are also sites of gender tensions. They seem to be the only skirts commonly made by Konso's few male leatherworkers. During one set of male-dominated lineage rituals, one group of agnatically related male blacksmiths perform their roles wearing a koora whose outer face is covered with cowry shells, a performance loaded with symbolic claims about gender and status, production and reproduction.

Married women who had given birth could wear the three-piece nuqota, which was the most popular skirt in Konso. Women often decorated them, including with a much-talked-about slit running up the back. “Nuqota was the best,” exclaims Kalle. “It is three pieces and it covers you well around here,” motioning toward her mid-section and thighs. “It covers well during dancing and moving. The big difference is that the nuqota has a split here in the back and it has cowry shells around these edges. When you walk, this split place moves like this.” Prancing in a circle, swaying from side-to-side, she smiles while imitating the skirt and beads rustling. Two other women who joined us in her compound break loose with laughter. “It is comfortable!” Kalle demands, “and it looks better,” while all three are laughing. I understand women's laughter in these conversations as unscripted and almost illicit expressions of pleasure in showing and discussing their skirts, feelings that exist in tension with enduring characterizations of leather clothing as backward and dirty.

Through leather skirts, women of all backgrounds established meaningful relationships with Xauta leatherworkers, despite notions of pollution and sanctions against other Etenta-Xauta interactions, and women today generally recall those who made their skirts. A woman would take goatskins to a leatherworker in her village to commission a skirt, paying her with a combination of grain and money. After relocating for marriage, she would sometimes continue to patronize that leatherworker until she became familiar with some local woman's work. Leatherworkers would also buy goatskins from butchers and make un-commissioned skirts to sell or exchange. Doing so required capital and confidence in the demand for their work, both of which they had in the 1950s. They scraped the goatskins, which they then softened, treated with butter or oil, dyed, and cut and sewed into the appropriate form. Women say an oiled and cared-for skirt would last for years, much longer than the cotton skirts that replaced them. Leatherworkers I spoke with proudly recalled making skirts, which was hard work but a skill they enjoyed possessing.

Emergent Hegemonies

The intimate violence of modernization contributed to emerging hegemonies, some of which became apparent in the months after the eradication campaign, while others took shape over years or even decades. The increased demand for cotton clothing, associated with modernity and the state, led some Etenta men to take up weaving for its new profitability. Tesfaye, trying to improve people's lives, helped establish government programs to teach modern weaving methods, and he recruited Etenta men from Konso to learn the new techniques. His efforts foreshadowed socialist training programs in craft production that similarly did not recognize weaving as a Xauta occupation. In both cases, the programs helped Etenta partially displace Xauta from this work. It is now common to meet Etenta who weave, and many of them no longer view the occupation as polluted or acknowledge any contradiction with their past beliefs.Footnote ²⁶ This shift is but one aspect of the emergent hegemonies connected with the intimate violence of modernization.

Ethiopia's modernization further enmeshed Konso's gender hierarchies in a masculine nationalist imaginary, which included Konso men in part by relegating them to a feminized status of uncivilized southerners.Footnote ²⁷ Tesfaye did not plan to subjugate women and feminize men to impose a masculine imperial domination; he sought to “modernize” Konso and thereby improve the empire and his own standing. But his ban on leather clothes was inseparable from the gendered subjugation of the south that began with imperial expansion and continues in new forms today. Konso became an object of the modernizing project; women stood in for “culture” and practiced, in Tesfaye's words, “harmful customs” that blocked modern (masculine) progress.Footnote ²⁸ Women were the focus of the pursuit of change and their bodies the sites of efforts at eradication, of everything from abortion to their everyday clothing. Konso men faced possible humiliation by the targeting of their wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers in a system of agnatic descent and “exaggerated” masculinity (Hallpike Reference Hallpike2008: 229). But men also benefited by complicity as their importance relative to women was asserted and the male work of farming cotton and weaving were officially contraposed to Xauta women's leatherworking.

Konso women did not always respond to such patriarchal forces with passive submission, and many resisted by avoiding men who were enforcing the ban and by hiding their leather skirts. Their subsequent actions also resonate with scholarship on gender and clothing that emphasizes women's agency even in oppressive circumstances. Like Nigérien women who refashion hijabi head coverings to suit individual tastes and convey meanings beyond piety (Masquelier Reference Masquelier2009: 218)—their bodies “sites of individual agency and instruments of social control” (278)—Konso women, though they in 1960 donned “simple” cotton blankets, soon found new ways to craft selves through cotton clothes. Women photographed in the late 1960s wore cotton skirts shaped like komfa or shoola (Hallpike Reference Hallpike2008: 35, 43). Today they wear white cotton skirts that incorporate dyed yarns, often imported, and added in multiple colors and patterns. But in the 1950s Xauta women were at the center of exchange relationships that involved the leather skirts, through which all women constituted and expressed aspects of their identities. Today it is men, often Etenta, who weave women's skirts. Through agency people reshape rather than escape their entanglements in social relationships.

When women today discuss the leather clothes they once wore, many laugh at past practices that, they say, appear funny through the lens of the present. This “modern” embarrassment about older “backward” practices became instilled through the intimate violence described in this article, as women's “traditional” clothing accrued new meanings in transformed interpersonal relationships and political-economic contexts. Women's ambivalence recalls Michael Herzfeld's concept of “cultural intimacy,” the recognition that certain practices and beliefs that have intimate meanings are also a source of embarrassment in interactions with others, particularly with dominant groups and the state (Reference Herzfeld2005: 3). Women in Konso today have come to accept the deeply gendered view that they engaged in “backward” practices, even though that knowledge runs counter to their own memories and experiences.Footnote ²⁹

While all women were targets of these modernization efforts, Xauta women, and particularly the leatherworkers, experienced the greatest change of status. The embarrassment women today express about past practices invokes Xauta directly, if enigmatically. The men who butcher animals and produce hides and the women who processed hides to make clothing are Xauta. Following the ban, leatherworkers and butchers were increasingly looked on as performing unclean occupations—handling dead animals and making premodern and unhygienic articles. Butchers remain in demand, although their work has been increasingly regulated and restricted to specific locations, to control putrefaction. The eradication efforts destroyed demand for leather skirts in all but infrequent ritual uses and thereby reduced the number of women leatherworkers (Arthur Reference Arthur2010: 229), which is now the most disparaged minority occupation. Some women today are buried in tanned hides and others in cloth, in part because leather skirts are unavailable and also because the skirts have very different meanings than they did in the 1950s. Etenta and Xauta women no longer come together through the exchange of these meaningful objects, separated as they are by revised notions of pollution. Today, rather than creating items that become extensions of individual women's selves, leatherworkers make utilitarian mats and bags. Leatherworkers, and to a lesser extent butchers, have become metonyms for despised minorities, whose overall status has declined.Footnote ³⁰

These changes fed into and expanded the gendered slurs Etenta use to degrade Xauta and justify their maltreatment. Farmers had long disparaged Xauta in numerous ways, from restricting their burials to areas of bush where garbage was thrown, to claiming that their “junior” status was established at creation. By the late 1960s, it was common for Etenta to equate the term “xauta” with feminine categories in derogatory ways. Etenta whose male children had died, for example, would call subsequent newborn sons by female names or “xautayta” [minority] “to deceive the evil spirits into thinking that the child is a girl or a xautayta and so not worth bothering with” (Hallpike Reference Hallpike2008: 502). At the same time, an “effeminate” male leatherworker was the object of “bullying”: “He won't hit you back,” Hallpike was told, “if you take his meat away, or knock him down” (ibid.: 233). During the socialist revolution, Xauta became objects of violence initiated by farmers; when they were attacked and their property taken they had no recourse. Similar violence followed the fall of the socialist regime in 1991 when some Xauta men who had gained land under reforms were again forced, like Etenta women, into a non-landholding status.

Further transformations of relations between Xauta and Etenta, enmeshed with the intimate violence of modernization, are evident in a recent rethinking of “harmful customs” by one conservative Etenta faction.Footnote ³¹ These men are not concerned with women's leather clothing but rather have come to resent the loss of generation-based marriage restrictions. Whereas Tesfaye's ban resonated with complaints that conservative elders enforced marriage rules through the threat of forced abortion, these men now claim the changes capitulated to the uncontrolled and uncivilized sexuality of Xauta occurring outside of generational restrictions, which they see as the real cause of unsafe abortions. The diminished significance of generation changes has weakened Etenta-controlled hierarchies and elevated the standing of Xauta, these men say, and they blame this for many current woes. Whereas in the past Xauta were “properly” feminized in their exclusion from generation grades, weakening these practices permitted new ambiguities in status and group endogamy. These men wish to reignite generation-change rituals and marriage restrictions under male Etenta control, citing both the “freedoms” of liberalization and the respect for “culture” that is a foundation of Ethiopia's postsocialist ethnic federalism.…..

Tesfaye insists he did not try to abolish Konso culture but merely to end harmful customs. “He could be my son, he could be my brother,” Tesfaye says, evoking a generic Konso man to explain his actions. Referring to a bridge he had constructed in Konso, he contends, “I had limited knowledge, but I tried to use my limited knowledge to help that area. This is the story that I want to tell you.” His story is profound. The biopolitical management of people's lives is based on situated knowledge of their worlds and experiences. The violence it creates becomes justified by idealized goals and because its targets exist as “exceptions.” Yet those designing the change may not even recognize the violence their work helps to generate. Tesfaye continues, evoking his interlocutor, “The present people who earn degrees, doctorates, or who are professors, they are fortunate,” as if such positioning might enable one to impose change without risks. “We didn't have that chance,” he adds. “But I did all these things with limited knowledge.”

By the time of the revolution in 1974, students and activists had become hostile to the imperial “governing elite,” whose education and standard of living they felt came at the expense of the country's development. That hostility was not entirely new. Msmaku (Reference Asrat2003: 80), for example, recalls resentment toward himself and the few other university-educated workers in the Ministry of Information's English department in the 1950s. The failed coup in 1960 expanded awareness among students and intellectuals about the emperor's centralization of control and his failure to modernize the country. Despite minor successes, overall development seemed elusive while impoverishment grew. The governing elite did well for themselves, while people in rural areas suffered famine.

Beyond biopolitics, Tesfaye's experiences with the revolution further illustrate the effects of the intimate violence of political and economic change on people's identities and personal relationships. He had begun serving in parliament in Addis Ababa, “presenting the people's questions” about development and receiving a salary five times that which he had earned in the south. In the summer of 1974, however, as the government fell apart and ministers and other officials went into exile, Tesfaye fled to his family in the south. There he ran into a friend with whom he had grown up. That man, in the meantime, had become a key organizer of Echaat, the Ethiopian Oppressed Peoples’ Struggle, a small, non-ethnic political party with roots in the 1960s student movement angered by the empire's failures in development (Andargachew Reference Tiruneh1993: 131–32).Footnote ³² The friend had Tesfaye imprisoned, and he was beaten and tortured. Over the next three years, he tried in various ways to negotiate his release, including by praising and cajoling different officers and administrators. When he tried these tactics during a chance encounter with Ali Mussa, then governor of Gamo Gofa, he was pistol-whipped.Footnote ³³

Because of his imprisonment and utterly changed social standing, Tesfaye's wife, from a higher-status family than his, left him. “We couldn't compromise with each other, after we had lost all the things that we had,” he explains. For Tesfaye, as for many others incarcerated by the Derg (e.g., Aberra Reference Jembere and Araaya2002), his long-term personal losses are inseparable from the political change. “All the things we had were nationalized by the Derg. It happened all over Ethiopia.” As a result, “I didn't have anything to give her,” he says. It is a connection he repeatedly conveys. “I lost my job, I had no salary. Even now I have no pension. Nothing. Because of the political situation, they arrested me. Whatever she asked of me, I did not have it to give her.”

Tesfaye was released from prison after three years, into the dangerous “Red Terror,” the Derg's purge of threats to its control that killed tens of thousands.Footnote ³⁴ Ali Mussa was still governor in Gamo Gofa, and Tesfaye went to him to seek work. Ali Mussa had a reputation as a “cruel man,” explains the man assisting me; “a bastard,” says Tesfaye, “known because of his assassination of so many people.” Tesfaye recalls that when he asked for work, Ali Mussa, “in front of other intellectuals,” replied: “Go and ask your emperor.”Footnote ³⁵ After many years, Tesfaye was again elected to a local government office, this time “in charge of bringing in goods for the town shop.” When we spoke he had left that position after he quarreled with the town chairman. He is obviously wary of political fights.