Adapting Gender and Development to Local Religious Contexts: A Decolonial Approach to Domestic Violence in Ethiopia

281 Pages·2021·2.811 MB·English

by  Romina Istratii

Romina Istratii’s book is a refreshingly comprehensive exploration of
the link between religious beliefs and practices and intimate partner
violence. Her work is ambitious in scope, impressive in its breadth and
depth, and an important contribution to any nuanced understanding of
the impact of religion or abusive relationships in a local context. The
myriad challenges she experiences in the execution of the research are
thoughtfully discussed and her engagement with the relevant academic
literature is noteworthy. As a result, her research will be useful to
scholars in many fields.
Nancy Nason-Clark, Professor Emerita, Department of
Sociology, University of New Brunswick, Canada
In this theoretically sophisticated and ethnographically grounded
monograph – that focuses on Ethiopia – Romina Istratii questions “the
idea of treating popular gender theories as globally relevant” because they
fail to view gender realities as “nuanced, complex and non-uniform”, as
well as to consider how the “non-secular” plays a role in shaping gender
subjectivities and relations. This book is an important contribution to a
growing field of studies that seeks to problematise the dominant secular
Gender and Development paradigm, where it seeks to understand and
transform gender relations, to eradicate social ills such as domestic viol-
ence, yet is underpinned by Euro-centric assumptions that are rarely
addressed.
Emma Tomalin, Professor in the School of Philosophy, Religion
and History of Science, Leeds University, UK

Adapting Gender and Development
to Local Religious Contexts
This book provides a critical and decolonial analysis of gender and develop-
ment theory and practice in religious societies through the presentation of a
detailed ethnographic study of conjugal violence in Ethiopia.
Responding to recent consensus that gender mainstreaming approaches
have failed to produce their intended structural changes, Romina Istratii
explains that gender and development analytical and theoretical frameworks
are often constructed through western Euro-centric lenses ill-equipped to
understand gender-related realities and human behaviour in non-western
religious contexts and knowledge systems. Instead, Istratii argues for an
approach to gender-sensitive research and practice which is embedded in
insiders’ conceptual understandings as a basis to theorise about gender,
assess the possible gendered underpinnings of local issues and design appro-
priate alleviation strategies. Drawing on a detailed study of conjugal abuse
realities and attitudes in two villages and the city of Aksum in Northern
Ethiopia, she demonstrates how religious knowledge can be engaged in the
design and implementation of remedial interventions.
This book carefully evidences the importance of integrating religious tra-
ditions and spirituality in current discussions of sustainable development in
Africa, and speaks to researchers and practitioners of gender, religion and
development in Africa, scholars of non-western Christianities and Ethio-
pian studies, and domestic violence researchers and practitioners.
Romina Istratii is currently Research Associate at the Department of
Development Studies and the Centre of World Christianity, SOAS
University of London, UK. She previously served as Senior Teaching
Fellow in the School of History, Religions and Philosophies. She has been
an active member of the Decolonising SOAS Working Group, initiating
the Decolonising Research Initiative on behalf of the SOAS Research
Directorate. She is co-founder of Decolonial Subversions.
Routledge Research in Religion and Development
Series Editors:
Matthew Clarke
Deakin University, Australia
Emma Tomalin
University of Leeds, UK
Nathan Loewen
University of Alabama, USA
The Routledge Research in Religion and Development series focuses on the
diverse ways in which religious values, teachings and practices interact with
international development.
While religious traditions and faith-based movements have long served as
forces for social innovation, it has only been within the last ten years that
researchers have begun to seriously explore the religious dimensions
of international development. However, recognising and analysing the role of
religion in the development domain is vital for a nuanced understanding of
this field. This interdisciplinary series examines the intersection between
these two areas, focusing on a range of contexts and religious traditions.
Editorial board:
Carole Rakodi, University of Birmingham, UK
Gurharpal Singh, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of
London, UK
Ideological and Cultural Encounters
Edited by Kathryn Kraft and Olivia J. Wilkinson
Adapting Gender and Development to Local Religious Contexts
A Decolonial Approach to Domestic Violence in Ethiopia
Romina Istratii
Adapting Gender and
Development to Local
Religious Contexts
A Decolonial Approach to Domestic
Violence in Ethiopia
Romina Istratii
First published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 Romina Istratii
The right of Romina Istratii to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-0-367-36608-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-00699-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Goudy
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Contents
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xiii
1 Introduction: the metaphysics of gender and
development 1
2 Linguistic and cosmological translation 40
3 Intimate partner violence, gender and faith in Ethiopia 72
4 The Ethiopian Orthodox Täwahәdo tradition and the
conjugal relationship 93
5 Conjugal abuse conceptualisations and attitudes 126
6 Marriage in the local normative framework 146
7 Responses to conjugal abuse in the local institutional
framework 166
8 Faith, culture and social norms 187
9 Faith, marriage and gendered expressions 207
10 The individual, human nature and conjugal abuse 224
Conclusion: beyond western ways 244
Appendix 258
Index 261
Preface
In 2012, graduating from my BA programme in the United States, I
embarked on a year- l ong Watson Fellowship in Ghana, Ethiopia, Rwanda
and Tanzania. Having spent the two previous years supporting the Faculty of
Economics at Bates College in researching African agricultural development,
I had encountered no direct testimonies of small- s cale African farmers pre-
senting their realities in their own words. I was therefore hoping to under-
stand how gender relations were explained through local people’s discourses
and how these could be related to agricultural development. In the one year
that I spent on the African continent, I passed through 60 or more rural and
urban communities and I spoke with about 300 female and male farmers and
local residents in their farms and homes and an equally large number of non-
governmental organisations, government officials and other stakeholders.
These discussions and living with hosts of diverse backgrounds and life situ-
ations made it clear to me that gender realities were considerably more
nuanced, complex and non- u niform than they were being portrayed in the
gender- s ensitive development literature on Africa. Moreover, I found that
aspects of vernacular life had been entirely neglected, the most important
being non- s ecular local belief and knowledge systems and their influence on
human thinking and behaviour, which evidenced a deeply secularised devel-
opment sector that still antagonised religious belief.
In 2015, I secured a scholarship to study an MA in Gender and Develop-
ment at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) in the UK, a research and
policy centre that many agricultural development practitioners in Africa had
cited in their interviews. I had thought it strange that a UK- b ased institute had
so much influence in setting gender and development standards locally,
and wished to understand the paradigm where it was being mainstreamed.
Studying at IDS evidenced to me that gender mainstreaming was a political
project, and like any political project, it was mainly concerned about the
change it wanted to enact. While I sought to engage openly with western fem-
inist pleas for gender- s ensitive development and equality, the dominant mental-
ity I encountered was off- p utting and exclusionary. The majority of instructors
and peers seemed to unquestionably accept theories of gender that portrayed
all women as victims, denying historical and contextual particularities. When I
Preface ix
cited egalitarian gender practices in the African countries I had visited and
from my home regions, Eastern and Southern Europe, I encountered silence.
What I said did not match the generalising narratives upheld and, hence, voices
such as mine had to be de- l egitimised. By being treated as ‘too intelligent’ or
idiosyncratic, and in some cases with open antagonism, I was effectively
‘subalternised’.
At IDS, my fellow classmates and I were taught a conceptualisation of
gender that was grounded in western European philosophies of gender
according to the branch favoured by the different instructors. Issues of posi-
tionality and differences in gender conceptualisations in the world were not
considered at all, even as the MA programme covered feminist epistemolo-
gies that supposedly affirmed the situatedness of all knowledge production.
Western European understandings and ideals of gender were treated as
normative, best exemplified in the typical gender exercises that were
delivered to us as a method to use with local communities in our ‘doing
gender’ work. These invited participants to attribute a number of specified
gender and sex characteristics to the categories ‘female’ and ‘male’ with the
aim of leading them to realise that gender should be conceived preferably as
a continuum. Through this exercise, a gender theory origin ating in a secular
logic and social constructionist feminist metaphysics was presented as
authoritative, while non - secular, non - materialist worldviews espoused by
some of us were deemed unintelligible. That this clearly violated our right to
an understanding of the world based on our preferred belief system was
simply ignored.
Like my instructors, many gender and development practitioners consider
it their mission to ‘change’ local worldviews and realities, accepting that there
is something inherently wrong with local socio- c ultural systems. I consider
this mentality to have its roots in imperialist and colonial legacies perpetuated
by unreflexive privileged writers and practitioners in academic, research-
intensive and techno- s cientific institutions, often perpetuated by their elite
counterparts in local societies. While most Gender and Development propo-
nents have now admitted the flaws of gender mains treaming, they have yet to
address the fundamental epistemological question: Who has and continues to
define the concept of gender? Have local communities been allowed to articu-
late gender according to their own conceptual repertoires and worldviews?
For the most part, mainstream theories and analytical frameworks continue
to be based on the conceptual repertoires of influential voices, usually affili-
ated with western institutions that secure them research funding, authority
and credibility.
The book aims to achieve wider recognition of the fact that such concep-
tual and theoretical constructs have been historically embedded in western
feminist metaphysics of humanity and gender as these emanated from and
evolved in western Christian, Enlightenment and post- E nlightenment think-
ing and are indivisible from the process of secularisation itself. On the basis
of this epistemological situatedness, I argue that these are unequipped to