CARTOGRAPHIC SOURCES AND TERRITORIAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF ETHIOPIA SINCE THE LATE 18TH CENTURY

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Wolbert Smidt
• Subject Area: African, American and Oceania Studies ; Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2016 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 281699264

Our knowledge of the geography of Ethiopia is marked by especially rich and ancient political and cultural history, ethnic diversity and a very rich corpus of historical and cultural source material. These include centuries-old local written works and oral traditions in the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia and neighboring Muslim polities. From the 19th century, the production of academic knowledge on Ethiopia and other territories of northeastern Africa include many maps and topographic information produced by foreign researchers and co-produced by anonymous local informants, such as traditional scholars, merchants and office holders of Christian Ethiopia and even in some cases of several neighboring kingdoms, disappeared today. However, the absence of compendium of maps has led to a fundamental ignorance of their potential resources of information for studies of the country and its region.The members of the French-German team, in close association with Ethiopian partners, have accumulated a lot of experience in fieldwork, combined with many years of work in archives and teaching experiences in Ethiopian universities. Their common observation is that there is an urgent need for a geo-historical instrument and reference work which can help to study and understand the meaning of maps: the epistemic operations behind the inscription of toponyms and ethnonyms; the evolution of spatial representations; the roots of territorial claims; the sustainability of collective memory; and the power of social imaginations to adapt to changing landscapes. This research will result in invaluable tools for accessing to the information contained in historical maps and for taking into consideration in other fields of study which have shaped the representations of space.The objectives of ETHIOMAP are twofold:1. Collection, critical analysis and indexation of historical cartographic sources: The project will collect, critically describe, analyze, index and publish a documentation of widely unknown, but historically important maps of Ethiopia and neighboring countries of northeastern Africa. The scope of the research is limited to maps that were designed between 1790 and 1944, each of them representing a specific historical period and constituting excellent ethnographic or historical sources that have been neglected by the general trend of studies on this area of the world. A selection of 25 maps will be fully indexed and made accessible through an on-line map-viewer application. 2. This work will be supplemented by targeted fieldwork investigations on contemporary territories. Selected areas of the most informative maps of the corpus will be compared to the corresponding territories in current-day Ethiopia. Through four focused surveys, we first expect to reach a better understanding of the work of map-makers by returning on their footsteps and by collecting cultural-historical spatial information from local populations in local context.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France
• Co-Investigator: Privatdozent Eloi Ficquet, Ph.D.