Speaking Peace

by Alula Pankhurst

After setting the scene of the peace ceremony held in Arbore, southern Ethiopia in 1993, and providing an outline of the sequence of events and issues at stake, this paper, which follows on from Ivo Streckerís presentation on tenor in culture, explores ways in which the principal actors sought to create a spirit of convergence, a tone of reconciliation, and a sense of harmony expressed through collective blessings and cursing. This involved strategies of persuasion and steering the debate away from issues that would result in postponing the ceremony, avoiding the allocation of blame and public admission of guilt, and stressing the need to rely on shared cultural patterns, formulas and institutions rather than external interventions.

In the dialogues, attempts at convergence and consonance were also created through rhetorical questions, mutual metaphors about the natural and social worlds, allusions to shared kinship, geographical proximity, common pastoral livelihoods, reciprocal exchanges, similar and related forms of leadership and institutions, and shared conceptions of divine agency.

But above all the attuning of a sense of harmony was sought by cursing war and blessing peace through deeds and words. The anointing of ritual leaders with butter, the symbolic blunting of spears, the exchange of cultural objects, and the wearing of fatty strips from sacrificed animals can be seen as attempts to emphasise spiritual leadership, give cultural salience to the ceremony, and create a sense of shared experience and mutual commitment.

The use of a common idiom of blessing peace and cursing war, led by religious leaders, performed in similar ways in different languages as variations on a theme, and approved through joint chorusing, can be considered as a form of instrumental performance, ritual invocation, and collective endorsement. The combination of evocative words, emphatic gestures using hands and extended through ritual sticks pointed in unison eastwards and raised and lowered to accompanying sounds, exclamations proclaimed by a blesser, followed by staccato refrains of the participants, repeated in a fugue-like fashion with an increasing pace, building up to climaxes, and refracted in cultural variations is an eloquent example of resonance in rhetoric culture.

 

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