Summary: | This article draws on an ethnographic study of the realities of conjugal abuse and attitudes
towards it in a religious society in Ethiopia. The study was prompted by tendencies in gender and
development scholarship to transpose feminist aetiologies of conjugal abuse cross-culturally through
sociological methodologies without paying sufficient attention to people's local belief and knowledge
systems, especially religious beliefs and spirituality, or without being sufficiently reflexive concerning
the influence of the researcher's epistemological locus in the research process. As an alternative
approach, I suspend a priori conceptualizations of gender, religion and conjugal abuse, combining an
anthropological study with participatory development methods to achieve more people-centred and
cosmology-sensitive research. Recognizing the colonial underpinnings of western anthropology and
the historically obscure character of the anthropological project, I followed a more reflexive approach
that made transparent the process of data collection and analysis and drew attention to the centrality of
the researcher's identity and personhood in the research process. Even such measures did not predict
or resolve a host of other communicational and analytical challenges that emerged in the ethnographic
experience and in the process of ‘translating cosmologies.' In this essay, I have made an attempt to
describe some of these challenges for didactic reasons in order to make anthropological research more
tenable for younger researchers, including practitioners of development who engage with
ethnographic methods, and to urge greater openness about the limitations and tentativeness of all
research that involves multi-dimensional human individuals and realities.
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