Situating the Banna: An Ethnographic Description of Ethnic Identification

Abstract

Studies of interethnic warfare in the Lower Omo Valley have explored relationships between ethnic identity and culture and between society and ecology. This paper is the first to add ethnographic information about myth, clan classification, and interethnic warfare among the Banna to academic discourse. It also clarifies how Banna people construct their “ethnic” identity: they identify themselves as members of the Banna through a various forms of recognition and narratives, but these everyday activities do not guarantee a discrete Banna land, language, and culture. Research has revealed that, contrary to the group’s assertion, Banna identity has no discrete unity. Appadurai (1996) theorized that locality is a “phenomenological property of social life,” which might be discovered through description of neighborhoods as “the actually existing social forms in which locality, as a dimension or value, is variably realized.”