Cultural Resilience among the Chabu Foragers in Southwestern Ethiopia

Abstract

Anthropologists have described the remarkable contemporary hunter-gatherer resilience to environmental degradation and global capitalism. The literature is abundant in detailed accounts of how foragers respond to changes as observed by ethnographers. By contrast, relatively few studies exist on how the local people perceive and rank the socialecological risks and acknowledge the indigenous strategies they call upon. This paper examines how the Chabu foragers in Ethiopia perceive socioecological risks and their coping strategies under dramatic culture change. Freelists and unstructured interviews with adult men and women indicate that deadly diseases and sporadic food shortages due in part to encroachments of immigrant farms and coffee plantations as the highest ranked threats to their survival. Despite these challenges, the Chabu values of sharing and helping others, flexibility in adopting new subsistence knowledge and practices, and their extensive ecological knowledge about the forest provided them with the strategies to withstand difficult times. The Chabu perception of risks and the cultural identity reflected in their survival strategies enhance our understanding and provide potential insights into the diverse challenges facing contemporary foraging societies.