The Formation of Ethnic Identity in South Omo: the Dassenech

The traditional history of the Dassenech is based almost entirely on oral sources. An amalgam of peoples who identify themselves as members of territorial sections, clans and sub-clans, the Dassenech came together as a people over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper reviews these various traditions and notes the particular role played by environmental and ecological disasters in causing individuals, families and larger groups of people at certain times to migrate and at other times to be absorbed as new immigrants by neighboring communities. Also considered are the mechanisms that facilitated these movements. More contemporary research makes clear that traditions, which recall such interethnic relationships, are still acknowledged and drawn upon in times of present-day violence and rapid change. However, as the last section of this paper notes, there is a serious lack of evidence from the period after 1925 as to the particular mechanisms that allow individuals, families, or larger groups of people to actually shift identity. Can the Dassenech still respond as they once did, and by extension the other peoples in the South Omo, to contemporary environmental and/or ecological crises such as are now posed by the dams of the Gilgel Gibe project on the Omo River?