Department of Anthropology

Abstract: This presentation details the production, distribution, exchange, and consumption of commercial beers to tell a story about industrialization in Ethiopia. Over the past decade, industrialization has regained popularity on the African continent as an alternative model of development to neoliberalism. Nowhere is this return more visible than in Ethiopia, a country that despite its tumultuous internal politics, has remained the one of the fastest growing economies in the world— a growth attributed to its strong industrial policy. Drawing from 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork on commercial beer and brewing, this talk examines the socio-cultural dynamics underpinning, driving, and resisting the growth of industry in Ethiopia with a focus on forward linkages (new economic activities generated through beer commodity output) and backward linkages (new economic activities generated through beer production inputs). This is what I call brewing development— a dialectical process of industrialization unfolding through the generative activity of linkage effects—a process that is not only material and economic in character, but scintillating with socio-cultural, symbolic, affective, religious, ethnic, and political meaning as well.
In collaboration with IU Emerging Areas of Research - Sustainable Food System Science (SFSS) project

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