PhD Oral Exam - Hone Mandefro Belaye, Social and Cultural Analysis

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

Over the past two decades, Addis Ababa has been radically reshaped through state-led interventions—expanding roads, building railways, and constructing more than 100 condominium neighborhoods under the Integrated Housing Development Program (IHDP), one of Africa's largest urban housing initiatives. These developments have transformed the city's spatial form while opening new terrains for negotiating state–society relations. This dissertation asks: how does state-led mass housing reconfigure everyday practices of urban sociality and belonging in contemporary Ethiopia?

Based on ethnographic research in Ayat 49, one of Addis Ababa's earliest condominium neighborhoods, this dissertation examines how the IHDP has generated new forms of urban subjectivity and neighboring practices. Through analysis of class formation, neighboring, state imaginaries, and property relations, and deploying netsanet(autonomy)—a key vernacular category—as both ethnographic finding and analytic framework, I demonstrate how residents navigate the tension between their desires for autonomy and the inescapable interdependencies of vertical living.

Residents experience the state through multiple and contradictory imaginaries—simultaneously as modernizer, foreign impostor, incompetent pretender, and corrupt entity. These encounters emerge through everyday interactions with infrastructure and governance structures yet cultivate powerful desires for nestanet. To renegotiate their relationship with the state, residents deploy property discourses alongside material assemblages—fences, guards, infrastructure, and financial resources—while condominium committees balance desires for autonomy with legal dependency on state recognition. Residents also draw on the distinctive built form and their embodied experience of condominium living, compared to previous neighborhoods, to make middle-class distinction claims in ways that foreground the need for a material-semiotic approach to class formation attending to how the built environment offers alternative pathways to social distinction beyond property ownership alone. Meanwhile, narratives about declining neighborliness articulate anxieties about social transformation while producing a new ethos of neighboring in condominiums that I call ambient neighboring. The dissertation contributes to anthropological understandings of property, housing, and the state by demonstrating how spatial configurations shape experiences of dependency and struggles for autonomy at multiples scales.