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, Ethiopia's Integrated Housing Development Program (IHDP), one of Africa's largest urban housing initiatives, has produced over a hundred new condominium neighborhoods across Addis Ababa. Coupled with expanding roads, new railway infrastructure, and other large-scale construction, these developments have led some observers to describe the city as undergoing a radical remaking. This dissertation asks how this state-led mass housing program has shaped state-society relationships and reconfigured everyday practices of urban sociality and belonging in Addis Ababa. Drawing on ethnographic research in Ayat 49, one of Addis Ababa's earliest condominium neighborhoods, the dissertation deploys netsanet — an Amharic term translated as autonomy, which interlocutors frequently invoke to describe life in the condominium neighborhood — as both ethnographic finding and analytic framework.

I begin by situating the IHDP within a longer genealogy of housing crises in Ethiopia and the recurring anxiety among Ethiopian leaders about the disjuncture between the country's narrative as netsa hager (autonomous nation that evaded colonialism) and the realities of famine, poverty and dependence on foreign aid. From this historical ground, the analysis turns to how residents, through embodied experiences and discourses about condominiums, encounter the state as modernizer, foreign impostor, incompetent pretender, and corrupt entity. These conceptions are contradictory and held in tension, yet they cultivate desires for netsanet among residents. Meanwhile, neighbourhood committee members engage in strategic boundary work to expand their capacity for self-governance within the compounds, even as they remain dependent on the state for recognition, legitimacy, and, at times, enforcement of compliance among residents. Furthermore, residents draw on the distinctive built form and the sensorial, embodied experience of condominium living, in contrast to previous neighbourhoods, to make claims to middle-class distinction in ways that highlight the need for a material-semiotic approach to class formation, one that attends 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.