Gender and Development through Local Epistemologies:. This research has been motivated by the aim to identify local mechanisms and resources for changing attitudes that sustain spousal abuse and, especially, the relevance and feasibility of theology-informed and clergy-centred solutions.
Ms Istratii presents here an overview of the project and fieldwork, contextualising it in the relevant literatures and the rationale for its epistemological and methodological innovations. While early to reach any conclusions, some research findings are delineated in ways that suggest intricate, multifarious realities on the ground and the need for multidimensional approaches to normative change. And yet, in this region and across the country spousal abuse continues to be commonplace, with previous national demographic and health surveys finding high percentages of men and women justifying wife-hitting.
Limited qualitative data from Ethiopia and Tigray suggest that cultural beliefs, inflected with vernacular religious and gender discourse, underpin spousal abuse attitudes in complex ways, but no attempt has been made yet to explore this intersection so as to make sense of existing attitudes in their context.
My objective for this project has been to start identifying part of the mechanism that sustains and explains such attitudes and to explore what sorts of resources exist locally that could be leveraged in efforts to change pernicious attitudes working within the local cosmology. Studies from Ethiopia have pointed to the existence of various forms of intimate cohabitation, many of them temporary, irregular, or even initiated by force, [v] which seem to have been considered equivalent to a marriage relationship.
Similarly, while a principal concern was to understand the effect of the vernacular religious tradition on married life, I did not limit my investigations to Church marriages alone, as this would be equivalent to assuming that the religious cosmology is influential or embodied by believers within these types of marriages only. This project reflects my experience working in gender and development research and practice and the corollary aim to overcome generic frameworks of analysis and methodologies in cross-cultural gender-related work, prioritising local epistemological and knowledge systems.
