Tempoethics : envisioning Asian modernities and enacting global health projects in Ethiopia
Keywords: Anthropology.

This study examines how the violence of Asian modernities has been entangled in family planning programs for the Oromo people under the haunting historical trauma of massacre and ongoing state violence in Ethiopia. I advance a novel notion of "embodied haunting": that haunting mediated by the violation of the body transforms collective historical trauma to facilitate alternative political action and imagination by recasting implications of massacre in times of state of emergency. I ground this argument of embodied haunting by examining present-day memories of the Aanolee massacre in 1884 among the Oromo people in Ethiopia. This ethnographic inquiry builds on the notion of "hauntology", the study of repressed historical memories which return and affect psychological and political subjectivities. In doing so, my study reveals psychological and political ramifications of doing global health projects under the authoritarian state and the unexpected ways that urgent temporalities of Asian modernities have contributed to violence in Ethiopia. This inter-regional ethnographic history aims to show that marginalized African communities simultaneously benefiting from Korean-funded global health programs while being harmed by state modernization projects, which are themselves inspired by East Asian development models. In modern Ethiopia, the Oromo people I study had to endure violence incurred by three successive regimes with distinct development models: Imperial Japan, Maoist China, and the developmental dictatorship of South Korea. Life histories of Oromo and their forefathers have been closely intertwined with violent government interventions based on East Asian models: colonial exploitation, forced resettlement and recruitment, and mobilization for family planning and state violence. I suggest that these violent characteristics of Ethiopian regimes can be connected to the context of the urgency of a compressed, accelerated East Asian movement toward becoming modern to catch up with the West or regime competitions during the Cold War —both with lasting consequences for biopolitics. Within this context, I examine Korean family planning projects in Ethiopia at the intersection of ethics, ethnic politics, gender inequality, religion and state development models. My ethnographic study shows how the long-acting family planning methods such as Implanon have been extensively promoted by the exigent tempo of the Ethiopian developmental state. From the viewpoint of the Oromo women in rural Ethiopia, Implanon was adopted for the spacing of children as well as protection from sexual violence during periods of domestic migrant labor in Saudi Arabia and Dubai. Building upon recent anthropological discourses on time and ethics, my research examines how their pursuit of better lives for families was in constant conflict with historical memories of depopulating colonial massacre and forced recruitment to the army that distorted sex ratios. By paying attention to "tempo" this study seek to understand experiences of the interruption of bodily rhythms—reproductive cycles and daily lives—by various conflicting temporal discourses and practices of family planning. Instead of enforcing the projected progress to the unrealizable future of development and modernization, I look for a "nonprojected" global health that allow room for being otherwise in time.