Ronald Reminick
Associate Professor of Anthropology, Cleveland State University, OH
Field: Anthropology
Host: Bahir Dar University, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia
Dates: February 3–March 16, 2005

In 2005, Ron Reminick combined his sabbatical year with a Fulbright Senior Specialists award. This involved both consulting and research at Bahir Dar University (BDU) in the town of Bahir Dar, formalized as a sister city to Cleveland, Ohio, in July 2004, when the two respective mayors and a contingent of Ethiopians met at Cleveland’s Empress T’ayt’u Ethiopian Restaurant for an elaborate ceremony.

Bahir Dar is a town of 130,000 situated at an elevation of 6,000 feet at the southern end of Lake T’ana, the source of the Blue Nile River. It is a charming town with streets lined with tropical palms and divided tree-lined boulevards. Everywhere one can smell the aromas of roasting coffee beans, burning incense, and eucalyptus fires. Here one can see the extremes of great wealth and abject poverty as well as efforts of development, including drainage pipelines and the new buildings being erected on the campus of Bahir Dar University.

Reminick’s primary goal as a Fulbright Senior Scholar was to set up a social science research program at the university to be facilitated through a Web-based set of courses on theory and methodology starting with basic introductory anthropology. This objective was frustrated by the inadequate dial-up telecommunications system and the heavy teaching schedules imposed by the government. However, recently Addis Ababa, the capital city, has established a broad-band system that promises to facilitate the Web-based course.

The more successful consulting and workshop goals included a series of lectures and workshops on proposal writing and strategies for accessing funding for research. There was also a very exciting series of conferences on culture and globalization, held in the town of Adama/Nazret, south of Addis Ababa, and funded, in part, by the American Embassy, included government ministers, teachers, artists and scientists from various regions in the country. Reminick’s presentations at these workshops and lectures included issues involving how Western technology and ideas affect both traditional and modern Ethiopian culture and society. The discussions following the presentations were vigorous.

The Fulbright Senior Specialist also launched a research effort on female identity transformation. At Bahir Dar University, out of a student population of 10,000, only 10 percent are female. These women struggle with their studies, against the traditions of patriarchal ethnicities, and only a fraction of the female student body graduate. But recently, several women’s affairs groups have sprung up around the country, encouraged by new constitutional rights granted women, established with the present government. 

With the encouragement of the local Women’s Affairs Association (Setoch Gudday), and the assistance of two English department faculty, an Ethiopian woman and an American woman, a few women’s support groups were started. They were met with a great deal of excitement and anticipation. In these groups of eight to 10 members, plus the group leader, women would share their life’s difficulties, conflicts, hopes and desires and strategize how to further their education and broaden their consciousness of the nature of their culture and society as it affects them personally. 

At particular intervals in the support group process a projective test such as a series of Thematic Apperception Cards (TAT) would be responded to by each woman who would, hopefully, reveal developmental moments in their cognitive and emotional states. All of the dialogue is in Amharic and funding will be needed for the painstaking translation into English. Reminick will have the task of analyzing and interpreting the English translations of the TAT.

After Reminick’s work as a Fulbright Senior Specialist was finished at BDU, he and his wife were able to spend some time trekking through the spectacular Semien Mountains of Ethiopia and climbing Mt. Bwahit, the fifth highest mountain in Africa with a summit at just under 15,000 feet.

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