Song, mobile phones and the echoes of war

Circulating poems and fashioning the past in Amhara (Ethiopia)

Dados Bibliográficos

ID9537323
AutoresKatell Morand (0000-0003-1155-9902, Laboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociologie comparative, autor correspondente)
Ano2026
Volume96
Fascículo1
Páginas58-79
Data de publicação2026-02-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAfrica (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0001-9720 • E-ISSN: 1750-0184
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0001972025101757
OpenAlexW7150223442
IdiomaEN
Referências citadas20

This article explores the connection between musico-poetic circulation and the ways in which conflicts are recounted and collectively given meaning in Ethiopia’s Amhara region. It highlights the key role mobile phones have come to play in social life. It contributes to current debates on how new information and communication technologies affect social relations, open up new communicative spaces or build on pre-existing modes of exchange. I focus on the possibilities that phones offer for producing, playing, exchanging and storing audio and video recordings of sung poetry. By revisiting the concept of ‘mediatized orality’, I analyse the relationships formed with and around these files, and trace their trajectories in two directions: spatially, connecting local affairs to national issues; and temporally, bridging past and present. I argue that this ‘regime of circulation’, which weaves the many voices of remembering into poetic circulation, is a practice of representing conflicts and fashioning the past – one that predates the arrival of new technologies, as evidenced by the Ethiopian historiographical tradition. What people do with phones and the files they carry draws on this tradition. It also transforms it, opening up ways of appropriating issues surrounding ethnicity, nation and history

Bridging (networking · Focus (optics · Historiography · Key (lock · Meaning (existential · Poetry · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · African history and culture analysis · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Diverse Musicological Studies