Accidental Environmentalists the Religiosity of Church Forests in Highlands Ethiopia

Worldviews 22 (2018) 113–142 WORLDVIEWS

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Accidental Environmentalists The Religiosity of Church Forests in Highlands Ethiopia

Eliza F. Kent Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, ny, usa [email protected]

Izabela Orlowska Leibniz—Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin, Germany [email protected]

Abstract

In the highlands of Ethiopia, the only remaining stands of native forest are around churches of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church. Though hailed as community- conserved areas by environmentalists, we argue that the conservation of such forest is not intentional, but rather an indirect result of the religious norms, beliefs and practices surrounding the sites. In actuality, the religiosity surrounding church forests maintains the purity of the most holy space in the center of the shrine, the tabot, a replica of the Ark of the Covenant, which ensures that the church is a legitimate and effective portal to the divine. An underlying cultural logic of purity and pollution structures the spatial organization of the site outward into a series of concentric circles of diminishing purity and shapes the social order into an elegant hierarchy. This article seeks to understand the norms, beliefs and practices of this sacred geography in its social and religious context, arguing that ignorance of or inattention to these can undermine the conservation goals that have brought these forests, along with so many other sacred natural sites, to the attention of environmentalists around the world.

Keywords

Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church – Ethiopia – church forests – sacred natural sites – sacred groves – sacred geography – community-conservation area

It was our second visit to an Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church (etoc) dedicated to St. Michael, which was located just off the main highway that fun- neled rural traffic to the regional capital of Bahir Dar.1 The January day was bright and warm, as it so often is in the Amhara-speaking highlands of Ethiopia. The week before, our nine-person research team had arrived at the church unannounced, bearing a letter from the bishop that granted us permission to conduct ecological surveys in the diocese’s many church forests. Like most etoc churches, this one was round, organized in a series of concentric circles that emanate out from a pure and holy center within the church’s built structure.The physical environs of the space considered “the church” extend as far as an outer boundary, which may be marked by a wall, a path, or simply the edge of a neighboring field. In the outermost ring of the church, one typically finds a forest used as a community burial ground, which has been conserved through the generations by a system of customary norms and prohibitions (Figure 1). In this part of Ethiopia, such church forests harbor the only stands of indigenous forest in a region otherwise denuded of trees, attracting the attention of conservation biologists, botanists and others concerned about forest loss, including ourselves (Bongers et al 2006, Aerts et al. 2016, Wassie et al. 2010). Though there is debate about whether or not the region was more densely forested in the past, we know that Ethiopian Orthodox church forests have endured on the landscape for decades, perhaps centuries, in spite of political turmoil, changes in land tenure, rising population and accompanying demand for timber, fodder and agricultural land (Klepeis et al 2016: 720–721; Scull et al 2016). Our interdisciplinary team, comprised of biologists, geographers, religious studies scholars and several student interns, was launching a multi-year research project to study these remarkable forests from diverse perspectives, hoping to understand better the socio-ecological dynamics that have led to their conservation. On our first visit, the church was deserted save for a few sleepy young priests-in-training sitting in the shade, whose lilting voices could be heard chanting the liturgical texts they commit to memory. We gathered leaf litter, identified and counted seedlings and established several experimen-

1 We gratefully acknowledge the funding provided by the Picker Interdisciplinary Science Institute at Colgate University. We also extend our thanks to the many priests, deacons, nuns, monks, and laypeople of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church in South Gondar, who patiently answered our questions and helped us understand their churches better. Finally, we owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the interdisciplinary team with whom we launched this project: Catherine Cardelús (principal investigator), Peter Klepeis, Peter Scull, Alemaheyu Wassie Eshete and Carrie Woods. Their intellectual camaraderie and collaborative generosity has greatly enriched this research at every stage.

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figure 1 Aerial view of church to St. Michael, near Bahir Dar tal plots to assess the present ecological health of the forest and track it over time. We were unable, however, to find anyone able to tell us about the religious norms and institutional structures that led to the conservation of this small patch of forest. So one week later, we returned to finish that work. It happened to be market day. Dozens of rural residents walked along the road staring at this strange assemblage of Western-born, mostly white foreign- ers and their vehicles. We began our interview outside the gates of the church forest with a priest and a local farmer who was also a member of the congregation. As we asked our prepared questions about the size of the congregation, the church’s sources of income and the ways in which people were and were not permitted to use the forest produce, the priest nervously adjusted his turban and the farmer darted glances at the crowd growing around us. I sug-

Worldviews 22 (2018) 113–142 Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:22:20AM via free access 116 kent and orlowska gested we move inside the church gates, ostensibly to get a closer look at the new tree plantings at the forest perimeter, but really in hopes that we could escape the pressure of the crowd. But as we rose to shift location, the priest announced abruptly that he had to get home and melted into the crowd, leav- ing the farmer to lead us, reluctantly, on a tour of the saplings. Suddenly, we were confronted by a bold youth, a trio of companions behind him. “What are you doing here?” He demanded, “You don’t belong here!” We explained we were here with a well-known local scientist and lay leader within the etoc, who had a long relationship with this church. “He’s just inside the forest—let us get him. He’ll explain.” They refused, citing bad experiences with “Protes- tants” who had recently tried to force their way in. Breaking the tense standoff, the farmer suggested we move our interview, once again, outside the church wall. But as we left, the youth slammed the gate behind us, locking us out. The farmer soon disappeared as well, explaining to the surrounding crowd that his cooperation with us had been a mistake, and in any case he had to go home now. This was the first time we encountered a hostile reception at the boundaries of a church forest, but it would not be the last. There were the men felling trees along a rutted dirt road who halted us as we carried our heavy gear towards the church forest, still a mile away. Standing up tall, their faces gleaming with sweat and their axes resting on their shoulders, they told us sharply to go away. There was the stout caretaker, his face marked with ritual scars, who followed every move of the biological assessment team with a suspicious glare. And there were the innumerable priests and laypeople who stared at us pointedly, took their large wooden or metal crosses out of their shirts and held them up to us, wordlessly asking if we were Orthodox Christians too. As significant as the resistance was, we were always able to overcome it eventually by appealing to elders high up in the church hierarchy. At St. Michael’s church, once we were able to persuade the young people to take us to him, the head-priest dismissed their alarm with a gentle wave of his hand and gave us a tour of the new tree plantings and a new concrete bathing area surrounding the church’s healing spring. Usually, though, winning people’s trust took a conversation with our local contact, and an explanation of the letter he carried testifying to the permission he’d gained from the South Gondar etoc diocese authorizing this work. Though inconvenient to our team at the time, in retrospect the hostility we encountered at the boundaries of these church forests, and the way it dissipated when we were able to demonstrate the support we had from upper echelons of the church hierarchy, testified to the existence of a robust system of norms, beliefs, and practices that have long supported the conservation of these forests. This article seeks to understand those norms, beliefs and

WorldviewsDownloaded from 22 Brill.com10/07/2021 (2018) 113–142 08:22:20AM via free access accidental environmentalists 117 practices in their social and religious context, arguing that ignorance of or inattention to these can undermine the conservation goals that have brought these forests, along with so many other sacred natural sites, to the attention of environmentalists around the world. Our ethnographic investigation indicates that the conservation of a forested ring around Orthodox churches in this region, though it motivates the interest of environmentalists, is not by any means the purpose of the practices, but a kind of indirect consequence. If the practices can be said to have a singular purpose, it is to maintain the purity of the most holy space in the center of the shrine, the tabot, a replica of the Ark of the Covenant (the tablets inscribed with the teachings that Moses received from God on Mount Sinai), which ensures that the church is a legitimate and effective portal to the divine. Close analysis of the beliefs and practices surrounding the site indicates that an underlying cultural logic of purity and pollution structures the spatial organization of the site outward into a series of concentric circles of diminishing purity and shapes the social order into an elegant hierarchy. The relatively pure or polluted status of beings, both visible and invisible, determines their hierarchical relationship to one another and authorizes those who belong to the community (who are all at least partially pure) to expel outsiders (who are all completely polluted), as we learned again and again in the course of our fieldwork. The increasing exposure and even “fame” of church forests is not unique to Ethiopia, but is true for sacred natural sites around the world. Interest in the conservation potential of sacred sites began in the 1980s and early 1990s with the “discovery” of sacred groves in India by environmentalists (Gadgil; Ramakr- ishnan et al). The 1990s and 2000s witnessed a surge of global interest in sacred sites as an alternative pillar of biodiversity conservation that affirmed grass- roots local control over natural resources. Inspired by traditional ecological knowledge and disappointed with the shortcomings of top-down environmental initiatives such as government-run nature reserves that depended on the exclusion of human activities, unesco launched the Man and the Biosphere program in 1997. In 1998 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (iucn) created the Specialist Group on Cultural and Spiritual Values of Pro- tected Areas (as the Task Force on Non-Material Values of Protected Areas). Their stated goals were to “support the efforts of a wide spectrum of faith groups and indigenous and traditional peoples of the world for the long-term conservation of their sacred natural sites” (Wild and McCleod, ix). Since then, international colloquia have been held in India, China, South Africa, Mexico, Japan, Spain, Mongolia and the us, culminating in 2008 when the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (iucn) created a special designation for sacred natural sites. At the local level, there is a corresponding plethora of

Worldviews 22 (2018) 113–142 Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:22:20AM via free access 118 kent and orlowska projects seeking to demonstrate the conservation potential of sacred sites and partner with local communities to foster this potential, bringing the latter into contact with researchers, journalists, photographers, film-makers and environmental activists on an unprecedented scale (cf. Orlowska and Klepeis, forthcoming). International conservation bodies have issued guidelines exhorting caution and respect when outsiders, even well-meaning ones, interact with sacred sites, but such exhortations are at cross-purposes with the sense of urgency that accompanies the discourse surrounding these sites when they are described as “the last remaining islands of biodiversity” (Wild and McLeod). Such calls for urgency may be helpful in gaining the attention of funders, but they also quietly sanction rushing through the process of creating rapport, trust and mutual understanding between actors inevitably motivated by different desires, norms and cultural values. In what follows, we first assess current scholarship on the religiosity surrounding church forests. The treatment of religion in the existing scholarship on Ethiopian church forests is on the whole quite superficial, understandably, because it seeks not to understand the religious dynamics of these sites but to establish their ecological significance so as to motivate conservation initiatives. After describing our own methodology and sketching the environmental history of the region, we provide an in-depth analysis of the religious beliefs and practices surrounding church forests that demonstrates how religious discourse embodied in a variety of practices gives meaning to the physical space of the church and structures relationships among the members of the church, and between church members and others.

1 Scholarship on the Religiosity of Church Forests

When a traveler sees a patch of indigenous old-aged trees in the northern highlands of Ethiopia, he/she can be sure that there is an Orthodox Church in the middle.They are visible from a great distance, with a majes- tic appearance, usually built on small hills “overlooking” the surrounding villages. The local people call these churches with the surrounding trees as “debr” or “geddam” [“church” or “monastery”] … [and they are] seen by the followers as the most holy place religiously as well as a respected and powerful institution socially. wassie 2007: 3

Ethiopian church forests are a good example of the worldwide phenomena of community-conserved areas (ccas), where ecological diversity has been main-

WorldviewsDownloaded from 22 Brill.com10/07/2021 (2018) 113–142 08:22:20AM via free access accidental environmentalists 119 tained because of the voluntary cooperation of a local community (Berkes 2004). While the phenomenon has been amply documented, the reasons why communities maintain ccas remain poorly understood. This is certainly true for Ethiopian church forests. Historians of Ethiopia have made scattered references to forested shrines or churches, typically representing the taboos against cutting the forest around them as a result of Christian-pagan syncretism. In his highly regarded survey of Ethiopian history, Layers of Time, Paul Henze specu- lates that forested churches were founded deliberately on pre-existing sacred springs and groves (Henze 2000: 74; see also Carlson & Carlson 2010:146–148). Such historical accounts have a certain appeal, but they are highly speculative. Moreover, even if true, explanations based on ancient syncretistic overlay do not explain why originally pagan taboos on forest produce endured over the course of several centuries of Christian dominance, nor in the face of the enormous social change that Ethiopia has seen in modernity. Natural scientists have also discussed the religiosity of church forests in the context of studies that document their ecological significance. Many such studies have little to say about the religious or socio-cultural significance of the forests besides noting that they are conserved because they are part of the church, and therefore considered holy or sacred, and that people fear supernatural sanctions if they transgress taboos against using the forest (Bingelli 2002, Wassie et al. 2005). Some discuss religion in the context of analyzing the ecosystem services the church forests provide, and increasingly include non-material uses such as the provision of shade, tranquility and pleasant smell, thus broad- ening the definition of “ecosystem services” beyond material uses (Bongers et al 2006: 39). Such analyses are good examples of the kinds of “acts of translation” that anthropologist Paige West has argued are integral to cross-cultural conservation practice where scholars and activists must communicate the value of local places in terms that global conservation ngos and governments can understand. Though motivated by the recognition that the validation of local knowledge about the environment generally correlates with more socially equitable conservation policies, they often construe “knowledge” about the environment too narrowly as practical knowledge embedded in different kinds of uses (medicinal, technological, etc.) (2005: 633). While recognizing and acknowl- edging non-material uses of the church forest moves us closer to understanding a community’s motivation for what outsiders regard as ecological stewardship, functionalist analyses of the value of the forest for church members fail to cap- ture how value sometimes exceeds utility, even when broadly construed. For example, in our fieldwork, many informants highlighted the church forests’ provision of shade and shelter from the rain. When pressed, however, infor-

Worldviews 22 (2018) 113–142 Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:22:20AM via free access 120 kent and orlowska mants readily acknowledged that the trees were neither necessary nor essential to providing shade and shelter. “What if all the trees were cut down?” we asked. “Then we’d build a structure,” came the response, with a look that indi- cated we were pretty stupid for asking. This suggests either that people do not sufficiently appreciate the ecosystem services provided by the forest itself and/or that something more than ecosystem services keeps people invested in these spaces. We need to probe more deeply in order to generate insight into the significance of the forests for the people who work hard to maintain them. To communicate the symbolic or cultural meanings of the forest, high- level etoc clergy have offered theological reflections on the significance of trees or forests, usually in the context of an initiative to promote or conserve church forests. For example, the idea that the church forests are miniature “gardens of Eden” is advanced by some learned priests, though it is unclear how widely held this interpretation is. In an interview, a young Addis Ababa- based monk, said that the forests associated with etoc churches symbolized genet (paradise) (Interview March 14, 2014). A more sustained reflection on this church teaching can be found in a web-published essay by Melakeselam Dagnachew Kassahun, another Addis-Ababa based etoc priest. Distinguishing the care for trees evident in etoc churches from heretical forms of “tree worship” found among animistic peoples of Ethiopian, Melakeselam argued that among etoc Christians, tree planting and protection was based solidly in Christian scripture. Church forests, he maintains, are Edenic spaces that take on meaning within the larger context of the Biblical creation narrative. He writes,

At the beginning of the creation history, the earth was without form and was void. Then it was made into a habitable place and nature was adorned, i.e. populated with flourishing and pleasant trees. It was not an ivory house or a place overlaid with gold and silver, but a garden. The heaven was the roof of Adam’s house, and never was any roof so curiously painted. The earth was his floor, and never was any floor so richly inlaid. The shadow of the trees was his retirement, under them was his dining room. 2001, n.p.

Melakesalem here celebrates the natural environs of a forest, connecting the present-day faithful’s use of the forests to that of the first man, Adam. The theme of beauty surfaces repeatedly in Melakeselam’s essay, as when he describes trees and forests as natural jewelry, adornments that make the space

WorldviewsDownloaded from 22 Brill.com10/07/2021 (2018) 113–142 08:22:20AM via free access accidental environmentalists 121 of the church beautiful (cf. Nugteren 2005). This alludes to the way God’s generosity as a Creator extends beyond merely supplying what is necessary to providing all that enriches and enhances life. Comparing church forests to gardens of Eden also underscores the importance of maintaining them, insofar as humans are supposed to engage with God’s creation through proper work, paradigmatically the work of gardening. In our research we found that only some of these ideas about the significance of church forests are trickling down to rural priests and laypeople. Many of our informants also referenced the beauty of the forest when they said that it gave honor and grace (tsega) to the church. Another meaning of “tsega” is virtue, a meaning mobilized when informants compared the “respectful cover” that the forest gave to the tabot with the clothes that people wear out of modesty (Klepeis et al 2016; Dodds 2015; Reynolds et al 2017).2 Beyond this, however, we did not find replication of Melakeselam’s symbolic interpretations of church forests in our interviews. Significantly, we found no support in our fieldwork for the idea that the small forests surrounding churches are “miniature Edens,” with which churchgoers are entrusted. Per- haps because English-speaking priests operating in cosmopolitan contexts are familiar with it, however, it has been picked up in non-scholarly discussions of Ethiopian Church Forests (Beeland 2012; Dodds 2015). To observers used to Protestant Christian modes of religiosity, it can be startling to discover the relative lack of importance given to Biblical exegesis or religious symbolism in vernacular Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity. It is not that Ethiopian Orthodox Christians do not ascribe any symbolic significance to the trees or forest surrounding their churches, or that they are indifferent to what their scriptural sources teach about our relationship to the natural world. As mentioned, the people we spoke with readily described the beauty and honor (tsega) the forests gave the church. But efforts to identify the specific religious beliefs that motivate forest protection, such as the idea that the trees symbolize angels guarding the church (Reynolds et al., 361), or that the forest is a mini-Eden entrusted to the faithful’s protection (Beeland 2012; Dodds 2015) are barking up the wrong tree, so to speak. As one of the world’s oldest varieties of Christianity, brought to northern Ethiopia by Syrian monk-missionaries in the mid-fourth century, Ethiopian Orthodoxy has its own distinctive ethos and theology. Within the sacramental theology that governs this variety of Chris- tianity, it is not correct belief, but rather the sacraments that are efficacious, or

2 Such covering out of respect is a cultural practice with a wide range. For example, images of the Virgin Mary are often veiled not only to protect the image, but out of respect as well.

Worldviews 22 (2018) 113–142 Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:22:20AM via free access 122 kent and orlowska more precisely, God’s power working through them (Boylston 2012). To assume otherwise is to imagine that humans can somehow effect their own salvation, whereas the power to save or damn, for Ethiopian Christians, lies firmly in God’s hands. What humans can control is being in the right conditions—ritually, morally—to receive divine grace (Boylston 2012: 80). For this reason, rather than correct knowledge regarding the teachings of the Church, staunch commitment to norms sanctioned by tradition and taught by religious authorities are central to the moral self-crafting of Ethiopian Christians and to their sense of religious identity. It is in this context, we argue, that the religious meaning of forest protection in Ethiopian church forests should be sought.

2 Beliefs and Practices Protecting the Forest: Wugz and Guards

In our effort to provide the first in-depth understanding of the religious and social significance of church forests to date, we focused on how everyday parishioners and local priests and deacons understood the forests surrounding etoc churches. Such people, after all, are the community whose actions lead to the conservation of this community-conservation area. The data and analysis presented here arise out of an interdisciplinary research project that studied church forest use, biological status, forest regeneration capacity, socio- ecological dynamics and change over time in the South Gondar Administrative Zone of the Amhara Peoples National Regional State. The study region is ori- ented around Lake Tana, one of the largest lakes in Africa, and is considered a stronghold of the Orthodox Christianity (Figure 2). These church forests are small in size, with an average area of five hectares, but numerous, with an average density of one per twenty square kilometers (Cardelús 2013).3 The thirteen church forests we visited all lay East of Lake Tana in a largely deforested landscape dominated by fields, dry pasture and eucalyptus plantations.4 The ecological findings and the gis analyses of land-use change over time have been published elsewhere (Cardelús et al 2013; Cardelús et al 2017; Scull et al 2016; Woods et al 2017).

3 Travis Reynolds et al. counted 2558 church forests in the three districts of Amhara state while Catherine Cardelús et al. found 1488 in a study area centered on South Gondar (Reynolds et al. 2016; Cardelús 2013); Aerts et al. estimates as many as 19,400 church forests in the Ethiopian highlands, covering an area of 39,000–57,000 hectares (2016: 410). 4 The church forests in our sample also span two ecological zones—montane (1700–2100 masl) and upper-montane (2410–2800 masl) and range in size from 2.6–42.6 hectares.

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figure 2 Map of the Research Site, by Peter Scull, Colgate University

Our analysis of the religious system surrounding the church forests is drawn primarily from field research conducted between October 2013 and May 2014. During two research trips in October 2013 and January 2014, we conducted semi-structured interviews in Amharic with priests, nuns, guards and lay people, often walking around the forest to learn about the history of the church and the meaning of various features. In-depth field research was conducted at a subset of five churches in March and April of 2014, which consisted of semi-structured interviews with a wider range of informants and observation at church festivals and other events. In total, this research draws on 31 interviews conducted at the thirteen churches in our sample. Our interviews pointed us directly toward one of the most common explanations people gave for the taboo against cutting trees: one should only give to the church, never take from it, for doing so risked divine punishment. Taking

Worldviews 22 (2018) 113–142 Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:22:20AM via free access 124 kent and orlowska wood from the church is tantamount to stealing; it is thus morally wrong and punishable by wugz.Wugz or wugzet broadly means “forbidden, prohibited” (as in, “it is wugz to plough on holy days”). It can result in being condemned to live outside the spiritual shelter of the church. Embodying the indirect, mediated form of authority characteristic of Ethiopian Christianity, wugz is based on a curse passed by priests in the name of the church fathers, the evangelists Peter and Paul. Because of the wugz protecting the church, those who violate the rules governing the church forest will be exposed to God’s punishment, usually in the form of a sudden accident. For the most part, the people we spoke with became vague when asked to describe specific instances of the wugzet in action, but one informant was strikingly specific. Describing the fate of a man who knowingly cut trees from a church forest and then saw six of his children die, he concluded, “He does not do that anymore.The tabot is powerful and now everyone is afraid” (Interview April 15, 2014). As the man’s words suggest, people talk about the tabot synechdocally to refer to God, specifically God’s dangerous and awesome power. Besides wugz, other divine protection surrounds the tabot, according to the priests we interviewed. For example, wild cats, tamed by the invisible saints living in the forests, will ferociously defend the tabot against intruders. And yet, in spite of the rules prohibiting forest use, and the stories describing the fate of those who break them, transgressions are frequent. When we pointed out evidence of cattle grazing or the trespassing cattle themselves, informants easily explained away such behavior: children could be careless, strong-willed bulls could be hard to control, in the summer months the only shade available to the suffering animals was in the church forest. While this kind of transgression was grudgingly tolerated, every forest also had two or more forest guards to prevent more extreme illegitimate forest use. In addition, we found at almost every site a system of graduated fines.5 Informants were unspecific when it came to describing the implementation of these fines, caus- ing us to doubt how stringently they were enforced. Even more significant than the fines, for many, was having to apologize publically in church. Ultimately, unrepentant transgressors who repeatedly violated the rules could be denied access to the salvific meditating power of the church—both in life, through par- ticipation in church services, and in death, through burial in the church forest common graveyard. This too was a kind of “nuclear option” that no one could recall ever having been invoked.

5 For example, for the first instance of cattle grazing one would receive a warning, for the second a fine of 50 birr (2 usd) per head of cattle; 500 birr (21 usd) for cutting a tree.

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From the point of view of environmental social science, the exclusion of outsiders, the monitoring systems, and the regulation of forest use through a system of rules and sanctions adapted to local conditions (three of the key design principals of Common Property Resources, as theorized by Elinor Ostrom [1990]) explain to a large extent why these forests have endured on the landscape for such a long time. Studies of church forests that care primarily about the conservation value of the forest and that emphasize the forests as “resources” utilized by “rational users” might well stop there. But were we to do so, we would still not know why these sites are so meaningful to people. To do so, we need to understand the wider religious system within which these extraordinary sites take on meaning. In a remarkably consistent fashion across the region, our interviews expose a striking absence of reverence for trees or forests as such, let alone concern for biodiversity conservation, though at times head priests recognized that outsiders valued this highly. Rather, we found shared norms, beliefs and practices that construct a sacred geography that organizes the space and the social order around a sacred center that people go to great lengths to keep pure.

3 Sacred Geography of Church Forests

3.1 Purity, Pollution and Sacred Geography The sites of churches and their forests are not random. All older churches have a story accounting for their existence in a particular place, some tracing their history into ancient times to the beginning of Christianity in Ethiopia. In some cases, divine warrant for a church comes from a story relating its tabot (the replica of the Ark of the Covenant) to the original Ark said to have been brought from Jerusalem to this area in ancient times. Informants narrate how founders carried the tabot from place to place (similar to how the Jews carried the Ark during their forty years wandering in the desert), until a manifestation of the divine will made clear the appropriate location for the establishment of a church. Alternatively, they link the founding of a church to the story of Jesus’ crucifixion in Jerusalem, when drops of His blood were scattered throughout the world. Each spot where a single drop of His blood fell became a location suitable for a church. While the founding of churches creates a kind of portal to the divine for human beings, whether through the tabot or through Jesus’s blood, Ethiopian Orthodox theology also teaches that humans are far too impure and sinful to connect with the supreme being directly (Boylston 2012). For this reason, etoc churches are organized both socially and spatially according to a clear logic of purity and pollution.

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Mary Douglas’s theories regarding purity and pollution are helpful in analyzing this religious complex (2002). Purity may be a condition for accessing the divine, but it is in fact opposed to life. Therefore, one finds in societies that strongly emphasize the codification of substances into the categories of pure and impure instances of periodic inversion, when the strict maintenance of purity is abandoned for deep and direct engagement with substances regarded as polluting. Such inversions are necessary for ordinary life to perdure. In the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian ritual calendar, this is seen with particular clarity in the regular periodic alternation between feasting times of exuberant socia- bility and commensality and fasting times of ascetic isolation where the faithful encounter the divine intimately but as discrete individuals (Boylston 2012). Such moments of ritual inversion in the temporal dimension are mirrored spatially, as we shall see, in the physical layout of the church in the juxtaposition of zones requiring purity with those that do not. People in South Gondar are quick to inventory the things that cause ritual pollution: having eaten (especially meat), having just had sex, having running sores, or a runny nose, menstruating, or having just given birth. All of these activities have to do with the irreversible flow of substances out of or into the body: food, semen, pus, mucus, menstrual blood or the fluids of childbirth. Regulating these are essential for maintaining the “flow” of life more generally, whether in sustaining the life of the body or in effecting the transfer of life across the generations. And yet, in cultures that exalt states of purity as the necessary condition for contacting the sacred, such substances are treated as dangerous and polluting. In his ethnography of an Ethiopian Christian community on an island in Lake Tana, Boylston reports a priest’s declaration that even if a fly flew into his mouth by accident, he would no longer be pure enough to handle the Eucharist (2012, 33). Activities such as eating or having sex, however, lead only to a temporary state of impurity, which can be reversed through purifying activities such as fasting, abstaining from sex, and healing. Thus, Ethiopian Orthodox social life is organized around maintaining purity, with fasting as the most visible and public marker of Orthodox identity. There are 250 fasting days in the year during which one must not eat breakfast, nor consume any foods with meat or dairy products. Being able to maintain this difficult regime is highly prized and respected as a sign of self-control. It demonstrates an ability to tame one’s appetites for sex and food, those drives that “consistently re-emerge to tie us to this world” (Boylston 2012, 16). And yet, excessive focus on the privations of fasting obscures the fact that in the religious calendar, days and seasons of fasting alternate with feasting. After significant deprivation and social isolation, the pleasures of feasting and sharing with others is intensified. Just as this periodic alternation between stringent

WorldviewsDownloaded from 22 Brill.com10/07/2021 (2018) 113–142 08:22:20AM via free access accidental environmentalists 127 self-control and joyous commensality is mapped onto the body through fasting regimes, it is also mapped on to the physical space of the church.

3.2 Sacred Geography Ethiopian Orthodox Churches are traditionally circular in design, with the physical space of the church building and surrounding area (the atsed betekiris- tian, lit. “the space of the church”) organized into concentric circles, each of which is governed by rules specifying who can enter that space and what they can and cannot do (Figure 3). To begin with, the built structure of the church, which lies at the center of the whole complex, is divided into three rings. In the innermost circle resides the tabot. Only ordained priests can touch the tabot, which is housed in the menbere tabot (lit. “throne of the Ark”) at the center of a church (qidduse qiddusan, lit. “holy of holies”). Dedicated to the patron saint or angel of the church (St. George, St. Michael, the Virgin Mary, etc.) the tabot is a six- to 30-centimeter long wooden or marble square that is always kept in a box, which is elaborately wrapped in decorated cloth. People often refer synechdocally to the tabot as the divine power residing in and presiding over a church, as when they ascribe to it the protective and vengeful, or benevolent and healing powers concentrated in the church. During annual celebrations of a church’s presiding saint, the tabot comes out of the churches in its protective decorated box in a festive procession around the church. The next rings are the meqdes, where ritually pure congregants and deacons receive sacraments, and the qine mehelet where the debtera (unordained religious specialists who chant the liturgy) sing and dance. It is here that congregants participate in the liturgy and thereby gain access to the salvific power of the divine, mediated through ritual specialists, angels, saints and the Vir- gin Mary. Colorful murals painted on the wall between the meqdes and the qine mehelet depict the sacred history of the church, embedded within the cosmic unfolding of grace as described in the Bible and the secular history of royal donors from the South Gondar region (Figure 4). On the Eastern side of the church, called Bethlehem (where the star appeared to mark the site of Jesus’ birth), one typically finds a separate small building, where the Eucharist is prepared, which is considered very holy. In a striking instance of symbolic inversion, while blood is a highly polluting substance, Christ’s blood in the transfigured wine of the Eucharist is the most potent purifier. Liturgical prayer is another means of accessing the divine that takes place within the built structure of the church. A large ritual cast of priests, deacons and debteras conduct the hours-long liturgy in Ge’ez, an ancient Semitic language, coordinating singing and chanting with complex movements.

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figure 3 Diagram of the interior and courtyard of a rural Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahido Church

The space extending out from the built structure of the church is organized by the same principle of purity-pollution discussed above. The area immediately around the church, from the walls of the church building to the stone wall (qab) that encloses the inner compound is called the qitsir. The qitsir is considered a particularly sacred space inhabited by the angels. Called “the courtyard” or the “church yard,” in English-language accounts, this open space consists of the awde mihret and the arba kind, terms that designate less precisely defined spaces than conceptual ones. Awde mihret, the ring of mercy, is immediately around the church and is typically where the priests deliver ser- mons after conducting the communion service. Priests told us the arba kind extends the length of forty angels’ arms out from the church building, a mea- surement which can be flexibly interpreted. Entering the qitsir requires ritual purity, which means that menstruating or postpartum women and men or women who have recently had sexual intercourse or have eaten avoid the space. In addition, graves are not allowed here (except occasionally for high ranking priests). Anything outside of that space is referred to as ke-qitsir wichi (outside of the qitsir), and the level of sacredness and degree of restriction tends to decrease there. Prayer in forested churches is thought to be especially effi-

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figure 4 Murals from the interior of Ura Kidane Mehret, a deconsecrated church in the Zege Peninsula of Lake Tana, which is open to visitors photograph by eliza kent

Worldviews 22 (2018) 113–142 Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:22:20AM via free access 130 kent and orlowska cacious because of the presence of menagn, invisible saintly beings whom we discuss later, and angels who can carry one’s prayers to heaven. It is in the ke-qitsir-wichi that one finds the native forest that has attracted the attention of environmentalists. Lacking a widely used specific term in Amharic, it is often called the atsed, the holy forest, but this term is also used to describe all the space from the church courtyard to the edge of the church land. Arguably, such lack of specificity indicates that the forest itself is not the focus of importance; rather, what is significant is that the atsed exists in a liminal zone between the holy domain of the church and the profane fields and pasture beyond. Before returning to describe the forested ring in more detail, brief mention should be made of two other kinds of sites beyond the forest that also belong to the church and are also protected by some of the same taboos: the margeja (or meeting place tree) and the tsebel (or holy spring). As in many African countries, older trees with large, spreading canopies are used as meetings places where news is distributed and communal decisions are made (Ross). The tsebel (holy spring) often constitutes the outermost site encompassed by the sacred geography of a rural church. Here, priests pray over the holy water, and infuse it with the blessings of the divine by reading sacred books over it, after which it is given to patients suffering from physical, mental, and spiritual diseases (e.g. demonic possession). For patients too impure to enter the qitsir, the shrine’s healing waters are a crucial material vehicle of divine grace (Hannig 2013). The dichotomous nature of the nomenclature (qitsir vs. ke qitsir wichi, “outside of the qitsir”) is reflected in stark differences in the behaviors permitted and expected in each. As we discuss in the next section, behaviors and substances permitted in the outermost forested ring mark it as a zone for the resumption of interpersonal contacts and material flows which are essential to life. All members of the Orthodox community may congregate here, even those who are not in a pure enough state to receive the Eucharist. And yet, insofar as it is still church land, it is still sacred. In part, the sacrality of the space is maintained by excluding outsiders. According to the logic of Orthodox norms, this makes sense: even temporarily polluted members of the Orthodox community are still members, capable of becoming pure. But outsiders are categorically impure. In the forested zone constituting the outermost ring of a Ethiopian Orthodox Church, the self-policing so central to the moral self-fashioning of Ethiopian Orthodox spirituality is redirected to the policing of outsiders, like ourselves. As such, we were consistently regarded with suspicion as danger- ously polluting outsiders until appeals to support higher up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy permitted our temporary presence in the area outside the qitsir, and sometimes in the qitsir, but never in the physical church building itself.

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4 Practices that Foster Belonging to the Church Community

As our exclusion from the purest zones of the church suggest, the beliefs and practices that lead to forest conservation determine who does and does not belong within the church community. Analysis of the main uses of the forest illuminates how the logic of purity and pollution organizes the sacred geography of these sites and structures relationships within the community. These uses of the space—for burial, traditional schools for the training of priests, and shelter and shade for lay self-help associations—are as much about situating individuals within the larger Orthodox community, both visible and invisible, and therefore about relationships and meaning, as they are about meeting physical needs.

4.1 Burial The church forest functions above all as a burial ground for the congregation. People’s wish to be buried here is directly linked to the church’s role as the essential mediator between sinful, suffering, impure humanity and the divine. The older trees of the atset serve as symbols of the community’s continuity over time, as the trees’ lifetimes encompass those of multiple generations of people, bound together in life as in death (Boylston 2012). A portal to the divine during life, the church’s role as a conduit of healing grace is even more significant at death, when a living body becomes a corpse. In Ethiopian church culture, a corpse is quite possibly the most impure thing, embodying the uncontrollable disintegration of the self into the surrounding environment. Anthropologist Anita Hinning describes the lengths that Ethiopian Orthodox Christians go to prepare a dead body to prevent the outward flow of substances, including sealing orifices and tying fingers and toes together (2013: 305). In earlier days, individuals were buried in simple open graves, their bodies carefully wrapped in cloth and secured under a pile of rocks that gradually disintegrated over time. However, a noticeable feature in all the church forests in our sample was the erection of cement gravestones marking the burial spot and the construction of sturdy wood and stone grave houses (maqaber bet) that contain the remains of wealthier lineages. In order to benefit from the outpouring of grace that the church represents, members of the church wish to be buried as close as possible to the tabot; and yet, concerns about death pollution mean that a certain distance must be maintained between graves and the tabot itself. Rules typically prohibit any burials in the qitsir, or open inner circle nearest the church, although the proximity to the tabot made the edges of the qitsir a desirable place to establish graves or a grave house.

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figure 5 Student huts at the periphery of a church forest photograph by eliza kent

4.2 Traditional Schools In keeping with the function of the church as a zone of purity that facilitates connection with the divine, church forests are sites for the traditional schools where boys learn to read Ge’ez and master the complex sung and danced liturgy of the etoc.6 The students, known as “roasted barley boys,” (yegolo temari) live a difficult life. Housed along with four to six other boys in wooden huts built from eucalyptus poles, and thatch or wood collected from the forest, they are allowed few if any personal possessions (Figure 5). They study with their teacher two to four hours a day in shaded clearings in the forest and are otherwise left to practice unsupervised the texts and tunes they must put to memory. Much of their days are spent begging for food from the surrounding villages, drying the collected leftover injera in the sun, and cooking that into a

6 The churches in our sample that housed a school (11 out of 13) had between 20–90 students. The church schools deliver a curriculum divided into six levels: 1) Nebab bet (reading school), 2) Zema bet (song school), 3) Qidase bet (liturgy), 4) Aquaquam bet (chanting school), 5) Qene bet (poetry school), 6) Metsehaf bet (Church literature). Each church typically specializes in one or at most two curricular levels.

WorldviewsDownloaded from 22 Brill.com10/07/2021 (2018) 113–142 08:22:20AM via free access accidental environmentalists 133 rough porridge over open wood fires. Many informants reported that it was best if students were sent to distant schools to mitigate the temptation to run away and come home. However, the rigors of student life seem to serve an important function in training future priests for the asceticism that enables them to act as mediators for the divine. As unmarried young men and boys removed from family and ordinary social interactions, who subsist on a very simple meat-free diet, these priests-in-training are quite possibly in the highest state of ritual purity they will enjoy in their entire lives. On a more practical level, even if they do not become priests, the access to religious knowledge that they gain through study enhances their standing in the community. Several boys we interviewed also suggested that life in the church school, however difficult, was preferable to the alternatives for poor rural children: herding cattle, helping with farm and domestic labor, or making a go of it as street children in Bahir Dar (Interview April 18, 2014).

4.3 Clearings for Mehabir Meetings The church forest also provides space for the meetings of mehabir, lay associations established in the name of the patron saint or saints of a particular church (Boylston 2017: 211). These associations are an essential element of village life in Ethiopia, serving multiple social, economic and spiritual functions and exemplifying the interweaving of spiritual and secular concerns in church forests. Mehabirs meet monthly to hold a feast in the name of the patron saint, which members consume together in the shade of the forest. Membership in mehabirs in groups of 25–30 is open to both adult men and women, with women as well as men often serving as officers (treasurer, attendance record keeper, president, etc.). Requests for membership, however, are considered carefully as mehabirs are also vitally important social support groups that provide material support to their members in times of need, especially death or illness: “If someone loses an ox and cannot plough, the mehabir ploughs. If someone falls ill, they provide treatment.They offer labor if the family is sick” (Interview, January 18, 2014). A regular test of the capacity for the reciprocal sharing that animates these associations are the feasts that members must be able to organize when their turn comes (usually once a year), with the host providing an injera for each participant, shiro stew and as much tella (homemade beer) as guests can drink. At mehabir meetings, members bond deeply while sharing food and providing care for each other in times of diffi- culty. These feasts exemplify the way that the rules that create pure conditions necessary for contacting the divine at the center of the church’s domain are regularly and deliberately inverted in an outpouring of commensality at its

Worldviews 22 (2018) 113–142 Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:22:20AM via free access 134 kent and orlowska edges. The innermost and purest circle of a church is where the ritually pure individual, having fasted and abstained from sex or sexual thoughts, meets God as an individual in the ritual of communion. At the edges of the forest, however, closest to the secular world beyond the church, this state of ritual purity and social isolation is broken in a celebratory commensal meal involving both food and homemade beer. At mehabir feasts, social connections are forged in an exuberant release of tension, bonding members and most of all celebrating the patron saint in whose name the feast in held. At this liminal zone, where the behaviors regarding purity and pollution are inverted, outsiders can be selectively incorporated into the group. Needy travellers or passersby are warmly included in the celebration. The saint’s blessing is thought to be “stronger” if such outsiders find comfort there. In striking contrast to our repeated experiences of exclusion from church forests, during the visits that coincided with a mehabir meeting we were warmly invited to join the drinking sessions and urged, even jokingly compelled, to take at least a sip of their tella. In a manner consistent with Douglas, while the strict rules governing purity lead to the exclusion of outsiders, and even distancing from related insiders, at mehabir feasts these rules are suspended, and church members commune and consume in ways that heighten pollution but also connectedness, even with outsiders.

5 Hierarchy and Belonging in the Church Forest

By living an ‘angelic life’, the holy men became like angels, divine mes- sengers believed to be capable of both conveying and influencing divine will … Such a mediatory role was of tremendous importance in Ethiopia where a pious Christian was primarily concerned with gaining the favor of an immediate figure such as an angel, Mary, or a holy man, rather than appealing to a remote and unreachable God. kaplan 1984: 82, cited in boyslton 2012: 111

While the mehabir feasts are a moment when social divisions are to some extent leveled in an exuberant outburst of sharing, openness and reciprocity, the enforcement of rules maintaining purity reinforces religious hierarchies, where those who can maintain a pure state are superior to those who do not. Ritual status, it should be underscored, does not correlate with material wealth, even though it conveys considerable authority in the context of the church. Those higher in the hierarchy have an obligation to compel those below them to follow the rules, and those lower in the hierarchy fear being

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figure 6 Diagram of the spiritual hierarchy of the etoc community observed by those higher in the hierarchy. God alone has the power to punish transgressors, so inferiors do not fear direct punishment from those above them so much as that those higher up in the hierarchy may withdraw their spiritual protection. Moreover, it is by observing these rules and regulating oneself by them that one establishes one’s place in the overall community, invisible and visible. In the visible human community, the spiritually pure bishops, priests, deacons, monks and nuns who serve etoc churches occupy the higher reaches of the hierarchy. (Figure 6). These mediators attain their spiritual purity by sepa- rating themselves from the ordinary mundane traffic with others that generates pollution, paradigmatically eating and sex, and thus provide the ritual means by which divine guidance and grace can be made accessible (Kaplan 1984; Boyl- ston 2012). The enormous spiritual authority wielded by priests is embodied in the brass or wooden cross each one carries, which laypeople are continu- ously asking them to offer so they may kiss it and thereby obtain the blessing of the divine (Figure 7). As discussed previously, training for the priesthood entails years of study in the traditional schools located on the forested periph- eries of churches. Once ordained, priests strictly adhere to the fasting regime expected of pious Orthodox, can only marry once, and live a life of relative

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figure 7 Cross held in the hands of a priest photograph by eliza kent poverty. Such rigorous asceticism enables them to perform their ritual work, but it simultaneously disqualifies them from more lucrative secular pursuits. Indeed, Boylston argues that etoc monks and priests live in a state of permanent liminality: while they are at the elevated center of society spiritually, materially they dwell on its borders in order to perform their religious duties in the proper way. Residing at most of the sites we visited were also monks and nuns. Where ordinary priests may marry (but only once) and typically live in a village with their families, monks have renounced all worldly things. Having recited the formula, “I have given up the world,” they forgo all sexual relations and may live in the village or, circumstances permitting, live in the forest surrounding a church or monastery. In order to climb the hierarchy and become bishops, young priests need to be virgins and thus cannot marry (Boylston 2012: 119). Priests who decided to marry and were widowed are not allowed to remarry and often in these circumstances opt for monkhood. Women are only permitted to become nuns after menopause (Hannig). Due to their ritually pure status monks and nuns are highly respected. In our field research, most were in fact very poor elders who, through misfortunes such as illness, the loss of land, and the death of children, had lost connections to their family support network, and as a result had turned to the church for material sustenance and physical

WorldviewsDownloaded from 22 Brill.com10/07/2021 (2018) 113–142 08:22:20AM via free access accidental environmentalists 137 shelter. Though poor, nuns are highly respected by virtue of their commitment to maintaining a pure state through fasting close to starvation and sexual abstinence. In addition to priests, monastics and bishops, an invisible coterie of saints, angels and quasi-supernatural holy men (menagn), fill out the upper reaches of the hierarchical pyramid of ritually pure mediators enabling sinners to access the divine. The menagn are particularly fascinating and illustrative of the principles that structure the whole etoc community. These mysterious, reclusive figures are rarely seen; they live in the trees, subsisting on leaves and roots, but their presence endows a site with additional prestige and sacred value, enhanc- ing the prayers of ordinary people and blessing them. In the veneration granted to these beings we see clearly the structuring principles of the church community, whereby spiritual status correlates with purity, which is achieved by separation from social relations. The disembodied angelic existence of these ethereal creatures at the top of the chain of being emphasizes how corporeal exchanges drag ordinary mortals down. Their spare diet and capability for living in austere conditions (in the trees) put them closer to the angels. Their presence enhances the holiness of church forests significantly, making one’s prayers in these places more effective.

6 Conclusion

The religious beliefs and practices that maintain an inviolable zone of ritual purity around the tabot have caused people to restrict their use of forests surrounding Ethiopian churches and thus fostered a remarkably resilient variety of community-based conservation. A comparison of satellite photographs from 1962 and 2014 indicate that in spite of a thinning of the forest canopy overall, the forested area of the churches in our sample stayed constant, and in some cases actually increased, during five decades of population growth, land tenure instability and extraordinary political turbulence (Scull et al. 2017). And yet, like sacred groves and other sacred natural sites globally, the church forests of Ethiopia are threatened by a variety of forces including the conversion of native forest to non-native, economically valuable species (especially eucalyptus), and the construction of buildings inside the forest (Klepeis et al. 2016; Reynolds et al. 2017; Orlowska and Klepeis, forthcoming.). Outsiders with an environmentalist perspective are often dismayed by these changes and disappointed by the lack of concern on the part of the communities who manage these sites, particularly if they assume their preservation stems from the community’s religious-ecological ethos. And yet, as we have shown in this article,

Worldviews 22 (2018) 113–142 Downloaded from Brill.com10/07/2021 08:22:20AM via free access 138 kent and orlowska the primary significance of Ethiopian church forests for the people who manage them is not their biodiversity nor their ecological value; it is the fact that they shelter something of immeasurable value, the tabot, whose spiritual purity affords the community access to the divine. The conservation of the forests surrounding Ethiopian Orthodox churches is not the primary purpose of the web of beliefs and practices that safeguard the purity of the tabot, but an accidental by-product. We would go further and suggest to those of us who regard such forest conservation a happy accident, that, in addition to the construction of permanent structures and the planting of eucalyptus, an additional threat to Ethiopian church forests (and other sacred natural sites) is ignorance on the part of well-meaning outsiders as to the actual religious significance they hold for the people who have conserved them for so long. Interacting responsibly with the traditional managers of sacred sites, church forests in particular, begins with accurately and deeply understanding the norms and values that govern it. Norms are delicate things, unpredictable and fragile. Alasdair McIntyre writes of the astonishing ease with which in 1819, forty years after the arrival of Captain Cook, King Kamehameha did away with taboos that had long structured the lives of native Hawaiians, creating a vac- uum into which New England Protestant missionaries gladly rushed. As cultures change over time, often in response to encounters with other cultures, so change the social and cosmological contexts within which taboos and other moral norms gain their original meaning. “In such a situation,” writes McIn- tyre, “the rules have been deprived of any status that can secure their authority and, if they do not acquire some new status quickly, both their interpretation and their justification become debatable.” (McIntyre 2007:112). The hostile wel- come we received when we sought access to church forests suggests that the rules and norms governing these sacred natural sites remain robust, at least for now. Moreover, environmentalists in collaboration with church elders tasked with interpreting the tradition for the laity may bring about new understand- ings of the taboos that have restricted human use of the church forests, encour- aging reverence for nature or a sense of human stewardship of the earth rather than emphasizing self-restraint in order to maintain purity. But it is worth con- sidering the impact of the attention these forests, along with sacred sites all over the world, are gaining from well-meaning outsiders, who transgress the taboos surrounding purity that are central to maintaining the sacrality of these extraordinary spaces in the course of trying to demonstrate their ecological value.

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