A note on space in the Ethiopian revolution

There have been two major approaches to spatial analysis in social and cultural anthropology. The first insists that distance is culturally categorised, that a person 's experience of space is relative to particular ways of dividing and conceptualising spatial relations. The second approach, most often associated with central-place theory, takes the opposite tack. Distance, in this view, has certain universal predicates; for example, the inherent difficulty of transporting goods with a simple technology means that markets in agrarian societies have a limited set of recurrent features—no matter how space is locally encoded. These two modes of analysis are often taken as mutually exclusive ways of proceeding. In this article it is suggested that neither can be neglected if large-scale transformations like social revolutions are to be understood in their complexity. In the course of developing a pioneering study of the role of peasants in revolutions Eric Wolf offered the beginnings of a general theory. After summarising some of his hypotheses, the author confronts them with data from the Ethiopian revolution as it unfolded during 1975 in an area called Maale.