 Hi everyone. I'm going to start with the problem. This was an observation originally made by the art historian David Buxton who noted that in northern Ethiopia during the transition to Christianity the people of the Highlands built their churches in design of old oxomite palaces or elite buildings. This design is laid out in a plan for towers and architecture in stone and timber frame known as monkey heads. The argument is simple. Two buildings of two areas look alike and implies some sort of continuity, something that lasts into the transition to Christianity. But what does this continuity actually mean? What does it tell us about Ethiopian society? I'm going to propose that it shows us a process of community building associated with commemoration of the dead and I'm going to explain how it's related to the innovation of traditions such as a Christian test car that helped to define different types of cosmopolitanism than we've known in the West. Now we'll start with this idea of cosmopolitanism. So I'm less interested in how cosmopolitanism has been used as an analytical category or an ethical project in Apia and others but we can certainly talk about that in questions. And instead I want to examine the social process by which cosmopolitans are made. A cosmopolitan is a world citizen or someone who sees themselves as belonging to a world community in its original formulation. A cosmopolitan is someone whose identity is rooted not in their local or national affiliations but who operate more as belonging to a global community across such boundaries. The outcome of cosmopolitanism is the rise of the individual. Anthropologists have noted that in many societies people often see themselves as families or social groups more than they see themselves as individuals meaning that they operate on obligations and motivations to each other more than their own individual free will. But whenever society starts to depend on long-distance trade groups break apart and people start living as individuals. We see this in Western history as emphasis shifts from common to private spaces and domestic structures. We also see it in the dissolution of group eating habits and the shift from group funerary ritual to individual burial and preservation. But the thing is this doesn't just happen in the West because dual processional and collective action theory archaeologists observe these kinds of patterns all over the world. So it may not be an idiosyncratic Western trade but it might actually be part of social process. This is because of how long-distance connections are mediated. Say you have a person. Through their body this person can easily interact with people nearby and form a group. However to interact with people far away the body can't communicate that far on its own. So those interactions take place through objects and material culture. This may still form some sort of imagined community but the lives are now defined by alienation and individualism because the immediate experiences are with objects instead of actual people. This is a phenomenon where I spend more time talking on my phone or talking on my phone with my friends in Austin than I do with my own neighbors. This is why even though we often take cosmopolitanism and globalism as celebrations of interconnection and diversity many times they come across more like celebrations of consumerism. The eating of the global, the eating of all things for it. Now when you go to Ethiopia today people often oftentimes think that globalizing means eventually their culture is going to have to look much more like individualist, Frenzy or Western culture. And when families have to send members off to college or find jobs in other regions of Ethiopia or the Middle East people fear those family relationships weaken and so yeah it starts to look like that's how things are going to happen. This is a big concern in Ethiopia today and it often gets talked about in terms of the traditional versus the modern or Habesha culture versus Frenzy or Western culture. However this is where Buxton's argument comes in. I propose that it tells us a different story. So this story begins around the first four centuries AD at Oksum. The Oksumai kingdom was the first major polity in the Ethiopian Eritrean highlands known to archaeology. The kingdom was centered on its capital of Oksum and as a trading power Oksum linked the African interior to the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean worlds. Through these proto-global connections Christianity entered Oksum at least by the 4th century AD but likely sooner and supplanted local polytheistic traditions in the following centuries. Symbols of the pre-Christian religious traditions remain today in the form of the Oksumai stele or large funerary monuments carved from granite. There are hundreds of these stele but the most famous are the six largest that were carved to look like multi-storied houses or palaces. Now in Buxton's argument the similarity and design between Oksumai elite houses and later Christian churches suggests a connection. However I would also add to this the Oksumai stele whose elite forms also incorporate the house symbolism in its design. This is necessary because now we're not just trying to compare a domestic to a ritual building of two eras but two ritual buildings where we see many of the same functions. So now we're simply trying to understand why the use of domestic symbolism on ritual buildings is important. To understand that we have to look at the common practices that went on around these buildings and the role they played in society and two important ones were group burial and rites of ancestor veneration and commemoration. So I'm going to go through this kind of quickly but I can certainly answer any questions on it that might be needed. But at its most basic the stele is the burial marker and it seems to mark groups rather than individuals. Burials tend to cluster around stele in groups of three or more both in the northern and the Judith stele fields as you can see in the the plant here where the dotted circles represent where burials were found. Bodies are often jumbled together and it's hard to find actual individual Oksumai in the group burial assemblages. Larger tombs also have group-oriented layouts where it is difficult to identify a head chamber. Along with this in front of the house stele are carved bowls which have been interpreted as spaces for the placement of of ablutions and offerings and rites of commemoration. Archaeologists have long noted the importance of such practices to building social groups through common history and social memory especially with monuments right. So these imply coming together events that help strengthen local relationships through memories of the dead. I've also argued that Neville Chittic's stratigraphy and representation of elements points to rituals of post-mortem manipulation secondary burial where bones are removed from graves for social rights and later re-deposted. These practices are often ethnographically associated again with rights of ancestor veneration and social memory. The importance of family grouphood may be the source of this house symbolism. At Oksum today this seems to originate with the the tour guide agency rather than anyone else but they often saw tourists at the largest tomb at Oksum. The mausoleum was actually made to look like the the inside of a stele which so you have the profile map at the bottom the plan on the top if you turn the profile map 90 degrees you can start to see kind of their resemblance and it's it's quite superficial but what might actually start to support their case is that the inside of the of the tomb was plastered to look like solid nephelin cyanide which is the same granite from which the seal of a cart and this plaster seems to have no other plastering properties. It seems then that the family in this tomb desired to be buried in something like the stone house to seal symbolizes. We can argue that this group identity is then tied to the house symbolism. The Oksum family saw themselves as a social house and took the material house as a metaphor of their groupness. What this reveals is the importance of communal burial and memory of and the memory of the dead and making these the open social unit. This is what lasts through time. When the highlands convert to Christianity over the course of the third to the sixth centuries AD churches quickly became associated with burial. The first cathedral at Oksum was built on the old stele field and two further tombs you can see the plans here were mounted by the silica churches four kilometers to the north. Other early Oksumite churches such as Appiata, George's Hill, Debra Dama, Wichigolu, as well as later churches and the Lawson Mountains all follow this pattern. You can see one of the burial crypts here. While these churches appear to be focal points for burial there has been little archaeology in the Christian period and so we don't know how these groupers were organized or commemoration rituals prevailed up this time. For this I turn to historical sources later in the Christian era. This means we have a huge gap in our timelines so be aware of that. But looking at historical sources we see a familiar focus on burial community building and commemoration rites that go on with the church. Travelers from the 16th to the 19th centuries all report that social life in the Christian highlands evolved around the church. The dead were buried either in churches or church precincts matching the link between churches and burials seen in the unknown segment of the Christian period. From these accounts we can argue that the idealized social unit was at the level of the Christian community. However though the unit of social organization may shift or may not shift the practice of community building through social memory does not. The church is involved in all aspects of social life but commemoration of the dead holds a special place. Travelers all report on mourning ceremonies where entire communities assemble for rites of displaying grief often with professional musicians and sacrifices offerings and lavish bees. These are the tusk cars or the drawing of tears. Walker summarizes that in historical times tusk cars took place every third day, seventh day, twelfth day, fortieth day, eightieth day with another tusk car six months after and then a year and then every seven years. And so I'm not quite sure that frequency is an exaggeration. Parkins also explains that anyone who does not show to these ceremonies is not regarded as a threat that's a quote. Francisco Alvarez attests to the presence of the tusk cars in the 16th century the earliest known record of their existence. We then see a transition from pre-Christian family to the Christian community but at least some of the ritual practices that built those groups remain the same. Now because of this gap in research we don't know if this is a direct continuity or a reemergence of similar traditions. We cannot say when the tusk car actually begins but we can start to understand why it begins. Social memory and commemoration were central in the building of the social unit. That unit once defined by the house eventually became defined by the church. And this package that includes rites of death and social memory as a way to keep people together as either continued or reinvented in the Christian era. The Ethiopian tusk car may well be a production such rites. Christianity arrived as a foreign faith but how it became an Ethiopian one helps us to understand continuity as a social process through histories of change. We can then turn again to Buxton's argument. Two buildings look alike. The argument is very simple but wrapped around those buildings is a story far greater. Sometimes we act if our societies are all on a line that we're all all of history is moving towards Western culture and those that do not sufficiently look Western are thought to have fallen behind so that this is the outcome of all society. That outcome is our version of cosmopolitanism which is very individualist very consumerist and forsakes people for the idea of them. Ethiopia shows us something different. A cosmopolitan does not a world community but plays on the world stage. That the world isn't just the modern and the traditional but that traditions are made to help people create different versions of modernities. In Ethiopia traditions such as the tusk car helped to define a cosmopolitanism focused on the local but flowing with the global. It keeps bodies in a rampant. It keeps people together. So today Ethiopia is one of the highest GDP growth rates in the world. Bollywood, Turkish, Korean and Brazilian soap operas and Chinese exchange to find the everyday experience and cosmopolitan cities such as Otis push people towards individual life but even there a one bedroom apartment is many times just as expensive as a two bedroom apartment because family will not be separated by the walls of the house and even there people will drive themselves into debt to hold a tusk car because family may not be forgotten and because family friends and communities must come together always to be made new. And just as in its history Ethiopia changes only in its own way and only to keep its own way. Thank you.