Stable Jobs, Precarious Lives: Rural Public Servants in Ethiopia

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My thesis explores the everyday workings of the Ethiopian state through the lives and work of rural public servants in a border area of Amhara Region. Ideas about the strong, authoritarian and innately hierarchical nature of Ethiopia's developmental state emphasise the coercive nature of policies and structures that reach down to ever smaller units of the population. However, scrutiny of those charged with carrying out this work has been neglected. Based on long term ethnographic fieldwork in North Shewa, this thesis provides an account of the lowest level of the state through close attention to the everyday social worlds and professional responsibilities of teachers, extension workers and administrators. In chapters that concentrate on child nutrition, latrine promotion and the idea of education, and through an individual life history, I show the physical, emotional and social consequences of state work on state employees themselves. I also look at the role of substances - including breastmilk, excrement and coffee - in how the state is continually constructed through everyday practices and performances, rather than existing as an abstracted monolith.The findings of my thesis challenge the notion of the universal desirability of state employment in Africa. Despite their success in education and achievement of stable, formal work in a context where such jobs are scarce, these public servants feel themselves to be marginalised, socially isolated and dependent on local people. Government workers bounce between villages in a quest to get closer to the urban, or exit from state employment for the 'struggle economy' of petty trade or the siren lure of illegal migration. Their precarious mobility stands in contrast to narratives about youth, uncertainty and aspiration, which assume formal employment to be a means of social and economic progress. I discuss the entanglement of mobilities in the context of education, the universal public good that is supposed to lead to social mobility, but instead extracts state employees from rural forms of solidarity (where they grew up) only to insert them into a kind of rural alienation and isolation (in the villages where they are unwillingly and temporarily posted). In their desire to escape a slow rural future, their precarious mobility within and outside government employment is both cause and consequence of their inability to cement social ties.This fellowship would allow me to develop and build upon my PhD research into a monograph, a journal article and multiple presentations for different audiences, within and outside academia. It would also allow me to develop my career as a researcher and build professional skills by collaborating on the development of a future research proposal, and through building relationships and networks.