The Role of the Orthodox Tewahedo Church in Biodiversity Conservation

Master's Thesis from the year 2012 in the subject Cultural Studies - North African Studies grade: Very good course: Social Anthropology with Concentration on Environmental Anthropology language: English abstract: The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church which is believed to be the largest of the five non-Chalcedonian Eastern Churches and is believed as playing an important role in Ethiopian life is a unique church deeply based upon Ethiopian history social life and ethics. In addition to its religious services i has a long tradition of conserving biodiversity. Hence if a traveler sees a patch of indigenous big trees in the northern highlands of Ethiopia most probably there is an Orthodox Tewahedo Church in the center. Having the main objective of investigating the role of the Orthodox Tewahedo Church in biodiversity conservation the paper deals with the religious values (principles and actions) of the EOTC that are in favor of biodiversity conservation. In line with it tries to explore the church values in relation to biodiversity conservation in terms of the sacred and profane (space wise dichotomy). Moreoveridentify the cultural bases on what plants and animals are conserved in the Church compounds. For this purpose four churches were purposely selected from Ìnderta wereda. To encounter informants in their everyday life the researcher lived for five months in the churches especially in churches of Mika'el Tsellamo and Mika'el Romanat and use 'Participant observation'. Moreover the researcher used semi-structured and informal interviews. To this end semi-structured interview was conducted with 40 purposely selected respondents. Accordingly 30 respondents from Mika'el Romanat and Mika'el Tsellamo (15 from each) and 10 respondents from Khokholo Yowhannis and Mika'el Dagya churches (5 from each) were interviewed. Moreover in-depth interview was hold with key informants from the churches. Besides different secondary sources were employed. The