ABSTRACT
Faith was pervasive in research participants’ lives and served as an undeniable moral force in the local society. Not surprisingly, my interlocutors invariably expressed the conviction that faith was beneficial for married life and that it could function as a deterrent to conjugal disagreement and conflict. In some cases, my interlocutors made direct connections between one being ‘spiritual’ (mänfäsawi) and being a good husband or spouse, with many women expressing the belief that most men lacked spirituality. Contrasting to the prevalent opinion, a couple of interlocutors associated religious values with women’s tendency to forgive husband abusiveness. Chapter 9 takes a closer look at these discourses by contextualising them in ethnographic observations to demonstrate a more complex situation. Whilst faith (haymanot) provided the wider edifice governing and holding together the local society, it was not necessarily theology that shaped most people’s understandings and experiences of marriage. Moreover, in contrast to monolithic representations about men’s spiritual life, men and women both were found to be influenced by religious values, but with differences that most likely reflected their gendered identities and socio-cultural circumstances. The overall analysis helps to diversify current representations in the Ethiopian and the international scholarships that portray religious beliefs exclusively as pernicious or as contributors to victim apathy in the context of conjugal abuse.
