Resumen de Transvaluing ISIS in Orthodox Christian-Majority Ethiopia: On the Inhibition of Group Violence
In anthropological works on collective violence, the term transvaluation refers to a process in which a particular conflict is reimagined on a higher scale, giving the conflict a general significance that can lead to wide-scale group violence. This article argues that by taking into account the varied iterations of transcendence and evaluation in transvaluative reframings, a reformulated concept of transvaluation can be used to understand the forces that influence collectivities to commit violence and to abstain from violence in a volatile situation. It provides an ethnographic account of collective reactions in northwest Ethiopia to a film released by ISIS in 2015 that documents the massacre of dozens of Ethiopian Orthodox Christian migrants in Libya. Using a reworked concept of transvaluation, it elucidates how actors framed the event within different imaginative scales and in reference to different values. These framings, I argue, have implications for whether collectivities anticipate that violent action will receive a positive or negative evaluation. While some Orthodox Christians privately equated ISIS with Ethiopian Muslims, which could have motivated collective scapegoating and violence, all the public transvaluations in this case worked to delink ISIS from Ethiopian Muslims and converged in casting a judgmental gaze on retributive violence. The article addresses how different transvaluations�religious, subversive, and nationalistic�compete and converge to make sense of destabilizing events and shape collective action in response to them.
