Gudetta Urgessa Bayissa

Transformed Oromo Lives and Secularization of Identity Gudetta Urgessa Bayissa

This book: Transformed Oromo Lives and Secularization of Identity - is a result of an assumption that in todays world, where hundreds and thousands of political and economic refugees bring different ways of making meanings to the modern world, the inquiries in social changes and transformations need to involve unconventional perspectives, i.e the perspective of the refugees, in order to explore reason for the side-by-side existence of diverse identities and values. It also is an attempt to draw attention to the way Oromo refugees experience the interplay between tradition and modernity in general, and to the resistance struggle waged by them under different conditions in particular. By citing the history of Oromo social organization and spiritual life, the book discusses how the change in social space and in social ties; how exposures to a foreign public judgement that defines normality and goodness in its own way resulted into both changes in cultural values, social norms and produced the yearning for own place, the sensation to re-establish continuity with the forms of cultural past.