Dances of Joy and Agony: The Kunama of Tigray
The Kunama are a Nilotic people sandwiched between Ethiopia and Eritrea. This research focuses on the Kunama of Tigray on the border. As one of the indigenous communities that inhabited this area, the Kunama developed various dances due to their constant challenge of existence in a volatile environment. This presentation will focus on fieldwork I conducted in May 2020, a few months before the Tigray War. As the constitutional order of Ethiopia was threatened, the Kunama joined their Tigrayan counterparts and demonstrated using their dances.