The Parchment Makers: an Ancient Art in Present-Day Ethiopia - Video Recording Review

African Arts, Autumn, 2002 by Worku Nida

The final products of parchment making and scribing have been the main focus of national and international scholarship on Ethiopian manuscripts (e.g., Tamrat 1972; Ullendorff 1960, 1968), and there has been a major effort to inventory, catalog, and microfilm about 7,000 manuscripts. (2) The Parchment Makers, on the other hand, focuses on the actual process of production, from goatskin to book. According to A. Gell (1992:46), the essence of an art is its making: "It is the way an art object is construed as having come into the world which is the source of the power such objects have over us, their becoming rather than their being." By documenting the process of parchment's becoming, the video makes its most significant contribution to the scholarship on this subject. In this way it is similar to Raymond Silverman's groundbreaking volume Ethiopia: Traditions of Creativity (1999), which focuses on the creative process and the artists themselves, as well as on a wide range of art traditions, most of them neglected by other scholars of Ethiopian arts.

The Parchment Makers carries broader implications for other areas of Ethiopian studies; in addition to their religious significance, these manuscripts are rich sources of cultural, social political and economic information. The video also has international implications because of Ethiopia's cultural diversity and geopolitical importance. The country's mosaic culture is the result of centuries of coexistence of indigenous, Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions. It is also "one of the world's great crossroads where the peoples and cultures of Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean have been meeting for thousands of years" (Silverman 1999:3). Thus, the information in this video, which shares elements with the ancient Middle East and medieval Europe, is valuable for comparative research on world religious art histories.

Nevertheless, I have a few quibbles. Given that the artist engaged in art making constitutes the central theme, including his voice could have added to the ethnographic richness of the video, providing the artist's perceptions of himself, his profession, and the whole processes of parchment making. Also, we are not told how Merigetta Birhane acquired his technical knowledge and skill. Traditionally, the process of making parchment and copying texts, along with learning to read and write in Geez, is part of the church education given to young people (mostly male), beginning in childhood. Such information would have helped viewers make more meaningful associations between what has been videoed and what has not. Moreover, one could not help but wonder whether there have been changes in the production of manuscripts over time, and whether regional or individual variations (in tools, styles, and text specializations) exist within Ethiopia.

Despite these minor limitations, The Parchment Makers is a valuable teaching and research tool. Though it represents centuries of cultural and religious traditions, it is short enough to hold the viewers' full attention. The video is well-shot, employing a very steady camera, occasionally zooming in to show minute technical details and pulling back to show the entire layout of the process of parchment production. The use of the video medium for the scholarly study of Ethiopian manuscripts is innovative, and this production will certainly be of interest to a broad range of educators, artists, and scholars of multiple disciplines.