Since the 1980s, analyses of African political identities have emphasized identity manipulation as a governance tool. In the Somali Horn of Africa, however, politicians’ efforts to reinvent identities confront rigid understandings of genealogical clanship as a key component of identity and political mobilization. This article explores how government efforts to construct a new ‘Ethiopian–Somali’ identity within Ethiopia’s ethnic-federal system are entangled with attempts to reinterpret clan genealogies and histories. We focus on efforts to revise the history of clans within the broader Ogaden Somali clan group and trace the possibilities and limits of these revisions in relation to legacies of colonialism as well as popular understandings of Ogaden identity. Drawing on fieldwork and archival research, we show that political struggles over Somalis’ integration with Ethiopia orient around Somali clanship, but that clanship is not a mechanical tool of mobilization, as it is often portrayed. We suggest that genealogical relatedness does not equate to political loyalty, but genealogical discourse provides a framework by which various actors reinterpret contemporary events by collapsing history into the present to imbue clan, ethnic, and national identities with political significance.

中文翻译：

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作为时间崩溃的政治身份：埃塞俄比亚联邦制和有争议的欧加登历史

自 1980 年代以来，对非洲政治身份的分析强调身份操纵是一种治理工具。然而，在非洲的索马里之角，政治家重塑身份的努力面临着将家谱氏族作为身份和政治动员的关键组成部分的僵化理解。本文探讨了政府在埃塞俄比亚的种族联邦体系中构建新的“埃塞俄比亚-索马里人”身份的努力如何与重新解释氏族谱系和历史的尝试纠缠在一起。我们专注于在更广泛的欧加登索马里氏族群体中修订氏族历史的努力，并追溯这些修订与殖民主义遗产以及对欧加登身份的普遍理解相关的可能性和局限性。借鉴实地考察和档案研究，我们表明，关于索马里人与埃塞俄比亚融合的政治斗争围绕着索马里宗族关系展开，但宗族关系并不是一种机械的动员工具，正如人们经常描述的那样。我们认为谱系相关性并不等同于政治忠诚，但谱系话语提供了一个框架，各种行为者通过将历史融入现在来重新解释当代事件，从而为氏族、种族和国家身份赋予政治意义。