There is a tendency for studies of Ethiopian political development to focus exclusively on ‘the modern’: the state and its projects, the formal arena of political competition, the developmental potential of civil society at the national level. It is usually easier for researchers to canvass the views of educated officials, civil servants, opposition leaders, businessmen and activists, than of the many women, hunters, pastoralists, or farmers who are fluent only in local languages, and resident far from towns and metal roads. Whilst social anthropologists and others have studied this more ‘traditional sector’, their findings have been under-integrated into political analysis at the level of the Ethiopian state. This has begun to change recently. A number of authors now focus their investigations at the complex interface between the modern and the traditional in Ethiopian political life (cf. for instance Donham, Abbink, James et al.(eds)). In demonstrating how much the two spheres influence, shape, even ‘reconstitute’one another, they suggest the artificiality of the divisions and categories within which politics has commonly been studied. Studies at the interface between state and population, have demonstrated that there is no straightforward correlation between such dichotomies as ‘state/people’‘modern/traditional’Introduction: perspectives on power and culture