What goes around, comes around: rotating credit associations among Ethiopian women in Israel

Author： Salamon Hagar Kaplan Steven Goldberg Harvey

ISSN： 1472-5843

Source： African Identities, Vol.7, Iss.3, 2009-08, pp. : 399-415

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Abstract

This article looks at how working-class Ethiopian women, who have migrated to Israel, have sought empowerment and economic control through the establishment of rotating credit associations known as iqqub. In the changing world of Ethiopian Israeli women, iqqub associations and their specific cultural manifestations constitute a highly meaningful experience, whose building-blocks incorporate the financial, the social, the ritualistic, and the symbolic. It is a complex mechanism of tradition and renewal: its existence challenges paternalistic assumptions regarding the status of Ethiopian immigrants vis-a-vis the state and its institutions and the experience of Ethiopian Israeli women specifically. As we shall demonstrate, the iqqub serves as a generative focus for gender relations and the dramatic changes that have affected them. Ethnographic examination of the iqqub and its internal discourse expands our understanding of the dynamics of change among the group's cultural, gender, and power relations.