Dr. Christina Gabbert

Echi (Christina) Gabbert is a social anthropologist with extensive fieldwork experience in Eastern Africa, especially in southern Ethiopia. Her research on conflict and peacemaking among agro-pastoralists resulted in the award winning PhD thesis „Deciding Peace“ at the Max-Planck-Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale, Germany. Echi's research foci are peace and conflict studies, agro-pastoral livelihoods, environmental anthropology and political ecology. At our institute, she works in Nikolaus Schareika’s team as research fellow and lecturer also for advanced and collaborative fieldwork and teaching methods.
Echi’s current project „The Musicality of Anthropology and Time - Dimensions of Sustainability in the Pluriverse“ goes hand in hand with the making of the film „Fields, Floods and Meadows. Sharing Land in Arbore“. Fostering interdisciplinary environments beyond academia, Echi coordinates the international „Lands of the Future“ research initiative that connects scholars and practitioners adressing land-, food- and climate-policies on agro-pastoral territories and is co-editor of the volume Lands of the Future. Anthropological Perspectives on Pastoralism, Land Deals and Tropes of Modernity in Eastern Africa (Berghahn 2021).

Information on the Lands of the Future Initiative


Political ecology, anthropology and future, sustainability of culture, agro- pastoralism, indigenous lands, food and climate justice, cultural and global neighbourhood, investment and land use transformation, peace studies, conflict and gender, visual anthropology, collaborative fieldwork, anthropology of the senses, oral history and music, storytelling, applied and engaged anthropology


Eastern Africa, especially Ethiopia and Kenya


Ongoing since September 1993
Research in Southern Ethiopia on agro-pastoralism, trading networks, language, music, material culture, bond-friendship, conflict, peacemaking, age-grades, clan system, innovation, cultural neigbourhood, global neighbourhood, cultural change, medicinal plants, human-animal-environment relations, multispecies relations, land use and sustainability (fieldwork periods in 1993, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2009, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018)

2013 und 2016
Korr, Kenya : material culture; Nairobi: land, investment, oil exploration in Northern Kenya