Jeremy and I are easily amused. When one spends time pouring over centuries-old Ethiopian books of uncertain provenance one comes to realize that we're never going to be as cool as those Dead Sea Scrolls guys. There is an ever-so-small (but slowly growing) segment of academia that cares about the work we are doing. It's easy to become disenchanted with the monotony of the work so Jeremy and I have learned to laugh a lot. Although we do discover some items of interest such as a new rubricated word or a nuanced piece of artwork.
When people ask what kind of work we are doing, we have both decided that offering the curious person a chance to have the question stricken from the record. I usually respond with, "Are you sure you want to know?" If they persist I try to give a quick synopsis of the work without too many details. The occasional person truly seems interested and asks a lot of follow-up questions. Strangely, the subject of famine or Rastafarianism pops up. To be honest, when I began working on this project, I knew virtually nothing of Ethiopia except for its famines and its claims of possessing the Ark of the Covenant.
Ethiopian history, as I have come to learn, is terribly complex and marked by war upon war. And to depict a single Ethiopia is as difficult as depicting a single America. We are exploring Ethiopian history through the lens of a Christian scribal tradition. Manuscripts are merely the jumping-off point into a broader historical criticism. You have to enter history someplace and, anthropologically speaking, the study of religion necessarily becomes a study of a culture's linguistic, economic, and social structures. We (Steve, Jeremy, and I) are not on the brink of blowing the top off of a cultural phenomenon (read: Dead Sea Scrolls) but the work is incredibly important and sets up many a budding biblical studies graduate student for some valuable research opportunities. We shall sally forth.
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