A CULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN THE OROMO SOCIETY

Abstract

In a society, gender ideology is created and refl ected in multiple ways. Among the myriad ways, language and culture play great role in creating and refl ecting gendered culture in a society. This paper examines the representation of women in Oromo folk-proverbs and folk-religion, and analyses the position of women in the traditional Oromo cultural practices. Despite all the barriers of patriarchal power, Oromo women had an infl uential position in the past although this has now declined following the decline in the people's indigenous cultural practices. Oromo proverbs about womanhood were categorized into cultural stereotypes. Although the majority of the sample proverbs were basically disparaging, the semantics were shown to depend to a large extent on the complex whole of their context of use. The implications were also presented and discussed.