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My PhD dissertation examines cross-cultural encounters in the town of Jinka, on the southwestern border of Ethiopia.

Originally a market and a garrison-town under Emperor Menilik II, Jinka has been a space of silent confrontation between northern highlands and indigenous societies of the vicinity, a great diversity of which live along the lower Omo valley. Attracted by this spectacular mosaic, increasingly numerous observers and tourists have travelled from the global North to Jinka in the past decades, interacting with the town people in order to access the valley.

In this cosmopolitan yet peripheral setting, tourist guides, social anthropologists and pastoral educated elites act as go-betweens who mediate between worlds by interpreting and operating differences. With different purposes, tools, and opportunities at hand, their work all play a prominent role in the crafting of "cultures".

I will discuss the heuristics and limits of the category of "culture broker", and will show that this work is embedded in three broader processes: the commodification of South Omo cultures, the ethnicization of Ethiopian politics, and the power dynamics in global knowledge production.