Over the past two decades, the ethnography of Africa has turned from a preoccupation with system and structure to an overriding concern for process and history. In making this move, the challange has been to integrate and go beyond -- rather than simply reject -- past structuralist insights. This book is one of the most successful examples in the Africanist literature of placing structures in time. It presents a detailed description of the politics of production in Maale during 1975 against a completed past of Imperial Ethiopian history and an uncertain future of revolutionary socialism.