Analysis of the Values of Enset (Enseteventricosum) in The SocioCultural Life of Thegurage of South-Central Ethiopia

Enset (Enseteventricosum) is a traditional multi-purpose crop mainly used as a staple/co-staple food crop over 20 million people in Ethiopia. The Gurage are sedentary agricultural people of patrilineal persuasion who speak a Semetic language and inhabit in a sparsely fertile semi-mountainous regionin south-central Ethiopia. Enset, their staple food crop, commonly called the “false banana plant”, is produced in abundance by each Gurage homestead. The objective of this study was to document the socio-cultural values of enset plant among the Gurage. In this study, a qualitative methodological approach is employed in extracting information from different sources on the subject in question. The study relied mainly on primary and secondary sources.According to findings, three types of food, viz, Kocho(fermented product from scraped pseudo stem grafted corm), Bulla(dehydrated juice), and Amicho (boiled corm) can be prepared from enset. As a food crop, it has useful attributes such as foods can be stored for long time, grow in wide range of environments, produces high yield per unit area and tolerates drought. It has irreplaceable role as a feed for animals. Enset starch is found to have higher and widely used as a tablet binder and disintegrant and also in pharmaceutical gelling, drug loading and release processes. Moreover, enset shows high genetic diversity within a population which in turn renders resilience and food security against the ever-changing environmental factors and land use dynamics.Enset is totally involved in every aspects of the daily social and ritual life of the Gurage, who, with other several tribes in southwest Ethiopia, form what has been termed “the EnsetCulture Complex Area”. From birth, when the umbilicus is tied off with a fiber drawn from enset fronds, the life of the Gurage is enmeshed with various uses of enset, not the least of which is nutritional