A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I 9783030456375, 9783030456382

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A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I A Mesography of an Indigenous Polity in Yemen Serge D. Elie

A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I

Serge D. Elie

A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I A Mesography of an Indigenous Polity in Yemen

Serge D. Elie Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

ISBN 978-3-030-45637-5 ISBN 978-3-030-45638-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45638-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Serge D. Elie This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To a new generation of practitioners of a field-based science of human emancipation

Acknowledgments

It is with considerable relish that I acknowledge my financial autonomy as an independent researcher, and thus my freedom from having to express (that obligatory) gratitude to a research grant-giving agency. Since the latter’s magnanimous act for the sake of science leads to one’s involuntary conscription into an indentured status. This status is consecrated in a serial number that must be cited every time one uses the information collected under its patronage. It is most peculiar that a sign of pecuniary dependency, if not intellectual conformity, is made out to be a mark of academic distinction. Instead, I acknowledge the “assistance” of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), having worked there for nearly a decade, in fostering my financial autonomy from the discipline’s conformity-inducing sponsoring agencies. This has allowed me to assert my intellectual independence from the prevailing conventions of disciplinary practice, and to avoid reproducing its endemic contradictions and illiberal practices inventoried in this book. My Soqotrans interlocutors, however, always betrayed a certain incredulity when I told them nafs¯ı (“myself”) in response to their not really innocent query: man yad‘amak (“who is supporting you”)? Nevertheless, I insist on paying homage to a community of people who incarnate a set of attributes that induce discomfort in the rest of us for being so deficient in them, such as generous hospitality toward unannounced strangers in spite of the absence of reciprocity from them, and inexhaustible patience toward those seeking their assistance and who always disappoint their legitimate expectations.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledging those who assisted me in Soqotra is rather risky, since it is not clear that they want to be identified nominally with a product, the contents of which might be perceived by some to be somewhat controversial. However, for a researcher who had no salary to distribute or a project to donate in return for assistance from individuals, saying a heartfelt “thank you” is the least that can, and must, be done. First and foremost, with genuine gratitude and fond memories, I refer to my two research assistants, mediators, translators, and brokers, whose identities have been modified in light of the current political tension in Soqotra. They literally had to soften my local interlocutors’ crystallizing reticence, after my initial welcoming in their midst, since I was someone who only had questions and nothing else to offer in return. My first partner, S. Y. Al-Qalansi, whose social stature seemed to have induced Soqotrans’ willingness to talk to me. My other partner, and pleasantly exasperating travelling companion, S. H. S. Al-Soqotri, had to do some serious convincing and extensive legwork in order to find interlocutors. As I was around long enough for people to know that “there is no benefit” (m¯ a f¯ı f¯ a‘ida). The latter term was invoked not only to suggest that there was no monetary benefit or forthcoming practical aid from talking to me, but also to express a general disinterest given their previous disappointing experience with foreigners promising assistance. Indeed, I was ascribed the reputation of someone with “dry hands” (¯ıdah n¯ ashifah in Arabic). As a result, he had to resort to some innocuous deception, such as mentioning the possibility of my bringing back a project someday. Both have conferred upon me the honorary title of “brother”, which has exempted me from the obligatory pecuniary relations between foreigners and locals. I take comfort in the knowledge that those who are not cited here would not feel slighted as they have more practical preoccupations and expectations, which this book elucidates. Also, worthy of special acknowledgement with gratitude is the work of my predecessors as fieldworkers in Soqotra—Miranda Morris and Vitaly Naumkin—who bequeathed to the rest of us a corpus of work on multiple aspects of local life for researchers to build on. Fortunately, they were not victims of postmodern social science and its preference for “astonishing interpretations”; thus their work contains enough reliable, even if debatable, descriptions to compare the extent of Soqotra’s transformation. In particular, I wish to convey my indebtedness to Miranda Morris for her generosity over the years in sharing her incomparable knowledge of the Soqotri language and for reading and correcting some of the chapters in their previous incarnations as journal articles. Vladimir Agafonov, who

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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spent time on the island during the 1970s and 1980s as a Russian-Arabic interpreter and a Soqotri enthusiast, has been a reliable correspondence partner for years and has enlightened me on many historical aspects of local life in Soqotra. Professor, Aaron Rubin was always willing and able to answer my queries about the linguistic conundrums of the Modern South Arabian Languages (MSALs) and saved me from embarrassment in the section on the Soqotri language. I am especially grateful to Mary Al-Sayed, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, who perceived the book’s potential contribution to current debates about the future of anthropology. And a special thank you to the two anonymous reviewers of the book proposal who found it particularly praiseworthy for its agendasetting contributions to the emerging field of Soqotran studies from a social science perspective. I hope readers will confirm their positive assessments. I reserve for last the indispensable role of my wife Lina Al-Eryani, who has been by my side since I started over a decade ago my foray into a scholarly life in Yemen. While her contributions during the writing of this book and the work that preceded it are inextricably weaved into them, I insist on acknowledging her role as the translator of the Arabic texts quoted throughout both volumes. In doing so, I spurn the mythic image of the anthropologist as linguistic hero endowed with full linguistic mastery (speaking, reading, writing and translating) after a couple of years of studying the local language. More crucially, she has been my anchor to local social reality and thus prevented me from engaging in interpretive misdemeanors associated with premature recourse to travelling theories. Given the long incubation period of this book, parts of it are already in the public domain, although in very different versions. I wish to acknowledge with gratitude the permission from a number of publishers to re-use some of the published articles in extensively revised and updated form in both volumes. Specific attribution will be made in the chapters concerned.

Notes on Terminology and Transliteration In this book I will use the term Soqotrans for the people, Soqotra for the territory, and Soqotri for the language. My spelling of the island’s name differs from the prevailing one “Socotra”, as the letter “c” has no equivalent in Arabic or in the MSALs (see discussion of the origin of the term “Soqotra” in Vol. II: Chapter 2). Also, I use the term West Asia or West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region as a more accurate geographical location of Yemen. In using this term, I intentionally

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avoid the prevailing geographical moniker for the region, Middle East or Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The rationale for this substitute geographical moniker is based on a historical shift: The Middle East evokes a congeries of tribal fiefdoms as imperial satrapies arbitrarily constituted into nation-states by a combination of Ottoman, British, French and American imperial cartographic demarcation exercise in the post1919 era. In contrast, WANA symbolizes an emerging reconfiguration and agonistic emancipation from the legacies of empire in the post-2011 era. Arabic and Soqotri terms are used throughout both volumes. In the case of Arabic words, I do not use diacritical marks for the names of persons, places and for terms familiar in English (e.g., shari’a, instead of shar¯ı’a). However, I use the diacritical marks for both the hamza (’) and the ayn (‘) as in Sana‘a’, but without long vowels marks (S.ana‘¯ a’ ). For the transliteration of all other Arabic terms, I use all of the diacritical marks based on the guidelines of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), along with its other conventions, such as anglicized plurals for Arabic terms: e.g., shaykhs and not shuy¯ ukh. There are some exceptions, however, in applying the IJMES guidelines. One notable exception is the term niz.¯ am (system, order), which approximates Egyptian Arabic, and is replaced with nidh¯ am as a more appropriate rendition of its pronunciation in Yemeni Arabic; while being fully aware that the Arabic word is written with a ‫ =( ﻅ‬z.) and not a ‫ =( ﺬ‬dh). In the case of Soqotri, there is no universally accepted transliteration system for reasons discussed in Volume II: Chapter 2. Nevertheless, the system recently proposed by Naumkin et al. (2018: 11–20), which remains a work in progress, is selectively applied to avoid the proliferation of spellings for established terms. For example, Soqotra is used but not Sok.ot.ra, which they suggest is the appropriate transliteration. Accordingly, the prevailing use of “Socotra” is avoided, unless it is included in quoted texts. The reader is forewarned about the inconsistencies due to the inevitable oversight or the inherently approximative conventions of the existing transliteration guidelines.

Contents

Prologue: An Invitation to Practice Anthropology Differently 1

Mesography as Paradigm for a Post-Exotic Anthropology: The Post-Ethnography Turn 1.1 An Axial Era: Anthropology in a Post-Universalist Conjuncture 1.1.1 Emergent Pluriverse: Geopolitical Transition 1.2 Epochal Transition: From Ethnography to Mesography 1.2.1 Epistemological Renewal: Beyond the Neo-Imperial Vulgate 1.2.2 Interpretivism: A Predatory Hermeneutics 1.3 Disciplinary Praxis Reimagined: Infrastructural Makeover 1.4 Anthropology’s New Ethical Covenant: Three Pillars 1.4.1 Research Ethic: Experiential Authenticity 1.4.2 Relational Ethic: Bond of Reciprocity 1.4.3 Discursive Ethic: Referential Veracity 1.5 Mesography Defined: Genealogy and Primer 1.6 Fieldwork as a Recursive Process: From Village Dwelling to Sites Hopping

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1 1 2 5 8 12 17 21 22 23 24 27 32

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CONTENTS

Part I

2

3

Eco-Socio-Economic Disarticulation: Waning Pastoral Community

Synoptic Preview: Context, Catalysts, Theory, and History 2.1 Situating Soqotra: Contextual Reconnaissance 2.1.1 Noah’s Ark Rediscovered: Arcadian Fixation 2.1.2 Clash of Futures: Incommensurable Visions 2.2 Catalysts of Transition: Transmigration and State Policy 2.2.1 Migratory Movements: Sociocultural Change Agents 2.2.2 A “Community of Fate”: Policy Mediation and Communal Formation 2.2.3 Domains of Analysis: Symbiotic Nexus 2.3 Anthropology of the Political: Beyond Travelling Theories 2.3.1 Travelling Theory: Indefensible Epistemological Paradox 2.3.2 Anthropology and the State: Reframing the Discourse 2.4 Historicizing a Communal Polity: Changing the Narrative A Socio-Ecological Formation: The Human-Environment Dialectic 3.1 An Atomistic Community: Inaugural Setting 3.1.1 Ecological Primordialism: A Conceptual Framework 3.2 Vernacular Homestead: Indigenous Lexical Appropriation 3.2.1 Mapping Landscapes: Toponymic Grid 3.2.2 Inventorying Resources: Taxonomic Symbiosis 3.3 Territorial Organization: Indigenous Clans vs. Settler Tribes 3.3.1 Sultanate Regime: Tributary Political Economy and Patrimonial Social Order

39 40 41 45 49 49 54 56 58 59 62 68

73 74 76 79 82 86 90 92

CONTENTS

Demographic Distribution: Land Occupation Strategy 3.3.3 Communal Social Structure: Clan and Locality vs. Tribe and Genealogy 3.3.4 Self-Governance: Traditional Institutions of Mediation 3.4 Cultural Geography: Space-Mediated Identities 3.4.1 Topographic Bifurcation: Domains of Livelihood Differentiation 3.4.2 Geographic Dichotomy: Eco-Cultural Divide 3.5 Community-Making: Social Cooperation Over Biological Affiliation 3.6 Socio-Ecological Change: Inherent Condition Annex 3.1: Mutual Aid Institutions of Soqotra

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3.3.2

4

5

96 99 102 106 107 110 112 115 118

Communal Identity Mutation: From Status Hierarchy to Ethnic Ranking 4.1 Identity Transformation: State as Vector 4.2 Status Hierarchy as Social Geography: Coastal vs. Hinterland Enclaves 4.2.1 Bin ‘Afr¯ar: Hereditary Nobility 4.2.2 Al-Ashr¯af: Sacerdotal Retinue ´ . arÒ: Sultans’ Protégés 4.2.3 Sh 4.2.4 Al-‘Arab: Immigrant Merchants 4.2.5 Al-N¯ub¯an: Clerical Intermediaries 4.2.6 Al-Bad¯u: Aboriginal Tributaries 4.2.7 Al-Akhd¯am: Self-Indentured Laborers 4.2.8 Imbu‘ileh: Conscripted Labor 4.3 Ethnic Reconfiguration: Centrifugal Paradox 4.3.1 ‘Arab¯ı: Pan-Ethnic Membership 4.3.2 Yaman¯ı: Hyphenated National Identity 4.3.3 Saqat.r…: Primordial Authenticity 4.3.4 Al-Muwallad¯ın: Ethnocultural Minority 4.4 Summation: History-Contingent Collective Identities Annex 4.1: Yemen’s Traditional Social Status Stratification

124 127 129 131 133 134 136 138 138 141 143 145 148 150 153 160

Island Pastoralism: External Entanglements and Internal Entailments

163

121 122

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CONTENTS

5.1 5.2 5.3

5.4

5.5

5.6

5.7 6

Pastoral Domain’s Annexation: Enclosure Threat Thematic Contextualization: Pastoralism’s Nomadic Fixation Livelihood Practices: Eclectic Subsistence Regime 5.3.1 Primary vs. Supplementary Livelihoods: Repertoire of Subsistence Practices Spatial Mobility: Seasonal Peripatetics 5.4.1 Transhumance: Intra-Territorial Migration 5.4.2 Situational Nomadism: Cross-Territorial Displacement 5.4.3 Agropastoral Movement: Food Harvesting Relocation Residential Modality: Shifting Economic Geography 5.5.1 Geography of Residence: Configuration of Regions, Villages, and Clans The Pastoral Fauna: Livestock as a Neglected “Endemic” Species 5.6.1 Herds’ Genealogy: Millennia of Pastoralism 5.6.2 Graze Phobia: Policy Consequences 5.6.3 Provisional Inventory: Variable Estimations Coda: Incremental Adaptations

Pastoral Economy: From Core to Auxiliary Livelihood 6.1 Pastoralism in Transition: Economic Disarticulation 6.2 Pastoralists as Bad¯u: Mistaken Identity 6.3 Parallel Economy: Patching up Ethos 6.3.1 Auxiliary Livelihood’s Mechanisms: Production, Distribution, and Consumption 6.3.1.1 Production: Artisanal Bricolage 6.3.1.2 Distribution: Self-Delivery and Provisioning 6.3.1.3 Consumption: Ascetic Food Substitution Strategy 6.4 Future Scenarios: Divergent Trajectories

164 166 168 170 172 173 174 175 179 182 186 187 191 193 197 199 200 203 206 208 210 215 217 220

CONTENTS

Part II

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Political Incorporation: Constitution of a Sub-National Polity

State-Community Relations: Political History Conjunctures 7.1 State Politics of Administration: Chronicle of a Recursive Relationship 7.1.1 Soqotra’s Modern Trajectory: A Conjunctural History 7.2 Settler Sultanate: Proxy Colonialism 7.2.1 Dynastic Fiefdom: Imperial Outpost 7.2.2 Minimalist Apparatus: Invisible State 7.2.3 Roving “Parliament”: Order Maintenance Mechanism 7.2.4 Primitive Accumulation: Taxation as Surplus Generation 7.3 Post-Revolution Administration: Socialist Transformation 7.3.1 Undoing Indirect Rule: “Revolutionary Decolonization” 7.3.2 Rural-Urban Nexus: Territorial Remapping and Population Socialization 7.3.3 Local Self-Rule: Hierarchical Committee System 7.3.4 Subsidized Consumption: State-Led Redistribution 7.4 National Unity Government: Republican Tribalism 7.4.1 State-Fomented Tribalism: From Organic Clans to Synthetic Tribes 7.4.2 Territorial Segmentation: Shaykhdom Formation 7.4.3 Shaykh Rule: Rural Periphery over Urban Center 7.4.4 State as Economic Driver: Public Sector Growth 7.5 Post-Unification Regime: Administrative State 7.5.1 Path-Dependent State-Community Governance: The Primordial-Modern Continuum 7.5.2 Election-Mediated Geography: Subsidiarity Principle Modernized

227 228 229 231 232 236 239 241 245 246 249 251 253 257 259 262 263 264 266 267 270

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CONTENTS

7.5.3

7.6

7.7

7.8

8

Simulated Decentralization: External Supervision Entrenched 7.5.4 Eco-Conservationism: Spectacle Economy Arab Spring Awakening: Communal Sovereignty 7.6.1 History’s Agents: Annexation Syndrome Renounced 7.6.2 Indigenous Sovereignty: Political Agency Asserted 7.6.3 Nominal Transformation: From District to Governorate UAE’s Humanitarian Protectorate: Compassionate Guardianship 7.7.1 Territorial Annexation: Natural Disaster as Pretext 7.7.2 Parallel Rule: Resident Advisory System 7.7.3 Nidh¯am Mash¯ayikh Restored: Competitive Patrimonial Politics 7.7.4 Philanthropic Ministrations: Polity Mobilization Postscript: From Protectorate to Colony? 7.8.1 “Act of Aggression”: UAE’s Military Intervention 7.8.2 Sovereignty Compromised: Foreign Supervision Reinstated

Politics of Redistribution: Governance Culture and Public Ethos 8.1 Amoral Communalism: Local Political Grammar 8.1.1 Public Values: Locally Emergent not Globally Disseminated 8.2 State, Nation, and Community: Failed Symbiosis 8.2.1 Public Sphere Formation: Institution over Discourse 8.3 Resenting Power: Contexts of Muted Activism 8.3.1 Local Governance: Power Deprivation Scheme 8.3.2 Administrative Disorder: Corrosion of the Work Ethic 8.3.3 Infrapolitical Practices: A Partial Inventory 8.4 Communal Civic Deficit: Dysfunctional Sociality

272 275 277 279 281 283 286 287 290 292 295 298 299 300

307 308 309 312 314 318 320 323 327 330

CONTENTS

8.4.1

8.5

Obstacles to Participation: Tutelary Public Sphere and Surrogate Civil Society 8.4.2 State Paranoia of Hegemony: Authoritarian Reflex 8.4.3 Communal Anxiety of Autonomy: Collective Acquiescence New Dawn: Evolving Transitions 8.5.1 Vectors of Political Transition: Translocal Events 8.5.2 Political Community in Formation: Contested Institutional Reconfiguration

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331 335 337 338 340 341

Epilogue: Soqotrans as an Indigenous Polity

347

Bibliography

375

Index

401

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 7.1

Geography of livelihoods A Sulh assembly Protesting government decision

81 105 285

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List of Tables

Table Table Table Table Table Table

3.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 7.1

Historical data on Soqotra’s population Soqotra’s seasonal calendar Geography of residence in Soqotra Historical data on Soqotra’s pastoral herds Pastoral herds’ distribution Historical conjunctures in Soqotra’s political supervision

98 176 184 194 195 230

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Acronyms

BCE CBD CBOs CE ERC GEF GoY GPC IUCN KBZ LA LAL LC NGOs PDRY PRSY UAE UN UNDP UNESCO WANA WB WHS YAR ZP

Before the Common Era Convention on Biodiversity Community Based Organizations Common Era Emirates Red Crescent Global Environment Facility Government of Yemen General People’s Congress International Union for Conservation of Nature Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Foundation Local Authority Local Authority Law Local Council Non Governmental Organizations People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen People’s Republic of South Yemen United Arab Emirates United Nations United Nations Development Programme United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization West Asia and North Africa World Bank World Heritage Site Yemen Arab Republic Conservation Zoning Plan

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Prologue: An Invitation to Practice Anthropology Differently

The purpose of this prologue is to outline the broad set of concerns that constitute the context in which this book intervenes. Accordingly, it summarizes the nature of the research project that resulted in this twovolume total community study of Soqotra; it identifies the initial vector that launched my quest for an alternative to the prevailing practice of anthropology; it invites the global audience of established and aspiring social scientists, to whom the book is addressed, to consider a different modality of doing anthropology; it highlights the pitfalls of the narcissistic foundation of ethnography and calls for its abandonment; it explains my oppositional attitude toward the transactional nature of fieldwork and its bathos; it situates Soqotra within an interstitial geo-cultural space that exempts it from the prevailing assumptions and themes associated with neighboring regional social formations; it proposes the re-centering of research subjects as audience of our research results as part of a discursive ethic of reciprocity; it laments the intellectual impasse engendered by the discipline’s anachronistic commitment to a Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge production that insists on a West-Rest antinomy and suggests an exit strategy; and finally, it confronts the endemic dumbingdown campaign for the use of “plain English” in academic social science that promotes the use of language as “mental popcorn.”

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A Mesogaphy of Soqotra: A Total Community Study This book is the first volume of a two-volume work that emerged from a research project entitled “A Mesography of Soqotra: A Total Community Study.” Cumulatively, the two volumes offer a panoramic explanatory narrative of the “rediscovery” of Soqotra Island, straddling the entrance to the Red Sea in the Indian Ocean, at the dawn of the third millennium based on the global significance of its endemic biodiversity. This rediscovery engendered Soqotra’s protective conscription into, and panoptic supervision by, the global environmental enclosure regime, and the intensification of its bureaucratic incorporation and political subordination by Yemen’s mainland national government. Together, the two volumes perform a comprehensive and integrated—i.e., “total”—community study, as they provide a historically contextualized and analytically detailed portrait of the Soqotran community. This portrait is assembled through a processual narrative of the multi-layered interactions and agonistic relations between Soqotrans as an indigenous sub-national community and the Yemeni state, members of the national society, and international benefactors. As an indigenous community, Soqotra straddles the margins of the dominant regional cultural formations (African and Arabian), given its mixed ethnic composition and its endowment with a non-Arabic mother tongue, whose use is neither formally encouraged nor officially recognized by the state. The study presents a historically embedded biography of a communal collectivity that strategically alternates between the micro, meso and macro levels in elucidating the impacts of trans-local forces on the transformation of Soqotra. This biography not only establishes the genealogy of the modern period in Soqotra, but also documents the transition process that has taken Soqotrans through a series of social mutations along a historical continuum. This multi-layered narrative is what I call a mesography, which is a research strategy that focuses on the vectors of change engendered by state institutions and their policies as well as non-state individual and institutional actors, at the local, national, and international levels, in structuring the existential context of the Soqotran community. Mesography is a new research procedure with the following practices: privileges evolving processes over bounded spaces; focuses on collective instead of individual actors; synthesizes the diachronic and the synchronic into a past, present and future analytical continuum; and triangulates the micro local lifeworlds, the meso societal structures, and the macro structural trans-local

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processes in an explanatory narrative about the transformation trajectory of the social formation under study. In effect, mesography is the underpinning method for the practice of a post-exotic anthropology. As such, it entails a critique of the hegemonic West-stream approach to the practice of anthropology as an exoticizing endeavor. Accordingly, it argues for the abandonment of ethnography as the discipline’s prevailing research and representation procedure given its widely recognized deficiencies. To cite just a few examples: its anachronistic preference for micro relational settings within bounded social formations, its obsessive privileging of individual actors or the lone informant as data source, its cursory engagement with history, and its perverting fondness for the self-centric interpretation of cultural others. The two volumes exemplify the application of the mesographic method through a holistic study of Soqotra as an indigenous community in transition. They serve as a reference work on the historical trajectory and contemporary dynamics of Soqotra. Moreover, they provide a baseline analysis with which to compare the island’s evolution in the future. In sum, the two volumes inaugurate a comprehensive and generative social science research agenda for Soqotra by identifying the key processes that are the inexorable vectors of its transition trajectory, and by unveiling the critical domains in which the transition process will continue to manifest itself in the foreseeable future. As such, they lay the foundation for the social science field of Soqotran studies as an island-based indigenous communal polity. In quest of the above, this book presents a countervailing model of practicing anthropology that renounces the discipline’s commitment to ethnography and its predilection for telling stories instead of explaining processes. In its inaugural incarnation, ethnography was an epistemically promising social discovery method, but it has since sedimented into a professionalized convention as a transactional academic ritual, which instrumentalizes research contexts into “sites of subordination” and research subjects into objects of cultural appropriation through their interpretive exoticization authorized by travelling theories. Instead, the book proposes the adoption of mesography, which pursues a genuine cross-cultural quest for understanding that is committed to locally plausible descriptive explanation of, and contextually emergent theory formation about, communities’ entanglement within processes of transformation triggered by shifts in historical conjunctures. In its current practice, ethnography is still beholden to a colonial model of

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field research within a geography of hierarchically categorized regions and peoples as reservoirs for data colonialism and as symbolic playgrounds for metropolitan theorizing. As one practitioner confesses: “Our ethnography is now too easily regarded as data, evidence or information for the support, or not, of theories constituted independently of it” (Kapferer 2018: 1). Moreover, the aim of ethnography’s knowledge production practices is to formulate travelling theory-mediated interpretations that are packaged into “ethnographies that everyone can read” (Ghodsee 2016) as infotainment for metropolitan audiences of cultural flâneurs engaged in armchair intellectual tourism. In contrast, mesography abandons these practices by situating its domain of inquiry within a polycentric geography emancipated from idioms of abjection (peripheral, marginal, subaltern), and by adopting a retrospective and prospective temporal spectrum that articulates a multi-scales analysis. Accordingly, mesography’s quest for knowledge is to generate historically grounded explanations that elucidate the internal logic of a social formation and that provide cognitive resources with political significance, explanatory relevance and emancipatory potential for audiences in the fieldwork site, in the academy and beyond. Furthermore, mesography selectively employs the conceptual and theoretical resources of the social sciences (laundered of their inaugural Eurocentric connotations) to retrace the historical trajectory of emergence of a communal formation and to produce a comprehensive biography of a social collectivity. This biography is constructed through an onion-peeling anatomy of this collectivity’s “dialectically structured and historically determined unity that exists in and through the diverse interpenetrations, connections, and contradictions that join its constituent parts” (Balée 1998: 22). This book demonstrates an approach to the re-visioning of an exotic anthropology, which routinely constructs travelling theory-mediated allegorical tales about foreign research subjects that misrepresent their sociocultural predicaments; into a post-exotic anthropology, which entails a non-ethnocentric disciplinary practice that has sundered its historical umbilical cord to the “savage slot” and emancipated itself from the dominant identity of anthropology as the exclusive brainchild of a colonialism-enabled Western Enlightenment. Paradoxically, the Enlightenment version embraced by anthropologists is that of European exceptionalism (Stocking 1987), not that of European anti-imperialism (see

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Muthu 2003). Consequently, the confounding irony of the still dominant mode of practicing anthropology, which I call “West-stream anthropology” (see below), is its self-entrapment within an epistemological aporia that has sedimented into a constitutive paradox: Its tacit theoretical fidelity to the core assumptions of the Enlightenment’s universalistic philosophical anthropology—namely that particularistic allegiances are evanescent, that cultural differences are convergent, and especially that Occidental cosmopolitanism is humanity’s “primal premise”—while its practice has shown the patent falsity of these assumptions (Gray 1995). This commitment to a universal standpoint informed by a particular canon has permanently established the foundational contradiction of Weststream anthropology in the form of an intrinsic incompatibility between its epistemology and method, which Fardon (2012) flippantly described as “flying theory, grounded method.” This flippant reference betrays the endemic practice of data colonialism, according to which anthropological knowledge production practices have always been informed by theoretical frameworks that were historically, culturally and conceptually alien to its fieldwork domains, which served exclusively as data reservoirs. The emancipation of anthropology from this debilitating aporia entails abandoning its commitment to an Occidental cosmopolitanism—the muse of these flying theories—that posits itself as a universal comparative standpoint based on the ethnocentric fantasy that global modernity is an “immaculate Western conception.” Noteworthy, is that data colonialism and Occidental cosmopolitanism constitute the enduring pillars of West-stream anthropology’s congenital bad faith at the core of its practice. Only their categorical renunciation would enable the discipline’s practitioners to pursue a genuine understanding of the incommensurable particularisms, modern localisms and value pluralism that animate the global mosaic of human communities without their hierarchical categorization, incommensurate comparison and without invoking the pejorative epithet of “relativism.” This would end the “wispy moralizings about universal values or dim banalities about underlying oneness” (Geertz 2000: 226). In this light, the book is an invitation to, indeed a provocation of, fellow practitioners of the human sciences, especially to the loyal practitioners of “West-stream anthropology”, to consider a countervailing mode of engaging in knowledge production about our contemporary world. A caveat: My use of the prefix “West-stream” to qualify the dominant mode of anthropological practice is a substitute for the term “mainstream.” It designates the initial provenance in northern institutional

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locations of a specific kind of disciplinary practice with inherently illiberal epistemic effects (see below). However, its professional practitioners are no longer bound to their northern location, as emulators have spawned in other regions within enclaves of “epistemological little Europes” (Santos 2018: 1). As such, they are fellow subscribers to a knowledge production ethos based on a “epistemo-political matrix” constituted by a shared commitment to the contingent combination of the following three discursive resources, which are the proxies of its universalistic pretensions: (a) neoliberalism, a fraudulent elixir peddled through a panoptic liberal internationalism (a euphemism for the prevailing regime of liberal imperialism with its racially hierarchic global configuration of power, and arrogated entitlement to universal cultural assimilation, political domination and economic extraction) deceptively asserting the moral prestige of progressivism, is embraced as the discipline’s theoretical alibi and “inevitabilist grand narrative”, which reduces the world’s peoples and societies into the playthings of a regional commercial oligarchy’s global market share expansion strategy; (b) postmodernism as its preferred fount for lexical resources and epistemological assumptions, which privilege a cynical disposition that is emblematized into a truism about social reality: “there is no truth about the world, there are only interpretations of the world” (Todorov 1995: 88); and (c) interpretivism as its principal representation strategy, which encapsulates others on the basis of local social facts constructed through interpretation mediated by exogenous conceptual and theoretical idioms that epitomizes the definition of epistemological imperialism (see Chapter 1). This leads to a congenital disciplinary syndrome where the theoretical, indeed the speculative, consistently overwhelms, if not erases, the empirical. As the guiding tenets of the practice of West-stream anthropology, these three discursive resources enact social realities that conform to a status quo enforcing “one world anthropology” (Ingold 2018). This leads to representations as semantic erasures that conjure up a universe of meanings disconnected from the lived experiences and self-understandings of field interlocutors who inhabit a pluriverse of marginally overlapping but ultimately non-converging lifeworlds. Hence the need to practice anthropology differently, as “different practices enact different realities” (Law 2015: 129).

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The Catalyst: Arcadian Epistemology Fatigue My quest for a countervailing mode of practicing anthropology was made imperative by the context of my fieldwork on Soqotra Island, which exemplified a post-exotic conjuncture: The socio-political topology of the fieldwork context was already under the influence of the economic policies of the Yemeni state, the environmental regime of the United Nations supported by a plethora of bilateral agencies, and the cultural politics of, and remittance dependency on, the Soqotran Diaspora in the Emirates of the Persian Gulf. In effect, Soqotra was already encompassed within the geography of spatial imbrication of the post-exotic pluriverse (see Kothari et al. 2019). As it was part of a geographically connected, economically interdependent, state organized, globally integrated, and electronically mediated transcultural world. However, this complex community-statediaspora-world relations mediated by the palliative micro-interventions of international aid agencies, and the process of change they had partially initiated were largely absent from the literature about the island, which was, and still is, permeated with a nineteenth century sensibility. This sensibility was expressed through an Arcadian epistemology that imagined Soqotrans as cultural remnants of a bygone century and that advocated for their island’s environmental preservation while neglecting their contemporary aspirations. This anachronistic epistemology and its phobia of modernity presumed a “natural environment” that is largely undisturbed by anthropogenic changes and is unmediated by trans-local meso and macro structural forces. This widely shared epistemological standpoint among scholars attracted to Soqotra has led to the reductive portrayal of Soqotrans as hapless victims of, and reluctant participants in, an imported and imposed modernity. Consequently, the existing sociocultural knowledge about Soqotra is represented through faded images of a pastoral idyll evocative of the sacralizing discourse of environmentalists that mimics the crass voyeurism of travel brochures, and the fantasist interpretive gaze of their authors. Accordingly the island is invariably described in a series of exoticizing metaphors: “Abode of the Blest”, “Island of the Phoenix”, “Isle of Bliss”, “Lost World”, “Islands of Heritage” and “Noah’s Ark.” Alternatively, the discourse is couched in a patronizing philanthropic gaze informed by a contrived urgency about an impending threat that betrays an eco-fundamentalist vision and its apocalyptic lexicon: “Saving Socotra”,

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“Threatened Paradise.” These characterizations of Soqotra and Soqotrans are egregious exemplifications of a metropolitan discourse’s endemic Occidentalist fondness for primitivist allegories about primordial others. To avoid these chimerical idioms and their implausible interpretations in which Soqotrans and their island were exoticized, I abandoned the still prevalent notion of the anthropological project as “a spatial journey into Otherness” animated by a redemptive xenophilia. In contrast, I adopted an anthropological practice that insists on the full contemporaneity of Soqotrans, as the majority had already made the virtual exit from their ascribed Arcadia. Indeed, in Soqotra the geography of spatial discreteness of an exotic anthropology, and its corollary research strategy, ethnography, conceived as a serendipitous errand into a pristine cultural wilderness, were already anachronistic. It was the epistemic challenge of explaining this transitional process of change in a post-exotic fieldwork site in as comprehensive a framework as possible that engendered my quest for an alternative to the conventional ethnographic appropriation of cultural others through an identity-mediated research protocol and self-centric interpretive practice, which confer a license to (mis-)represent the social reality of research subjects. Beyond my deep antipathy toward this illiberal practice of interpretation and its idle curiosity about, and “unburdened spectatorship” of, others’ predicaments, I was goaded by my Soqotran interlocutors not to follow the traditional anthropological practice of exotica hunting. First, through the constant refrain of ¯ aysh al f¯ a‘ida (“what is the benefit?”) that greeted my inquiries, and which forced my self-interrogation about the intended use of the information I was collecting. Second, I was admonished to “tell the truth” (qul al-h.aq¯ıqah) in my writing about them, and to avoid the ethnographic malpractice of one of my precursor anthropologists who was unfairly maligned for giving the impression that Soqotrans were obsessed with magic, and for being perceived as giving priority to the cultural traditions of Soqotrans of African descent (al-muwallad¯ın) while neglecting those who consider themselves of Arab descent. Third, I was advised to do something “useful” (muf¯ıd) with my research—that is, to produce knowledge that others could use to guide their assistance to Soqotra. I have endeavored throughout both volumes to “tell the truth” and to be “useful.” I fear, however, that I may have heeded their advice about truth telling rather excessively to the chagrin of many.

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Targeted Audience: Status Quo Dissenters This book is an invitation, or more aptly a provocation, to fellow practitioners of the human sciences, especially those who prefer to call themselves anthropologists, to consider an alternative mode of engaging in the production of anthropological knowledge about our contemporary world. For the current practice of anthropology has lapsed into an academic discipline that seems overly preoccupied with putting out institutional brushfires generated by a growing skepticism about its raison d’être both within the academy and society at large. Moreover, too many disciplinary practitioners have resigned themselves to the endemic inadequacy between their professional identity-endowing method (ethnography) and contemporary reality. This resulted in the production of knowledge that is circumscribed to an intramural soliloquy among its academic practitioners who are imbued with “instinctual conservatism and brand protection” loyalties. Consequently, it has consecrated anthropology as a “completely academicized profession”, as Geertz (1988: 130) acknowledged a generation ago. This status is still lamented a generation later: “A discipline confined to the theatre of its own operations” [i.e., academia], which “turns the project of anthropology into the study of its own ways of working” (Ingold 2014: 383). The institutionalization of the discipline as an exclusively “academicized profession” has engendered a malignant symbiosis between the discipline’s purpose and its practitioners’ academic career animated by a gregarious disposition and a sterile quest to retrofit the disciplinary status quo. Indeed, anthropology’s academy-centric preoccupations are exemplified in discussions about the need to update its “legendary method of engagement in the world”—ethnography—in a quest to find a “surrogate for the traditional affinity for the exotic.” Such a quest seems permanently tethered to a “schizophrenic modernization” through the selective adaptation of the new on the same old foundation (Westbrook 2008: 87). The discipline’s insulation within the academy as its exilic enclave engendered what I call Galileo’s dilemma among West-stream practitioners: Embrace the emerging historical conjuncture and face an inexorable loss of the discipline’s “traditional” identity by abandoning the discipline’s “classical field practice”; or deny its existence and ensure academic self-preservation by defensively reaffirming the contemporary relevance of the anachronistic method of ethnography. This dilemma is confirmed by the confession of one of the gurus of the ethnographic

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method, George Marcus, in a book dedicated to the remodeling of “the pedagogy of training” in ethnography: “I do not argue for a revolution in or reformation of pedagogy, but rather a morphing of it to catch up” with the “problems of the contemporary” (Marcus 2009: 16). In effect, training to practice ethnography has become an induction ritual, in which students are cloned into advocates of a disciplinary tradition rooted in a defunct world order, and not as adaptable practitioners of a field science in a permanently evolving world. Readers who are aspiring disciplinary renegades and are averse to this permanent retrofitting exercise in the guise of an incremental methodological “morphing”, and thus are willing to abandon West-stream anthropology’s ethically indifferent theorizing and morally ambiguous relational protocols (see below) are the preferred interlocutors. However, status quo practitioners who dare to spurn the discipline’s prestige economy obsessed with the accumulation of reputational capital predicated on strict conformity to the dominant Eurocentric theoretical repertoire, procedural ethical norms, and extractive research practices; and therefore, who are keen to reconsider their enthrallment to defectionprevention conformist anxieties and who can overcome their epistemic panic toward abandoning the conventional disciplinary bandwagon are most welcomed. Perhaps their engagement might relieve them of their endemic “sacrificial sentinel” syndrome given their “deliberate act of loyalty to the arbitrary limits” of their discipline (Robbins 1992: 180). This syndrome is exacerbated by an existential panic toward an imagined horde of invasive subalterns at the gates threatening to dispossess the discipline of its Western ownership. Abandoning these sentiments could rid these practitioners of their insular anxiety animated by a permanent urgency to re-affirm and sustain the distinctiveness of anthropology’s ethnographic method. Also, it would obviate the necessity of policing disciplinary boundaries in order “to preserve a unique scholarly patrimony from the encroachment of an ever more generic social science” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003: 155). I should interject at this point that beyond practicing and aspiring anthropologists, this two-volume work avoids any disciplinary provincialism by catering to the interests of apprentices or practitioners in the following fields: Island studies, regional studies, indigenous societies, environmental conservation, development, pastoralism, and cultural geography. The new ethos of anthropological inquiry is being offered as a “modest proposal” toward fulfilling the quest for an alternative disciplinary praxis

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that has eluded numerous reformist attempts by practitioners who feared the loss of professional identity. For example, Gupta and Ferguson (1997) felt the need to overthrow the “tyranny of ethnography” as the methodological dynasty and pillar of anthropological traditionalism, but incongruously subordinated their aspiration to academia’s ethnic quota system by calling for reforming its norms of inclusion to accommodate postcolonial scholars and their “subjugated knowledges” (see Elie 2006); Ingold (2014) merely suggested a moniker switch from ethnography, which he labeled a “treasonable activity”, in favor of “participant observation” that enables the “fictive native” and the inauthentic experiencing of local lifestyles; and da Col and Graeber (2011) appropriated ethnography into an exclusive and mystifying intramural dialogue between the Elysium of Western philosophy and anthropology and the discipline’s one percent contemporary avant-garde in quest of an ethnographic theory that entails a mystifying “generation of a disjunctive homonimity, that destruction of any firm sense of place that can only be resolved by the imaginative formulation of novel worldviews” (2011: vii–viii)—go figure. In contrast, mesography abandons these “manacles of the mind” and advocates an insurgent post-Western epistemic practice and not an antiWestern one. As such, it promotes an alternative disciplinary ecosystem for an insurgent community of practitioners of a post-exotic anthropology that eschews both ethno- and ego-centrism in all their guises. There is no cheerleading on behalf of a Sino-, Indo-, Afro-, Arabo-, Latino- or Asiancentrism to replace the current Euro-centric world order. The guiding motto is “let a hundred regions bloom in a hegemon-free world.” Indeed, a post-exotic anthropology, borrowing Viveiros de Castro’s phrase, is “an anthropology [that] would make multiplicities proliferate” (2009: 45). Therefore, I invite scholars everywhere—especially the new generation of graduate students and their professors on all continents as producers of de-colonizing knowledge for a new historical conjuncture—who reject the prevailing misanthropy-inducing obsession with travelling theories that serve primarily as opportunistic means for the self-centric interpretation, the spectatorial critique, and the instrumentalized theorization, of cultural others’ existential predicaments. And who are committed to the collective quest for, and ethical practice of, an authentically human science from an epistemological standpoint that transcends the chronic provincialism and ethnocentrism sustained by the hegemony of West-stream anthropology’s epistemic ministrations.

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Marshall Sahlins warned us about the consequences of West-stream anthropology’s epistemic ministrations, when he observed that: Ours is the only culture that has escaped deconstruction by the changing of the avant garde as it retains its essentialized and monolithic character as a system of domination. So anthropologists can do nothing but to reproduce it … in the stereotypic expression of a totalized system of power. (Sahlins 1999: 16)

In fact, Sahlins was merely paraphrasing an observation that Montaigne made about his fellow Europeans in the sixteenth century: [W]e seem to have no other criterion of truth and reason than the type and kind of opinions and customs current in the land where we live. There we always see the perfect religion, the perfect political system, the perfect and most accomplished way of doing everything. (1993 [1580]: 108–109)

This festering ethnocentric reflex after a half millennium of history should have inspired a moral revulsion among its practitioners (Etinson 2013). Instead, it has led to its permanent reification in West-stream anthropology through an updated lexical repertoire, which allows it to sustain its ethno/ego-centric practice. Indeed, its trinity of guiding tenets—neoliberalism, postmodernism and interpretivism—are the updated lexical fig leaves that cloak its practice of this gangrenous ethnocentricity as the “stereotypic expression” of that imperial “system of power”, which instrumentalizes others’ lifeworlds, in Sahlins’ words, “to manure our little academic fields.” This reflexive ethnocentricity, which seems to be a prerequisite of membership in an “imperial system of power”, is not an ontological fatality. As this disposition is not the inescapable legacy of researchers’ inherited ethnocultural identity that pre-determines their membership in a particular “interpretive community” bounded by what Gingrich (2010) called “national container paradigms.” Instead, it is a discursive strategy that betrays an intellectual choice about the kind of agency one prefers to embody as a practitioner of anthropology. Indeed, there is a spectrum of such agencies (see Todorov 1993: 342–352; Katz 2004), two of which are highlighted below:

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• The “bourgeois professional” who interprets the meaning of fieldwork within pre-established framework of travelling theories in order to animate intramural debates about theoretical problems of exclusive interest to inmates of academic institutions. • The “cross-cultural fieldworker” who seeks policy relevance and political significance in documenting “social life… within local terms as its central contribution” (Katz 2004: 286), and generates knowledge as actionable cognitive resources for the community of research subjects. The first agential disposition prevails among practitioners of West-stream anthropology. The second, is the kind of agency that is conducive to the practice of a post-exotic anthropology.

Anthropology Without Narcissus: Abandoning the Self-Other Dialectic While this book claims the disciplinary mantle of anthropology, it seeks to free its practice from the discipline’s narrow vocational identity and egoethno-centric tendencies. As Viveiros de Castro noted, “Narcissus [… is the] tutelary spirit of anthropology” given its practitioners’ obsession with “asking what distinguishes us from the others” (2009: 43). This Narcissus-mediated anthropology authorizes the practice of perceiving the other as a reflection of its practitioners’ own imaginings embodied in socially inoculated selves against “going-native.” Indeed, it promotes an egocentric conception of the world, which smuggles in the liberal vulgate of autonomous individualism, and the capitalist credo of the primacy of self-interest. This malignant synergy has bequeathed to the discipline a fetishism of epistemological individualism, according to which the idiosyncratic travails of the self during fieldwork is the exclusive basis of ethnographic knowledge. Consequently, it has sanctioned the ethnographer’s egotistic academic quest, which breeds aloofness towards the existential concerns of cultural others encountered in the field. This disposition is cloaked under the euphemism of “scholarly detachment” and is promoted by the discipline’s code of ethics, which privileges procedural accountability to professional bureaucracies over social accountability to research subjects. In contrast, this book proposes an approach (see Chapter 1 for details) that emancipates human scientists/anthropologists

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from the excessive foregrounding of their individuality as constituted through epistemic entanglements with competing national intellectual traditions and their region-bound repertoire of travelling theories as an obligatory matrix of anthropological knowledge production (Bourdieu 2003). The metropolitan academy’s promotion of the enclosure of disciplinary practitioners within the epistemic provincialism of their national anthropological fields, or “national container paradigms” (see Barth et al. 2005), has led to these practitioners’ subjection to the tyranny of their biosocial inheritance or ethnocultural particularities as the ineluctable filtering prisms for their knowledge production practices. The end result of this malignant narcissism is a self-centric form of knowledge production that is existentially dependent on hierarchical and asymmetric relations between researchers and research subjects. This selfcentrism of a Narcissus-inspired anthropology has blurred the boundaries between ethnography and “ego-graphy”, which prioritizes the cognitive preferences, interpretive predilections and professional ambition of the anthropologist-ethnographer as the determining motivation and the primary frame of reference for the study of communities. These egographic practices constitute the discipline’s prevailing norms, which sanction the amalgamation of self-contemplation with description of the world. This orientation toward ego-graphy is manifested, for example, in the use of the conventional mise-en-scène vignettes that foreground the anthropologist’s encounter with field natives as a means of establishing experiential authenticity and authorial authority. The latter tend to mutate into an arrogant “ethical obligation” to give voice to those natives. An anthropological practice emancipated from a narcissistic muse would replace these vignettes with the historical contextualization of the community’s experience. A more significant obstacle to a non-narcissistic practice of anthropology is the permanent identification of the conventional practice of anthropology with ethnography as its signature method. That method was founded on a self-other dialectic that is ineradicably tethered to a notion of “otherness” based on “difference” as a pejorative epithet inscribed within a hierarchical scale. This dialectic was the microcosmic instantiation of the “us-them” dialectic that served as one of the foundational premises of imperialism and its ethnocultural hierarchies (cf. Coronil 1996: 73). Ingold, however, correctly noted that “anthropology and ethnography are endeavours of different kinds”: Anthropology “is an inquiry in the conditions and possibilities of human life in the world”;

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while ethnography’s objective “is to describe the lives of people other than ourselves” (2008: 88–89, 69). Ingold’s sundering of the presumed indelible umbilical cord between ethnography and anthropology is crucial to the discipline’s emancipation from its self-centric and identity-driven research protocol. His definition of ethnography, however, re-affirms the acceptability of a number of troubling doxa about its practice: (a) it upholds that the condition of possibility for ethnographic practice is exclusively between a foreign self and a native other, which suggests that it is methodologically illegitimate for a “native” to study other natives; (b) it naturalizes its accommodation to a non-reciprocal project of knowledge production through data colonialism; (c) it confirms its existential dependence on an unbridgeable ethnocultural dichotomy and hierarchy, between ethnographers and their research subjects; and (d) it normalizes the un-achievability of a reciprocity of understanding between foreign researchers and native research subjects. Ingold’s definition betrays a disqualifying rule of engagement when it comes to the non-Western disciplinary practitioner: “The conditions for participating in the making of an anthropological discourse is, for the non-Western anthropologist, an act of renunciation of the contemporary possibilities within her own culture” (Das 1995: 33). This illiberal conditionality re-affirms West-stream anthropology’s archetypal aporias of relationality: (a) a structural hierarchy, which was anchored to an imperialist cartography of praxis in non-Western social formations and that authorized the persistent hierarchical ranking of the West over the Rest; and (b) a relational asymmetry, which was based on a supremacist sociointeractional protocol toward ethno-culturally different research subjects and that perpetuated the ethnic sorting and ranking of the discipline’s practitioners and their segregation from research subjects. This segregationist ethic, which is still practiced, was classically formulated by Geertz as follows: Anthropology’s “subjects and its audience were not only separable but morally disconnected, that the first were to be described and not addressed, the second informed but not implicated” (1988: 132). In effect, the practice of West-stream anthropology is predicated on a relationship of non-reciprocity. In contrast, mesography disembeds anthropology from its relational and structural legacies of empire, as it situates its practice within an emergent polycentric world order without a center or periphery, and does not impose exclusionary ethnocultural prerequisites on its practitioners (see Chapter 1).

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These relational aporias are exacerbated by the intrinsic narcissism of anthropological discourse, which reifies disciplinary practice into “a mandarin culture maintained by a sophisticated minority in a superior language” (Mishra 2017: 174). This is formulated as an ineluctable axiom: “anthropological analysis achieves its proximity to and replication of its subjects’ comprehension through a form of… knowledge that belongs distinctly to itself” and is unavailable to its research subjects (Strathern 1988: xi). Thirty years later, Strathern confirms that this axiom is an intrinsic feature of West-stream anthropology and is thus generative of its segregationist ethic, data colonialism and non-reciprocity ethos. As she confesses that this axiom reflects “two deep-seated Euro-American assumptions: first, that knowledge can be detached from those who produce it and can be circulated or exchanged without reference to them; second, that its effect is dependent not on such persons (interpersonal relations), but on the correctness of its correlation with apparently independently occurring phenomena (epistemic relations)” (Strathern 2018: 34). These assumptions are integral to the hegemonic consensus about the nature of West-stream anthropological knowledge that it is inescapably “the result of applying concepts that are extrinsic to their object” (Viveiros de Castro 2013: 477). This rationalization of the chronic cognitive dissonance and semantic distance between the discipline’s knowledge claims and its subjects’ self-understandings into an epistemic fatality for anthropologists, not only makes a mockery of their self-description as “scholars of human diversity”, but also saddles their knowledge claims with an intrinsic trust deficit. This axiom not only betrays the imperious standpoint of detached metropolitan observers wielding an expropriating metalanguage, but also confirms the extractive and non-reciprocal nature of the prevailing mode of anthropological knowledge production as a disciplinary norm. In effect, these relational aporias have sustained practitioners’ morally deplorable dispositions toward research subjects: (a) a paternalist intellectual sensibility that prioritizes an instrumental “emotional empathy” (i.e., condescending identification with their personal circumstances) while neglecting an ethical “cognitive empathy” (i.e., non-self-centric understanding of their collective social realities); and (b) a colonialist ethic of interpretation trough the discursive expropriation of local symbolic capital, which exemplifies the absence of cognitive empathy (Bloom 2016). These two dispositions have sustained West-stream anthropology’s entanglement with an endemic exoticism: The misrecognition of others

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due to the appropriation of their indigenous self-conception into travelling theories’ exogenous idioms of interpretation (see Kapferer and Theodossopoulos 2016). Consequently, research subjects are dispossessed of any sovereignty over their own meaning-making practices. As a result, West-stream anthropology and its underpinning method—ethno/egography—have lapsed into a regime of praxis that authorizes a form of “symbolic cannibalism”: “the dissolution of the other’s point of view on him- or herself in our point of view on ourselves” (Descola 2014). Furthermore, the above described practices have relied on an “epistemology of ignorance”: A knowledge production practice that is historically embedded within a political economy of Western domination, which has bequeathed certain norms of cognition (e.g., exclusive reliance on self-centered templates of cultural appropriation) that engender a chronic pattern of cognitive dysfunctions (e.g., ethno-centric interpretivism) that disable the capacity of the knowing agent to understand the cultural otherness of research subjects (cf. Mills 1997: 18). Moreover, anthropologists have instrumentalized the discipline for largely self-serving ends through their quest for disciplinary preservation through institutional niche-building, and their pursuit of professional distinction for career enhancement (see Chapter 1). Consequently, West-stream anthropology has lapsed into a modality of research and a practice of representation that thrive on the “dialectic of distance and indifference.” The privileging of these self-serving ends has relegated the primary task of anthropology— namely, the elucidation of the human condition for emancipatory action— to the status of an incidental by-product. Finally, there is the pandemic failure of disciplinary practitioners to heed Kant’s injunction towards self-enlightenment as a “departure from self-imposed immaturity” due to their obsessive commitment to an anachronistic tradition-sustaining mode of producing knowledge, instead of focusing on the production of contextually-relevant kinds of knowledge (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff 2012b: xxix).

Oppositional Standpoint: Constructive Iconoclasm I claim exemption from this “self-imposed immaturity” due to my peculiar occupational itinerary, which was marked by a shift in vocational allegiance: From the disabling self-indoctrination with “development” as a United Nations staff, which turned out to promote social change as the local parody of an imported societal model; to my intellectual

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re-incarnation in the discipline of anthropology. However, I resolved that I would not relapse into my previous state of intellectual intoxication with, or in Bourdieu’s term “doxic submission” to, any discipline’s established repertoire of assumptions, concepts and theories, and thus would be vigilant against premature disciplinary co-optation—especially of anthropology’s theology of otherness. Moreover, I was deprived of a deference-inducing flag to follow, or of a distinguished compatriot maître-penseur as precursor to emulate, at least, not in the region where I metamorphosed from development missionary into anthropologistin-residence. Indeed, to facilitate recognition of my place of origin I was introduced to my conscripted hosts in the field as coming from the country of my university, as my own “was not known.” The silver lining under this litany of disenfranchisements is that I had no imperialist guilt to assuage, no fealty to a national disciplinary tradition except to my own intellectual sovereignty constrained by local realities, no “us vs. them” rampart to climb over, and no ethnic superiority or inferiority complex to dissimulate under some contrived “fellow feelings” for the locals. I was animated by the credo of autonomous epistemic agency, which requires a truth-seeking ethos. This entailed the abandonment of the pursuit of interpretive virtuosity through travelling theory-testing, for the practice of a genuinely human-centric science (see below). Animated by this credo, I resorted to travelling between distant places and spaces empowered by an old fashion belief in the availability of a truth (see Blackburn 2018) that would resonate with the local realities of those I was studying. To uncover such a truth as a fieldworker, I was guided by a practical ethos that entails the following practices: The adoption of a research orientation that is fashioned through a prior familiarization with the history of the selected domain of study, and then through field contingencies engendered by the research context and process; the rejection of an a priory submission to disciplinary conventions that privilege the validation of anthropology’s ancestral legacies, or of its more recent fads, through demonstrating the pertinence of the received suppositions of its methodological and theoretical repertoire; the avoidance of the still prevalent extractive relations between researcher and research subjects that is dissimulated under a patronizing ethical obligation of “giving voice” to cultural others, which has saddled the discipline with an intellectual philanthropy syndrome (i.e., a philanthropology); and, ultimately, the generation of useful cognitive resources to our (researcher and research subjects) collective emancipatory aspirations.

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My oppositional attitude towards the conventional practice of anthropology was not a biographic compulsion, but a cultivated attitude that is available to conscientious practitioners who feel that the human condition is too important to be left captive of the discipline’s lingering accommodation to a colonial mode of knowledge production under the aegis of Occidental cosmopolitanism; or as the plaything of an academic apparatchik consumed by the quest for “theoretically innovative engagements.” This epistemic obsession led the discipline into a misanthropic cul-de-sac: The fetishism of the everyday life of ordinary people while producing knowledge that is irrelevant to its amelioration or indifferent about its fate. An additional enabling condition in developing my oppositional attitude was the financial independence afforded me by my decade-long occupation as a development professional at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in four field stations (Mauritania, Somalia, Kenya and Yemen). This allowed me not to follow through on my initial aspiration to join academia’s practices of “elite” patronage, adjunctocracy employment regime, and quantity over quality “audit culture” after obtaining my D.Phil. degree. I was free to pursue a socio-intellectual vocation instead of chasing a career niche. Therefore, I avoided the professional deformation induced by the obligatory task of teaching the conventional anthropological literature and its thoughtcolonizing and groupthink syndrome-producing effects. Accordingly, this book is not motivated by academic career-building or tenure track-riding objectives and thus is free of the associated conformist exigencies to the discipline’s traditional knowledge production practices. This oppositional attitude is best described as a constructive iconoclasm animated by an indomitable quest for alternatives to travelling “regimes of truth” that are reified into a set menu of thematic entry points and interpretive frameworks promoted by epistemic communities constituted around shared assumptions and “networked facts” with which research domains are colonized. Accordingly, this oppositional attitude entails the following set of combative epistemic practices that could stimulate a “productive dissensus” within West-stream anthropology: An ideational insurgency against established disciplinary diktats; a critical engagement with the existing knowledge repertoire relevant to the social formation under study; a skeptical demeanor toward the interpretations of fellow observers; a contestatory disposition toward the premature enclosure of communities within region-specific theoretical frameworks and vis-à-vis the hegemonic consensus on the knowledge production protocols for their “social

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construction”; an avoidance of the premature comparative practice of extensive referencing of the theoretical literature, which tends to serve as a local knowledge gap-filling exercise; an uncompromising break with the discipline’s founding, and still defining, refusal to be categorized as a social science; and ultimately a rejection of the prevailing epistemological malpractice of appropriating fieldwork data into travelling theorymediated interpretive parodies of local life. The fieldwork that followed from this oppositional attitude sought to carve a different path from the idealized mode of ethnographic immersion—namely, the self-serving quest for rapport as a “participant-observer” fetishized by the discipline. This opportunistic rapport-seeking entails the ritualistic performance of an “Oriental masquerade” during fieldwork: “to want to become, and not only to master, the Other” (Shatz 2019). Moreover, beyond its use as a rapport-seeking means, this “Oriental masquerade” is deployed as a discursive strategy through the representational practice of “ethnographic ventriloquism” discussed above. I refused to impersonate the “fictive native” role in my quest for communion with Soqotrans or to mimic the ventriloquist in representing them. The end result was that my experience unaided by the discipline’s orthodoxies allowed me to formulate an alternative conception of fieldwork as a research process disassociated from the notion of ethnography, and to abandon the latter in favor of mesography as a new ethos of inquiry for a post-exotic anthropology (see Chapter 1). My voluntary confinement as a resident scholar in Yemen in a state of permanent fieldwork—a form of lived praxis that blurs the boundary between living and researching, or work and life—free of funding grantdependent time limitation was instrumental in formulating and sustaining my oppositional attitude towards conventional disciplinary practices and which enabled my emancipation from “self-imposed immaturity.” This situation afforded me an “experiential thoroughness” that removed the home-field dichotomy of the relatively short one-year grant-driven duration of conventional anthropology’s “ethnographic immersion”, which inexorably engenders an exoticizing reflex due to its inherent bond with data colonialism. The latter entails the repatriation of field data to an institutional milieu (e.g., the metropolitan university) alien to the fieldwork context, which leads in turn to the interpretive decontextualization of communities’ lifeworld through filling data gaps with travelling theorymediated interpretations. Hann (2009: 131) has called this discursive practice the “theft of anthropology”: It entails an anarchic eclecticism informed by an opportunistic theory selection, sophistic interpretation,

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and empirically challenged representation. This “theft of anthropology” syndrome is exacerbated by the “postmodernist skepticism about the very notion of truth”, which is now seen as a “fugitive and endlessly contestable” notion (Blackburn 2018: 1). Accordingly, the resulting ethnography not only simulates the contrived authenticity of a TV reality show, but also betrays a casualness with the veracity of its representations. Indeed, one anthropologist embraces the notion of “post-truth” as the common practice within the discipline: “let us acknowledge that the plane of the real can tilt far more wildly and profoundly with any good story of ours” (Pandian 2019: 7). This has saddled ethnography’s knowledge claims with an authenticity and trust deficit. Moreover, the related practices are not only circumscribing the discipline’s primary purpose to an egoistic quest for the professional self-realization of its practitioners, but also are sustaining the latter’s “symbolic cannibalism” of research subjects’ lifeworld. This semiotic empire-building quest seems to be intrinsic to the ethnographer’s mandate as exemplified by Malinowski, the “father” of the ethnographic method, who confessed his “Feeling of ownership” toward his research subjects on the Trobriand Islands and declared that “It is I who will describe them or create them”. (Malinowski 1967: 140) This “pilfering” imperative and its effects threaten to remain a permanent condition, as the time period required for a true immersion in the local context and thus to free fieldworkers of the socio-intellectual crutches from their native grounds exceeds the one-year minimum regarded as a disciplinary norm. The result is the perfunctory performance of ethnography due to funding-based time constraints, and the practice of substituting travelling theory-mediated interpretations for the lack of local insights. This leads to an inherent interpretive unreliability and plausibility deficit of knowledge claims that are based on temporally inadequate residence. Moreover, it engenders a permanent dilemma between the time constraint of grant-funded ethnography, which reduces anthropological research into a data mop-up operation that mimics a commando mission, and the long-term residence requirement of a mesography and its deep immersion in the social milieu of the research context, living and observing in permanence.

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Interstitial Zone: Straddling Africa and Arabia Yemen once occupied the “prestige zone” of anthropology’s regional paradigm within its division of the world into culture areas. These anthropologically demarcated zones were encapsulated within master concepts (e.g., tribes and Islam) that claim to represent their sociocultural totality. This conceptual encapsulation led to the establishment of an enduring intellectual architecture that structured the way peoples, societies, and cultures “incarcerated” in those regions were apprehended and rendered familiar to metropolitan audiences (Abu-Lughod 1989). This familiarization was done through deeply ingrained biases which privileged certain objects and the exclusion of others for anthropological attention. The latter was, and still is, subservient to a metropolitan state-centric nexus between the politics of research grant-giving agencies, the discipline’s topical priority, and the region’s geopolitical importance to Western powers (Deeb and Winegar 2016). In the case of Yemen, prior to the 1980s the thematic focus was on the “stratified mosaic society” of provincial towns, and subsequently the topical priority became the organization of its polity around segmentary tribal formations as the indubitable foundation of state-society-community relations that was impervious to historical change. Since 9/11, Yemen has fallen into a “danger zone” that encompasses the entire West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region and has become a privileged target of the discipline of “security studies.” In the 2017 Global Terrorism Index Yemen was ranked 6 out 162 countries and had a score of 7.88 out of a maximum of 10. Accordingly, the prevailing topical and research focus on Yemen is dictated by the shifting geopolitical and security concerns of the West and the potential threats posed by its status as a failing state and its entanglements with externally fomented radical Islam and internally self-destructive terrorism. Soqotra, however, occupies a hyphenated geo-cultural space that resists encapsulation within a pre-configured regional framework and its imported topical and thematic priorities. Accordingly, there are no a priori selected thematic or topical entry points dictated by established regional paradigms with which to dismember the research domain in order to interpret it within imported theoretical frameworks. Indeed, my study of Soqotra is devoid of any opportunistic accommodation to an externally-imposed menu of topical choices and their accompanying

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lexical, conceptual, and theoretical repertoires. As there is no monotopical entry point. Instead, the study is primarily informed by an analysis of the issues “thrown-up” by the transitional process of a communal social formation driven by agonistic relations between a plethora of differently positioned actors and their multilayered interactions with the state’s administrative apparatus, the national society, the regional diaspora, and with state-invited or self-appointed international protectors of the island’s environment. As a sub-national entity within the political jurisdiction of the Yemeni state, Soqotra represents a microcosm of state-nation-society-community relations in Yemen, which affords a bottom-up perspective on the nature of the Yemeni state and from which to assess the adequacy of a recent spate of travelling theorymediated studies of state-society relations in Yemen (e.g., Day 2012; Willis 2012; Phillips 2008; Wedeen 2008). Indeed, the book pries open, and elucidates the empirically-grounded and historically-informed workings (not the theory-prescribed or interpretively-imagined operation) of state-community relations in Yemen. Accordingly, I avoid travelling theories with their imported themes and presumption about what is analytically significant. In doing so, my approach in this book offers a jarring contrast to the recent application of West-stream anthropology’s ethnographic method to Soqotra (Peutz 2018). That book is based on a monothematic entry point borrowed from the shelf of travelling theories (“performing heritage”). More significantly, the book excessively conforms to the ethnographic method’s ideal narrative as a potpourri of self-centric vignettes and self-absorbed descriptions and interpretations. As a result, it resembles a fieldwork memoir based on an auto-ethnography through a meandering confessional. The case of Soqotra offers an intra-national, and inter-regional, comparative perspective that eschews the conventional disciplinary recourse to the conceptual albatross of tribalism and the epistemological cul-de-sac it has engendered in the historical anthropology of Yemen (Dresch 1989, 2001, 2009). Beyond the role of tribalism—which is an epiphenomenon of a contingent configuration of local factors and the partial effect of historical path-dependence (see Chapter 2)—this study challenges the archaic presuppositions of the anthropology of the WANA region as there is no evidence of historical immutability, no endemic resistance to modernity, or the prevalence of cultural inertia that are presumed to afflict this region’s social formations (e.g., Lindholm 2002; Salzman 2008). In contrast, Soqotra is a transitional social formation that is fully

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engaged in this post-exotic conjuncture as its inhabitants cannot be categorized as unreceptive traditionalists, voluntary isolationists or uncritical assimilationists, but are discriminating participants in the local fashioning of the modern influences on their homeland. This discriminating attitude towards modern influences is also applied to their past, as Soqotrans betray a deliberate amnesia through the selective disavowal of cultural practices associated with the Sultanate period, which they dismiss by invoking the term that represents the pre-Islamic dark age: al-j¯ ahiliyya (the age of ignorance of Allah). Soqotrans constitute an aspirational community animated by a practical imperative: To emancipate themselves from the haunting collective historical memory, and still contemporary experience, of enduring political subordination and endemic material and social deprivations. Accordingly, the fieldwork-generated themes that are addressed in this book not only reflect Soqotrans’ current engagement with the exigencies of modernity, but also constitute an inventory of the crucial emerging vectors of change for future research about Soqotra’s transformation process. These themes include: Identity formation as a local effect of evolving state polity formation strategies and not an ontological inheritance informed by genealogical tradition (Chapter 4); communal economy as the outcome of the historically contingent priorities of the state’s political economy, and not configured by the inertia of traditional livelihood practices (Chapters 5 and 6); local history emerges out of a series of discontinuous conjunctures of the politics of state-community relations mediated by trans-local politics across an island-mainland divide and diaspora-homeland nexus (Chapter 7); state governance culture is the dominant structuring vector of the communal polity’s political agency and subjectivity, the development of its civic structures, and the scope of local democracy (Chapter 8); and Soqotrans’ self-recognition as an indigenous community in reaction to the shared phenomenon among Arab states, namely the persistent denial of official recognition and thus the structural exclusion of non-Arab ethno-cultural minorities as fully recognized members of the national polity (Epilogue). The cumulative impact of the above is an existential disjuncture and an affective antinomy between a state-imposed national identity and a culturally-embedded communal political subjectivity, identity and agency. These themes constitute the key dimensions of the communal transformation process that is anatomized in this book.

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Engaging Locals: Ethic of Reciprocity I turn now to another issue concerning one of the prerequisites of the ethical orientation of a mesographic approach, namely, the inclusion of members of the researched community as an integral part of the audience of research results through the ethos of discursive reciprocity (see Chapter 1 for details). This ethos seeks to remedy the normative practice of West-stream anthropology of repatriating data about local reality to the academy through the act of “engaging others where they are and representing them where they are not” (Geertz 1988: 130). It is precisely this practice of data extraction and repatriation with its distance-mediated relationality, and absence-enabled representation of others located elsewhere that define an exotic anthropology. The adoption of an ethic of reciprocity not only requires the engagement of research subjects where they are, but also that they are addressed directly and not only spoken of in absentia. Accordingly, this book is a belated response to Soqotra’s premiere local intellectual and autodidact historian, Ahmed al-Anbali, who “honored” me in his book, History of Soqotra Island, with the following attack: It was God’s will that I met one of those tourists on some trips, who claimed (za‘am) [skeptical of my motives] to be doing research in anthropology (‘ilm al-¯ ajn¯ as ) on the island. And following a heated conversation (h.ad¯ıth s¯ akhin) about Soqotra, its population, language, religion, and affiliation, in which that researcher (dhalik al-b¯ ah.th) [condescending connotation] tried to convince me that all these issues are unrelated to an Arab heritage. His justification is that the Arabs did not have a language or presence [in Soqotra] before Islam. However, I asked him to prove that with tangible evidence if he is right. As he could not, and would not, I told him that his methodology is inadequate, and that he has committed unforgivable mistakes, him and people like him [i.e., tourists and/ Orientalists], when he carried out a field study and ignored historical references and did not benefit from the Arabic library. And as a result, his kind of research does not deserve the least of attention (¯ adna ¯ıhtim¯ am) [categorical dismissal]. (al-Anbali 2007: 55)

This is not my recollection of the brief and rather calm encounter that took place in Hadiboh airport awaiting the plane that would take him back to the United Arab Emirates where he is a permanent resident, while I was going to Sana‘a’ where I was scholar in residence, on one my recuperative excursions from fieldwork’s austere living conditions. The irony

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here is that we were both “tourists on some trips”, given our permanent residential location elsewhere. His vantage point, however, is that of a native son versus an interloping foreigner preparing to make knowledge claims about his motherland. Al-Anbali’s skeptical demeanor toward my very presence on the island, is actually an innate proclivity characterized by a deep suspicion of the intellectual honesty, ethnic eligibility, and scholarly motivation of foreign researchers studying his homeland, and who are invariably ascribed the denigrating epithet of “Orientalists” (al-mustashriq¯ın). This is revealed in his response to an interview question about such researchers: “The problem lies in ascertaining the veracity of their information… because most of them depend on myths… I say for each country and each heritage nobody can truly understand it and present it as it is, except for its native sons”. (Kafayin 2010:17) While al-Anbali’s point of view betrays nativist anxieties, I nevertheless sympathize with it, given foreign researchers’ dependence on hermeneutically ethnocentric travelling theories and the symbolic violence they authorize on native cultures. Noteworthy, is that al-Anbali’s nativist anxieties are mirrored in, and justified by, the reflexive denial by West-stream practitioners about the intrinsic anomalies of the dominant practice of anthropology: (a) the intellectual hubris of pre-figuring the fieldwork experience within the registers of travelling theories and the subsequent analytical instrumentalization of research subjects and contexts; (b) the related interpretive misdemeanors (that is, the ostensibly plausible but empirically dubious interpretations) that are rationalized as “productive misunderstandings” of the social reality of communities; (c) the social accountability deficit of anthropological knowledge toward the existential predicaments of researched communities; and (d) the lack of reciprocity epitomized in the exclusion of researched subjects as audience of research results. Paradoxically, these anomalies are not seen as such by practitioners of West-stream anthropology. This is because the primary purpose of their exoticizing ethnographies is to represent and interpret non-Western societies to mostly, if not exclusively, Western academic audiences. The quest for an ethos of discursive reciprocity that would establish more equitable “cultural terms of trade” between anthropologists and research subjects entails: (a) the recognition and renunciation of the practice of segregating research subjects from research audiences through their inclusion as integral members of the research audience; (b) the critical engagement with the work of local intellectuals by challenging their nativist claim of privileged access to local subjects and knowledge; and (c) the abandonment of

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the self-imposed and condescending redemptive obligations toward field interlocutors. In responding to al-Anbali, I hope to confirm to him that I was actually “doing research in anthropology”, and not being a j¯ as¯ us (spy) on behalf of some foreign powers, or an “Orientalist” purveying myths about Soqotra. More important than al-Anbali, however, is the ever increasing numbers of university educated Soqotrans who are tri-lingual and are gradually consolidating into a critical mass of avid knowledge-seekers and knowledge-producers whom I wish to address with this book. Indeed, my practice of an inclusive ethos, or of a discursive ethic of reciprocity, is through packaging the local knowledge I acquired from the Soqotran community into potentially actionable resources for its members’ individual educational quest or for the collective construction of a vision of their homeland’s future. It is my fervent hope that this book will be useful, first and foremost, to Soqotrans in their quest for a deeper understanding of the forces shaping their destiny and in their attempt to harness them, and second to the community of aspiring practitioners of an authentically human science that is no longer beholden to West-stream anthropology and its travelling theories.

Reclaiming Anthropology as a Human Science: Beyond the West-Rest Antinomy A generation of “critique of anthropology” and its various reformist incarnations (Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus and Fischer 1986) have produced a minimalist “de-Westoxication” of disciplinary practice (McGrane 1989). As a result, there still prevails a persistent affirmation that “Anthropology is a Western mode of knowledge, and it continues to revolve around the definition of cultural ‘otherness’ as non-Western-ness” (Gledhill 2000: 239). This affirmation is true only in a retrospective sense, that is, if a scholar’s historical horizon is still entrenched in nostalgia about the uncontested hegemony of the West during the colonial era. Prospectively, however, it is patently false, given the impending demise of the current hierarchically structured world order due to the counterhegemonic redistribution of political and economic power among the world’s social formations. The latter are being reconfigured into a polycentric “plural regionalization” of the world system that will eventually demote the reigning politico-cultural hegemons into mere regional actors among others within a post-Western-centric geopolitical order (ISSC

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2010). This is the background for my use of the term Global South as a provisional geographical idiom and epistemological space that is emblematic of an emergent “pluriversality” that is displacing Western universality and is predicated on the continuing transformation of the world’s geopolitical architecture. Mignolo’s definition of the term Global South captures its emancipatory promise: It “refers to epistemic places [and geographic spaces] where global futures are being forged by delinking from the colonial matrix of power” (2011a: 184). In this emerging context, the affirmation that anthropology is indelibly Western is a selfserving essentialization; because the dominant identity of a disciplinary formation is a historical contingency and not an ontological fatality. Nevertheless, attempts to articulate from the Global South an alternative vision to this Eurocentric encapsulation of the discipline turned out to be false prophecies, which are mired in epistemological contradictions. As their advocates are merely engaged in a self-deluding “performative radicalism” that effectually sustains the disciplinary status quo mired in neoliberal affinities. Three such attempts are briefly reviewed below: • “Theory from the South”: Meta-Profiling This “theory” emanates from a few scholars from European settler states in the Global South who are opportunistically using their biogeographic idiosyncrasies as the basis of an ethnicized epistemological privilege to formulate a “Theory from the South.” Its protagonists either promote a hermeneutics of diversity through an epistemically charitable and redemptive evaluation of the modern relevance of social scientists from the Global South (Connell 2007); or impersonate allegorists of the apocalypse who indulge in defamatory comparisons of the Global South vis-à-vis the Global North. The latter case is epitomized in the text arrogantly titled Theory from the South: or, How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012a). In it, the South merely provides a convenient setting to construct allegories about how life in common will lapse into an epidemic of societal dysfunctions engendered by the spread of neoliberalism in Africa that will ultimately reverberate back to the North. This represents an egregious form of negative geographic, cultural, socioeconomic and racial profiling on a continental scale. As Africa is used as an exemplar of the Global South’s perennial archetype of an abject cartography of endemic societal failures.

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Accordingly, the continent is instrumentalized as a “futuristic auguring” and “spatial teleology” for the coming neoliberal dystopia on a global scale. These theologians of the universal reach of neoliberalism imbued with a prophetic conceit are de facto practitioners of “entropology”, which is Lévi-Strauss’ term that melds entropy to anthropology: It refers (in my adapted definition) to the study of the homogenization of the planet’s cultural formations (1992: 414). These “entropologists”, as high-ranking members of the indentured service class to the West’s “totalized system of power” over the Rest, as Sahlins puts it, have reified an entire continent and its multitude of peoples and cultures to the singular logic and predatory tentacles of neoliberalism. In doing so, their “theory from the South” is a “reductionist implement” that have dispossessed the totality of Africans of their agency to envision and pursue alternative futures that could defy neoliberalism’s misanthropic ideal of reifying the totality of life into tradable commodities. In effect, this contrived “theory” is articulating the morally craven and empirically false status quo-supporting “end of history” rationale that confirms the reactionary maxim of neoliberalism’s chief zealot (Margaret Thatcher): “There Is No Alternative” (TINA) to this dystopian regime, which will permanently and inescapably colonize the entire planet. Moreover, this “theory” has merely performed an opportunistic inversion of the teleology of Occidental cosmopolitanism: the Rest’s contemporary predicaments as the West’s ultimate destiny. Ultimately, it is an expression of Eurocentrism’s vulgar ontology: the reduction of the existence of the other to the “totalizing interpretive imperium” of the Western self. • Postcolonialism: Comprador Epistemology Postcolonialism abandoned its inaugural promise as a radical interdisciplinary field of enquiry and political-epistemic commitment to social transformation, when it mutated into a neo-colonial epistemology as an instrumentalized episteme for the self-promotion of comprador cosmopolitan academics from the Global South. This comprador intelligentsia’s enduring longing for metropolitan recognition has entangled them within an epistemological vassalage by practicing, as Wallerstein puts it, an “anti-Eurocentric Eurocentrism”: To critique Eurocentrism using its

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own epistemological premises (1997:101). Nandy called this effete antiEurocentrism that mimics what it opposes, the “second form of colonization” practiced by metropole-approved “ornamental dissenters” in the post-colony and in the metropolitan academy (1983: xi). Postcolonialism recuperates an alienating exoticism through the intervention of cosmopolitan “diasporic mediators” engaged in the compradorial representation of fellow natives through a form of neo-colonial academic discourse that has been mislabeled “postcolonial.” These diasporic mediators privileged the territories of the Global South and their peoples, but as mere sites for the virtual reconstruction of vernacular modernities as “exotic parodies” of metropolitan societies. Moreover, they deployed an accommodationist positionality that grandstands as a form of political opposition, through their advocacy of a post-nationalist ethos that promotes a kind of “comprador cosmopolitanism.” The latter led to a premature assimilation into an imagined global cultural ecumenicalism à la Davos. Consequently, they indulged in hyperbolic claims about anthropology as a craft “without ethnos and beyond cultures” thanks to the imagined hegemony of a border-transgressing and heterogenizing transnational public sphere that has dissolved the internal dynamics of local historicity (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 2–3). More importantly, postcolonial analytics are either entangled with travelling theorydependent interpretive mystifications of, or betray a chronic externalization of culpability for, the societal dysfunctions in the Global South. Lastly, postcolonialism’s ideational resources for research (i.e., themes and problems) are still circumscribed to the effects of empire and colonialism, while future possibilities are neglected. Finally, given the global political awakening and the corollary emergence of a geopolitical transition and its inexorable reconfiguration, if not demise, of the established North Atlantic-centric system of imperial power, it is time to abandon the increasingly anachronistic term “postcolonial” (see Chapter 1). • “World Anthropologies”: Epistemic Bantustans More recently, there emerged an academic movement called “world anthropologies” anchored to an increasingly obsolete center-periphery architecture of world power and promoted by disciplinary practitioners who, at least in its initial formulation (e.g., Restrepo and Escobar 2005; Ribeiro and Escobar 2006), seem to be promoting a derivative version

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of West-stream anthropology given its allegiance to postmodern theory. In fact, world anthropologies is a discursive hybrid of post-structuralism and postcolonialism that calls for a mystifying “academic cosmopolitics of otherness” in pursuit of an utterly banal aspiration: To promote “the importance of diversity for human kind” (Ribeiro 2006). This diversity, however, is articulated through a “plural monoculturalism” that federates the world’s peoples into geographically bounded, racially ranked and culturally segregated Bantustans as the peripheral dominions of a hegemonic Occidental cosmopolitanism. As the distinguishing feature of this network of scholars seems to be an epistemic standpoint founded on a “biographical situatedness” that betrays an academic instrumentalization of an ethnicized and gendered regional identity and its “victimary thinking” syndrome burdened with “self-inflicted if not self-serving agonies of identity” (Dirlik 2003: 118). This epistemic standpoint betrays an ingratiating self-exoticizing identity, which amounts to a surrender to the metropolitan academy’s crude recruitment logic based on diversity through “ethno-commodification.” Moreover, world anthropologies’ aspirational horizon is articulated within neoliberalism’s status quo affirming “one world imaginary” as it is motivated by the quest for intellectual recognition for Global South practitioners in Global North’s institutions (see WAN 2003). Furthermore, it offers a kind of “boutique disciplinary multiculturalism” that is readily coopted into the margins of EuroAmerican disciplinary status quo as a discursive ghetto in which disciplinary practitioners from non-Western places can showcase—in the words of the American Anthropologist editor when launching the new section on “World Anthropology”—“the varied configurations of the discipline around the world” (Weil 2014: 160). This rationale betrays, as Clifford puts it, that condescending gesture of “liberal privilege of ‘making space’ for marginal perspectives” from the Global South (2013: 3). Ultimately, world anthropologies practitioners’ claim to be engaged in “critical resistance” against West-stream anthropology’s epistemological and methodological hegemony is belied by their lamentable intellectual sycophancy on its “imperial epistemology” and its corollary practice of data colonialism founded on the assumption that “theory is located in the North while the subjects to be studied are located in the South” (Grosfoguel 2011). In sum, although the protagonists of postcolonialism and world anthropologies have initially sought to “provincialize Europe”, they have merely managed to acculturate themselves into it. This acculturation

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occurred through their uncritical embrace of the epistemic fetish of postmodernism with its “meme hustling” discourse and its obsession with cognition as an identity-mediated practice. This resulted in the adoption of the intellectual sensibility of a compradorial intelligentsia’s extreme Europhilia and self-loafing cultural mimicry, which led to a historical myopia that renounced their civilizational heritage. This attitude seems to confirm that colonialism’s project to transform the colonized native intelligentsia into the colonizer’s post-colonial intellectual clones has succeeded. Such a project was emblematically articulated by the British colonialist Thomas Macaulay (1835), whose dream for the emancipated colonials of South Asia was “to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect.” Alas, his success is epitomized in Chakrabarty’s astounding affirmation: “European thought is a gift to all of us. We can talk of provincializing it only in an anti-colonial spirit of gratitude” (2000: 225). This is essentially a neo-colonial “spirit of gratitude” given the enduring legacies of such an intellectual heritage: the endorsement of colonialism as an indispensable civilizing mission, the institutionalization of racialism as an ordained principle of social organization, and the justification of human exploitation as a “temporary” prerequisite of an economic liberalizing mission. This “gratitude” has bequeathed a lasting ambiguous political subjectivity and endemic intellectual sycophancy among the intelligentsia of the Global South. Moreover, it has sustained the hierarchical differentiation of the epistemic orientation of disciplinary practitioners based either on their ethno-national identities and/or geo-institutional locations: The hegemonic presumption of northern scholars driven by an ethos of epistemic conquest, and the mimetic reflexivity of southern ones animated by a credo of doxic submission. This credo’s indelible colonial stain is articulated by an Asian anthropologist in a cringe-worthy language that betrays unconditional intellectual surrender to the specious universality of a provincial canon: “to accept the core countries’ [i.e., the West] achievement as the common heritage of all anthropologists throughout the world” (Kuwayama 2004: 47). The antidote to both northern scholars’ hegemonic reflexivity entrenched in an ideology of Occidental cosmopolitanism and southern scholars’ mimetic reflexivity anchored to an intrinsic penchant toward appropriating metropolitan travelling theories entails the following: First, the abandonment of the narrow temporal span associated with the study

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of social formations in the Global South that circumscribes research topics to the effects of colonialism and empire, in favor of a historical purview that encompasses the pre-European past and a post-Western future. In this way anthropological practice renounces the provincial narrative that confines the relevant trajectory of humankind from the purported “autonomous” emergence of Greek civilization to the neo-liberal order as the societal endpoints of humanity. And second, the adoption of a non-ethnocentric and post-universalist epistemological standpoint, which resists the reflexive coat-tailing of the disciplinary status quo and asserts its autonomy from the false universalism and hegemonic pretensions of the prevailing or emerging ideological formations. The latter are manifested in: (a) neoliberalism as the epistemic patronage for the production of a colonizing knowledge whose ultimate aim is to affirm the universal supremacy of the West; and (b) the competing politics of cultural exceptionalism and the associated dogmatisms—in both its Western (still aspiring to a universal imperium while tethered to a Graecophilia-inspired Enlightenment as the historical destiny of humankind) and Eastern (animated either by a “messianic Eurasianism” or by Confucianism’s promise of global harmony) variants—that are contesting for symbolic hegemony within the global public sphere. It follows that disciplinary practice should be emancipated from the provincialism of its metropolitan fields and the associated oracular ruminations of its empire-enabled forefathers. The latter have bequeathed a dominant ethos of inquiry animated by a partisan politics of civilizational supremacy buttressed by stadial theories of societal development that produced tendentious comparative analyses of European social formations and non-Western ones as part of a “global linear thinking” that allows a singular evolutionary continuum. For example: Hegel’s ascending societal typology, the “Primitive”, the “Oriental”, and the “Western”; Marx’s linear transitional modes of production: Asiatic, ancient, feudal and capitalist; Weber’s Euro-exceptional “Protestant ethic” as a universal prerequisite for economic development and his Orientalist dichotomy between an evolving feudal Europe and a stagnating patrimonial East due to an “Islamic Ethic”; and Smith’s “invisible hand”, which has indelibly reified the human species into Homo economicus. The latter incarnate a human archetype who is congenitally motivated by self-interest and greed. This conception of human agency has corrupted our assumption about human motivations and circumscribed the horizon of human possibilities. Moreover, the oracular musings of these dead luminaries of Western

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social science have led to the hegemony of an anachronistic epistemology of ideal type social systems indelibly linked to an insular comparative hermeneutics and embedded within an Occidental cosmopolitanism that have generated specious axioms about the development of societies. These axioms have ever since encumbered the foundational assumptions of the explanatory schemas of all the modern social sciences into a West vs. Rest antinomy (see Hall 1992 for the origin of “the West vs. Rest” discourse). Indeed, one legacy of this ethos of inquiry is the “epistemological paradox,” in which the understanding of a cultural formation is inexorably mediated by the epistemic categories based on the historical experiences of another society (see Chapter 1). This legacy has vitiated our understanding of humanity’s evolution and contribution to the global sociocultural patrimony. This patrimony must be reclaimed from, what Reinhold Niebuhr called, the “bland fanatics of Western civilization… who regard the highly contingent achievements of our culture as the final form and norm of human existence” (quoted in Mishra 2017: 37). This reclamation process is a collective endeavor for knowledge workers willing to abandon their intellectual crutches whether as beneficiaries of empire or as its victims, and committed to the study of the emergent world order unaided by these exhausted intellectual traditions in order to contribute toward the stewardship of its future trajectory: From a Eurocentric ethno-science to a global-centric (but locale-specific) human science. This entails the categorical rejection of anthropology’s traditional definition as the “natural science” of non-Western societies, and its redefinition as a field-based science of the human condition in all societies. This redefinition would, at last, unshackle anthropology from its congenital association with the defamatory schematization of the world’s human population, which emerged from the long genealogy of Europe’s encounter with its external others. This resulted into the categorization of humans according to different cognitive capacities and ontological constitution and their ascription into asymmetric agencies in the domain of knowledge production: • The humanitas , representing civilized humanity as inhabitants of a regional ecumene made up of a succession of dominant ethnies (e.g., Greeks, Romans, Europeans and Euro-Americans) who were (and still are) animated by an enduring pretension of being “the elect

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portion of the terrestrial globe, the pearl of the sphere, the brain of a vast body” (Valéry 1919). • The anthropos , representing the cognitively and ontologically deficient hordes outside of that ecumene (e.g., savages, barbarians, primitives, slaves, colonized and postcolonials) who were (and still are) ascribed a permanent need for external civilizational tutelage and are condemned to be objects of study and represented in absentia in the learned annals of the humanitas (see Mignolo 2011b; Osamu 2006). It is this human geography that provided the discipline with its foundational research object (“primitive societies”), that circumscribed its spatial domain of research (non-Western places) and prescribed its traditional method of field research (ethnography). These features have remained its permanent parameters, and have inscribed its practice within a “paradigm of condescension” which induces a megalomaniac penchant in its practitioners’ interpretation of cultural others. Finally, the challenge that a countervailing praxis of anthropology seeks to address is best expressed in the following set of questions: “What practices of thinking and feeling, what dispositions and attitudes, what capacities can we cultivate to displace the familiar mode of” doing anthropology? (Gibson-Graham 2006: xvii). A collective commitment to this quest for a new set of practices, dispositions and capacities will ultimately rehabilitate the discipline into an authentically human science that serves as the fount of emancipatory social thought. More importantly, it would unshackle the dominant mode of disciplinary practice from its epistemic incarceration within the hegemonic “political-intellectual complex” constituted by neoliberalism, postmodernism and interpretivism. Only by abandoning, in Borofsky’s term (2011), this “imprisoning hegemony” can anthropology as a human science be liberated from its misanthropictravelling theory-obsessed discourse. This would enable the practice of anthropology (a) to reclaim its civic-mindedness, (b) to renew its implicit contract with the wider human community (as is, or should be, the case with all social sciences), and (c) to generate problem-solving and aspiration-enabling cognitive resources. Only then would anthropology be “ready to fully assume its new mission of being the theory and practice of the permanent decolonization of thought” (Viveiros de Castro 2009: 40). This thought decolonization would ultimately render anachronistic the denunciatory critique of the West and the semiotic colonization of

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the Rest, which are now obligatory discursive practices that serve as an intellectual rite-de-passage for scholars pursuing their disciplinary vocation across the North-South divide and along the East-West axis.

Caveat About Language: Against Linguistic Populism This book is a work of social science, which obligatorily employs the associated lexicon. Alas, in an emerging post-literate, audio-visually intensive and app-promoted ethos of intellectual convenience, there is an increasing intolerance toward discursive complexity that merely seeks to be faithful to the natural complexity of social life. This historical-cultural conjuncture promotes the use of language as “mental popcorn, meant to be rapidly consumed and forgotten” (Bowden 2018). As a result, writing is judged solely by its reader-friendliness—that is, it must cater to a facile intelligibility without the inconvenience of substantive understanding— and where a college level diction is disparaged as “jargon.” A modicum of linguistic populism that defends intellectual access by the “phantom common reader” is a necessary antidote to the lexical excesses of voguish postmodern academic prose. However, when it mutates into a dumbingdown crusade that imposes a stylistic uniformity as a hegemonic norm under, what Poole (2013) pithily derides as, “that shibboleth of dull pedants: ‘plain English’”, it is complicit in a diversity-bashing linguistic authoritarianism. This tacit linguistic authoritarianism cloaked under populistic mantras betrays an Anglo-Saxon nativist anxiety that is nostalgically anchored to the fatwa-like anachronistic injunctions contained in Orwell’s (1946) essay “Politics and the English Language.” The latter was written during the heydays of colonialism when English was the distinguishing symbolic capital of the courtiers of empire and it admonished against “stylistic vices” that would threatened the hegemony of the mono-cultural use of English as Anglospeak. Its legacy is a linguistic mono-culturalism that promotes the use of a mind-numbing “plain English”, which is oblivious to the fact that to write in English is not to mimic Anglo-American discursive idiosyncrasies (Pinker 2014), but to communicate in a global lingua franca whose native speakers have lost their hegemony over its mode of use (Kirkpatrick 2010). This convenient obliviousness has led to the following consequences: A provincial attachment to a minority audience of native Anglo-Saxons, which betrays a linguistic xenophobia towards the

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demographic diversity, divergent sensibility and international scope of the English writing and reading public; the imposition of a fictional common denominator in terms of readers’ stylistic preference (for a contrived lexical simplism and formulaic syntax), which promotes intellectual intolerance towards non-conforming discursive styles; the erasure of scholars’ discursive individuality for the sake of commercially motivated plebeian sympathies; and a condescending set of assumptions about “common” readers’ ingrained intellectual indolence, innate limited comprehension and irremediable sophistication deficit. Remarkably, Orwell’s anachronistic injunctions in favor of “plain English” are still touted as hegemonic norms, while his warnings about the banalization of truth through the corrosion of linguistic resources for critical thought are not heeded. The tragic end result of this form of intellectual pandering is the lowering of expectation on the part of both the general reading public and university audience about the robust effort quotient required to understand the plurality of forms of social life around the planet. Given this endemic condition, one feels obligated to apologize for using a social science lexicon and its multi-layered explanatory discourse, even if it is devoid of contrived sophistication. Indeed, according to one “common reader” advocate of “anthropology as a good read” through an aestheticized story-telling narrative for ninth-graders, it should avoid “needless erudition” (Ghodsee 2016: 1). This seemingly innocent exhortation to avoid social complexity betrays ethnography’s intrinsic aversion to the non-self-centric explanatory discourse of the social sciences in favor of the ego-graphic interpretive narrative encouraged by the “show don’t tell” literary credo. This credo licenses anthropologists to engage in the kind of “creative writing” that Geertz calls “ethnographic ventriloquism”: “the claim to speak not just about another form of life but to speak from within it” (Geertz 1988: 145). I prefer not to mimic this novelist manqué syndrome, which animates ethnographic discourse and encourages its populistic pandering to the “common reader.” Instead, I take take refuge in Karl Marx’s aspirational injunction against intellectual indolence and discursive pandering that a new generation of human scientists and their conscientious readers should heed: “There is no royal road to science and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits” (1872). Perhaps, I should invoke instead Gramsci’s less intimidating suggestion: “It will be necessary to resist the tendency to render easy that which cannot become easy without being distorted” (1971: 43). Indeed, the effort quotient

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required by producers and consumers of knowledge about the human experience is captured in Geertz’s observation: “Understanding social life entails… the restless making and remaking of facts and ideas” (1995: 117). Finally, related to my rejection of this cult of linguistic populism, is my refusal to participate in academia’s tacit “peer policing” ethos with its epistemically suppressive, ethnically bounded and socially exclusionary ramifications. Such an ethos allows a simulacra of critique of fellow scholars’ work as part of established epistemic communities’ guild ethos of collective self-defense against dissenters. Perry Anderson called this ethos the “culture of euphemism”: According to “which disagreeable realities are draped with decorous evasions or periphrases…. To any sensibility accustomed to this kind of verbal emulsion, calling a spade a spade is bound to be jarring” (quoted in Bidwai 2012). In the chapters that follow, I engage in a decorous evasion-avoiding discourse animated by a non-ethno/egocentric epistemological standpoint in contributing toward the collective quest to repossess our patrimonies, shared or otherwise, through the practice of an authentically human science. A final caveat about the discussion above and in the chapters that follows in both volumes: In making my case for the adoption of mesography, I am not suggesting that it is the only available method for the anthropological study of communities caught up in a historical epoch of continuous transition (see Carrier 2016). I am insisting, however, that West-stream anthropology has compromised its adaptability to a postEurocentric epoch as its practitioners remain committed to writing its obituary through: (a) its irredeemable fossilization within the Eurocentric ancient régime based on its fetishism of Enlightenment universalistic philosophical anthropology tethered to the anachronistic and ethnocentric universalism vs. relativism comparative paradigm; and (b) its ethnographic method’s inescapable circumscription within a self-centric interpretivist ethos that predisposes its practitioners toward symbolic cannibalism. For those who disagree, they are invited to critique my “mischaracterization” of their disciplinary practice and purpose. For those who agree, they are encouraged to enhance mesography’s applicability by engaging communities of research subjects anywhere in the world in a shared pursuit of their particular emancipatory paths. Regarding my account of Soqotra, I leave it to you the reader to compare and contrast it to others in evaluating their usefulness to your quest to understand the existential predicaments of a

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particular community in transition, which could illuminate the quandaries of communities elsewhere.

Structure of the Book: Presentation Rationale The book is based on the analytical integration of the multiple strands of information culled from the results of my initial eighteen months residence in Soqotra that started in February 2002 until July 2003. This was followed by multiple visits over more than a decade up to January 2014 and subsequently complemented by electronic communication with local interlocutors. This distance-mediated communication is due to the UAE’s protectorate regime in Soqotra since 2015 that discourages foreign researchers’ presence, at least those without the preferred national pedigree or organizational sponsorship. A preliminary reader’s guide is proposed below in the guise of a book overview that explains the rationale of its presentation, and which reflects the sequencing dynamics of the island’s transition process. The book represents an attempt at achieving the elusive anthropological ideal of a holistic account of a trans-locally constituted communal formation that can be described as a “total” community study. The following set of chapters (along with those contained in Volume II) cast a comprehensive net over the constitutive aspects of the island’s communal life in order to retrace the trajectory, and to describe the scope and depth, of its transformation as part of a still evolving transition process. Collectively, the chapters performed all of the five analytical tasks (i.e., historical biography, structural anatomy, strategic inventory, lexical genealogy, and processual analysis) that produce a mesography as an analytical synthesis of the complexly imbricated plethora of factors and actors constituting a communal social formation. The expository strategy is best captured in the metaphor of peeling an onion, as the chapters systematically dissect the overlapping layers of the multiple factors that structure Soqotra’s complex transitional transformation process. Accordingly, the book is organized into two parts, each with a set of chapters, which are structured into multiple sections, and further divided into sub-sections, that map the constitutive aspects of Soqotra’s evolving transition in their sprawling inter-connectedness. Although the chapters of the book are tightly integrated, each chapter can be read either in a sequential or topical order: Chapter 1 introduces the method—mesography—that underpins the construction of both volumes. It explains the emergence of a global

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context that necessitates the quest for an alternative method to study the contemporary world that encompasses Soqotra. Subsequently, it outlines a reconceptualized methodological infrastructure and the associated ethical covenant as well as a new conception of fieldwork. The rest of the chapters are organized into two parts under distinct aggregating themes: The first part elucidates the historical factors that engendered the processes of ecological, social and economic disarticulation, which initiated the waning of Soqotra’s pastoralist community. The second part narrates the different historical phases of the mainland state’s political incorporation of Soqotra and the multiple ramifications. Part I and its five chapters provide a broad contextualization of the relational contexts of the islanders’ communal life through the analytical description of the historical forces, the ecological milieu, the socio-political structure, and the traditional economy. Collectively, these chapters represent the traditional remnants of a rapidly de-traditionalizing social formation and its waning as a pastoral community. Chapter 2 provides an overview of Soqotra’s current predicaments engendered by the interventions of external actors’ clashing visions for the island. The role of the state’s policy regime and that of migration are highlighted as the key vectors of the island’s transition process. It identifies the locus of this communal change process through the “recursive relationship” between the Yemeni state and the Soqotran community, which establishes the condition of possibility for the trajectory of emergence of Soqotra as a communal polity. Also, the chapter examines the untenable practice of applying travelling theories and their conceptual repertoires in studying communities unrelated to the societies where these theories originated, and suggests an alternative approach. Chapter 3 explores the multiple ramifications of the human-environment dialectic through the domestication of the landscape, territorial organization, and cultural geography and their structuring effects on communal life. Chapter 4 sketches the initial social structure of the island under the Sultanate, and traces its mutation through the emergence of new modes of ethno-political identification under an evolving incorporation process. Chapter 5 analyzes the underpinnings of pastoralism in Soqotra as a mixed subsistence strategy in terms of livelihood practices, spatial mobility, residential modality, provides a genealogy of the island’s pastoral herd as an “endemic” species, and offers a provisional inventory. And Chapter 6 describes the current functioning of the pastoral economy of the island, which was once the dominant economy and is being relegated into an auxiliary livelihood, due to a

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disarticulation process between the subsistence economy of the hinterland and the state’s political economy. Part II and its two chapters recount the Yemeni state’s political conscription of Soqotrans into the national polity through forms of externally imposed sovereignty. Chapter 7 provides a historical account of the different phases of Soqotra’s political incorporation process, which articulates the series of institutional reconfigurations as well as the communal adjustment effects they engendered. Chapter 8 offers a case study of the translocation of the mainland’s state patronage culture of governance with its political regime and administrative practices. It explores the effects of the transferred mainland state governance culture on communal polity formation and local civic disposition in terms of citizens’ relationship to state institutions and their recourse to an infra-politics of contestation against the state; and it evaluates the impact of the above on the constitution of a communal public sphere. The book ends with an epilogue that makes the case for Soqotrans as an indigenous polity, which is a term that is largely avoided in all references to them. It offers a retrospective synopsis of the process of Soqotrans’ dawning consciousness of incarnating a collective identity as an indigenous community. It highlights the UN criteria for designating a community as indigenous and compares how Soqotrans fit into the established framework. It identifies the nature of Soqotrans’ conception of their indigeneity. And it evaluates the prospect of Soqotrans achieving their aspiration for recognition as an indigenous polity.

CHAPTER 1

Mesography as Paradigm for a Post-Exotic Anthropology: The Post-Ethnography Turn

This chapter introduces a new research praxis, namely mesography, to underpin the practice of a post-exotic anthropology, which heralds an overdue shift to a post-ethnography era. It identifies the nature of the changes that must be adopted in order to transition from the practice of an exotic to a post-exotic anthropology that can address the existential issues that are endangering our “art of living together.” Accordingly, the chapter undertakes the following tasks: situates the recourse to mesography within an epochal transition in disciplinary practice necessitated by an emergent global political conjuncture; highlights the three dimensions of a post-exotic anthropology as a domain of study; proposes a new ethical covenant for the practice of mesography; provides a tabular presentation on the entailments of a mesographic approach as the method for a post-exotic anthropology; and re-conceptualizes the nature of fieldwork associated with the practice of mesography. The ultimate aim is to institute a symbiosis between the epistemic ambitions of anthropology and the pragmatic concerns and emancipatory aspirations of communities of research subjects and a critical global audience of readers and scholars.

1.1 An Axial Era: Anthropology in a Post-Universalist Conjuncture Post-exotic anthropology is a field-based science of the human condition and the foundational cognitive tool for elucidating, and practically contributing toward realizing and sustaining, the “plurality of ways of © The Author(s) 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45638-2_1

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belonging and being” in the world. This is a world in the throes of a converging dual crisis: an ecological crisis engendered by the dawn of the Anthropocene that threatens the livability of our planet, and a cultural crisis induced by the resurgence of ethno-nationalism animated by a nostalgic recourse to a “retrotopia” that threatens the “art of living together” on the planet. Retrotopia entails the “rehabilitation of the tribal model of community, return to the concept of a primordial/pristine self, predetermined by non-cultural and culture-immune factors” (Bauman 2017: 12). This is the prevailing mood among the West’s former and current imperial states, their dominions within the European Union, their diaspora’s postcolonial settler states elsewhere, and even in some of their former colonial appanages (e.g., Hindutva India). As their “native” populations, or a significant segment of them, perceive demographic and cultural diversity in their midst and external technological and economic competition as existential threats to their history-endowed supremacy. In such a context, anthropology must reclaim its initial raison d’être as a mediator of the meaningful coexistence of a plurality of worldviews, value repertoires, societal configurations, and sociocultural ontologies. This would renew its abandoned promise of fostering an egalitarian global cross-cultural conversation. This is all the more urgent in view of an emergent polycentric world order that heralds an epistemological and methodological rupture with the Western cognitive empire and its hegemonic disciplinary praxis that assumed the structural permanence of a geopolitical hierarchy between a northern center and a southern periphery. 1.1.1

Emergent Pluriverse: Geopolitical Transition

Indeed, the emergent geopolitical transition from a post-colonial to a post-imperial world and the demise of an Atlantic-centric geopolitics are engendering “the dynamic shift in the world’s center of gravity from the West to the East, [… and] the accelerating surfacing of the restless phenomenon of global political awakening” (Brzezinski 2012: 5). For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. Global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination. (Brzezinski 2008)

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This awakening is heralding the dawn of an axial moment in global history in the wake of the unraveling of Western hegemony under historic duress. As it is ushering a geographical ecumenalism that irreversibly establishes the temporal coevalness of the world’s social formations and banishes their hierarchical ordering. More significantly, this shift in the world’s center of gravity is heralding a reversal in global power flows that are subverting the hegemonic assumption about neoliberalism’s geocultural singularization of the planet’s pluriverse of social formations, while producing the geocultural pluralization of the worldsystem beyond neoliberalism and its Atlantic-centric geographic axis. In effect, the emerging global landscape is a “No One’s World” that is without a hegemon’s Archimedean pedestal and devoid of a “consensual ecumene.” As “power is diffusing and politics diversifying, not one in which countries are converging toward the Western way” (Kupchan 2012: 3). Accordingly, a post-exotic anthropology must conceptually relocate disciplinary practice within a reconfigured metageographic imagination in order to recalibrate its practice with the emerging state of the world. This gravitational shift is one of the ramifications of the still incomplete decolonization process and the dethroning of colonialism’s structural legacies and epistemic hegemonies. One hegemony that is being dethroned is the “one world anthropology” and its facile accommodation to the tyranny of neoliberalism, or more accurately liberal imperialism. As this decolonization process has led to the “shattering of larger coherences … into smaller ones, uncertainly connected one with another, [and] has made relating local realities with overarching ones … extremely difficult” (Geertz 2000: 221). Noteworthy, is that this global power shift and the resulting decolonization effects were catalyzed, not through the dissemination of a westernizing neoliberalism according to the prevailing assumption, but through “the multiculturalization of international capital […which] produced a sense of dispersion, of particularity, of complexity, and of uncenteredness” and engendered a “more pluralistic pattern of relationships among the world’s peoples” (Geertz 2000: 220, 219). The end result of this heterogenizing process is a pluriversal civilizational order encompassing a plethora of heteromorphic sociocultural formations. Moreover, as Law observed, “there is no overarching logic or liberal institutions diplomatic or otherwise to mediate the different realities” between the social formations within the emergent pluriversal world (2015: 127).

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This Global South’s awakening has engendered a reaction from the Global North in the form of the “retrotopia” noted above and its paranoia-driven “identity geopolitics” based on a cross-nationally shared perception of relative “demographic, economic and political decline, and the loss of intellectual hegemony, [which] have plunged [them] into a vengeful despair” (Mishra 2018). This is manifested in illiberalizing Western societies as political parties are frantically harnessing national electorates into political communities around “the rapid mainstreaming of white supremacism” and virulent xenophobia. This has engendered an increasingly and widely shared perception among southern polities that the West is being dethroned from its self-arrogated “human presidency” pedestal as the pinnacle of social evolution and has gone rogue. This is manifested in the erosion of its global social capital, the loss of its vestigial moral credibility, the forfeiture of its political exemplarity within the global public sphere, which engendered a globally endemic ressentiment against it (Mishra 2017). This is accompanied by a consolidating geopolitical grammar of emancipated southern polities capable of “speaking their own lines” on the global stage. Geertz warned a generation ago that these emancipating polities have made the traditional role of “the anthropologist […as a] tribune for the unheard, a representer of the unseen, a kenner of the misconstrued, increasingly difficult to sustain” (1988: 133). More importantly, such a world of politically and culturally assertive polities emancipated from the tutelage of empire is heralding a postuniversalist phase in the practice of the social sciences, which entails the abandonment of the delusional universal mandate of West-stream travelling theory. In recognition of this eventuality, Bruno Latour’s magnum opus (2013) is dedicated to establishing a symmetrical “comparative anthropology” that promises to rectify the fact that “in the history of anthropology, there haven’t been any ‘first contacts’ with the Whites” who are the sovereign arbiters of the current fading world order (Latour 2013: 478). The ultimate social purpose of his research program is to prepare the primary inheritors of Western civilization for “the planetary negotiation that we are going to undertake in preparation for the times when we shall no longer be in a position of strength” (Latour 2013: 16). Remarkably, the renowned French “tentacular thinker” reflexively affirmed a chauvinistic regional ontology, as he lapsed into sociocentrism: the identification of the West with just one social group—indigenous Christian European “Whites” and some of their creolized progenies in settler post-colonies (see Latour 2013b; Maniglier 2014). In contrast, the

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mandate of a post-exotic anthropology does not accommodate ethnocentrism or sociocentrism (see below). This global awakening, and the geopolitical transition it is engendering, demands a renewed empirical engagement through the reconceptualization of knowledge production practices that are de-linked from any universalizing Occidentalism or Orientalism. As Talal Asad noted a generation ago, “Anthropology does not merely apprehend the world in which it is located, but… the world also determines how anthropology will apprehend it” (1973: 12). Henceforth, there is a need to reinvent anthropology’s methodological infrastructure still dependent on a geohistorical perspective that assumes an intrinsic asymmetric relationality between ethnicized participants in the fieldwork encounter; and to reconstruct its theoretical scaffolding still in thrall to the disciplinary heritage of a few hegemonic metropolitan centers of knowledge production and dissemination throughout the world. This methodological reinvention and theoretical reconstruction process entails the quest for an alternative pathway to an anthropological praxis that can elucidate the manifestation of this “global awakening” and of its reactionary antagonist in the guise of a nostalgic ethno-nationalist geopolitics that is endangering our “art of living together.” This chapter will identify the nature of the changes that must be adopted in order to transition from the practice of an exotic to a post-exotic anthropology that can address the existential threats to life in common. Accordingly, the chapter undertakes the following tasks: (a) situates the recourse to mesography within an epochal transition in disciplinary practice necessitated by the global awakening; (b) highlights the three constitutive pillars for the disciplinary praxis of a post-exotic anthropology; (c) proposes a new ethical covenant for the practice of mesography; (d) provides a tabular presentation on the entailments of mesography as the method for a post-exotic anthropology; and (e) re-conceptualizes the nature of fieldwork associated with the practice of mesography.

1.2 Epochal Transition: From Ethnography to Mesography This epochal transition is heralding an intellectual ecosystem of competing alternative conceptions of the organization of society, the purpose of economy, the practice of politics, the role of culture, and their contribution to the social engineering of a diversity of futures. Indeed, it is a

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historical phase that is generating a geopolitical decentering of the established world order through a structural heterogenization process that obviates the conventional classification of the world either into totalizing civilizational polarities (e.g., West vs. Rest, East vs. West), or into geopolitically ranked trichotomies (First, Second, Third Worlds). Moreover, this process is disrupting the associated one-way knowledge and power flows that materially construct domains of peripherality and symbolically reproduce relations of dependency. This calls for a new epistemic praxis that will elucidate the global mosaic of lifeways within re-emergent multi-continental and plural regional civilizational formations that constitute the post-exotic historical conjuncture. In effect, this conjuncture is the catalyst both to the emergence of “new differences” that are no longer markers of socio-cultural superiority or inferiority and to the renewed contestation of the West’s global monopoly over the “idea of humanity.” Consequently, as the West’s half-millennium crusade “to dominate the world” is retreating into a penumbral phase, it is thus constrained to participate equally in, and not exercise hegemony over, the emerging pluriversal civilizational formation. At last, the prevalent assumption “that everything has a center,” as epitomized by the West as the world’s “historical headquarters” from which everything originates, is being buried. This emergent structural divergence and entrenching sociocultural heterogeneity calls for a reversal in the discipline’s prevailing structural relationality: from its current Euro-centric axis characterized by the centripetal motion of non-Western societies around Western civilization as a constellation of peripheral dominions, to a world-centric pivot enabling the centrifugal emancipation of non-Western societies beyond Western civilization. This transition is prefiguring the inexorable decentering of the “West” as the hegemonic frame of reference, interpretive center, as well as politico-economic and socio-cultural anchor for the rest of the world. This emerging conjuncture demands the anticipatory reconstitution of our geographic imagination, which is still tethered to empire as the prevailing political organization of the world. This geographic re-imagining exercise is to be pursued through the empirical mapping of the processes of enmeshment engendered by the circulation of peoples, ideas, practices, institutions, and technologies, which are articulating these territories into spatially imbricated cross-regional civilizational matrices. The reconfiguration of the world’s politico-economic

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balance of power has invalidated West-stream anthropology’s conventional relational protocol, traditional research method, and expropriative interpretive practices, which were founded on the structural permanence of a geopolitical asymmetry that subordinated the majority of humankind to an ethno-regional minority. The epistemological challenges posed by this epochal transition has yet to be reflected in anthropology’s mode of methodologically engaging and theoretically representing cultural others. As anthropology is still burdened with the albatross of exoticism, and its exorcism from its practice is mired in epistemological quandaries. For example, researching “matters of contemporary import” in the world while employing travelling theories to interpret them (MacClancy 2002); or through the self-serving repurposing of obsolete concepts (e.g., exoticism, relativism) (Kapferer and Theodossopoulos 2016). In fact, exoticism is constitutive of the discipline’s two foundational purposes, which continue to guide its contemporary practice. Marcus and Fischer described them as follows: (1) “the salvaging of distinct cultural forms of life from a process of apparent global Westernization” and (2) the use of these salvaged cultures as allegorical tales “to serve as a form of cultural critique for ourselves” (1986: 1). These two objectives betray the inaugural self-serving raison d’e“tre of West-stream anthropology through data colonialism and the resulting congenital reciprocity deficit toward its research subjects that has defined the practice of ethnography ever since. Yet they persist as an anachronistic expiatory ritual to memorialize the West’s victims in the Rest. These two archaic objectives can no longer contribute to the decipherment of this emergent historical conjuncture. This epochal transition has effectively provincialized the purview of Weststream anthropology by (a) circumscribing the relevance of its knowledge claims to its native grounds; (b) deflating its hegemonic epistemic pretensions into mere provincial ruminations; and (c) disabling its travelling wings and confining its destination to its regions of origin. This is the background to the necessary transition from ethnography to mesography, which is imperative if anthropology is to emancipate itself from being the epistemic handmaiden to the hegemony of one of the world’s regional cultural provinces and to become relevant to the pluriverse of human communities around the globe.

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1.2.1

Epistemological Renewal: Beyond the Neo-Imperial Vulgate

In spite of this epochal maelstrom, the practice of West-stream anthropology is still wallowing in an interstitial academic subculture that straddles two sociocultural worlds: the residual exotic pre-modern past in which anthropology’s conceptual repertoire and research practices were honed, and the dominant late modern post-exotic present that demands its radical retooling. This impasse is partly due to anthropologists’ seemingly entrenched professional loyalty to a particular “investigative modality” that is unable to emancipate itself from its colonial origin. That investigative modality initially emerged from what Cohn (1996: 6) called the “observational/travel” modality and subsequently mutated into the ethnographic method (see Fabian and Rooij 2008). What is significant about this modality is that its vaunted particularities—e.g., face-to-face encounter, micro-settings, synchronic focus, etc.—were morally motivated and politically inflected practices by anthropologists who imagined themselves as “envoys of conscience” against the West’s colonial depredations. Accordingly, they “developed practices through which they sought to erase the colonial influence by describing what they took to be authentic indigenous cultures” (Cohn 1996: 11). Paradoxically, they denied colonial influence in their research settings, while “their epistemological universe… was part of the European world of social theories, and classificatory schema that were formed, in part, by state projects to reshape the lives of their subjects at home and abroad” (Cohn 1996: 11). Ever since then, the discipline has remained faithful to ethnography’s compromising historical baggage as the “basic modality of colonial knowledge production” through fieldwork that relies on data colonialism and travelling theory-led interpretation that evokes epistemological imperialism. Remarkably, the current practice of ethnography seems more evocative of the colonial mode of knowledge production given its more acute subordination to metropolitan travelling theory. This subordination led to a peculiar role reversal between anthropologists from the colonial era and contemporary practitioners: The former sought to erase the colonial influence from their research domain, while the latter are promoting a “globalist homogenization” through an imperious encompassment of their fieldwork sites within neoliberalism as a “causal force that comes along and assimilates local ways of life” (Laidlaw 2015: 912).

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The foundational contradiction, noted by Cohn, between research context and theoretical text continues to influence the practice of Weststream anthropology. As its practitioners have maintained their epistemic subservience to those state-enabled social theories, as is evident in the use of neoliberalism as the discipline surrogate interpretive paradigm (Ganti 2014; Venkatesan 2015). This collective surrender of West-stream anthropology’s practitioners to state-centric theories led Carrier (2016) to invoke the term “neoliberal anthropology” to epitomize the symbiosis between theory and the state’s predatory practices and to label its practitioners as academic entrepreneurs on behalf of neoliberalism’s dystopic vision of society. Noteworthy, is that this epistemic subservience was partly due to anthropology’s affliction with an acute case of theoretical drift that resulted from the anachronism of its own theoretical and lexical repertoire. As Fardon noted, “By the early 1980s, theory had become a commodity that social anthropology more consistently imported than exported” (2012: 2). Moreover, the dubious analytic utility of the discipline’s lexical repertoire is acknowledged by two committed practitioners of West-stream anthropology as follows: “our ‘subjects’ no longer inhabit social contexts for which we have a persuasive lexicon” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2003: 152). The discipline’s theoretical orphanage and lexical inadequacy has made its practitioners vulnerable to an opportunistic accommodation to the “globalization hype” and to its ideological underpinning, neoliberalism as a universal hermeneutic, which authorized the “promiscuous consumption of all the cultures in the world at the level of their surfaces” (Iyer 2000: 275). In essence, neoliberalism is what Bourdieu and Wacquant called a “planetary vulgate” that universalizes “the particularisms bound up with a singular historical experience” (2001: 2). Accordingly, West-stream anthropologists tend to employ the term in a manner that assumes what needs to be empirically demonstrated. As they obsessively refer to the imagined planet-spanning “governing rationality” produced by Western capitalism and disseminated through a North Atlantic-led geopolitics that inexorably engenders the hegemony of the West’s cultural regime over the Rest. Consequently, West-stream anthropologists’ quest to fill their discipline’s void of a contemporary epistemic raison d’être resulted in neoliberalism’s totalizing encompassment of anthropology’s representation of communities through its ubiquitous invocation as an interpretive mantra (Ferguson 2009; Kingfisher and Maskovsky 2008). The expedient surrender to this neo-imperial frame of reference and its hubristic

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mandate incorporated researched communities within “one world anthropology” as neoliberalism’s teleology. The hegemony of this neo-imperial vulgate has led to the subordination of the global practice of anthropology, among other social and human sciences, under the tutelage of a “planetary intellectual marketplace.” The latter functions as a tributary of Western travelling theories through mechanisms of diffusion and convergence under the hegemonic prestige of Western academic institutions and the global distribution of their scholarly outputs. These mechanisms generate processes of persuasion and mimicry as part of a global system of unwitting cognitive vassalage (cf. Wimmer 2001: 435). This cognitive vassalage to the neo-imperial vulgate is self-servingly claimed, by one West-stream anthropologist, to be an inexorable fatality: “The capillaries of neoliberal governance seem so firmly entrenched in the cartography of our everyday lives, there to remain for the foreseeable future” (Comaroff 2011: 149). This enthusiastic affirmation of neoliberalism’s “theoretical overtotalization” of the world betrays an impoverished critical imagination that has failed to recognize “that there is no theory capable of covering, closing off, predicting all the situations in which it might be useful” (Said 1983: 241). Relatedly, the advocacy of neoliberalism-enabled “one world anthropology” as the exclusive paradigm to understand the dynamics of contemporary social formations around the world betrays a latent enthrallment to imperialist proclivities and neocolonialist longings. This suggests a refusal to abandon the illgotten role of “sovereign arbiter” of a historical teleology that coerced the whole of humankind into its diffusionist trajectory of modernization, globalization, and universalization as Westernization. This role is now confronting multiple existential crises that have already undermined its hegemony and now threaten its protagonists’ civilizational sustainability. This has engendered an endemic apocalyptic sentiment about the impending demise of the West’s hegemony over the Rest that is manifested in the “retrotopia” phenomenon discussed above. Moreover, through the reflexive invocation of neoliberalism, Weststream anthropologists are engaged in an “academicized sociodicy,” which dresses “up the effects of American imperialism in the trappings of cultural oecumenicism or economic fatalism and to make a transnational relation of economic power appear like a natural necessity” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001: 4). This “sheep-like enthusiasm” for a status quo affirming notion has undermined the intellectual autonomy of a generation of practitioners who have domesticated themselves into a gregarious

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disciplinary herd bleating out in unison the West’s hegemonic mantra and converting their varied fieldwork domains into exclusively neoliberal pastures seeded with imported theoretical fodder. Furthermore, this herd mentality has reduced anthropologists into theologians peddling neoliberalism as a secular eschatology of Western capitalist societies as the Promised Land for humankind. In effect, their advocacy of this secular eschatology makes them protagonists of cultural assimilationism and philosophical universalism, which are the antitheses of their vocation as advocates of ontological pluralism of the world’s peoples. The end result is a disciplinary practice in the throes of endemic inadequacies in its “axis of cohesion”: a research method (ethnography) that is now manacling the discipline’s research imagination; a knowledge repertoire that is mired in a social relevance and epistemic accountability deficit; an ethical standpoint that has been reified into a “duplicitous” professional ethics; and consequently, its practitioners’ domain of legitimation has retreated to the insular universe of the academy. This has generated a growing skepticism about its raison d’être both within the academy and society at large. Mindful of the discipline’s slide toward real-world irrelevance, disciplinary practitioners have been engaged in the opportunistic redefinition of its relevance through the much-touted “public anthropology.” Borofsky (2019) presents the most detailed attempt at reforming the practice of the American version of West-stream anthropology through public anthropology as an “alternative paradigm” to bridge the chasm between practitioners’ pursuit of a “career good” and the “public good.” He offers a damning diagnosis of a discipline caughtup in a “mutually reinforcing triadic infrastructure”: funding agencies, universities, and publishers. These institutions constitute “hegemony-like structures… [that] shape the academy’s production of knowledge as well as the behavior of those who produce it” (2019: 24). This results in an endemic bad faith ethic among practitioners, who “despite appearances to the contrary, tend to be more focused on advancing their careers than on refining anthropological perspectives or building cumulative knowledge” (2019: 29). However, his solution betrays a largely status quo accommodating, and anachronistic method preserving, public anthropology, which pursues an incremental reformism through a set of prosaic strategies unlikely to remedy the discipline’s epistemic aloofness from society sustained by these hegemonic structures. Moreover, the discipline’s quandary is exacerbated by its susceptibility to a phobia of “indistinction” from the other social sciences, and a desperate clinging to

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“the transparent fantasy” that ethnography remains the guarantor of the discipline’s distinctiveness, and the touchstone of its practitioners’ vocational identity (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012a: xxix). This is taking place within a historical conjuncture that promises a new world order, which is gradually but inexorably consigning these disciplinary salvage activities into the historical dustbin for the relics of empire. This emergent context calls for the radical reinvention, and not the incremental adjustment, of the discipline (as proposed by the contributors in Jebens and Kohl 2011). 1.2.2

Interpretivism: A Predatory Hermeneutics

At the core of West-stream anthropology’s practice is a discursive protocol commonly referred to as the “interpretive turn.” The latter emerged in the 1970s and 1980s out of a transition from the anthropological study of the social structure of communities to that of their cultural meanings and symbols. This transition evolved out of American practitioners’ anxious quest for new research subjects in the wake of the circumscribed emancipation and assimilation of their “domestic exotics” and for theoretical resources with which to appropriate the new foreign exotics made available by US imperial excursions abroad (Patterson 2001). The fashioning of these theoretical resources was influenced by deconstructionist literary criticism, classical and critical Western social theories, and non-foundationalist philosophy, which catalyzed the emergence of a “transdisciplinary” era in the human and social sciences. This era heralded the primacy of a theory-led conception of social reality and thus imparted, perhaps unwittingly, a misanthropic vision of humanity. These resources were appropriated as the epistemological pillars of a hegemonic conception of the discipline as “interpretive anthropology” whose vanguard practitioner was Clifford Geertz (1973). Accordingly, the anthropologist became a “cultural interpreter” who constructs social reality out of the “negotiation of meanings” mediated by the above-mentioned epistemological foundation and its associated travelling theories (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 26). The professionalization of the anthropologist’s role as “cultural interpreter” has authorized the self-serving invocation of “theory,” which has reified anthropological practice through its ethnographic method into a theoretical experiment with others’ ways of life as instrumentalized objects of study. Weststream anthropology has wallowed ever since in this interpretive turn, which has become a permanent phase. Consequently, this interpretive

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protocol mutated into a carceral hermeneutical matrix that I call “interpretivism”: It is a discursive practice that transformed Nietzsche’s nihilist lament into a disciplinary axiom: “There are no facts, only interpretations.” Consequently, the social reality encountered in fieldwork is portrayed in ethnographies through a discursive reconstruction that is contingent on the anthropologists’ particular interpretive community that is either biographically situated idiosyncrasies (e.g., racialized epistemic privileges, gendered grievances, ethnicized victimhood, postcolonial resentments), and/or nationally circumscribed ontologies (e.g., American, British, French), which are constituted around particular repertoires of travelling theories that mediate the interpretation of communities of research subjects. Inexorably, the end result of interpretivism is the mystification of others’ lifeworld by privileging a travelling theory-prescribed subtext over the lived experience of research subjects within their local context. How did West-stream anthropology get caught-up in this epistemic morass? Its foundational imperative to cross borders to encounter cultural others has afflicted disciplinary practice with a “representational problem.” The latter is the result of fieldworkers’ initial local knowledge deficit, which was never remedied, but exacerbated, by the accepted disciplinary conventions: extractive research method, reliance on alien theoretical templates, and condescending ontological assumptions about research subjects (see Faye 2014). Interpretivism is the default local knowledge gap-filling discursive strategy that rationalizes the chronic cognitive dissonance and semantic distance between practitioners’ knowledge claims and local subjects’ self-understandings. Consequently, interpretivism introduced an era of “post-truth” avant la lettre and betrayed a deep moral vacancy at its core by depriving research subjects’ sovereignty over their understanding of their own social reality and launching anthropology on a career of theory-authorized misrepresentation of local lifeworld. In effect, this interpretive practice employs a “predatory hermeneutics,” which entails the insidious practice of thinking “on behalf of those we believe to understand, and that we make them say more than what they think, or something else entirely” (Lévi-Strauss quoted in Viveiros de Castro 2009: 46–47). The logical consequence of this practice is what Bob Scholte (1984: 964) called “epistemocide,” which entails the denial of the legitimacy of the native’s knowledge claim as the precondition for the legitimacy of the anthropologist’s knowledge claim (cf. Viveiros de Castro 2013: 477). Ultimately, the symbolic cannibalism of interpretivism is

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equivalent to previous acts of colonial depredation of other cultures: such as the repatriation of native cultural artifacts to Western museums, and the extraction of indigenous peoples’ biodiversity resources or minerals without compensation. There is another emergent turn, the “ontological turn,” which takes the “interpretive turn” to a higher level of abstraction in exploring the traditional narcissistic problematic of West-stream anthropology: the difference between self and other. As Heywood puts it: “The ontological turn continues a long tradition in anthropology of aiming to take difference seriously and understand it as best we can on its own terms” (2017). The mystifying nature of its subject matter is conveyed in the definition of an ontological anthropology by a posse of protagonists dedicated to “experimenting with conceptual affordances” to re-evaluate indigenous cosmologies: It “is the comparative, ethnographically-grounded transcendental deduction of Being” (Holbraad et al. 2014). The privileged incarnation of this “Being” is indigenous peoples who are presumed to be endowed with an “indigenous alterity” osmotically imparted either through their indigenous religious practices and/or perspectives (e.g., animistic cosmologies) or through their habitation of pristine natural landscapes. Yet the proponents of this “ontological turn” are primarily preoccupied with the epistemological ramifications of the ethnographic encounter between the modern anthropologist and his indigenous research subjects as part of a self-serving quest. As Holbraad and Pedersen (2017: x) admit: “the ontological turn poses ontological questions to solve epistemological problems.” Indeed, these ontologists’ ultimate aspiration is to deploy a “metaontology” to arbitrate the ontologies of various indigenous worlds (see Bialecki 2017). Henceforth, West-stream anthropology is assigned a new imperious function: “the science of the ontological self-determination of the world’s peoples” (Viveiros de Castro 2013: 475). This is tantamount to a re-colonization of indigenous peoples through a kind of travelling theory-mediated mestizo epistemology. Given the practical and existential preoccupations of indigenous peoples—especially in light of the travelling global policy regime of the “new green economy” (see Vol. 2: Chapter 6) and its covetous interest in pristine hinterlands—such preoccupations betray a form of intellectual escapism. The latter is aptly captured in the words of Bessire and Bond: While “the alter-modern worlds discovered by elite scholars provides redemptive inhabitation for the privileged few, […] the global masses confront increasingly sharp forms and active processes of inequality and

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marginalization” (2014: 449). The troubling aspect of this “ontological anthropology” is that its practitioners’ “n’importe quoi” (anything goes) theorizing frenzy is an extreme exemplification of both “ethnographic ventriloquism” (through “gaining access to the interiority of other beings”) and semiotic imperialism (through the “imputation of identities”) (see Halbmayer 2012). Moreover, their interpretations are thoroughly mediated by the oracular ruminations from the members of the Elysium of Western philosophy and anthropology (see Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Vol. 2: Epilogue). This leads to the semiotic colonization of the “world’s peoples” at the very moment of their re-emergence, by the re-deployment of a “predatory hermeneutics” that reduces them into its interpretive pawns for the sake of “experimenting with conceptual affordances.” The representation practices of the practitioners of “ontological anthropology” evoke the colonial ascription of native identity: It “is at once a metaphoric substitution, an illusion of presence and by that same token a metonym, a sign of its absence and loss” (Bhabha 1986: xxx). In sum, the protean incarnations of this interpretivism authorized an epistemic equivalence between historical facts and imaginative representations, and blurred the distinction between interpretation and appropriation. This is exemplified in Comaroff’s (2010) manifesto on the credo of interpretivism, which touts its main contribution to knowledge as “astonishing interpretations.” In privileging the latter, he betrays an embarrassing attachment to a sophomoric conception of anthropologists’ vocation as “merchants of astonishment” enabled by data colonialism. Moreover, he flaunts his misanthropy by claiming “exquisite irrelevance” to research subjects’ existential predicaments (see Elie 2015). The anthropological account that is informed by this practice is a hybrid narrative of facts and fiction constructed through an idiosyncratic interpretive bricolage of dubious experiential authenticity and referential plausibility as well as devoid of reciprocity with research subjects. This interpretive practice is sanctioned by the crass libertarian notion of the “free market place of ideas” in which explanatory plausibility is abandoned in favor of imaginative audacity. This practice inevitably engenders illiberal discursive consequences: (a) the lack of commitment to the accurate historical contextualization of the contemporary reality of the social formations being investigated; (b) knowledge claims are independent of the historical process of the context of inquiry; and (c) representations are selectively articulated with local social facts but are unrelated to research subjects’

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self-understandings. These discursive misdemeanors are the inexorable effects of the reflexive recourse to metropolitan travelling theories, which inflicts on its practitioners a “voyageur philosophe” syndrome. Stagl explains this syndrome thus: The anthropologist when “entering into the other ways of life… cannot escape remaining a representative of his own: he carries its prejudgments everywhere with him” (2004: 4). Furthermore, in spite of protestations to the contrary, the discipline’s research imagination is still in thrall to an exoticizing penchant due to its community of practitioners’ subordination to the constraints associated with the “sacrificial sentinel” syndrome discussed in the Prologue. This syndrome is manifested in the following epistemic entrapments: (a) the xenophilic yearning and nostalgic quest for a contemporary primordial substitute (e.g., “indigenous ontologies”) for the irremediable loss of the pre-modern native as its privileged subject of investigation; (b) the willful oblivion to the untenable condescension of its representation practices that valorize the interpretation of ethnographers over the understanding of research subjects; (c) the persistence of a collective denial about the patently obvious anachronism of its ethnographic method driven by an excessively improvisational research ethos based on serendipitous divagations in the field as the primary means of data collection; and (d) its knowledge production practices betray a parochial allegiance to ethnocentric discursive traditions that are entrenched within provincial travelling theories inherited from Western disciplinary forefathers that are still tethered to “the logic of colonial affiliations.” These anachronistic practices have led to what the Comaroffs called above the “transparent fantasy” of an exoticizing ethnography, given its methodological insolvency vis-à-vis the contemporary world. By maintaining their allegiance to this “transparent fantasy,” disciplinary practitioners have incarcerated themselves within an anachronistic professional identity as a “committed disciplinarian” and are still beholden to a defunct ideal of disciplinary practice of “committed localism” bounded to micro social formations. To emancipate themselves from these disabling commitments, disciplinary practitioners must heed the following axiom: The methodology of a social science discipline is an evolving and contextually adaptive social, intellectual, and ethical practice, and not a professional identity that the researcher takes to the field. It was my attempt to heed this axiom that led to my quest for a research approach through fieldwork that was adaptable to the emerging historical conjuncture.

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Disciplinary Praxis Reimagined: Infrastructural Makeover

To transit from an exotic to a post-exotic anthropology, the triad of components that constitutes a disciplinary study must be reconceptualized. Only then would anthropology be made relevant to the pragmatic concerns of a critical global audience beyond the university’s walls. Accordingly, the adoption of mesography entails the following reconceptualizations: • Study Object: Communities in Transition It proposes an alternative object of study that is neither “primitive societies” which no longer exist nor “subaltern communities” which is a condescending social categorization, but “transitional social formations” as part of an emergent polycentric world order sundered into regional civilizational clusters. In these clusters, there is a profusion of non-convergent polities with their incommensurable socio-cultural practices that are sustained by economic success (or failure) and the corollary confidence (or despair) to reclaim prior civilizational inheritances along with their distinctive value repertoires. These emergent social formations can neither be accommodated within the tradition-modernity dichotomy nor categorized as hierarchically ranked dominions of neoliberalism. • Research Method: Mesography It replaces the traditional research method of ethnography that was initially conceived to study communities that were beyond the pale of modernity and dwelled outside the state and resisted its encompassment. Consequently, ethnography has lapsed into a state of entropy as its selfcentric and serendipity-driven itinerant research procedure has exhausted its adaptability to the post-exotic historical conjuncture. Mesography is the substitute ethos of inquiry that effectuates an appropriate pairing of method and epistemic orientation for the emerging post-universal practice of the social sciences. It privileges evolving processes over bounded spaces, prioritizes social collectivities over individual actors, combines

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the diachronic and the synchronic into a full temporal analytical spectrum, and triangulates the micro, meso, and macro levels into a synoptic narrative about the social formation under study. • Theory Formation: Contextually Emergent It promotes a practice of theory formation that presumes the permanent revisability and impossible universality of theory, if it is to concretely elucidate contemporary social reality. As the latter is always changing given the historically contingent and contextually specific nature of the processes that produce societal outcomes. Moreover, as Geertz observed, “abstraction from specifics is not the only form that theory takes” (2000: 226). Accordingly, theory formation must be grounded in the analytical articulation and comprehensive explanation of the ensemble of social processes that generate the vectors of transformation within the emergent social formation under study. Indeed, Manicas definition of theory captures my emphasis on social processes: “theory aims to provide an understanding of the processes which jointly produce the contingent outcomes of experience” (2006: 1). Ultimately, theory is a conceptual means to illuminate, not to mystify, social reality. As such, it entails the exhaustive examination of local determinations of social reality prior to invoking external factors in identifying the vectors of change. Consequently, it relies on an endogenously generated explanatory framework, which is contingent on the investigative recovery, analytical valorization, explanatory elaboration, and critical evaluation of local events, practices, and understandings produced within the emergent social formation. These research procedures are the infrastructure of this immanent theory formation praxis, which is grounded in the indelible nexus between the history of, and theory about, the research context, in order to articulate the endogenous potentialities of the social formation’s transition process. As such, it delegitimizes dependence on metropolitan travelling theories and their premature panoptic enclosure of local social formations within the global matrix of the political economy of liberal imperialism. There is no advocacy of an anti-theory or post-theory disposition. Instead, the aim is to abandon the prevailing practice of travelling theory dissemination and to engage in local history-embedded theory formation that explains the transformation process of communities in transition. This mode of theory formation entails the rejection of the hegemonic conception of

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the discipline as an “interpretive anthropology” that privileges particular discourses, individual motivations, and cultural meanings, and of the anthropologist’s vocation as a “cultural interpreter” who offers spectatorial cultural critique. Instead, it promotes an alternative conception of the discipline as an “explanatory anthropology” that prioritizes historical processes, politico-economic causes, and societal consequences, and of the anthropologist as a “social explainer” who produces actionable policy critique. Some of the key investigatory tasks of a practitioner of an explanatory anthropology include the following: (a) to inventory the trans-local vectors of transition; (b) to identify the immanent logic of the transition process; (c) to map the trajectory of emergence of the community in transition through the multiple local ramifications of the vectors of change; and (d) to formulate scenarios about the always provisional end state of the transition process. These tasks, among others (see below), are the foundations of theory formation in a mesography. The practice of a post-exotic anthropology on the basis of this reconceptualized infrastructure would emancipate practitioners from their current incarceration within the “imprisoning hegemony” of a metropolitan ethno-epistemology and its arbitrary strictures on disciplinary practice: geographically delimited domains of research; compromising historical association with past imperial incursions through flagpole carrying intellectual subservience to metropolitan states’ cultural diplomacy and geopolitical interests in the fieldwork domain; the “fetishistic theorizing” that presumes what it is supposed to explain due to practitioners’ sycophantic coat-tailing of the imagined global supremacy of a westernizing neoliberalism; ethnic differentiation between researchers and research subjects as a prerequisite of an anthropological practice that consecrates the exclusion of research subjects as audiences of research results; and epistemic commitment to “national container paradigms” with their knowledge archives and established repertoire of theories. The persistence of these limitations as the accepted boundaries of disciplinary practice has demeaned West-stream practitioners (both in the Global North and South) into opportunistic enablers of Euro-American epistemological hegemony and as complicit agents of its political imperium over the rest of humanity. Their rejection of this ascribed agency as an institutionally indentured service class to power is an overdue moral imperative. Embarrassingly, West-stream anthropologists act as if neoliberalism is a philosophical system that can be used as a “good-to-think-with” theoretical framework. When, in fact, it is the manifestation of a “rogue

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capitalism” reified into a “liberal totalitarianism.” The latter is a socioeconomic panopticon that is organized around “corporate gigantism” endowed with a surveillance regime’s “instrumentarian power” dedicated to the insidious disabling of consumer-citizens’ autonomous political and socioeconomic agency (Zuboff 2019). This dystopic social order compels practitioners of the human sciences to seek emancipation from it and not their accommodation to it. Mesography provides the means to West-stream anthropologists’ intellectual manumission from their current vocation as evangelists of neoliberalism and as enablers of the hegemony of its cultural regime of Occidental cosmopolitanism. Also, mesography liberates Global South’ practitioners from a compulsory racialized, ethnicized, or indigenized standpoint that foregrounds their scholarly activity as an act of “ethnic self-expression” of their grievances through denunciatory critiques of Western scholars’ semiotic colonization of cultural others with their travelling theories’ data colonialism. Ultimately, mesography is an approach to knowledge production that transcends these embodied intellectual enclaves and their provincial disciplinary practices. However, it does not preclude the strategic recourse to these embodied standpoints when necessitated by the research context and the individual scholar’s situationally-induced imperative to rectify a historical wrong. For example, scholars from unrecognized or non-sovereign indigenous communities (e.g., Smith 2012), or scholars who are from ethno-racial minorities who are the chronic target of the state’s political repression through police violence, the society’s structural exclusion through institutional racism and the majority population’s social ostracism through cultural ghettoization (e.g., Harrison 1997). However, there is a caveat: Scholars need not wallow in retroactive denunciatory critiques of imperialism and colonialism, but should engage in the production of actionable knowledge as galvanizing resources for the emancipation of communities of research subjects victimized by past regional empires or the prevailing or emergent global ones. The aim is to avoid the intellectual trap of over-commitment to critique of historical wrongs at the expense of producing knowledge that provide solutions to contemporary challenges.

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1.4 Anthropology’s New Ethical Covenant: Three Pillars The mandate of a post-exotic anthropology is the production of cognitive maps that offer a shared intellectual compass between, and actionable knowledge useful to, researchers and communities of research subjects. These communities are constituted by a politically awakened humanity who no longer needs to be represented by unsolicited spokespersons, and who inhabit a world increasingly inauspicious to the global cultural hegemony of any regional social formation. To contribute toward the production of such knowledge resources, a post-exotic anthropology must commit to an ethic of praxis that spurns the perfunctory codes of ethics adopted by professional bureaucracies and their minimalist moral mantras that emphasize procedural rectitude in the conduct of research while neglecting the pervasive motif of extraction through data colonialism that is intrinsic to disciplinary practice (see Laidlaw 2017). Indeed, at the core of anthropology there is what I call the “fieldwork paradox”: The primary means for our vocational self-realization inexorably entails an imperious intrusion into others’ lives, and their socialization into our research agenda with our expectation of their voluntary surrender to our opportunistic quest for information through data colonialism that gives them nothing in return. This is evocative of the inaugural colonialist act, which continues to animate the practice of anthropology. This is the background to Faubion’s observation that fieldwork is intrinsically an “ethico-intellectual labor,” as it is constituted by “a moral-affective, epistemological, and ontological triangle” (2009: 157). This colonial legacy-mediated triangular relationality between moral disposition, epistemological orientation, and ontological constitution was never addressed by the discipline’s official ethical injunctions. Consequently, the related misdemeanors toward researched communities that were highlighted in the Prologue have persisted. For example, the travelling theory-authorized interpretive instrumentalization of cultural others, the social accountability deficit of anthropological knowledge, and the exclusion of researched subjects as audience of research results. This set of misdemeanors have sustained ethnography’s intrinsic accountability deficit as an inevitable effect of its reliance on travelling theories and the resulting disjunction between the exogenous origins of its explanatory concepts and the endogenous nature of the phenomena to be explained.

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A post-exotic anthropology based on mesography as its research method seeks to remedy West-stream anthropology’s untenable epistemological and methodological legacies, which have sustained a structural contradiction between disciplinary practice and its research contexts. The ethical covenant that is proposed here endeavors toward the reconstitution of the regulative norms that inform the agency and practice of anthropologists. This entails the rejection of liberalism’s delusional hubris about autonomous individualism as the default nature of human agency, and of capitalism’s decadent credo about the primacy of selfinterest as the foundational human motivation. As these self-serving axioms undermine the discipline’s commitment to both emotional and cognitive empathy (discussed in the Prologue), and thus lead to a transactional intellectual sensibility that engenders a gratuitous symbolic violence through a semiotic imperialism over research subjects’ social reality and a “willed oblivion” of their self-understandings. This transactional ethos is embedded in the three critical domains of anthropological practice: approach to research, relational protocol, and orientation to discourse. Accordingly, I define briefly what the rehabilitation of each of these three pillars entails and propose a series of practical tenets as operational means. Indeed, the application of these tenets would transform the prevailing disciplinary practice of appropriating research subjects’ cultural resources into a genuine dialogic encounter with them about their self-understanding and its broader comparative ramifications. 1.4.1

Research Ethic: Experiential Authenticity

The fieldwork experience is the primary research tool of anthropology and the sole legitimizing ground of anthropologists’ claims to knowledge. Fealty to that experience should militate against the distortive mediation of travelling theory. And explanation and/or interpretation of such experience should resonate with it and not be alienated, indeed falsified, by premature appeal to theory. The key index of experiential authenticity is an affirmative response to the question: Did my fieldwork experience validate the claims I am making about the community of research subjects? The philosopher Kwame Appiah noted that through “the intellectual discipline of fieldwork, living intimately with strangers,” anthropologists were supposed to “have escaped the prejudices of their backgrounds” (2006: 15). Alas, ethnographies have rarely confirmed this supposition. A mesographic approach is another attempt at realizing this

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potential. Hence, the ultimate aim of pursuing and sustaining experiential authenticity is to delegitimize dependence on travelling theories and to emancipate practitioners from the alienating sensibility that they impart. To inoculate myself against the latter, I have used the following guiding tenets. First and foremost, to spurn the customary genuflection toward metropolitan travelling theories whose border-crossing credentials as interpretive frameworks have lost their presumptive credibility, explanatory capacity, and cognitive legitimacy; to affirm a world-centric sensibility that rejects the prevailing regional Euro-centrism and its discursive clones—namely post-modernism and its alter ego postcolonialism— which have exhausted their potential as emancipatory critique of the legacies of empire; to uphold the founding principle of epistemic emancipation through the disavowal of disciplinary cloning encouraged by academia and the pursuit of alternative intellectual paths; to pursue a research approach that is anchored in an intellectual standpoint emancipated from the flag-carrying provincial chauvinism associated with a modern nation-state identity; and to adopt an epistemology that enables opened-ended theory formation to accommodate a world always historically and culturally emergent. These are some of the prerequisites to sustaining the experiential authenticity and intellectual honesty of our fieldwork. Indeed, the latter requires a permanent intellectual insurgency against the hegemony of established disciplinary traditions that are more affirmatory than critical of the status quo. 1.4.2

Relational Ethic: Bond of Reciprocity

The quest for “rapport” was the foundation of the relational ethic of traditional fieldwork associated with ethnography, which became the practitioner’s “mysterious necessity,” as Geertz (1973: 416) called it, about the need to achieve empathy with research subjects. It turned out that it was always a self-serving requirement, as it was primarily motivated by the necessity to get our “informants” to be more cooperative in our self-interested quest for local knowledge. In effect, it epitomized a transactional means that was cloaked under the ennobling designation of the ethnographer as “participant-observer.” That role entailed sharing in the chores and living the life of one’s research subjects, which Bourdieu (1990: 14) aptly characterized as “spurious primitivist participation”; as such a practice tends to be a condescending parody of

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our local interlocutors’ lifestyle. Mesography abandons this transactional and pantomimic rapport-mediated participant observation of ethnography and its empathy-generated self-imposed ethical obligation to “give voice” to research subjects. This quixotic endeavor is replaced with a pragmatic one that spurns the moral posturing and duplicitous ethic in favor of a genuine intellectual engagement with field interlocutors’ existential dilemmas. Accordingly, fieldwork relations are informed by a tacit research contract that stipulates the exchange of organic reciprocities between researchers’ intellectual goals and research subjects’ social aspirations. This symmetrical relational ethic entails the following adjustments from practitioners of a post-exotic anthropology: To relinquish the ethical stance that is founded on the condescending justification of redeeming others and its paternalist assumption of an obligatory discursive enfranchisement of the voiceless; to shed our attachment to intellectually provincializing and ethnocentrism-inducing ontological traits (i.e., inherited biosocial and ethno-cultural constitution embedded in a national identity) that sustain the us-them perspective in fieldwork; to practice an earnest humility in our knowledge claims, which ought to be based on a genuine commitment to articulate a shared understanding between mesographer and the community of research subjects; to adopt a communication strategy that considers research subjects an integral part of a cross-cultural conversation and as recipients of our research results; to nurture a self-awareness as a practitioner of the transgressive act of fieldwork that is always responsive to the practical interests of field interlocutors. Finally, my own strategy in adopting a relational ethic toward my research subjects was to act as a practical mediator using a data reciprocity ethos in contrast to ethnography’s data colonialism. This approach to data entails the packaging of the local knowledge I acquired from the community into potentially actionable intellectual resources for its members’ own emancipation. This simultaneously articulated my ethic of reciprocity that fulfilled my own intellectual emancipation while addressing the local knowledge gaps they had identify and helped me filled, which I present in this book. 1.4.3

Discursive Ethic: Referential Veracity

West-stream anthropology’s Achilles’ heel is its intellectually indefensible discursive practice of subsuming endogenous field data within exogenous

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analytical frameworks. This practice not only violates the purpose of fieldwork as a discovery procedure aimed at recognizing the existence of the other on their own terms, but also perpetuates the colonialist penchant for expropriating the physical and symbolic resources of cultural others. The paradox is that while this practice contradicts the very raison d’e“tre of the discipline, it serves as the regulatory norm for the discipline’s claim to knowledge. Such claims start, de rigueur, with a “literature review” that foregrounds an imported theoretical template and its conceptual repertoire as the interpretive framework for the field data. Yet there is an endemic silence about, if not acceptance of, the moral liability and cognitive hubris associated with such a practice. This is epitomized in the discipline’s adoption of neoliberalism as its default paradigm, which betrays its intellectual surrender to, and opportunistic coat-tailing of, the fragile hegemony of liberal imperialism. Alas, West-stream anthropology may have reluctantly resigned itself to the loss of the “primitive natives” but it cannot let go of empire. Hence, the urgent need to rescue disciplinary practice from the prevailing Euro-American epistemological hegemony currently in the throes of an epistemic panic induced by the inextricable nexus between Western power’s post-imperial detumescence and the discipline’s institutional precarity. As it “runs the constant risk of being [….] voted out of existence by deans and administrators impatient of its methods and ideologies” (Latour 2017: 35–36). The prevailing “ethical” orientation of West-strean anthroplogy’s discursive practices is one that condones the panoptic epistemic encompassment of cultural others and their representation through the interpretive figment of empire-enabled travelling theory animated by the “willed oblivion” to the interpreted’ self-understandings. The practical effect of this is to reduce the existence of the cultural other to the xenophilic fantasies and hegemonic obsessions of the “totalizing interpretive imperium” of the egocentric practitioner of West-stream anthropology. This is what interpretation actually entails in the mainstream practice of anthropology, which was officialized as the discipline’s credo when the executive board of the American Anthropological Association modified its “Statement of Purpose” in 2010. It inserted, and thus elevated, “interpretation” as anthropology’s distinctive contribution, which replaced the phrase “its use to solve human problems.” This affirms that anthropological knowledge is optionally mediated by empirical evidence and historical context and is primarily determined by the anthropologist’s theoretical muse and interpretive flair. The alternative is

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a discursive ethic that is faithful (a) to the experiential authenticity of fieldwork not to be surrendered to theoretical expediency, and (b) to the referential veracity of claims about the researched community not to be sacrificed for the sake of interpretive convenience. The critical starting point in the mainstreaming of such a discursive ethic is the recognition that the decaying epistemological foundation of anthropology can only be reversed through (a) the adoption of a pluralistic philosophical sensibility and epistemological standpoint that spurns any claim to universal exemplarity by any philosophical tradition, thereby preventing the spread of an “insolent consciousness of superiority” of one national-cultural formation or civilizational heritage over another; and (b) the abandonment of the notion of “cultural relativism,” which was initially animated by a philosophical magnanimity was eventually undermined by the use of travelling theories to interpret local lives. Cultural relativism was initially a set of guidelines that informed fieldwork in order to prevent the researcher’s prejudices from polluting her understanding of research subjects. Its magnanimous spirit is captured in the following rationale: “because no infallible method has ever been discovered for ‘grading’ different cultures and sorting them into their natural types, we assume that every culture, as such, is equivalent to every other one” (Wagner quoted in Viveiros de Castro 2013: 489). However, the five-hundred-year predatory hegemony of the West over the Rest has engendered Occidental cosmopolitanism as an “ideological universalism” that tacitly serves as the basis for the comparative evaluation of other cultural formations. Accordingly, cultural relativism has lapsed into a mere euphemism for the belief in the relative superiority or inferiority of cultures and thus cloaks a condescending tolerance toward the cultural “deviances” of non-Western social formations. In fact, this disposition is a persistent undercurrent in West-stream anthropology, according to which cultural others “are owed our help but not our respect” (King 2019: 4). Its invocation betrays an ethnocentric social imagination that condones a hierarchical recognition of difference and is animated by a tacit disavowal of the intrinsic equality of other peoples and of the inherent legitimacy of their sociocultural practices. Only by abandoning this ethnocentric epistemology will anthropology authentically engage the world free of cultural prejudices and ethno-racial hierarchies. Ultimately, anthropologists’ ethical challenge is not to engage in a more genuine performance of the epistemic charity of cultural relativism, but to abandon their practice of semiotic violence through the interpretive misdemeanors produced by

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their travelling theory-driven creative interpretations, in favor of historyinformed analytical explanations of communities of research subjects. This is the promise of a mesography-based post-exotic anthropology.

1.5

Mesography Defined: Genealogy and Primer

The term mesography was first used, at least in the social sciences, by sociologist Frank Lester Ward (1902) to refer to a synthetic social scientific practice, or what he called a “constructive science,” that makes use of the human and social sciences to “extract truth from social facts.” It was mentioned in rather desultory and cryptic terms in an anthropological text as a conceptual auxiliary to geography: “Geography was but an ancilla, a sort of ‘mesography’ – an environmental description” (Geanˇa 2013: 64). Indeed, most references to mesography (e.g., graphic design, urban architecture) are without substantive definition (as a Google search will show). Therefore, my use of the term here represents a first attempt at elaborating it into an approach to social science research that is independent of any particular disciplinary matrix. As such, it offers a redemptive mode of anthropological inquiry that liberates its practitioners from the “dead end of professional self-definition” through their allegiance to an anachronistic method and its chronic incongruities with contemporary reality (Robbins 1993: 193). Also, given that in West-stream anthropology “the past is not only not dead, it is not even past” (Geertz 1988: 135), the adoption of a mesographic approach might finally bury the discipline’s unserviceable past entrapped within an exotic imaginary and its delirious theology of otherness; along with the transactional ritual of ethnography and its “repetitive enactment of field research … [as] part of a sustained effort to maintain a certain type of relation between the West and its Other” through data colonialism (Fabian 1983: 149). Indeed, a mesographic approach could break this “repetitive enactment” of that colonial relationship between anthropologists and research subjects. Since its object of study is no longer the postcolonial progenies of empire but the transitional transformation of emergent social formations within a new global historical conjuncture that pluralizes the relationship between peoples, cultures, nations, states, and regions. The recourse to mesography will finally implode the vicious circle in which initially colonialism and its successor liberal imperialism constitute the exclusive enabling condition for the practice of anthropology. Historically, disciplinary practice was always contingent on the prevailing

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political and economic relations, which configured “the conditions for others to be construed in specific terms and as particular objects of knowledge… It prejudged the form and content of the act of representation” (Fardon 1990: 6). Accordingly, within the emergent epochal transition to a post-imperial world, the unfulfilled egalitarian global crosscultural conversation that anthropology promised can now be carried out with mesography as the founding method of a post-exotic anthropology. Furthermore, mesography could restore a genuine commitment to an ethical disciplinary praxis through the adoption of what might be called the mesographer’s oath, as formulated in the words of Rorty (1999: xiii): “I want to demote the quest for knowledge from the status of end-initself to that of one more means toward greater human” emancipation. Ultimately, mesography is a research paradigm in quest of alternative groundings for the renewal, borrowing Latour’s words, of the “aborted dialogues about the diversity of cultures, the plurality of worlds, the future composition of a common world, [and] the universals to be extended” (2013: 20). The tabular presentation in Box 1.1, provides mesography’s operational definition and a set of praxis-related tenets as a paradigm of anthropological inquiry. The chapters in both volumes empirically demonstrate its viability as an anthropological practice.

Box 1.1: Primer on Mesography What is Mesography? Mesography is the methodological underpinning for the practice of a postexotic anthropology as a human science within an emergent post-imperial shift in the world’s geopolitical order, which enables the study of human predicaments in adapting to change in social formations everywhere. It replaces ethnography, which was the founding method of an exotic anthropology as an ethno-science based on data colonialism and linked to a geopolitical order under the aegis of Western imperialism and that exclusively studied colonized “primitive societies” and their postcolonial progenies. The ultimate aim of mesography is to present a panoramic portrait of a social formation that encompasses multiple loci of investigation, spectrum of thematic foci, varying scales of analysis, diverse spatial locations, and changing temporal contexts. It is an integrative research framework that is based on a data reciprocity ethos and seeks to elucidate historically-grounded processes of societal transformation.

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Research, Analytical, and Expository Practices • It privileges evolving processes that • It adopts an expository strategy that foregrounds the ethno-historical generate the vectors of change over context of the community being bounded spaces and places, and investigated, performs a “contrathus abandons the “romance of puntal” (against the grain) “literspatial confinement” of traditional ature review” to show how the ethnography. fieldwork material will not be made • It focuses on social collectivities to fit travelling theories, and privin quest of a historically contexileges analytical explanation over tualized and institutionally mediated “creative” interpretation. communal biography, in contrast to presents research findings ethnography’s haphazardly selected • It through a transversal analytical individual actors within an isolated perspective that strategically altermicro community in search of an nates between the micro, meso, interpretive understanding of their and macro levels in elucidating, cultural matrix. through an explanatory narrative • It synthesizes the diachronic (histor(not a story-telling one) about the ical span) and the synchronic impacts of trans-local forces on the (contemporary scope) into an multiple dimensions of local reality analytical continuum that not only and the transformation of the local straddles the field and the text, but order. also articulates the past and present as well as anticipates the future, • It validates its knowledge claims on the basis of: historicallythereby encompassing a full temporal informed experiential immersion; spectrum. empirically validated description; • It transgresses the traditional polarity local knowledge-grounded explaof scales by triangulating the intrinsic nation; contextually-embedded analytical relationality between the theory formation; and an ethic of micro level (i.e., the practices of indisharing cognitive resources between vidual actors in their local/communal researcher and research subjects. settings), the meso level (societal institutions), and the macro level (i.e., • It pursues a non-extractive research that generates knowledge resources the encompassing national societal as “relational goods” for the mutual structures, and regional civilizational benefit of fieldworker and field matrices) in the investigation of a subjects. social formation.

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Mesography’s Rules of Engagement: Praxis Commitments • The emancipation of the practice • The deterritorialization of the practitioner’s epistemic and ontological of anthropology from its normative attachments from her provincial enthrallment to the travelling internative grounds in quest of a nonpretive templates authorized by the egocentric and non-ethnocentric fashionable theories of the Western means for achieving a contextacademy. This entails obligatorily the dependent (not self-centered) conceptual laundering, definitional understanding of the dynamics of divestiture, theoretical supersession, the sociocultural formation under lexical renewal, and taxonomic substistudy. This entails the jettisoning of tution of the discipline’s conventional national identity and its associated knowledge production resources. epistemic tradition as cognitive • The abandonment of the discipline’s crutches for disciplinary practitraditional object of study as the tioners engaged in cross-border “science of others” located in the research. This would restore the non-Western segment of humanity, abandoned inaugural promise of and its reconstruction into a worldfieldwork: To emancipate practicentric science of the whole of tioners from their nativist fealties humanity in a post-exotic socioculto provincial repertoire of travelling tural “pluriversality.” theories. • The recuperation of the discipline • The reconfiguration of disciplinary from its current status as the practitioners’ “network of commitacademic repository of the coloments” (e.g., methodological, nial epistemé through the persisconceptual, and theoretical loyaltence of a series of taken for ties) that are embedded within their granted illiberal practices: (a) its respective national anthropological dominant institutional configuration traditions through the cultivation of as a “Western only and white mostly a set of combined critical compespace,” which reluctantly integrates tencies that are cross-disciplinary. its “domestic exotics” and tolerFor example: (a) the historian’s ates its foreign exotics only through comprehensive diachronic contextheir representation in absentia; (b) tualization of the research domain; its normative epistemological orien(b) the sociologist’s elucidation of tation as the symbolic domination the nexus between human actions of others through an endemic inteland institutional contexts; (c) the lectual ethos of interpretive expropolitical-economist’s meticulous priation based on metropolitan travdissection of the configuration of elling theories; and (c) its segregathe state-power-polity matrix; and tionist relational protocol embodied (d) the methodological pluralist’s in the professional phobia of “going pragmatic selection of research tools native”—a self-serving deployment of adapted to the research context. a strategic xenophobia averse to reciprocal cultural influence that masquerades as a guarantor of scientific objectivity.

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Epistemic Imperatives • The rejection of an a priori submis- • The repudiation of the discipline’s nostalgic fondness for, and thus sion to the discipline’s established anachronistic advocacy of, methoddoxology. For example: (a) its excluological purity based on the false sive mandate to study the “other” as a symbiosis between a specific method hierarchically racialized or ethnicized and the substance of a discipline subject, and (b) its epistemological through the tyranny of ethnogmonopoly over the production of raphy, which circumscribes the defi“cultural” knowledge about the nonnition of objects and subjects of Western regions of the world that is investigation to its existing research chronically burdened with a legacy techniques (i.e., micro-scale and of bestowing cultural recognition as face-to-face encounter). alienated representations. • The refusal to occupy exotic anthro- • The dismissal of the notion of a mutual exclusion between explapology’s “savage slot” with an ethos nation, as the primary discursive of inquiry animated by a theology tool of the social sciences that of otherness: (a) a compulsive indulproduces generalizing abstractions, gence in a xenophilia for the primorand interpretation as the excludial other, (b) an emphasis on the sive means of knowledge production remote and the marginal remnants in anthropology. Explanation and of societies as the preferred domains interpretation represent an analytof fieldwork, and (c) wallowing in ical continuum. The recourse to the West/Rest dichotomy and its one or the other is contingent agonies of conscience. This reduces on knowledge or ignorance, as per disciplinary practice into a kind of the following maxim: “When you philanthropology: To give voice to understand you explain, when you research subjects invariably ascribed don’t you interpret.” the status of subalterns. Mesography as a Synoptic Study The end product of a mesography is a historical anthropology of the key domains of a community crafted through a panoramic analysis of the diversity and fullness of its particularities based on the following analytical procedures: • A historical biography of a commu- • A strategic inventory of the network (a) of actors (individual, collecnity’s emergence through a multitive, and institutional), (b) of temporal chronological reconstrucfactors (material and symbolic), and tion of its initial production, subse(c) of loci of influence (global, quent attempts at its reproduction regional, national and communal) and its contemporary transformation. that generate the vectors of change.

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• A structural anatomy of its social, • A processual analysis that situates the above within a relational political, economic, cultural, and matrix encompassing variously situenvironmental configuration through ated actors, trans/local institutions, a multi-scalar analytical excavation. and catalyzing events in a miscellany • A lexical genealogy of the key of external and internal sites and local words relating to categories of at multiple scales that are relevant social classification, collective identito the investigation of the social ties, sociocultural practices, and other formation. aspects that constitute the communal social taxonomy.

1.6 Fieldwork as a Recursive Process: From Village Dwelling to Sites Hopping Mesography promotes a different conception of fieldwork, which is another crucial distinction from the conventional practice of anthropology. It disassociates fieldwork from ethnography and belies the conventional wisdom about the indelible symbiosis between the two: Ethnography is a data appropriation research practice, which is framed within a self-centered interpretive paradigm that is animated by an autonomous individualism and its compulsory ego-centric orientation that foregrounds the ethnographer’s agency and privileges her hermeneutic predilection. This conception of ethnographic fieldwork not only renounced the ideal of fieldwork as an empirical elucidation of research subjects’ lives, but also demoted anthropology from a social scientific enterprise in quest of knowledge for the public’s enlightenment, to an intellectual exercise for the gratification of the anthropologist’s professional aspiration. Fieldwork, in contrast, is a generic research activity that is pursued as a heuristic quest for the drivers of social transformation in the social formation under study. It proceeds through resident empirical social learning informed by the historical process of the research context, and the current realities engendered by the gauntlet of local, national, and international institutions and actors and their policy regimes. Lastly, this conception of fieldwork requires the abandonment of the self-other dialectic in favor of a community-world relationality in which the fieldworker spurns the pantomimic performance of the “participantobserver” role in favor of the genuinely empathic role of a “practical

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mediator” in quest of a shared understanding of the community’s worldly entanglements. Accordingly, fieldwork within the research framework of a mesography seeks to map out the ripple effects of the interactions between actors and institutions, and to inventory the reactions from the inhabitants of the social formation being studied. This mapping process cannot be performed with the traditional mise-en-scène of anthropology, namely the one village approach, or its incrementally adjusted version of “multi-sited ethnography.” Instead, it entailed an expanded conception of fieldwork as constituted through a recursive movement between places and texts embedded in social-historical processes that are conceived as relational settings encompassing the following dimensional spectrum: Temporal polarities (past vs. present), scalar hierarchies (macro-meso-micro), spatial positionalities (mainland-island and homeland-diaspora), and geographical localities (rural-urban and mountain-coast). These dimensions are integrated into a history-contingent dynamic trajectory of the communal formation under study. This recursive movement applies as well to the modality of “being there” in the field, as it entails the abandoning the traditional notion of static “dwelling” in one location and its contrived participant observation ethos, in favor of a dynamic “commuting” to multiple places to engage in the ambulant witnessing of peoples’ lives (cf. Clifford 1997). Moreover, this recursive movement could emancipate anthropological fieldwork from its touristic “postcard experience” effect: the failure of anthropologists to escape the entrapment of their “national container paradigms” and thus the encapsulation of their data within a menu of provincial travelling theories. Indeed, ethnographers seemed to have remained faithful to the maxim, which guided Western travellers’ performance of an “Oriental masquerade” during their exotica hunting ventures centuries ago: “Put on the costume of the country you visit, but keep the suit of clothes you will need to go home in” (Diderot quoted in Todorov 1993: 13). The result of this sartorial and epistemic chameleon strategy is not only the erasure of the presumed benefits of the fieldwork experience, but also the renunciation of its very purpose. In my fieldwork, this recursive movement between multiple locations took the form of “sites hopping,” which refers to the practice of the short stay followed by multiple re-visits as part of a pattern of commuting at irregular intervals to locations all over Soqotra Island. This approach simulated Soqotrans’ opportunistic spatial displacements in pursuit of a multiplicity of livelihood sustaining activities. It served as my means

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of mapping the multiple localities as “points of articulation,” in which the situated interactions between actors and institutions mediated by the implementation of government plans and policies, international agencies’ projects, infrastructure development, among other activities seemed to provide the clues regarding the nature and direction of the island’s transition as an emergent social formation. The practice of “sites hopping” was grounded on my mode of “being there” in Soqotra, which approximated the routines of local residents and obviated the need for pantomimic performances of “participant-observation”: Procured my weekly provisions at the local market as everyone else; breakfasted, lunched and dined frequently at different restaurants along with locals; attended (infrequently) Friday prayers at the mosque with my neighbors; witnessed the divergent wedding rituals in urban areas (mass weddings in Qalansiyah, and singular ones in Hadiboh) and in rural areas where the rufda custom (gifts of livestock to the groom by all the neighboring clans) is practiced; participated in the regular afternoon tea drinking ritual (muqhib); observed communities engaged in conflict resolution sessions sulh (s.ulh.); tagged along with politicians on the campaign trail in hinterland villages; attended lunch invitations in urban and rural households; attended football matches between local teams during the tournament season; went on walking expeditions to the central and southern regions and stayed with “Bedouins” in their modest abodes (not in a separate tent) and without indulging in “fictive native” practices (e.g., milking cows, herding goats or pruning date palm trees); conducted extensive exploratory travels by car throughout the island; and socialized at q¯at chewing sessions, among other activities. The place that served as my commuting platform for “sites hopping” was Hadiboh, the main urban formation of the island and its only market place (see Vol. 2: Chapter 1; Elie 2004a). It was my launching pad into the rest of the island, and from which I mapped the changing aspects of the emerging communal order. The fact is that our modality of “being there” and to live among our research subjects determines how we represent them in our work: The “fictive native” modality and its chameleonic Oriental masquerade leads to the formulation of travelling theory-led instrumentalized representations; the “practical mediator” modality and its commitment to a locally shared understanding leads to the production of knowledge as mutually enlightening “relational goods.”

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Ultimately, the use of mesography and its ensemble of practices should enable the practitioner of a post-exotic anthropology to generate knowledge that provides an informationally substantive, theoretically generative, and even actionable understanding of research subjects’ communal ways of life, as part of anthropology’s larger project of explaining and maintaining the planet’s cultural diversity and the corollary modes of thought that sustain alternative ways of life. This two-volume book aspires to contribute to that project.

PART I

Eco-Socio-Economic Disarticulation: Waning Pastoral Community

CHAPTER 2

Synoptic Preview: Context, Catalysts, Theory, and History

This chapter performs the analytical prerequisites of a post-exotic anthropology using the mesographic approach in the study of a community: First, it contextualizes Soqotra within a continuous process of entanglements with external factors that insist on its political subordination and symbolic exoticization. Second, it identifies the catalysts to the island’s transition process and analyzes the vectors of its transformation into an emergent social formation. Third, it calls for an alternative framing of the discourse on state-society relations; suggests that theory about such relations must be embedded within the enabling historical conditions of a social formation and should not be borrowed from the shelf of travelling theories; and adopts, as an alternative to reliance on travelling theories, the notion of a “recursive relationship” between the state and community as the analytical pivot of Soqotra’s transition process. And fourth, it proposes an alternative narrative to the two dominant ones (i.e., cultural and structural) that framed the polity formation dynamics of societies within the West Asia and North Africa region by coining the term “conjunctural narrative” to contextualize the historical trajectory of emergence of Soqotra as an indigenous communal polity.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45638-2_2

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2.1 Situating Soqotra: Contextual Reconnaissance The Soqotra Archipelago is Yemen’s ultimate frontier, dangling between the African continent and the Arabian Peninsula. It is located within 250 km (155 miles) of the Somali coast and separated by a distance of about 380 km (236 miles) from the southeastern coast of mainland Yemen. The Archipelago constitutes a haphazard clustering of a few isolated specks of land that straddles the entrance of the Red Sea, as if its gatekeeper, while simultaneously demarcating the beginning of the Indian Ocean in the Gulf of Aden. When seen on a map, the aggregated cluster of islands evokes the image of a doorknob to the b¯ ab al-mandab, the gateway to the Suez canal. The Archipelago is composed of four islands: Soqotra (3625 km2 or 1399 mi2 ), ‘Abd al-Kuri (133 km2 or 51 mi2 ), Samh.a (40 km2 or 15 mi2 ), and Darsa (16 km2 or 6 mi2 ) in addition to a few rock formations. Only two of the islands are inhabited: Soqotra and Abd al-Kuri. The Archipelago’s landmass represents a continental fragment that was geologically linked to the continental plate of Africa until about six millions years ago, as it “rests on a shelf platform that is attached to the Horn of Africa” (Fleitmann et al. 2004: 28). The Bents’ metaphorical characterization of the Archipelago’s straddling location is apt: “Cast away in the Indian Ocean, like a fragment rejected in the construction of Africa… Though it is Arabian politically, Sokotra geographically is African,” and equally mixed in its ethnocultural endowment (1900: 342, 345). The Archipelago’s location on the threshold of two continents, Africa and West Asia’s landmass, and as a cardinal node on the sea-lanes linking the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond, placed it at the center of an area, which for millennia was the epicenter of international trade among the great empires of the East as well as between them and a then backward West. Soqotra Island, with a landmass measuring 133 km (82.6 miles) from west to east and 43 km (26.7 miles) from north to south, is the largest island in the Arab world, out of an estimated 258 islands that are dispersed throughout an area stretching from the Maghreb in the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf (Al-Hity 1998: 285). To appreciate Soqotra’s size and potential, an illustrative comparison to the tiny island-state of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf is revealing: Bahrain has one-fifth of Soqotra’s landmass (780 km2 ), but contains thirty times its population (over 1,500,000) and its total gross domestic product (GDP) of nearly 34 billion dollars is three-fourth of the Republic of Yemen’s

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GDP ($ 43 billion for 26 million people) for 2014, the year prior to the start of the Saudi war and the economy’s collapse. 2.1.1

Noah’s Ark Rediscovered: Arcadian Fixation

Soqotra’s strategic geographic location ensured its entry into the annals of ancient as well as modern history. Moreover, given the re-emergence of the Indian Ocean as the “strategic hub of the twenty-first century world” and thus the fulcrum of the “new Great Game in geopolitics” with the shift in the global balance of power to Asia, Soqotra may well play a key role in twenty-first-century history (Kaplan 2010). Indeed, by an accidental conjunction of events, its role as a potential military base became a reality in 2015, as it was placed under the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) “provisional” humanitarian protectorate regime with the reluctant consent of the “internationally recognized” government in exile of the non-sovereign Yemeni state. It is astounding to observe the similarity in Soqotra’s political situation at the dawn of the third decade of the twenty-first century CE with its status back in the middle of the first century CE when the anonymous author of the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote: “at present time the kings [of Hadhramawt] have leased out the island, and it is under guard” (Casson 1989: 69). This confirms the chronic condition of political heteronomy that has plagued the existence of the island’s residents. Throughout its history, Soqotra’s fluctuating political fate and economic fortune was contingent on the values outsiders attached to its strategic location or to the perceived commercial potential of its resources. Moreover, its physical isolation as a landmass endowed it with an endemic biodiversity that has spurred reveries about the lost Garden of Eden, and made it a coveted haven for a mosaic of human aspirations. This evolved into a discursive tradition entailing the symbolic expropriation and discursive subsumption of the island to the phantasmic musings of outsiders (see Elie 2006a). Soqotra’s initial fame from the first millennium BCE was due to its aromatic plants regarded then as the “gold of the East.” The island’s recent “rediscovery” by the international community at the dawn of the third millennium CE is based on the perceived global significance of the biodiversity of its endemic species of fauna and flora. This renewed interest in Soqotra’s biodiversity has made it vulnerable to a virtual colonization by environmentalists through a hyperbolic imaginative symbolism, which evokes the primitivist exoticism—“they live according to nature” discourse—of the sixteenth-century

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“Age of Discovery.” This is exemplified in the “chronological primitivism” of the report submitted on behalf of the Government of Yemen to the UNESCO’s selection committee for Natural World Heritage Sites: The natural environment of Soqotra has retained an impressive level of integrity till present date, making it the equivalent of a precious Noah’s Ark, where ancient flora and fauna, as well as an associated unique culture and traditions, have survived until the present day. (Government of Yemen 2006: 7)

Given its location, Soqotra has had a long history of strategic entanglements with, and symbolic appropriation by, a succession of great powers vying for resources in the littoral territories on the rim of the Indian Ocean. Consequently, Soqotra’s historical transformation was driven primarily by a series of acts of political incorporation into various external state entities. This process of political incorporation may have begun in the seventh century BCE, which marked the emergence of the ancient “incense kingdoms” of South Arabia, and when Soqotra (then known as Sakrad) was already a plantation colony of incense-bearing trees inhabited by migrant laborers from eastern South Arabia and annexed to the ancient Kingdom of Hadhramawt until the fourth century CE when the incense trade began to decline. The Kingdom of H . imyar (second century BCE to 525 CE) replaced that of Hadhramawt and became Soqotra’s political overlord. Subsequently, Soqotra seems to have mutated into a settlers’ colony, at least on the northern coast, made up of a mosaic population of immigrants, and seasonal vagrants, who shared the island with an indigenous people inhabiting the mountainous interior. These settlers turned it into a quasi-stateless peddlers’ emporium that was loosely linked to various mainland and foreign political overlords and subjected to occasional raiding parties and temporary occupation from state and non-state actors of all provenances, until the island’s re-incorporation into the South Arabian Sultanate of al-Mahra in the fifteenth century (see contributors in Strauch 2012; Elie 2006a). Soqotra Island and its approximately fifty thousand inhabitants, or more precisely 44,120 according to the most recent census of 2004— a figure that is contested by Soqotrans who suspect the mainland of a politically motivated undercounting of the island’s population, and who are convinced that the population ranges between 80,000 and 120,000— occupy a hyphenated geographical place (Africa-Arabia) as well as an

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interstitial ethnocultural space (Soqotri-Yemeni). The island precariously straddles a fading traditional present and a foreseeable future of continuous change, over which national and international actors are competing for the right to influence the island’s fate according to their particular environmental muse and development vision. These actors include the state bureaucracy, international agencies, and most prominently UNsponsored globe-trotting environmentalists as “green missionaries.” Guha prophetically warned that these “green missionaries are possibly more dangerous, and certainly more hypocritical, than their economic or religious counterparts” (Guha 2000: 370). As they arbitrarily appropriate and imperiously confer “totemic status” on other peoples’ environmental assets and livelihood resources for their own worshiping rituals (e.g., nature tourism) that are evocative of a primordial “environmental paganism.” The dominant expression of their vision is the local promotion of an invasive trans-cultural subjectivity that would transform Soqotrans into conscripts of an externally driven, prematurely preventive, and excessively disciplinary environmental conservation regime. The aim is to preserve the indigenous inhabitants as noble ecological custodians of their island, in order to maintain it as a bucolic abode for the visual pleasure of ecotourists and to safeguard it as a territorial set-aside for the benefit of the global environment (see below). Soqotra Island is the largest of the Archipelago, and as such, it is the primary focus of this study. Beyond its two main northern coastal towns (Hadiboh and Qalansiyah), which contain one-third of the total population, the rest of the territory is sundered into an Archipelago of over 600 clans’ hamlets. According to the last population census conducted in 2004, each hamlet is occupied by an average population of 50.4 inhabitants, who are seasonal peripatetics, as their residence in these hamlets is contingent upon seasons, weather condition, and availability of resources (e.g., water and pasture). Soqotrans have always pursued a multiplicity of subsistence livelihoods: non-nomadic transhumant milk pastoralism with herds of goat, sheep, cow, and camel, which is complemented by fishing, date farming, and geographically limited vegetable gardening. Their practice is contingent on seasons, variations in agro-ecological zones, and further constrained by the nearly five-month summer monsoon, during which economic life comes to a relative standstill (Chapter 5). These subsistence livelihoods are being supplemented by increasing employment opportunities through an emerging modern economic sector—e.g.,

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construction, tourism, salaried posts in the island’s government bureaucracy as clerks, police, and military personnel—and further complemented by remittances from the Soqotran émigrés in the Arabian Gulf diaspora (Vol. 2: Chapter 5). In spite of a long history of multiple contacts, Soqotra was until the early 1990s one of the few remaining spaces that can be legitimately considered, at least at first sight, as an exemplar of “the pristine replicas of the pre-capitalist, pre-industrial past in the sinks and margins of the capitalist, industrial world” that anthropologists have always looked for (Wolf 1982: 8). As it resembled a communal remnant that has survived the attempt at its transformation by a larger world, and thus, its people still dwell in an idyllic abode, indeed an Arcadia, and were endowed with an indigenous ethnic, linguistic, and cultural heritage. Soqotra epitomized this Arcadian ideal as it had, until the 1990s, a barter-mediated social economy where the profit motive or the cumulative logic was still unknown, at least in its rural milieu. Moreover, its landscape was relatively “pristine,” with a culture that was not yet hybridized in the modern sense—i.e., having lost its traditional cultural core—and a people not yet, or at least not entirely, seduced by the titillations of modernity. Therefore, they were still self-possessed and not yet prey to the self-doubt and identity crisis that usually afflict those who have embraced the social philosophy of “development.” By the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, Soqotra was being incorporated into the “development” paradigm, which is the discursive progeny of the “civilizing mission” undertaken during over half a millennium of colonial kleptocracy. This new civilizing mission is now repackaged into the Global North’s travelling international development regime propagated among the countries throughout the Global South. This regime ranks countries along a comparative “deficit index” anchored to Western standards of wasteful consumerism, and subsequently, it administers a plethora of merely ameliorative socio-economic “development” projects as part of a failure-ridden “catching-up” ritual (see Kothari et al. 2019). In effect, these projects are conscience-appeasing philanthropic ministrations, given that this regime is framed within “a moral universe organized around the principles of sin and expiation” (Collier 2007: 123). Soqotra was becoming an experimental dumping ground for these “eco-development” projects as the primary means of its incorporation into a post-liberal environmentalism regime that promotes a development-prevention and modernization-postponement strategy, as

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the island’s development was made a sacrificial lamb for its environmental conservation (Vol. 2: Chapter 6). Since the incorporation of Soqotra into the Southern Yemeni state following the 1967 revolution that led to its independence from the British, the island has been engaged in an inexorable transition process. The latter was inaugurated by the continuous transfer of teachers, administrators, military personnel, and their related institutions from the mainland, as agents of change on behalf of a socialism-inspired and Arabic-based polity regimentation process. As a result, Soqotra began to emerge gradually from its condition of extreme geographic peripherality, and socio-economic marginality. The island’s gradual entry into modernity has intensified since the unification of the states of Northern and Southern Yemen in 1990 into the Republic of Yemen. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, Soqotra’s modernization took a decisive turn due to the acceleration of its political incorporation into the mainland nation-state and international conscription into a globally disseminated environmental policy regime. 2.1.2

Clash of Futures: Incommensurable Visions

As I made my fieldwork entry into the island in February 2002, however, its relative insularity had already been breached, as it had come under the protective environmental circumscription of the international community, and the galvanized political circumspection of the national government. Indeed, a dual incorporation process had begun in 1996 almost simultaneously but not necessarily harmoniously: on the one hand, the Yemeni government signed the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and declared Soqotra a natural area in need of urgent protection. This was followed by the formulation and implementation by United Nations’ (UN) agencies of a biodiversity conservation project that started in 1997 and has undergone multiple reincarnations extending its life beyond the second decade of the twenty-first century. Both events, the signing of the CBD and the initiation of the project, have heralded the official transfer of the Archipelago’s environmental assets to the UN’s stewardship. On the other hand, the national government launched an aggressive program of political and economic recuperation through extensive infrastructural development as well as the commissioning in 2000 of the ten-year Socotra Archipelago Master Plan with funding from the European Union. As a result, Soqotra began its incorporation into the institutional logic of a

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global environmental regime through the seemingly innocuous guise of environmental protection and biodiversity conservation, and its accommodation to the political strictures of a (belated) formalized national integration process. Again, it seems that Soqotra was fulfilling its historically assigned role, namely to accommodate itself to the desiderata of external actors and their vision of the island’s place in the national imagination and in fantasist global schemes. The cumulative effect of these actors’ interventions was to transform Soqotra into an externally driven eco-political project that has deepened as well as accelerated a process of change along intra-national, inter-regional, and trans-national dimensions. Ultimately, the end-result of this eco-political engineering of the island is contingent on the interactional outcome between three marginally related visions of its future that are briefly highlighted below. First, the UN vision seeks to establish an ecocracy—that is, a social formation structured by internationally determined constraints on local use of environmental resources to which the Soqotran community must adjust. This vision entails the re-socialization of the population’s interaction with the environment in the form of a disciplinary regulation of the Soqotrans’ use of their island’s environmental assets. In this context, development seeks merely to stabilize and marginally improve local good practices without changes in the prevailing lifeways of Soqotrans. In effect, it seems that the UN and its surrogate agencies’ primary preoccupation is with brokering a transition, or gradual emergence, of the Soqotran population from subsistence pastoralists re-invented as conscientious indigenous conservationists doubling as part-time ecotourist guides. To accompany this caricatural ideal type, Soqotra is envisioned as a social formation that approximates an idyllic bucolic abode frozen in a pristine state and to be kept that way. This is aptly captured in a description of Soqotra, which contrives a seamless web between past and present and thus depicts institutions and peoples as museum artifacts: “They live by fishing, herding livestock, date cultivation and gathering plant products – a lifestyle that has changed little since the first settlers arrived over 2000 years ago” (Government of Yemen 2006: 40). This is a rather astounding assertion, as it seemed deliberately oblivious to Soqotra’s contemporary situation. This imagined pastoral idyll has engendered a “let’s save them from modernity” syndrome, in which conservation and development are reified into two mutually exclusive alternatives.

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Second, the national government’s vision can be imputed to a paramount motive: The nationalization of the Soqotrans’ cultural identity, which is driven by the state’s ethnocultural diversity-averse ideology of nation-building. This disposition is partly engendered by the state’s experience with the mainland’s population, where the central government’s ineffectual institutional presence, when not entirely absent, in rural areas has engendered a deeply ingrained proclivity toward the nonrecognition of its political legitimacy and institutional authority. The mainland rural polity’s autarkic attitude was bred by its atomized geography of residence in which over 70% of Yemenis live mostly as agricultural peasants in the cloistered intimacy of sparsely populated rural villages and hamlets that are widely dispersed throughout Yemen’s mountainous landscape. Soqotra represents an even more extreme case of insular existence, given its hyper-marginal location from the mainland, and scattered topography of residence, which are conducive to a parochialism that might be especially resistant to the profession of national loyalties. The government’s vision is to transform Soqotran clansmen with local fealties into citizen-tribesmen with exclusive national allegiances. In this context, governmental interventions take on monumental dimensions, in the form of airport, seaport, extensive network of asphalted roads, and over-size public office buildings, in order to signify the mainland’s architectural proprietorship of Soqotra’s landscape. Also, the state’s local development activities are pursued through the distribution of projects that take on the character of an exchange of gift, or favor, between the Soqotran community and the executive branch of the national government. Ultimately, they symbolized a kind of politically expedient quid pro quo that seeks to engender communal gratitude toward the state, which is supposed to be paid back in the form of votes for the ruling party during elections, as tokens of appreciation of state largesse. Third, the overwhelming majority of Soqotrans remain oblivious, if not actively antipathetic, to the above visions of their future and the agentive effigy into which they have been caricatured. In the case of the UN eco-engineering project, they have shown a deep skepticism vis-à-vis the relevance of its goals to their lives and have remained uncooperative toward its activities. In the case of the mainland government’s politicocultural nationalization project, they have withdrawn their confidence in its professed good intentions, even though they perfunctorily participate in its rituals. Prior to the beginning of the second decade of the twentyfirst century, Soqotrans had no formally articulated vision of the future,

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as they were preoccupied with their perilous straddling of the economic exigencies of an encroaching modernity and the diminishing effectiveness of their traditional means of subsistence (e.g., pastoralism). Their demands from the mainland government and international development agencies were focused on the most elementary form of human development: effective educational institutions, functioning health services, reliable access to water, and adequate food security. While these demands remain crucial to their well-being on the island, Soqotrans, since the launch of the Arab Spring in 2011, have radicalized their political aspirations regarding the future of their homeland. Indeed, divergent political visions have emerged, which have engendered an internal clash of futures among the population and sundered it into multiple opposing political camps. However, all of them share in common an emergent ethnoregional communalism, which is animated by a transnational imaginary and diasporic solidarity that are engendering aspirations toward a postnational identity that circumvents identification with the Yemeni state by shifting the scale of loyalty beyond national borders (see Epilogue). The Archipelago’s recent accession to Governorate status may not necessarily enhance Soqotrans loyalty to the mainland nation-state; instead, it might stimulate their appetite for greater autonomy from it. And its incorporation as a humanitarian protectorate of the UAE as of 2015 will test Soqotrans’ loyalty to the Yemeni mainland state. In sum, this is a multi-strand process of communal transformation through the halting, uncoordinated, and conflictual implementation of an ecological, cultural, and political engineering project. This project, however, is driven more by happenstance than by design, as its evolving configuration is entirely contingent on the ultimate denouement of the complex relations involving the following actors and factors: (a) the UN-mediated environmental management regime, which is supported by a constellation of globe-trotting eco-conservationists seeking to realize their ecotopia; (b) a fluctuating stream of economic migrants from the mainland fleeing idleness, and seeking to remake Soqotra, or at least its main urban center, into their own image, and bringing along their cultural habits (e.g., q¯at chewing, various brands of Islam, etc.) as well as their skills, and in the process helping to broker a local service economy and consumer culture; (c) the state’s attempt to create a culturally homogenized sub-national polity in a context of a locally emergent social fragmentation and in the absence of a thought out political and cultural incorporation strategy; and (d) the recent geopolitical machinations of

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some regional states in quest of Soqotra’s annexation. The next section identifies the drivers of Soqotra’s transitional transformation process.

2.2 Catalysts of Transition: Transmigration and State Policy Soqotra’s emergence as a communal formation and its entry into the modern period were mediated by its serial entanglements with trans-local forces in the form of mainland state institutions and policies. These were complemented by the interventions of the state’s international partners (the UN and bilateral aid agencies), and the migratory movements these engendered (e.g., internal migration from hinterland to the coast, emigration of locals, and immigration of mainlanders and others). In effect, Soqotra’s transition process is demarcated by the sequential grafting of external socio-political models on the local socio-cultural infrastructure. This occurred through the transfer of state institutions under different political regimes with their distinctive administrative modus operandi and their re-structuring effects on Soqotrans’ indigenous institutions, traditional social structures, and the associated cultural practices. In the three sub-sections below, first I provide an overview of the migratory flux that catalyzed the island’s transition process; second, I highlight the phenomenon of the island’s dependency on external policy-imposing agencies; and third, I identify the domains of analysis pursued in this book that were constituted by four major processes as vectors of change engendered by migration and externally-imposed policies. 2.2.1

Migratory Movements: Sociocultural Change Agents

Soqotra, since antiquity, was a magnet for various forms of vagrancy, which made it a haven for a human mosaic that generated a population mélange, the biological sediments of which can be observed in the varied phenotypes of Soqotrans. In keeping with this historical legacy of population contact, Soqotra’s modern process of change is still driven by the politico-cultural entanglement of people from different places. This section highlights the socio-cultural consequences of the migratory movements engendered during the periods of political incorporation noted above. Six migratory phases are identified and their impacts are summarized below and are elaborated upon in subsequent chapters.

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The first influx of migrants to the island came from the south-eastern part of mainland Yemen along with the Sultan of al-Mahra, when he shifted the Sultanate’s administrative center from mainland Yemen to Soqotra in the late nineteenth century. This move led to a corresponding relocation of members of the Sultan’s “court.” The latter included members of the Sultan’s family, families of notables, and a retinue of service providers. Another group came as economic migrants from countries in the Arabian Gulf that made up the Trucial States under British protectorate, which are today’s Oman and the UAE. One group among these migrants was known in Arabic as “t.aw¯ aw¯ısh” (“oversea traders”) who resided on the island during the annual fishing season to trade pearl shells (mos.elih. in Soqotri) and pearls (bilbil in Soqotri) and in East Africa as well; others sought to broker the trade in butter-oil (h.ami in Soqotri), then a major export commodity to the Gulf and East Africa. In effect, they were pioneer economic migrants, who had a pull effects on Soqotran migration to the Arabian Gulf after the 1967 revolution in the South (see below). The transfer of the official seat of the Sultanate led to the imposition of a proxy settler colonial regime, and the consolidation of an ascriptive social status hierarchy, which legitimated the primacy of the Sultanic tribe from al-Mahra and the subordination of the rest. This social pyramid was based on a descending scale of social prestige and related occupational functions (see Chapter 4). At the apex were the Sultan’s family and a class of notables (main landowners and tax farmers), for whom taxation was a form of “primitive accumulation” that ensured the socio-institutional reproduction of the Sultanate. Certain aspects of this social structure have persisted in spite of subsequent attempts at dissolving them. Therefore, a set of cultural perceptions, social expectations, and occupational functions continue to be associated with some social groups. Beyond these legacies, one enduring structural effect is the exogenous nature of political rule over the island and the circumscribed sovereignty exercised by the indigenous Soqotran population. The second major period in migratory movement was the end of British colonization of South Yemen on 30 November 1967, which led to the demise of the Sultanate of Soqotra and of its incorporation into the new South Yemeni state. This period inaugurated the island’s entry into modernity, which Soqotrans describe in Arabic as h.ad.¯ ara (civilization) and that began a process, which is still ongoing, of opening the island up to the outside world. This process breached their communal insularity as well as challenged them to adapt their cultural repertoire honed in the

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bad¯ awa (pastoralists’ hinterland) to the construction of a modern society. The socialist administration not only started a population transfer from the mainland to the island, but also engineered an internal population redistribution from the hinterland to the coast. This was pursued through a land redistribution and job creation policy in the coastal areas. Also, it introduced formal schooling and initiated the Arabization of the culture partly as a by-product of an administrative imperative. Moreover, the new administration sought to drastically reconfigure the island’s communal life in order to uproot the social legacies of the previous regime. While the state was sending a contingent of mainlanders as change agents, its coercive political means of engineering social change on the island seemed to have engendered a selective exodus of members from the upper echelon of the old regime’ status hierarchy. This accelerated the emigration of hundreds of people from the island as permanent exiles to the Arabian Gulf countries, especially the United Arab Emirates, where they became the founding members of a now vibrant Soqotran diaspora. This diaspora is becoming increasingly influential in shaping the economic and cultural development of the island through frequent visits, investment in real estate, and support of relatives in local businesses ventures. The third period of migration was initiated with the unification of North and South Yemen in 1990, and it engendered new dimensions in the migratory process to the island. On the mainland unification led to a northern cultural appropriation of the south, emblematized in the dah.b¯ ash¯ı syndrome. The latter was named after the main character in a Yemeni television series shown in the early 1990s, whose demeanor symbolized all that was perceived as obnoxious in the northern Yemeni culture by the people in South Yemen. In Soqotra, the new migrants came from the north as well, and were, and are still, known as al-shim¯ al¯ıyin (northerners), a term that has the same connotation for Soqotrans, as did dah.b¯ ash¯ı (pl. dah.¯ abisha) for southerners. This northern migratory influx accelerated the qualitative modification of Soqotran culture. First, as economic migrants in search of livelihood opportunities and not social integration, these “northerners” brought along their cultural habits in order to recreate the cultural universe they were familiar with to the coastal enclave of Hadiboh, which they consolidated into the island’s economic capital and main gateway to external cultural influences. As a result, they became unwitting agents of cultural diffusion, as their clothing style, consumption pattern, and certain cultural habits (e.g., q¯at chewing) were gradually adopted by the locals. This has induced a degree

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of communal cultural disaffiliation and thus a partial discontinuation of the local socio-cultural reproduction process. Second, in economic terms Hadiboh was transformed into a retailers’ emporium, and from which the rest of the island was gradually being weaved into a web of monetized economic transactions. Third, the extension of the political incorporation process, through an expedient institutional modernization (e.g., the rapid spread of schools, and the reconfiguration of the local governance system), has generated problems of educational socialization and cultural integration. Fourth, the intensification of the Islamization of Soqotran culture, as the island became a regular destination for various mainland Islamic missionary groups that have established their local niche. Initially, Islam was a means to undo the secularization impacts of the socialist administration, but has since shifted the aspirational horizon of Soqotrans by providing a competing source of identification to a national identity. Moreover, it is modifying Soqotrans’ relationship to their cultural heritage, as the practice of some activities (e.g., music playing and dancing during wedding ceremonies) is now being discouraged because their performance usually involved the participation of both men and women. As these practices violated the Islamic code of modesty and its injunction against socializing between different genders. The fourth migratory movement was the result of the Yemeni government decision in 1996 to designate Soqotra as an environmentally protected zone, and the subsequent approval and implementation of an environmental conservation project funded by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) beginning in 1997. The ultimate aim of this project is to transform the island into a biodiversity preserve, an environmental research station, and an international ecotourism destination. This initiated, what is expected to be, a continuous and perhaps long-term engagement with foreign experts, researchers, and tourists. The expected influx of this new breed of seasonal migrants has generated a lot of infrastructure development. The island boasts of a recently completed airport whose size and appearance surpass that of much bigger regions on the mainland, and its airport has the longest runway in the country. This is being complemented by an extensive asphalted roads network, and the construction of a modern seaport is in the planning stages, and new hotels have been built. More importantly, is the reconfiguration of Soqotrans’ relationship to their environment through the implementation of the “Conservation Zoning Plan for Socotra Islands,” and the adoption of ecotourism as the island’s engine of development, and the prioritization

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of related economic activities that have wagered the islanders’ economic future on the destination choice of ecotourists on their environmental pilgrimage around the world. Also, this period occasioned a significant influx of prominent visitors from the Arab states in the Persian Gulf (Qatar and the UAE) who have engaged in rather politically calculated philanthropic gestures. The fifth migratory movement was not about people but the spread of ideas through the cathartic trans-national political movement launched in January 2011 known as the Arab Spring. It engendered optimism about new political potentialities, which inaugurated a political discourse that abolished fear of the state, and which seemed to have engendered a relative rebalancing in the power relations between the polity and the state. Moreover, it inspired hope about new possibilities in state-community relations through the following means: (a) the renegotiation of the social contract between state and nation; and (b) the people’s emancipation from their reflexive deferential accommodation to the state’s political whims. The more liberating aspect of these ideas is that they are neither government-authorized nor foreign agency-sponsored, and thus free of the tint of illegitimacy intrinsically associated with these entities. The spread of ideas produced a new political assertiveness among Soqotrans and emboldened them into organizing frequent political demonstrations against the political status quo. This new political assertiveness challenged the primacy of the traditional political parties as Soqotrans sought to reconfigure the island’s political landscape as well as state-community relations. Moreover, the robust political activism generated by the local availability of a broad range of ideas about political identities has led to communal fissure through the ideological annexation of the island as a dumping ground for branches of political groups from the mainland. The resulting fissure is expressed locally in the Arabic phrase, m¯ a f¯ı thawra f¯ı fawdh¯ a (“there is no revolution, but chaos”). Nevertheless, this “chaos” did lead to a significant concession by the state, namely the status of Governorate, whose ramifications may turn out to be revolutionary in the long-term. Finally, and provisionally, there is a sixth migratory movement engendered by the UAE’s humanitarian intervention in Soqotra in 2015. Since then, the migratory flow to and from the island was redirected, and the composition of the migrants has changed as well. In terms of the direction of migratory movement, it has shifted from island-mainland to island-Gulf region. In terms of the composition of this migratory flow, foreigners,

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who are not from the region whether as tourists or researchers, have been replaced by visitors from the Gulf diaspora and residents from the Gulf countries as individual prospectors, managers, military officers, and “philanthrocapitalists” who are accompanied by their “indentured” workers from South Asia. For the first time, Soqotrans can travel without visa and free of charge to the UAE. This new population exchange will most likely intensify the economic-twinning between the island and the UAE as well as population-bonding if not territorial-linking. The potential consequences of the UAE-supervised emerging social order under are explored in the subsequent chapters. 2.2.2

A “Community of Fate”: Policy Mediation and Communal Formation

In effect, Soqotra’s recent historical trajectory and the changes in its polity, economy, culture, and environment that will be discussed throughout this book exemplifies what Fredrik Barth has called a “community of fate”: A group whose social situation and political consciousness were shaped by a near-exclusive dependency on state action through the determination of policy priorities and the allocation of resources in the economic, political, and cultural domains (1996: 19). This is the result of a long history of political domination by foreign entities that have dispossessed Soqotrans of any “sovereign entitlement” as an indigenous polity, and consigned them to a haunting condition of political heteronomy. This condition entails the permanent captivity of a communal polity under the external political supervision of mainland regimes. The nature of change in such an external policy-dependent social formation results largely from the state-allocated, resource portfolio (e.g., budgetary allocations, institution transfer, and peoples contact), which drives the political incorporation process and engenders enduring societal effects. Soqotra’s dependency was exacerbated, if not initially induced, by its peripheral geographic location, spatial confinement, and relative resource deprivation. Soqotra offered a communal context that was, and still is, dependent on governmental action as well as susceptible to external socio-cultural influences. In this context, political incorporation constitutes the primary determinant of communal order, as it imparts directionality to the process of social change—even if not always efficiently done or with the expected outcomes. The principle at work in a state policy-dependent communal

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formation is that its historical trajectory is determined by the fact that “Different regimes require very different conditions for their perpetuation and have quite different agendas; [and therefore] as actors they will pursue dissimilar policies towards… the populations they seek to control” (Barth 1996: 20). The community’s state dependency, however, is not a one-way relationship but a relational process that is part of the intrinsically “recursive nature of social life,” which entails the mutually constitutive interactions between human agency and social institutions as part of a process of continuous societal transformation (Giddens 1984: xxiii). The state’s policy choices and its culture of governance are constitutive of state-community relations through the crucial effects they engender. For example, they set the mode of operation of local governance institutions; structure the agency (i.e., civic disposition) and value orientation of citizens (i.e., their public ethos); and influence the degree of citizens’ commitment to community traditions, the strength or weakness of their affiliation to the nation-state, and their level of trust in government institutions. The likely outcomes from such interactions are either (a) a virtuous circle of mutual respect of the government’s legitimacy and of citizen’s voice or (b) a vicious cycle of perennially antagonistic relations between government and community (Chapter 8). In effect, the island’s political and economic incorporation and its internal transformation could be understood as a product of the Yemeni state’s operationalization of two principles: first, political integration since the South Yemeni administration was based on the nationalist principle of vertical integration into the Yemeni nation-state; and second, economic integration since unification was pursued through a national crony capitalism based on an elite exclusive economic patronage network constituting a clientelist oligarchy of rent-seekers vying for the monopoly franchises allocated by the cabalistic state (Elie 2018a). Finally, the state’s political incorporation effects are complemented by the UN-led environmental conservation regime launched in 1997, which together represent a most invasive form of social engineering. As they could lead to (a) the comprehensive territorial reconfiguration of the island through the demarcation of the entire landscape into protected areas; and (b) the extensive recruitment and reconstitution of the agency of previously neglected groups (e.g., pastoralists) as environmental guides.

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2.2.3

Domains of Analysis: Symbiotic Nexus

This series of migratory movements and of policy mediations have produced four pivotal processes, which constitute the social mechanisms that are structuring the island’s internal transformation. These processes are categorized as follows: • Economic disarticulation between the rural-based and individual herders-led transhumant pastoralism that represented the core economy of the proxy colonial settler polity in the 1890s and the coastal-based and state-led political-economy under different political regimes from the 1970s onward. This disarticulation between community-centric and state-centric economies was the catalyst to the waning of Soqotra’s pastoral community. • Political incorporation as the catalyst of the island’s change process through engendering a series of ripple effects: (i) the serial transfer of institutional apparatuses with their divergent mode of operation and their reconfiguration of the communal order; (ii) the imposition of different conceptions of political geography and their re-structuring effects on territorial organization; and (iii) the divergent menus of economic policy and their social ramifications. • Cultural modernization through national cultural integration, if not assimilation, and the reconstitution of the social imagination that informs communal relations based on externally induced exigencies and the locally engendered accommodation practices related to changes in language preference, mode of self-identification, religious practices, and socio-economic order (discussed in Vol. 2). • Environmental annexation through an imported biodiversity conservation regime that is leading to the relative loss of Soqotrans’ autonomy over both the determination of their homeland’s future and their use of the island’s environmental resources due to their managerial appropriation into conservation practices driven by the abstract notion of “global environmental benefits” (discussed in Vol. 2). To operationalize the analysis of these four processes that forming Soqotra’s landscape as well as Soqotrans’ communal I have identified four domains that serve as the analytical tion for the location and investigation of the community’s

are transexistence, demarcatransition

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process. These four domains are linked through a symbiotic nexus, as the internal dynamics of each have determining ramifications on the others. These domains represent simplified terminological substitutions for more complexly constituted social spheres: • Politics: is the domain where there is a tug-of-war for the soul and territory of the Soqotran people through competing attempts between (a) the Yemeni state nationalization of the communal polity into its politically and culturally homogenized citizens, (b) the epistemic community of environmentalists’ internationalization of the stewardship of their ecological endowments, (c) a regional monarchy’s appropriation of Soqotra into a permanent protectorate, and (d) Soqotrans’ manifold strategies of feigned accommodation and dissimulated resistance to these projects’ dispossession of their indigenoussovereignty. • Economy: is an ever-evolving context of partially overlapping economic domains encompassing different sectors and actors: A transhumant pastoralism, which was once the foundational pillar of Soqotra’s traditional economy, is being gradually replaced, or at least complemented, by a combination of state-led local economic activities (e.g., bureaucratic post creation and infrastructural public works), supplemented by fishing and UN and NGO run projects for environmental protection, ecotourism development, and basic needs subvention, and a horde of micro-retailing shopkeepers from mainland Yemen who are inducing change in local consumption habits. These activities are complemented by the UAE’s philanthropic diplomacy as part of a communal polity cooptation strategy. • Culture: is the existential matrix in which assimilationist pressures are being exerted through multiple and contradictory sources in the interaction between local and national culture, and are further mediated by regional and international influences. • Environment: is considered to be the crucible of the island’s economic future by international agencies and donors with the ambiguous acquiescence of the national government and the reluctant collaboration of Soqotrans. The environment is the strategic playground of foreign conservation actors who are promoting it as the exclusive basis of a development model that entails the adoption by Soqotrans of an imported ecological consciousness and of a restrictive protocol of human-environment relations. This model

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is leading to the re-engineering of Soqotrans’ relationship with the island’s natural resources. The “organic entwinements” and “progressive enmeshment” between these domains have engendered a transition process in which Soqotra is emerging as a “trans-local socio-cultural order” that spans the historical divide between the traditional and the modern, the developmental distance between center and periphery, the geographical chasm between island and the mainland, the cultural difference between Yemeni mainlanders as the island’s co-residents and Soqotran islanders, and the relational bridge between, if not nostalgic lifeline for, the émigrés’ diaspora in the Arabian Gulf and their island homeland (cf. Sahlins 1999: xx).

2.3

Anthropology of the Political: Beyond Travelling Theories

This study of Soqotra’s transition process is informed by a historical anthropology of political incorporation, which entails the study of “how institutions and policies are organized, function, and change and the way these influence social actors, social boundaries, and the construction of social identities” over time (Wedel et al. 2005: 32). Moreover, it locates these changes within the historically-contingent and powermediated ensemble of temporally-demarcated trans-local processes, which constitute the conditions of possibility for the establishment of a political community in a particular social formation. As noted in the previous section, the catalysts to Soqotra’s transitional transformation are the succession of political regimes and the imposition of their policy choices, the transfer of their administrative practices, and the strategic allocation, and/or withholding, of resources (symbolic and material). Here, I explain how I conceptualize the role of state politics in producing Soqotra’s communal transformation process. Accordingly, in this section I undertake two tasks: (1) to contest the prevailing norm of using Western travelling theories to understand non-Western social formations; and (2) to reframe the anthropological discourse on state-society relations beyond the dominant theoretical spectrum constituted by a hegemonic Eurocentric ethno-epistemology.

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Travelling Theory: Indefensible Epistemological Paradox

Travelling theory has become a defining norm in all disciplinary practice, which entails “the movement of ideas and theories from one place to another [which] is both a fact of life and a usefully enabling condition of intellectual activity” (Said 1983: 226). However, the modality of their dissemination through a unidirectional “commerce of theories and ideas” across borders has inexorably led to the reification of local social reality into, and instrumentalization of local agency through, alien interpretive idioms. This has led to the “epistemological paradox” phenomenon, in which the understanding of a cultural formation, say an Asian one, is inexorably mediated by the epistemic categories based on the historical experiences of another society (e.g., Western). Consequently, this paradox has sustained practitioners’ epistemic disconnectedness from the local context of inquiry, and engendered their interpretive disengagement from research subjects’ self-understandings, which are the very antitheses of the rationale for fieldwork. Ultimately, this paradox promotes an intra-Western soliloquy about cultural others as the prevailing orthodoxy of anthropology’s interpretive practice. Moreover, the incommensurability between such theories’ exclusive domain of formulation (northern academies) and their privileged sphere of application (southern sites) has produced knowledge as counterfactual interpretive narratives of people from elsewhere for the sake of validating imported theories that obfuscate an understanding of their local reality. Latour called this practice “arrogant particular universalism” where “One society – and it is always a Western one – defines the general framework… with respect to which the others are situated” (1993: 105). This arrogant universalism is the epistemic legacy of the global colonial project that continues to animate an Occidental cosmopolitanism: the achievement of the West’s planetary supremacy in perpetuity through the diffusion of an unassailable Euro-American epistemic hegemony that would obviate the need for nonWestern contribution to the founding assumptions of the social scientific knowledge repertoire about humankind and to the structural transformation of the North Atlantic-led global order. In effect, those who appropriate Southern realities within the compass of Northern travelling theories are engaged in a “pervasively deforming” knowledge production practice, which articulates a cognitive economy characterized by an “aprioristic inclination” toward a “Eurocentric normative standpoint”: the West as the normative pole of comparison for the Rest.

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This “aprioristic inclination” has consecrated this epistemological paradox as the discipline’s official credo: The illiberal practice of interpretively appropriating cultural others into our own culture-bound worldview. Indeed, Geertz acclaimed this act of “symbolic cannibalism” as a disciplinary imperative. As he explained: “any attempt to portray [anthropology] as anything more than the representation of one sort of life in the categories of another is impossible to defend” (Geertz 1988: 144). This illiberal comparative standpoint is tethered to a global political economy under the tutelage of an imperial liberalism that is euphemistically labeled neoliberalism. The latter serves as the epistemic Trojan horse of West-stream travelling theorists who are, perhaps unwittingly, the selfappointed intellectual enablers of its soft colonizing power (cf. Mills 2015: 217). In invoking neoliberalism, scholars are in effect reducing the multitude of social formations around the world into “locally variegated instantiations of global ideas” disseminated from the world’s (former) epicenter: the West (Goldstein 2012: 305). Indeed, neoliberalism is not a “meta-critical discourse,” but a meta-teleological rationale, which prematurely establishes a synergy between West-disseminated global forces and the fate of individual lives, the transformation of communities and the emerging trends in the societies of nation-states in the Rest. This rather flippant advocacy of neoliberalism—which encapsulates the world into a singular and universal model called globalization—is evocative of nineteenth-century scholars, the “extreme diffusionists,” who saw the “inventive” Global North as the sole purveyor of modernity and the “imitative” Global South as a passive receptacle for the North’s innovations (Blaut 2000: 5). This practice betrays an existential panic in light of the impending reversal of the West’s half a millennium crusade for the “unchallenged and self-sustaining” full-spectrum dominance of the planet. As reflexive evangelists of neoliberalism, West-stream scholars insist on maintaining the world in epistemic subjection to their provincial theoretical and conceptual artifacts. As a result, they have become protagonists of the despotism of the Western norm and of its epistemological tyranny over regional others as they assert “the epistemic privilege of presuming their own beliefs are not beliefs, but universal truths” (Gross and McGoey 2015: 4). This sentiment of epistemic exceptionalism encourages a collective folie de grandeur among travelling theorists as they deploy a “strategic ignorance” that entitles them “to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that their mistaken ways of making sense of events count as accurate representations” (Gross and McGoey

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2015: 5). Underpinning this strategic ignorance is an inexorable axiom about knowledge production practices that emanates from what can only be described as a megalomanic standpoint: There “is a normal, logical, and ethical flow of culture, of innovation, of human causality” from a permanent European center (the principal location of travelling theorists) to a permanent non-European periphery (the preferred experimental terrain for their “subjectivist epistemic adventurism”) that constitutes the unalterable geographical destiny of, and epistemological norm for, the world (Blaut 1993: 1). The framing conceit of these theories’ Eurocentric genealogy and comparative standpoint subordinates disciplinary practice to the primacy of the Western episteme and intellectual sensibility and reifies the anthropology of the political into a survey of the effects of Western societies on non-Western ones under the euphemistic notion of “globalization.” The end result is the generification of the world’s societal and institutional diversity through the diffusion of a regional ethno-epistemology that insists on its universal relevance and thus distorts the empirical elucidation and theoretical explanation of other regions. Moreover, these theories are consensually subservient to an idealized model of liberal democracy and to an extroverted neoliberal political economy as a universal comparative framework. This comparative framework is based on a delusional conviction about the historical inevitability, and permanent sustainability, of the Western model’s global hegemony. Sadly, it seems necessary to reiterate that the remit of anthropologists is to engage in grounded theory formation, and not in travelling theory dissemination. This is all the more urgent, given the defining characteristics of an emerging post-universalist conjuncture: (a) the intrinsic individuality and thus non-convergence of the historical trajectories of each one of the world’s pluriverse of social formations; (b) the inexorable divergence of the institutional configuration of their polities; and (c) the incommensurable plurality of values that motivate their aspirational horizons (see ISSC 2010). This conjuncture delegitimizes metropolitan travelling theories’ ecumenical ambition “to compare, generalize, and theorise the production of the social [on a global scale] within a unified framework” created through a centerperiphery global diffusion process (Hilgers 2011: 357). This emergent post-universalist conjuncture entails the disavowal of the hegemony of “metropolitan ways of knowing” and the permanent sundering of the complicitous relationship between Western geography and history with the disciple’s epistemology.

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In this light, Ingold’s (2018) notion of “one world anthropology” and its quest to reconcile the particular with the universal, betrays an anachronistic commitment to salvaging the ethnocentric universalparticular binary, which was always predicated on the universality of the West over the particularity of the Rest. Indeed, there is no “one world” (a universe), there is a shared planet in which co-exists multiple worlds (a pluriverse), each with a distinctive “mode of existence.” The challenge for anthropology is not about articulating the particulars of these modes of existence with the “universal,” which was always a conceptual fig leaf for the “arrogant particular universalism” of the West. Instead, it is to elucidate the internal logics of these multiple worlds and their inhabitants’ predicaments and aspirations, and only secondarily to establish empirically the nature and scope of the overlapping domains of relationality, if any, to the others. Accordingly, this quest for a one-world theorizing standpoint should be considered an anachronistic endeavor to be abandoned, as I do in this book. 2.3.2

Anthropology and the State: Reframing the Discourse

Over a generation ago, West-stream anthropology lapsed into an acute theoretical drift as it was rendered homeless by the anachronism of its own theoretical repertoire. This theoretical orphanage threatened the discipline’s contemporary raison d’e“tre. Instead of innovating, disciplinary practitioners not only became enthusiastic supporters of the global status quo, but also opportunistic appropriators of epistemic resources from other disciplines. Indeed, since the 1980s anthropologists have been scavenging through the library shelves of cultural studies, science studies, classical sociology, which engendered a chronic intellectual sycophancy on the oracular pronouncements of a posse of postmodern mandarins made up mostly of Gallic theorists (Latour, Foucault among others) (Fardon 2012). This led to the circumscription of the prevalent anthropological discourse on state-society relations within a Gramscian-AndersonianFoucauldian-Agambian theoretical quartet. This theoretical quartet is widely applied in the thematic deconstruction, historical disembedding, and analytical instrumentalization of social formations in the Global South. Each theory is succinctly explained and followed by a review of ethnographies of Yemen that employed related travelling theories of political anthropology:

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• The Gramscian axiom presupposes the need for the socio-cultural hegemony of a ruling stratum achieved through its pedagogical functions and their polity consensus building effects, as part of the symbolic formation of a more sustainable legitimacy of state authority (Gramsci 1971). • The Andersonian hypothesis is predicated on a process of “cultural modernization” as catalyst to nation-formation that assumes the dawn of mass literacy and the availability of printing technology to disseminate a textualized national narrative through newspapers or other discursive means for a literate population. This process produced the nation as an “imagined community” made up of a mass-mediated collectivity of discursively constructed citizen (Anderson 1991). • The Foucauldian discursive formation has bequeathed a hyperreferential and totally encompassing conception of power as “biopolitic” that organizes the totality of a social formation through the “disciplinary effects” of its “capillary form of existence … where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (Foucault 1980: 39). • The Agambian political dystopia is informed by a paranoid anthropology of the gulag, in which the modern state is obsessed with “the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government.” This eventually leads to the normalization of the concentration camp as a model of state governance the world over. His worldview is one in which there is an “unstoppable progression” toward a “global civil war” between states and within societies. This is leading to the “state of exception” under which humanity is reduced to “homo sacer”: A human being who is always under the threat of being reduced to “bare life” through arbitrary deprivation of citizenship and of her human and civil rights (Agamben 1998, 2005). Collectively, these hypotheses about the trajectories of nation-state formation are based on a “narrowly Eurocentric genealogy,” which informs their particular dynamics of state-society relations. Consequently, their situationally specific conceptions of power, their culture-bound conceptual and lexical repertoire, and their ethnocentric epistemology are, at best, only tangentially relevant to non-Western social formations. Yet they are appropriated as the universally applicable epistemic resources

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of an “anthropology of the political,” which are reflexively employed as “paradigm of government” to elucidate state praxes in the Global South (e.g., Das and Poole 2004; Lewellen 2003; Spencer 2007). To avoid the epistemic pathos associated with this ethnocentric comparative epistemology, I focus on what Migdal (2001: 125) called the “recursive relationship” between the Yemeni state and Soqotra’s communal social forces. Accordingly, I explore the interactional dynamics of this recursive relationship in Soqotra’s historical constitution as a sub-national polity, in which the analytical focus is on elucidating the vectors of change engendered by the preponderant role of state policies and institutions in shaping the existential context of the Soqotran community through various modes of polity regimentation. This is the analytical standpoint from which I reconstruct the “progressive enmeshment” of the incorporated community into successively larger societal structures, and the multiple local adjustments that produce the community’s transformation process. Mapping this incorporation process with its trans-local entwinements and their island-wide effects entails at least three analytical dimensions: First, the elucidation of the forces of incorporation that include: (a) the establishment of a political-administrative apparatus through the new modalities of governance; (b) the introduction of alternative economic arrangements, in the form of new types of activities involving the participation of national and international economic actors and the resulting modifications to the pre-existing modes of production and exchange; and (c) the insertion of new means of communication, such as electronic media (e.g., radio, TV, and the Internet), and the importation of new means of transport (e.g., cars and airplane). Second, the inventory of the impacts of incorporation in terms of the expansion or the contraction of the locally existing “field of opportunities” in the economic, political, and cultural domains, either for the community as a whole or for specific groups or individuals within it. Third, the identification of the types of responses engendered within the community toward the incorporation forces, which may range from positive (acceptance) to negative (rejection), but might vary along a spectrum of “specific configuration of attitudes” depending on the situation of the local actors involved (see Cohen 1977: 322–329). In this light, political incorporation effectively articulates the relations between the nature of the state, regime orientation, citizen formation, and polity configuration. In fact, political incorporation has been the unacknowledged paradigm in many of the anthropological studies of

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Yemen, which explored—through a variety of thematic emphases, subregional foci, historical periods, and theoretical frameworks—the Yemeni state’s polity regimentation strategy as part of its territorial expansion and institutional consolidation. Box 2.1 presents a selective review of the ethnographic literature on political incorporation in Yemen.

Box 2.1: Ethnographies of Political Incorporation in Yemen A Selective Review I illustrate the use of the political incorporation paradigm in the following selective review of anthropological studies of Yemen that addressed the effects of the state’s polity formation strategies, albeit without using the term as conceptual framework. These ethnographies sought to accommodate the historical changes engendered by the periodic shifts in the political incorporation strategies deployed in state-society relations and the subsequent reconfiguration of societal structures and the realignment of local political forces. Their anthropological analyses of Yemeni society adopted varying theoretical frameworks and employed an imported grid of analytical categories that in some instances coerced recalcitrant facts of Yemeni history into conformity with their preferred representation and interpretation. They are briefly discussed in chronological order based on their date of publication. Nationalism Emergent ‘Abdallah Bujra’s ethnography published in 1971, which was the first application of the political incorporation model, avant la lettre, in the South Arabian context as an anthropology of social change. He initially shared the presuppositions of South Arabian anthropology of his time, namely that provincial market towns, or areas called hijra or h.awt.a that were sanctuaries in which tribal feuding was prohibited, were the privilege research sites. As they were socially stratified and thus more amenable to the application of the status hierarchy analytical framework. Accordingly, his research focus was “the way the closed H . ad.ram¯ı system of stratification, as it operated in H . ura¯ıd.ah [a provincial town], has adjusted to changes in the economic, political, and ideological field operating at different levels.” However, his findings did not confirm the assumptions of his theoretical framework about the social stasis, or status homeostasis and historical immutability of tribal communities. Instead, he identified the vectors of communal change in the socio-political dynamics of events that led to the de-traditionalization, of politics and the emergence of an alternative form of collective loyalty, other than primordial fealties in the ideology of nationalism, which

induced the relative abandonment of the ascriptive status hierarchy. For example, he showed how the pre-existing regulative principles of social interaction both within the urban and rural/tribal domains were modified: that is, communal relations mediated through descent ranking were partially revised to accommodate the lower service classes’ more active socio-political role, and tribal power was partially disabled through the transfer of the monopoly of arms to the Sultans. Those changes were brought about through successive phases of political incorporation: first through British colonial engineering of South Yemen’s traditional political institutions and of its political geography; and subsequently its political recuperation and institutional re-engineering through a nationalist liberation struggle. Bujra’s ethnography turned out to be most prescient, as it challenged, perhaps unwittingly, the underpinning assumptions regarding the static image of the stratified mosaic society paradigm, and the structuralist bias of the subsequently dominant segmentary model about the unchanging nature of tribal polities.

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Tribalism as Casteism Paul Dresch seemed to pursue an ethnographic project that entailed the transfer of Dumont’s (1980) caste sociology of India to a tribe-centric anthropology of Yemen. The end result was similar: from the Brahmanization of Indian society by Orientalists to the tribalization of Yemen’s polity by anthropologists. This project was initiated with his first ethnography of North Yemen (1989), as a case study of a “segmentary society” in which the tribe is “the prime ethnographic fact,” and which could not be dislodged by the modernist political rhetoric of national leaders. Subsequently, his historical anthropology (2001) of the emergence of the modern Yemeni state initiated by the Ottoman occupation of the north in 1872 and the British occupation of the South in 1839 until the immediate aftermath of unification in 1990 was a continuation of his earlier project, as it seems to symbolize an attempt at rehabilitating the tribe-centric paradigm. In his account, Dresch does not engage, indeed rejects, Bujra’s insight about the catalytic role of the state’s policy choices and their enduring socio-structural and institutional effects on national polity configuration. As Bujra

suggested that the historical continuity of the traditional social structure is not based on the strength of its organic social foundation and thus of people’s intrinsic cultural attachment to it, but is due to the modality of its appropriation by the state for its own political purposes. Instead, Dresch insists that the persistence of the tribal social structure reflects an indelible ontological feature of Yemen’s political organization. Therefore, the modernist rhetoric of national leaders is delusional as it betrayed a chronic disconnect between them and the ingrained political culture of a traditional society. Moreover, he implied that the national polity’s capacity to adopt modern forms of collective life was limited by its cultural endowment. As the failure of the state to politically incorporate and domesticate tribes was due to the tribal social structure’s inextricable anchorage in both the history and psyche of Yemenis. Ironically, Dresch failed to realize that his historical anthropology was a narrative about the transition from an autonomous tribalism to an incorporated tribalism that was partly engineered by state policies.

Andersonian-Foucauldian Fantasy Brinkley Messick (1993), who had initially done his doctoral fieldwork in the provincial town of Ibb in Lower Yemen in 1974, returned to his ethnographic data through an articulation of the Orientalist tradition of textual exegesis and the anthropological vocation of face-toface interaction, leading to a hybrid practice: an “ethnography of texts.” His aim was to reconstitute the role of the actors at the hierarchical summit of North Yemen’s traditional social order, namely the religious-judicial elite (‘ulam¯ a ), and their textual productions, in establishing the legitimacy of religious authority, and in engendering polity formation under the Imamate regime. In contrast to Bujra’s grounded approach to political incorporation, Messick adopts a theory-driven historical reconstruction, if not an interpretive expropriation of relative plausibility, of North Yemen’s Imamate as a textually mediated process of polity formation. Accordingly, his ethnography of political incorporation through symbolic domination

sought to offer Yemen as a counter-intuitive combination of Anderson and Foucault theory according to which the dissemination of a theocratic discursive formation creates a national polity through a diffused process of “textual domination” of its citizens. He constructed a narrative that showed how the propagation of the ‘ulam¯ a ’s textual production was instrumental in establishing the legitimacy of theocratic authority as the ideology of political incorporation under the Imamate, while constituting a national polity through a process of symbolic domination. The end result is a post-modernist “discursive history” narrated as a detached intellectual experiment disinterested in truth-seeking. Accordingly, it ends with an ironic disclaimer that betrays a spectatorial standpoint: It affirmed the nonexistence of a “specific polity” but merely an imaginative “construct” of a “composite of historical materials” (1993: 255).

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The Peasantry and the State Martha Mundy’s ethnography (1995) of political incorporation depicts a hierarchical integration process, along a concentric path from household, village, region, state, and ultimate the world system. It sought to offer an alternative analytical template to the two dominant theoretical frameworks that encapsulated Yemeni society: first, the stratified mosaic society, the conceptual legacy of Orientalist scholars of Yemen in which “the dominant image of Yemeni society was [initially] that of a hierarchy of social status and the central object of debate the nature of stratification,” and for which the town was the privilege domain of ethnographic intervention; and second, the segmentary society model in which “the categories of interpretation shifted to tribe and state and debate came to focus on the nature of the Yemeni tribe” vis-à-vis the state, and for which the village was the ideal site for ethnographic fieldwork (Mundy 1995: 6).

Her ethnography of a Wadi Dahr village (northwest of Sana‘a’) sought to remove Yemenis from “the ghetto of the segmentarist problematic” and to locate them in their villages as agriculturalists engaged in “peasant production.” She conceptually locates her fieldwork site within the hierarchies of shaykh and state, and proceeds to analytically describe the relations between the political, economic, and cultural factors that impinged on intraand inter-household formation processes and their encompassment within state structures. Ultimately, her ethnographic project was “to build a corpus of documentation in terms other than the segmentary problematic… not of tribes against the state but villages, regional systems and national leadership” of a state undergoing political and economic integration in the modern world system.

Bourdieuesque Imaginings Gabriele vom Bruck’s (2005) ethnography is a narrative about a text-mediated adjustment strategy deployed by a cohort of hereditary elite (al-s¯ ada) who held government posts in the Imamate and were cast away under the new republican regime in the post-1962 revolution period. She retraces the biographical trajectory of her subjects’ predicaments through Bourdieu’s symbolic lexicon as they are theoretically conscripted into a “moral economy” within the private sphere through reliance on their “cultural capital” (i.e., their expert knowledge of the Zayd¯ı creedal repertoire) as they perform taql¯ıd (the recitation of Zayd¯ı religious texts). Thus taql¯ıd becomes the “habitus” through which they performed a quietist propitiation of the state’s animosity toward them and enacted a discursive accommodation to their status demotion, social exclusion, and political subordination.

In this way, an existential condition is presumably remedied through a symbolic act of “moral rearmament” that helps them “transcend an ambivalent placement between a scorned past and a future of uncertain fulfillment” in order to avert the state’s chronic suspicion toward their political loyalty. The focus on the domestic management of their social exclusion led to the neglect of their potential historical agency within the public sphere through the practice of khur¯ uj: rising against an unjust ruler. It is the promise of khur¯ uj not the practice of taql¯ıd that explains the resilience and motivation of the current rulers of parts of Yemen (al-Huthi tribe) who are the progeny of the s¯ ada.

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Segmentary Theory Revised Finally, Shelagh Weir’s (2007) ethnography is about the resistance effects engendered by the state’s attempt to incorporate the village of Razih located in the northern highlands. She adopts a “geo-political approach” in demonstrating the persistence of “tribal governance and sovereignty” against state incorporation. She discusses the recursive relationship between state and tribe through a historical reconstruction of four centuries of attempts at the political incorporation of Razih district, as part of a process of national state formation.

She differentiates her approach from Dresch (1989, 2001) by labeling his use of segmentary theory as an “anarchic and agonistic vision of tribal societies,” which sees “tribesmen more as warriors to be mustered in battle than as citizens subject.” However, she remains anchored in the segmentary tribe-centric paradigm of relative stasis given her perception of the “remarkable continuities in structures and practices,” which are the major themes of her ethnography (see Elie 2008).

2.4 Historicizing a Communal Polity: Changing the Narrative The anthropological discourse on the WANA region seems to be caughtup in a chronic interpretive disjuncture, given its continuing engagement with traditional region-specific paradigms that are oblivious to the transformational effects of history. This is in spite of the fact that the region’s social formations have moved beyond its anachronistic conceptual repertoire and interpretive frameworks. I am referring to tribalism, and its underpinning theory—the kinship-based segmentary lineage society— that was introduced by Ernest Gellner (1981) as a heuristic model, but was converted by his epigones into a panoptic paradigm (Hart 1993; Elie 2010). It persists as a region-wide analytical framework that promotes a regional exceptionalism. As Sahlins insightfully explained long ago: “The tribal condition… is transcended the moment a state apparatus is differentiated and imposed upon society at large” (1968: 15). Instead of being transcended, tribalism has been reified into a “tribal ethic,” which is evocative of Weber’s “Protestant ethic.” Accordingly, it constitutes a binding doxa, a region-specific millennial tradition, a foundational and ineluctable value system that determines cultural attitudes, structures social relations, ascribes civic identity, constrains societal change, and sustains archaic sociocultural practices. In fact, tribalism has been undergoing a long transition process that has led to its mutation into a neo-tribalism: the carrying over of the sociocultural features and practices of a traditional social order into an emergent

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modern political order. Yet, tribalism is still perceived as a historically immutable ideological grid that endows inhabitants of the WANA region with indelible primordial fealties that incapacitate their integration into modern institutions (Rosen 2006). This “tribal ethic” relies on anachronistic assumptions about the region’s social formations in spite of their distinctive historical trajectories and the resulting structural diversity of their polities. The latter are characterized by confessional cleavages, differing political regimes, various development phases, multiple configurations of civil society, divergent dynamics of polity formation, and dissimilar manifestations of modernity. In this light, tribalism as an analytical framework can no longer accommodate the multiple contingencies associated with history and the policy-mediated shifts in the “recursive relationship” between state and society as determinant of social transformation. Soqotra’s dynamic historical itinerary invalidates the applicability of this anachronistic regional paradigm and its egregious essentialization of the region’s history. Accordingly, I propose an alternative historydriven narrative to frame Soqotra’s transformation process, which I call the conjunctural narrative. It replaces the two dominant narratives—the cultural and the structural—about the nature of change in West Asian social formations. These three narratives are briefly described below. • The cultural narrative argues that the inhabitants of the social formations within the WANA region, and the Arabian Peninsula in particular, are saddled with an inherited “trait complex,” which presupposes an ineluctable symbiosis between geographical location, ecological milieu, social organization, and politico-religious ideology. This ecological context is assumed to impart an essentialized “cultural imaginary” as an indelible social ontology. The latter is constituted by “the deeply-held indigenous values that provide the most salient and strongly motivating bases for action, feeling and thought among regional residents themselves, inspiring them in their ordinary lives, in their symbolic and religious experiences, and in their dialectical interaction with the rest of the world” (Lindholm 2002: 10). This narrative is based on the arbitrary selection of a few sociocultural characteristics abstracted from the historical specificities of concrete social formations, and to treat them as trans-historical constants that can account for the historical patterns of, and impart a uniform cultural ontology to, the entire

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region’s socialscape over centuries, if not millennia (Lindholm 2002 epitomizes this narrative). • The structural narrative portrays the region as a collection of unchanging societies with sclerotic polities and atrophied civil societies caught in a developmental impasse, as they have been dominated for centuries up to the present by two anachronistic corporatist social categories: the sedentary townsmen as an embourgeoisé political elite in the urban center with a monopoly on patronage, and the politically opportunistic and predatory nomadic tribes soldered by a genealogy-based archaic ideology of cohesion known as ‘as.abiyya, and inhabiting the rustic periphery. Incredibly, these two groups are assumed to have remained largely unaffected by modernity’s multiple processes of change. This narrative employs the structuralfunctionalist segmentary society paradigm that emphasizes societal dynamics exclusively informed by kinship relations structured through a patriarchal system bound to a progenitor-progeny dialectic and subsumed within a genealogical framework. This led to the fetishism of tribes as the dominant, if not exclusive, basis of collective loyalty, the ineluctable organizational principle, and institutional logic of state-society relations in the entire WANA region. Consequently, tribalism was, and still is, considered to be ineradicably constitutive of the nature of the region’s social formations (Salzman 2008, 2015; see critique in Elie 2010). • The conjunctural narrative is the approach adopted here, which rejects the above narratives’ essentialization of tribalism as the inexorable driver of the region’s social formations. Instead, it embraces history and considers change an intrinsic condition of all social formations, as such it is the analytical pivot of a historical anthropology. This narrative explains as well as illustrates the historical conditions that have engendered the constantly shifting political relations and the changing profile of local polities as a result of the interactions between the state and the various sub-regions of the national territory. Such relations are contingent on these regions’ various social and cultural configurations and their local polity’s civic disposition engendered by their different geographical location, eco-topographical profile, resource endowment, livelihood opportunities, occupational structure, ethno-demographic composition, religious practices, diasporic linkages, social organization, and historical memory. It is this set of factors that mediates state-community

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relations and structures the formation of differentiated communal and/or regional polities within the state’s territorial jurisdiction. Consequently, the role of tribalism is seen as an epiphenomenon of contingent historical conjunctures and not a societal fatality engendered by immutable traditional social structures. Moreover, the conjunctural narrative articulates the political incorporation model through the inventory of the discontinuous effects of historical change engendered by the state’s varying polity regimentation strategies. This analytical approach refutes the prevalent assumptions regarding the historical continuity, the socio-structural rigidity, and the institutional perpetuity of sociocultural traditions that inform the cultural and structural narratives of the region’s social formations (Chapter 7 exemplifies this narrative). Lastly, a caveat: The use of the conjunctural narrative to explain Soqotra as a transitional social formation in its “totality,” enables its contextualization within a historical continuum that encompassed a “from-to” trajectory: The “from” is both a fading past that had to be reconstructed and a shifting present that had to be stood still for processual analysis; and the “to” is still embryonic and thus the future had to be imagined in its provisional contours based on the preponderant trends of the incorporation process. The aim is to provide a historically grounded anatomy of Soqotra’s multilayered transformation process that retraces its inaugural entry into its modern phase from an island-wide focus and that comprehensively explains its trajectory of emergence and contemporary situation. However, no attempt is made to predict the future, but only to depict the fits and starts as well as to identify the significant tendencies or emergent patterns shaping the future trajectory of Soqotra’s transitional transformation process.

CHAPTER 3

A Socio-Ecological Formation: The Human-Environment Dialectic

This chapter inventories the initial conditions of possibility for the establishment of a proxy colonial settler polity, whose trajectory of emergence and transformation is retraced in the subsequent chapters. Accordingly, it depicts the initial human-environment relations that prevailed during the pre-modern period of Soqotra’s history prior to its incorporation into a state-led modernization process and its subsequent enclosure within a United Nations-designed biodiversity conservation zoning plan and ecotourism economy. The term ecological primordialism is coined to highlight the primacy of the environment as the enabling and constraining context for the constitution of the Soqotran community. The term entails a symbiotic relationship between an ecosystem and a human social system, which structured the contingent relations between the raw materials for livelihood-making and community formation: people, resources, and space. The chapter elucidates how Soqotrans managed this mostly constraining human-environment nexus through a series of adaptive practices: their taxonomic appropriation and practical domestication of the island’s environmental resources; their transformation of the landscape into domains for an eclectic regime of subsistence

A shorter version of this chapter was published under the title “Ecological Primordialism: The Human-Environment Nexus in Soqotra.” GeoJournal 85 (5) (2018): 897–913. © The Author(s) 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45638-2_3

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livelihoods; their organization of dispersed settlements into a sociopolitical unit; their demarcation of the island into geographical zones of cultural differentiation; and their establishment of mutual aid institutions that simultaneously regulated resource use while integrating all islanders into relations of social kinship. In describing the above practices, the chapter provides an overview of Soqotrans’ own repertoire of indigenous traditional knowledge. The chapter concludes with a cautionary tale about the use of anachronistic human-environment relations as the basis of conservation policy.

3.1

An Atomistic Community: Inaugural Setting

Soqotra is not an oceanic island, but a continental island that became separated tens of millions of years ago through tectonic drift from the landmasses of Africa and Arabia, and the resulting isolation endowed it with a significant endemic biodiversity that made it a coveted conscript into the global conservationist enclosure movement (Cheung and DeVantier 2006: 16–19). The ecosystem-friendly social formation that preserved Soqotra’s endemic biodiversity is illustrated through the human-environment dialectic that prevailed during the period of the Sultanate. The latter was established from the last quarter of the nineteenth century when the seat of government was formally shifted from the Sultanate of al-Mahra on the southwestern part of mainland Yemen to Soqotra and lasted until the newly independent state of South Yemen took over the island in 1967 (see Chapter 7). This period constitutes the crucial comparative frame of reference for understanding the subsequent transformation of human-environment relations in Soqotra and its related development predicaments. The social formation that existed during this period was made up of a relatively small and largely troglodytic population of transhumant pastoralists living in widely dispersed settlements with very few inhabitants. Most of the population dwelled in the hinterland and eked out a living as pastoralists herding goats, sheep, and cattle, as well as breeding camels and donkeys for transport. The main economic purpose of the herds was not, at least not primarily, for the consumption or sale of meat, but for the production of milk that was transformed into butter-oil. The latter was not only bartered for other local products and imported goods, but also served as the primary export product of the Sultanate’s economy. In 1896, it was observed that “Butter is the chief product and almost the

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sole export of the island, and Sokotra butter has quite a reputation in the markets along the shores of Arabia and Africa. The sultan keeps a special dhow for the trade, and the Bedouin’s life is given up to the production of butter” (Bent and Bent 1900: 346). Pastoralism was complemented with limited agricultural activity (e.g., date palm and finger millet cultivation) in certain parts of the island, and fishing by the coastal population as seasonal subsistence activities. In the hinterland, cave-dwelling was the prevailing form of residence until the 1980s. The physical isolation of this form of dwelling was reinforced by the topographical barriers of the island’s landscape, which was overlaid by a grid of footpaths and camel tracks that constrained travel between different villages to a matter of livelihood necessity. For example, it took four days of camel-riding through mountains to cross the 35 km (22 miles) between Hadiboh and Noged in the south (Zabal 1971: 103). This topography-enforced isolation turned every extended family, which usually made up the residents of a hamlet, into an autarkic unit of production. As a result, the island was constituted into village-based economy organized around an Archipelago of households producing butter-oil for export to an inter-regional market encompassing East Africa, the South Arabian coast, and India’s western coast. Moreover, this internal isolation among groups was coupled with the island’s relative isolation from the outside world, and thus contributed to an elementary level of technical capacity, and a minimally elaborated form of political organization. The synergy between these factors constituted the matrix of Soqotrans’ communal existence, all aspects of which were forms of ecological adaptation that can be expressed in the following axiom: Simplicity of material culture = intensity of environmental dependency. Therefore, the environment enabled as well as constrained the community’s way of life by structuring social relations and limiting the available livelihood opportunities to that of cave-dwelling pastoralists, subsistence agro-pastoralists, and artisanal fishermen. Accordingly, the quotidian imperative of pursuing a livelihood was inexorably constrained by the island’s topographical barriers and its differing ecological contexts. These conditions have dictated the widely dispersed and sparsely inhabited settlement patterns that constituted what I call an atomistic community. During the period of the Sultanate, the population went from an estimated 4000 with a density of 1.1 km2 in 1835 (Wellsted 1835) to 11,220 with a density of 3.1 km2 in 1966 (Brown 1966). This demographic distribution pattern was linked through a repertoire of mutual aid customs that guaranteed

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communal survival against the chronically precarious life on the island. Also, Soqotra’s demographic configuration has influenced its historical itinerary and continues to affect its development prospects. Engseng Ho captured the symbiotic relations involved thus: “The lay of the land gives shape to the social formations and political relations within it, patterning themes in its history and [… structuring] the flow of events” (2006: 33). 3.1.1

Ecological Primordialism: A Conceptual Framework

I employ the concept of ecological primordialism to emphasize the ineluctable dialectic between ecology, topography, geography, economy, and culture as the structuring drivers of Soqotran communal lives. Indeed, the term operationalizes the axiom: “To understand social systems we must ultimately seek some answers in the ecosphere” (Ellen 1982: 277). As it refers to a situation in which the ecological attributes, environmental resources, and topographical characteristics of a particular geographical context have an a priori structuring effect on the inhabitants’ livelihood practices, settlement patterns, political organization, and the corollary socio-cultural practices. These features are the constituent parts of a socio-ecological formation, which I define as follows: a historically contingent social formation that is established within a shared territorial realm, endowed with particular bioecological attributes (demographic and natural resources), embedded within geophysical landscapes (spatial and topographic characteristics) that are brought into dialectical relations of production through a human community’s repertoire of livelihood practices, the associated knowledge resources and sociopolitical organization. The analysis of such a communal formation is well suited to the concept ecological primordialism, which valorizes the environment as a co-agent in, and not as mere backdrop to, human community formation. However, as a conceptual framework it is primarily applicable to social formations characterized by a chronically low population density, seasonally contingent subsistence opportunities, limited repertoire of indigenous technology, and thus a minimal capacity to manipulate the environment, as was, and in many ways still is, the case in Soqotra. Such a situation entails an interactive, not a transformative, relationship with the environment. Furthermore, in contrast to environmental determinism, which posits a causal relationship, ecological primordialism privileges the interactional effects between human beings and their ecological milieu that are contingent upon the uneven availability of both environmental and

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cultural resources. The “possibilistic” nature of this relationship is aptly captured in the following axiomatic observation: While environments provide certain opportunities, only certain possibilities are identified, selected, and realized by human efforts, in part owing to a community’s shared cultural resources and social predispositions … and in part owing to the political and economic history within which its values and social relations are defined. (Galaty and Johnson 1990: 30)

The above quote highlights the contingent relations between the multiplicity of factors involved in producing the synergistic effects of ecological primordialism: The nature of environmental constraints channels livelihood opportunities that are further mediated by political history, which, in turn, engenders social relations that subsequently structure not only the choice, but also the realization, of human possibilities. In the case of Soqotra, ecological primordialism entails the following structuring effects: (a) environmental vagaries engendered chronic risks to livelihood and thus constrained the pastoral economy to a subsistence mode; (b) this season-dependent pastoral economy necessitated the adoption of an extensive (as opposed to intensive) land use management system and the establishment of an island-wide network of reciprocal obligations that privileged a cooperation ethos to ensure their collective survival; (c) topographical barriers engendered the population’s physical isolation and thus enforced a kind of involuntary autarky in terms of socio-economic selfsufficiency, and gave rise to divergent cultural geographies as groups in different regions developed divergent dialectal repertoire and peculiar consumption habits among other social particularities; (d) these barriers led to the wide dispersal of settlements that made residential proximity a constitutive factor in the formation of kinship relations; and (e) the resulting minuscule population congregated into isolated hamlets as residential enclaves precluded the formation of corporate groups (e.g., tribes), and kept political organization at the clan level. In sum, during the pre-modern phase in Soqotra’s history all forms of organization (e.g., spatial, territorial, familial, productive, and political) were opportunistic accommodations to the island’s eco-topographical context. The analytical approach adopted here can be described as a transversal standpoint, which entails a mode of inquiry that articulates the locally forged intersections between the community’s existential domains. These

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domains encompass environmental assets, subsistence strategies, politicoeconomic regimes, cultural practices, intra-communal relational ethos, among others. The end result is an understanding of the catalytic role of the human-environment nexus in Soqotra’s constitution as a socio-ecologically embedded communal formation. This understanding is pursued through the empirical mapping of the multiple communal ramifications of Soqotrans’ adaptive practices to their environmental context. The analytical output of such an approach is not the interpretive cultural representation of individuals’ environmental agency, but the structural anatomy of the formation process of the Soqotran community engendered through the effects of their collective ecological praxes, which are “the forms of human activity that structure the usages of the environment” (Whitehead 1998: 30). In keeping with my mesographic approach (discussed in Chapter 1), while I address themes and concepts that are integral to the theoretical frameworks of a number of disciplinary formations—e.g., cultural ecology, political ecology, and cultural geography—I do not entangle my discussion within their post-modernist epistemological preoccupations and their inherent tendency toward the theoretical instrumentalization of field data and analytical reification of research subjects’ life-worlds. Moreover, such entanglement is obviated by the fact that the concept of ecological primordialism synthesizes the political, cultural, and geographical factors with the ecological context of a particular social formation. Accordingly, it captures the contextually specific, historically situated and temporally demarcated nature of human-environment relations in Soqotra. Indeed, the term not only illustrates the synergy between environmental conditions and human possibilities, but also accords an “agentive presence” to the environment in the historical formation of a human community (see Chakrabarty 2009). Finally, the focus on Soqotra’s pre-modern period is not due to the antiquarian fascination usually associated with anthropological studies, but because it is a seminal period in the historical constitution of the Soqotran community and a requisite prelude to understand its contemporary modernization impasse. In the following five sections of this chapter, I survey Soqotrans’ ecological praxes in response to their island’s environmental endowments in their pursuit of sustainable livelihoods and in organizing themselves into a viable community: First, Soqotrans’ symbolic appropriation of their environment is seen as being driven by a utilitarian discernment of the landscape in search of resources for both humans and animals through the

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deployment of a taxonomic and toponymic imagination in the domestication of the island as their homestead. This is manifested in the invention of an extensive knowledge repertoire that simultaneously familiarizes and evaluates the usefulness of the island’s environmental resources. Second, their territorial organization is explained as a form of clan autarky that is due to the combined effects of the demographic dynamics of low population density, resource-seeking use of space structured by the availability of extensive rangelands and by the Sultanate’s tributary political-economy. Third, the formation of different cultural geographies is shown to have emerged out of a long-term synergy between geographical locations, topographic markers, ecological habitats, residential patterns, and livelihood practices. Fourth, the development of mutual aid institutions is seen as promoting an island-wide ethos of reciprocity in sharing scarce environmental resources that mediated kinship relations. And fifth, I highlight the history-contingent nature of human-environment relations in Soqotra in order to stress the fact that socio-ecological change is inevitable. The failure of environmentalists working in Soqotra to recognize this fact has led them to assume that the prevailing community-nature interactions during its pre-modern period have not only remained unchanged but could be adapted to the modern period. This erroneous assumption has undermined the United Nations’ environmental conservation efforts in Soqotra (see Vol. 2: Chapters 6 and 7).

3.2 Vernacular Homestead: Indigenous Lexical Appropriation Soqotrans have thoroughly appropriated the island as their existential commons through the deployment of an indigenous lexicon that imposes a toponymic grid on the landscape and taxonomically domesticates its environmental resources. The resulting lexical repertoire constitutes the symbolic architecture of the island as a vernacular homestead and represents “structures of meaning” encompassing perceptions, values, and feelings about the environment. Moreover, it is a system of spatial orientation as well as a scheme for resource evaluation that are encompassed within a metaphorical appropriation and a utilitarian categorization of both space and resources. This combination of taxonomic nomenclature and toponymic grid is directly linked to the extensive mode of pastoralism practiced by Soqotrans which makes use of as much of the landscape as is available and possible. Accordingly, Soqotran pastoralists

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cast a prospecting gaze on their environment, in order to identify key resource location, to characterize the fitness of the landscape as pasturage, and to demarcate and catalogue their resource endowments. These inventorial practices have established a toponymic repertoire that familiarized the island’s geography and socialized its landscape into a collective homestead. Similarly, a taxonomic imagination is deployed in the discovery of the constellation of resources—e.g., natural, physical, vegetal, animal— that flocked the landscape and that became utilizable after experimental use over time. These resources are given an identity through a naming process designed to capture their utility to the pastoralist livelihood and are inventoried into a local (oral) knowledge repertoire (see the encyclopedic text of Miller and Morris 2004). Soqotrans employ a mode of classification—i.e., the manner in which “the elementary components of the world are represented as socially recognised categories” (Descola and Palsson 1996: 17)—through a prospecting gaze that appropriates their environment by means of a toponymic and taxonomic scheme. This is exemplified in their meticulously systematic identification and linkage of both the nature of the topography and the associated grass resources in the case of a transect of the upper plateau to the coastline of the southern region: The upland plateau is called dimidi and has ibihir grasses; the escarpment face is named tiyoh and has mirjif grasses; the base of the escarpment is called qezaz and has zift grasses; the foothills after the escarpment base are called zahr and have mirjif grasses; the plain is called himiher and has the occasional ishhib grasses; and the foreshore is called shiyfeh and has the di-owjihir grasses (Morris 2002: 63). The pairing of topography and vegetation type reflects an ecological symbiosis, which is partly affected by type of rains, winds, and seasons, and the knowledge of which Soqotrans have accumulated for all the physiographic zones of the island (see Miller and Morris 2004). Indeed, this knowledge repertoire embodies the pastoralist’s environmental consciousness, or better his “ecological rationality.” This consciousness stems from the material practices of livelihood-making that were shaped by the island’s natural setting, and its resource constellation, and the cultural practices elaborated to regulate their use (see Fig. 3.1). Indeed, these cultural practices have constituted their repertoire of “indigenous traditional knowledge” (ITK): The “traditional practices, culture, knowledge of plants and animals and knowledge of their methods of propagation; it includes expressions of

Fig. 3.1

Geography of livelihoods. Reprinted with permission from the map designer Daniela Siebeck

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cultural values, beliefs, rituals and community laws and it includes knowledge regarding land and ecosystem management” (UNECOSOC 2007: para. 2). Indeed, this section provides an overview of Soqotrans’ ITK and its repertoire of practices of human-environment coexistence. In the following two sub-sections, first, I will exemplify the process of topographic identification through a description of the main geographical regions of Soqotra as physiographic zones; and second, I will selectively illustrate Soqotrans’ taxonomic categorization of environmental resources as a means of identifying their practical use. 3.2.1

Mapping Landscapes: Toponymic Grid

The dominant topographical ordering of the Soqotra landscape—using a north-south axis, and vertical perspective (up-down and vice versa), which approximates the Soqotrans’ practical geo-spatial orientation and locational sensibility—is the natural succession of certain topographic features, over most of the island’s landmass that constitute five physiographic areas: Arid coastal plains (´sete), followed by high granite mountains that are called fedenhen (sing. fidehen), and elevated limestone plateaus that are called dimidi across the south, igalis in the center, and shibereh in the east, separated in the eastern-central area by internal valleys called ´si‘ib (sing. ´sa‘ab), and interior semi-arid plains in the west called zahr that are punctuated in places with rolling hills (h.ám@r), and finally sand dunefilled coastal plains again. This undulating topography is articulated with seven types of vegetation that are classified as follows: (1) the coastal mosaic: located in the coastal zones around Soqotra and endowed with varying combination of low succulent shrubs and woody herbs; (2) the croton shrubland: located on the low land plains at sea level to above onehundred meters elevation and are dominated by the Croton socotranus along with the widely distributed presence of one of Soqotra’s charismatic floral species the Soqotran Cucumber Tree (Dendrosicyos socotrana) with the swollen trunk, among others; (3) the succulent shrubland: located above the coastal plains on the rocky slopes and cliffs, limestone escarpments and steep wadi sides, which feature Soqotra’s Desert Rose (Adenium socotranum) among other endemic species; (4) the semievergreen woodland: located at altitude above 150 to 700 meters on steep limestone escarpments, plateaus and granite outcrops where Soqotra’s emblematic Dragon’s Blood tree (Dracaena cinnabari) is found along with frankincense trees among others; (5) the woody-based herb

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communities: located on wind-swept limestone plateaus at more than 500 meters above sea level where frankincense trees (Boswellia elongata) are common; (6) submontane shrubland: located at elevation from 750 to 900 meters on the granite slopes of Soqotra’s iconic mountain range, the H . agher (h.ághђr) mountains, where the highest Dragon’s Blood trees can be found; and (7) the montane mosaic encompasses a “floral buffet” of evergreen woodland, grassland, dwarf shrubland and cushion vegetation, which are located above 950 meters on the slopes and ravines in the surrounding regions of the H . agher mountains and where the Dragon’s Blood trees are found in all their different growth stages (see Cheung and DeVantier 2006: 65–74; Miller and Morris 2004). These topographic contours and vegetation types harmonize with, indeed dictate, the Soqotrans’ practice of a seasonal altitudinal transhumance form of pastoralism that alternates with the two monsoon seasons: mђzhíro (mezhiro) meaning “bringing down” from higher to lower grounds during the South West (summer) monsoon from May to September and the reverse movement mђrqíyo (merqiyo) meaning “bringing up” during the North East (winter) monsoon from November to March (see Chapter 5). Soqotra lies on the margin of the subequatorial and northern tropical climate belts. Accordingly, mean annual rainfall is 216 mm which varies across the island according to exposure and elevation: On the coastal plains the annual precipitation may be as little as 125 mm or even absent altogether; while in the mountains it can reach exceptional levels of 1000 mm (De Sanctis et al. 2012: 2). In a context of high variability in rainfall and erratic availability of key resources (e.g., water and pastures), the islanders demarcate this landscape into zones that do not merely designate geographical locations, but represent a series of natural frontiers made up of topographic signposts, climatic and altitudinal variations, agro-ecological particularities, and the types of subsistence livelihoods they afford. Furthermore, these zones are catalogued by Soqotrans in terms of the following aspects: The seasonality of resources availability; the environmental variability of resources accessibility; the locational suitability of these zones for human and animal habitats; the rangeland types and their adequacy for pastoral herds; and the livelihood enabling activities of their resource endowments. The resulting landscape demarcation into five physiographic areas are briefly described below in terms of their eco-topographical profile, resource endowment, and the related constraints and opportunities for livelihood activities.

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• Coastal Plains (CPs) cover the territorial span between the sea and the foothills that abut the high mountains of the north central region, or the high plateaus of the south. The CPs in the south are the most extensive of island as they extend 70 km in length and 5 km in width. The coastal population undergo seasonal fluctuation, especially during the June to September monsoon winds. In the north, the CPs are most affected by the summer monsoon winds; thus, their residents tend retreat to villages at the foothills of the high mountains. The CPs also serve as the seasonal refuge of pastoralists from the high mountains and high plateaus during the summer transhumant season. The primary livelihood activity of CPs’ residents is fishing, supplemented by agropastoral activities, such as date cultivation and increasingly market-oriented agricultural activities (vegetables and fruit cultivation). In addition, there is herding activity, albeit of variable importance to some coastal residents, as it tends to be more of a cultural ritual and less to fulfill subsistence needs. This is especially so in the two main coastal towns of Hadiboh and Qalansiyah. In these two towns, government jobs play an important role along with businesses, which have significant trickle down effects on the island’s economy. As part of the emerging local ecotourism economy, a number of protected areas have been demarcated all along the northern, southern, and western coasts, and for which ecotourists are being charged a visiting fee. • High Mountains (HMs) are situated in the north central part of the island. The H . agher mountains are the iconic physical feature of the Island, and they are composed of an ensemble of peaks, the highest being jebel skand that towers over the northern coastal plains at over 1550 meters. The HMs offer rangelands with dense vegetation on their slopes, which are suitable for cattle herding. Their high altitude makes them susceptible to climactic variation, and the effects of the monsoon winds; hence, their population (as well as those of the high plateaus) represent the main, not exclusive, practitioners of the alternating altitudinal transhumant pastoralism. Moreover, their difficult to access topography limits access to alternative livelihoods. The HMs are the repository of the most charismatic flora of the island, namely the Dragon’s Blood Tree. As a result, their scenic assets figure among the hiking trails identified in the UN’s ecotourism

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strategy. This puts these assets at risk of potential trampling by tourists, which is as bad as overgrazing. • High Plateaus (HPs) encompass the largest part of the island as they are located in the south-central region, and along the edges of the western and eastern regions. Their inhabitants are transhumant pastoralists with variable degree of dependency on herding as primary subsistence activity, and with different herd composition. In the central region where the HPs are interspersed with interior valleys with permanent streams, there is considerable herd diversity, and residents engage in agropastoral activity. In the eastern HPs, there is greater subsistence diversity and their inhabitants participate in seasonal fishing. Noteworthy, in the absence of the men during the fishing season, women become full time pastoralist for all the animals including milking them (traditionally a male activity). In the mostly arid western HPs, there is little subsistence diversity and the inhabitants are compelled to practice a peripatetic semi-nomadism with herds of primarily goats in a perennial search for water. Indeed, in the western HPs water is available only through rain, and the latter is erratic in its occurrence. When rain does occur, it is collected in a handful of rainwater catchments called kar¯ıf , which constitute the area’s only water sources. • Interior Valleys (IVs) afford their inhabitants an almost idyllic setting to pursue an agropastoralist livelihood. The IVs are all located in the central region. Their geographic position within the interstices of the HPs offers the best protection from the monsoon winds, and their ecological resources have made them an attractive destination for Soqotra’s migrating pastoralists who sought permanent residence in other clans’ territories to escape the chronic resource failures of their regions. The IVs’ dense vegetation provides varied grazing and browsing resources that support the full spectrum of livestock available in Soqotra: cattle, goat, sheep, camel, and donkey. The latter two are used as baggage animals; however, the camel was sometimes slaughtered for inter-clans problem solving meetings in the past. The permanent streams of their wadis provide plentiful water for dates and vegetable gardens. The proximity to upland areas enables the practice of transhumant pastoralism, which not only serves to restore the grazing grounds below, but also to tame the animals (especially goats) that have gotten used to roaming wildly under cover of their dense vegetation.

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• Interior Plains (IPs) are located in the arid western region. For the most part, the IPs are characterized by chronic environmental resource deficiency. Their relative deprivation not only in human and herds-supporting resources, but also in touristic landscapes and charismatic flora, has led to their relative neglect by the UN, other international agencies and by the government given their exclusive focus on ecotourism. However, the traditional cultivation of aloes in the region has attracted external interest in exploring the viability of its commercial production. This initiative is partly inspired by the fame of Soqotra’s aloes, which were exported in great quantities from the fourth century BCE until the seventeenth century CE. This has resulted in the publication of research papers (e.g., Christie et al. 2003), glossy brochures, and a pilot project to revive aloes’ production as a sustainable income generating activity (GIZ 2011). 3.2.2

Inventorying Resources: Taxonomic Symbiosis

Soqotrans’ taxonomic imagination in the classification of their environmental resources produced an extensive repertory of indigenous traditional knowledge. Soqotrans most exemplary demonstration of this know-how is as “artisan botanists,” which is only a subset of their more extensive repertoire of indigenous traditional knowledge. Prior to illustrating their taxonomic practices, I highlight briefly their technological capacity as craft-makers, which is another dimension of their repertoire of indigenous know-how. Indeed, Ellen’s assertion that “it is fallacious to infer a ‘primitive technology’ from a restricted toolkit [since] much cultural activity directed towards subsistence does not involve tools so much as know-how” (1994: 197). Comparatively, the Soqotrans’ homegrown technological toolkit was limited, but was not lacking in ingenuity. This is exemplified in the extensive multi-purpose utilization made of the date palm tree, as every part of it was transformed into items that satisfied some of their most essential needs: (i) shelter: walls, roofs, doors, and fencing; (ii) food and medicine for both humans and animals; (iii) tools, and home furnishings: ropes, timber, mats, baskets, containers, and bedding; (iv) fuel for heating their compounds, night-lighting, and livestock fumigation (Morris 2002: Chap. 13; Miller and Morris 2004: 393–398). Some of these multiple uses were observed by the Bents during their two month tour of the island in 1896:

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[D]ates form the staple food of the islanders. And out of the date tree they get branches for their hedges, stems for their roofs; the leaf provides them with their sleeping mats, and, when beaten on stones, with fibre, with which they are exceedingly clever in making ropes… They also make strong girdles with this fibre, which the slaves, who are employed in fertilizing the palm-trees, bind their bodies to facilitate their ascent… They weave, too, baskets, or, rather, stiff sacks, in which to hang their luggage on either side of the camel. (Bent and Bent 1900: 368–369)

In addition to the date palm tree, the Soqotrans displayed their technical capacity in the multiple use of animal hide and wool in the making of rugs, clothing items, storage containers, musical instruments, among other accessories (Miller and Morris 2004: 27–30). These activities coupled with the use of stones in traditional housing construction, and the use of clay for household pottery (that serves today mostly as tourist souvenirs), would perhaps exhaust the most important aspects of the Soqotran repertoire of technological knowledge that underpinned their material culture. Beyond these craft-making activities, Soqotrans’ real forte, however, is in their role as “artisan botanists,” which is evident in their constitution of a repertoire of environmental know-how through the mnemonic cataloguing of the island’s environmental resources. This knowledge is organized in a metaphorical taxonomy and not in the Linnaean hierarchical classification (e.g., family, genus, and species). Accordingly, it employs a practical taxonomy that categorizes the vegetation according to its practical features and livelihood utility: where and when it grows, appearance, size, taste, and fodder quality (see Miller and Morris 2004: 22–23). This metaphorical taxonomy is illustrated in the Soqotri term used to name some of the many species of the frankincense tree—for which the island was famous in the early centuries of the first millennium CE—which is based on the condition under which the tree grows, namely zifha: This is the nominal form of the verb zafah, meaning “to be squashed, squeezed, have insufficient room, to not stand free” (Miller and Morris 2004: 23). It was in this manner that Soqotrans’ extensive environmental repertoire was constituted and which includes knowledge of pasture in terms of topographic particularities and corresponding types and qualities of grass, and plants; varieties of rain and their impact on vegetation; comestible wild plants that maintain energy during transhumance movement; particularities of landscapes and their assets; animal

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responsiveness to different types of grasses and plants, and the resulting quality of their milk; and trees that can be used as animal feed in times of drought.1 Among this extensive repertoire of indigenous environmental knowledge, three of nature’s products—rain, grass, and milk—are selected for an illustrative discussion below. This is because they not only exemplify Soqotrans’ metaphorical taxonomy, but more importantly they epitomize their appropriation of the Arabic word baraka (plenitude), which expresses a reverential attitude toward nature that “emanates naturally from dependence on seasonal harvests and direct exposure to environmental forces” (Barakat 1993: 59). However, in Soqotra, the term baraka was invoked to symbolize nature’s largess in terms of the seasonal availability of, and the natural symbiosis between, rain, grass, and milk. It was the quality and quantity of their availability that determined transhumance pattern, residential location, and all of the associated livelihood practices. Most remarkable, is that these three natural products seem to constitute a virtuous circle of production given their symmetrical correspondence in the form of a triad of taxonomic symbiosis encompassing seven different kinds of rain, seven qualities of grass cover of the pasturage, and seven types of dairy products that milk is converted into: • Rain (mšsε) is the elixir of pastoralism, since its occurrence regulates the rhythm of pastoral life. Indeed, water (rího) is Soqotrans’ existential anchor as it is the source of life itself, thus a sacred substance. This is expressed in the Qur’anic verse, which is familiar to Soqotrans: ja‘aln¯ a min al m¯ a’ kulli sh¯ı hay (“we made from water every living thing”). The seven types of rain identified below range from a drizzle to the torrential and were collected from pastoralists in the high mountains of the central region, and therefore might differ from terms used elsewhere. What can be generalized about these terms is the metaphoric language that is employed in conveying the nature of the rain to an enquirer: (i) Tirhu di uben: This is the lightest form of rain possible and its literal meaning is to “dampen the stone” and that has no effect on grass. (ii) S.ís.ihin: refers to the sound of the rain falling on the earth, and water is in the form of a light trickle. (iii) Mis.elif : means rain that leaves small puddles, which might lead to the sprouting of grass. (iv) Rehe tirhu: The literal meaning is “wet cover” over an area. (v) Rehe tirhu lowfish (?): is

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a stronger rain, which leads to grass good enough for large ruminants. (vi) Qulum .salhil: Literal meaning is “the water running in a small wadi,” when the rain is strong enough to generate streams of water on the ground. (vii) Qulum jáh.i l-imul: the strongest form of rain that leads water to rush down a large wadi or ravine (Miranda Morris pers. comm.). • Grass (k.ös.ho) is the transmutated gold for the pastoralist herd resulting from nature’s alchemy, as “grasses are regarded as the best possible feed for all livestock, regardless of species, age, or condition” (Miller and Morris 2004: 343). The terms that are used to describe the state of the rangeland seems not only to correlate with the seven types of rain listed above but also to characterize the developmental stages of grass: (i) Bitil mqanhim: means “enough to bring an end to the need to lop foliage,” as there is enough grass on the ground. (ii) Qerhe ta’amo h.¯ıdibi: “just enough for the local livestock to have a taster.” (iii) Shibo‘o dish h.ídib: “enough for the local livestock to eat their fill.” (iv) Qas.eho di irihan: tuw’an dish: “feed for mature goats: enough for people with small stock to transhume to.” (v) Qas.eho di folihi we minqo’: tuw‘an dish: “feed for weaned calves: enough for people with young cattle to transhume to.” (vi) Qas.eho di ilehe: tuw‘an dish: “feed for cattle: enough for people with pregnant and milking cows to transhume to.” (vii) Qala’ bi chadihir wi ‘a iteybur: “enough pasture for a clay pot to be thrown to the ground and not break” (Miller and Morris 2004: 342). The last type of pasture represents the ultimate state of rangeland quality and epitomizes the manifestation of baraka. • Milk (ˆsh.af ) epitomizes the cornucopia of pastoralism, as it is the very raison d’être of the Soqotran pursuit of a pastoralist livelihood, especially today. Milk, from cows and goats and not from sheep, remains the most cherished consumption item among Soqotrans. Indeed, it is apt that the symbol of cornucopia is the horn of a goat, which is the dominant animal on the Island. From the rich Soqotri linguistic repertoire for dairy-related aspects (see Morris 2002: Chap. 16), the focus here is limited to identifying the stages in the conversion of milk into the main seven different dairy products. Putting aside fresh milk (ˆsh.af ), which is customarily not consumed in that state, and butter-oil (h.ami in the east and khaymi in the west), which was primarily used as an exchange commodity, the different types of converted milk products are as follows: h.ilub: Buttermilk

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is the first stage of conversion from fresh milk and is the base product from which all other types of milk are made; maqdif : boiled buttermilk; mis.lif : soured buttermilk; qat.amhim: butter; h.amdihir: separated buttermilk; h.anekeh: the curd from the h.amdihir that is left overnight from the surplus that could not be consumed; and finally, jibneh: dried cheese made from the h.anekeh (see account of milk-making and varying names of its by-products in Naumkin et al. 2018: 54–61). The simultaneous production of the above types of milk during a single season was the ultimate symbol of baraka. Finally, the know-how regarding the nature and uses of these three resources and the labor deployed to harvest them were partly due to the incentive provided by the external market for butter-oil. In the absence of such an export market, both the amount of milk produced and the associated ecofriendly herd management practices began to decline. These were subsequently exacerbated by climate change and government policyinduced socioeconomic transformation of the island. Consequently, the natural symbiosis between rain, grass, and milk that constituted a “virtuous cycle” of production and consumption within the pastoral domain came to an end. This signaled the dawning of h.amshal (or khamshal in the west): meaning the withdrawal of God’s favor (baraka), and thus the onset of scarcity of the island’s natural resources (Morris 2002: 500).

3.3 Territorial Organization: Indigenous Clans vs. Settler Tribes Worthy of note is that the concept of clan is rarely invoked in discussions of the WANA region’s social formations with the exception of Somalia (see Lewis 2008). In Yemen, the tribe is regarded by foreign scholars as “the prime ethnographic fact” (Dresch 1993: 32) and is endowed with “cast-iron legitimacy” (Gilsenan 1990: 232). The reason for this endemic assumption about the primacy of the tribe as the focal unit of territorial organization that led to its reification as a “living heritage” of Yemen is best explained by Southall: “It is the melancholy paradox of anthropology that effective study of [tribal] social systems dates only from a period so late that they had already ceased to exist in [their original forms]”; thus, the “symbols of their passing” are mistaken for signs of

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their persistence (1970: 29). To avoid the perpetuation of this “melancholy paradox” and the arbitrary conceptual enclosure of Soqotra’s social organization, I identify the main definitions for the terms clans and tribes: (i) an intrinsic ethnological category used in classifying social groups; (ii) a stage in an evolutionary sequence (e.g., band, clan, tribe, and state); (iii) an expression of social identity based on shared ancestry; (iv) a discursive idiom employed to differentiate the organizational configuration of a political community; (v) a genealogically bounded and territorially demarcated matrix of social membership and political loyalty; (vi) competing “projects of sovereignty” over a territory; (vii) opposing sociopolitical ideologies of polity formation; and (viii) a secondary product of state expansion (Winthrop 1991: 308). It is the last definition that will inform the discussion in this section. Indeed, both clans and tribes in their contemporary manifestations—as the socio-organizational expression of human communities—are progenies of the state as they reflect the success or failure of its polity formation strategies. It is worth recalling the initial conditions that gave rise to these micro/meso social organizations. Hourani’s description of these initial conditions shows them to be essentially mutual aid groups that were formed in response to livelihood-sustaining needs and survival-related urgencies within specific contexts at particular historical conjunctures: A natural phenomenon of rural society, whether pastoral or agricultural: the formation of more or less permanent cooperative groups such as herding units or villages, because of the need for certain types of cooperation in the migration of pastoral groups, the operation of plowing and harvesting, the periodic distribution of land, and sometimes for defense. Such groups, bound together as they are by proximity and cooperative activities, tend to be linked by kinship through either common descent or intermarriage. These kinship bonds arise because of the group’s isolation from others, the need to keep land in a family, or the need to establish binding personal relations with those whom one has common interests. (Hourani 1990: 303)

It is this “natural phenomenon” that was appropriated by the Sultanate to generate the resources needed by its elite. Accordingly, the dispersed and isolated hamlet dwellers engaged in a subsistence transhumant pastoralism were regimented into clans as in-kind tax extraction units as the economic foundation of the Sultanate. In effect, the Sultanate’s

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incorporation of Soqotra into its self-sustaining political economy and the pre-existing communal social structure have led to the divergence of its social organization from the prevailing view of the Yemeni mainland as a tribal polity. The four sub-sections below identify the factors that led to this divergence: (a) the catalytic role of the island’s political economy through a cascade of effects on (b) the residential configuration of the population, (c) the communal polity’s social structure, and (d) the local institutions of governance. 3.3.1

Sultanate Regime: Tributary Political Economy and Patrimonial Social Order

Soqotra was not a feudal social formation as was said to be the case in parts of mainland Yemen. This is because the main distinguishing feature between a feudal and non-feudal social formation is whether or not agriculture—in terms of the structure of land ownership (private estate, landless tenants), and as a source of surplus extraction—is the primary basis of the economy. Samir Amin has argued that the pre-colonial Arab world was not feudal because “agriculture never played a key role in its development,” but relied on a tributary mode of production based on surplus extraction from long-distance trade, in which the states in the region were mercantile entrepôts (1978: 7). During the bin ‘Afr¯ar dynasty, the source of surplus extraction in Soqotra was not transit trade, but a transhumant pastoralism embedded within a barter-driven local economy dedicated to the production and processing of milk into butteroil as the main export commodity within a three continents-spanning trade network: East Africa, the Arabian Gulf, and India’s western coast (Seland 2014). As part of this trade network butter-oil production was not merely a subsistence activity but also an “entrepreneurial venture” that sustained pastoralist livelihoods, maintained the micro state and its social elite through taxation and confederated the isolated hamlets into an embryonic communal polity. Moreover, this polity was subordinated (a) to the political supervision of a proxy colonialist settler regime as the transfer of the official seat of al-Mahra Sultanate to Soqotra in the 1890s was both enabled and encouraged by the British through their establishment of protectorates throughout the South Arabian mainland (see Chapter 7); and (b) to the regimentation of a patrimonial social order under the absolute rule of the Sultan assisted by a network of hierarchically ranked clients who

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resided on the northern coast from where they controlled the economy through surplus extraction from pastoralists and the use of slave labor. The term patrimonial is pertinent as Soqotra under the Sultanate exemplified its definition: a regime in which “the polity is considered the personal property of the ruler, and state administration is essentially an extension of the ruler’s household” (Fukuyama 2014: 10). This patrimonial social order was based on a tributary political economy, which encompassed a rural-led production system based on the labor of pastoralists as primary producers engaged in herding livestock for the production of milk that was converted into butter-oil as an exchange commodity. The latter was appropriated as a surplus through a compulsory in-kind taxation regime imposed by these settlers’ arbitrary political authority based on their hierarchically ranked social status. The Sultan and his retinue of clients constituted a landowning “nobility” who relied on slave labor as there was no serf-like peasantry to exploit. In sum, Soqotra was not a tribally-organized agriculturally-based feudal regime but a clan-based pastoral economy controlled by tribute-extracting settlers from al-Mahra in mainland Yemen who established a patrimonial regime on the island as a colonial proxy of the British Empire with the following politico-economic features: • Primary producers were not cereal grains-producing peasants in serfs-like bondage on the land held by a seigneurial class linked to a suzerain by a pledge of fealty, but clans of butter oil-producing pastoralists bound to their collectively maintained territory in the hinterland. While date-palm plantations were cultivated and dates were taxed, and subsistence agricultural production (e.g., finger millet) was practiced as an auxiliary livelihood, Soqotra cannot be considered an agrarian community of peasant farmers. • Means of production were not agricultural fields, but the pastoral domains collectively controlled by geographically demarcated clans who claimed privileged access for their individually owned herds. These herds were the primary means of production and their main dairy by-product—butter oil—was the main source of the Sultanate’s tribute extraction mode of revenue generation. • Administrative modality was based on a tribute extraction regime as part of a barter economy in which the payment of tributes was in-kind only, and therefore was structured around the logistics of its collection from a dispersed population. This entailed the following

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tasks: The elaboration of regulations regarding who pays what, how much, and when, as the availability of the main taxed items (butteroil, dates, sheep, goats and animal skins) was contingent on seasons and regions; the designation of key coastal villages as collection hubs; the strategic allocation of tax farming privileges; the deployment of a contingent of camel-riding tax collectors; and the levying of custom duties on imported and exported goods as part of mercantile activities with ports in Muscat (Oman), Zanzibar (East Africa) and Bombay (India) (see Chapter 7). This tributary political economy was based on property relations, which were not established on elaborate conventions between land-holding ruler and land-dispossessed ruled as in a feudal regime. Although, there was a landed “nobility” circumscribed to the northern coast and in a few enclaves in the eastern hinterland who owned large date plantations and seasonally employed slaves and destitute pastoralists as migrant laborers on these plantations in exchange for part of the harvest. Instead, the pastoral domain was symbolically appropriated by the Sultan through the imposition of usufructuary rights over parts of the products of pastoralist labor, which was legitimated by a status hierarchy based on the primacy of the Sultan’s tribe and the ascriptive elites as settlers from al-Mahra. These relations were based on the following property-rights regime: • Communal ownership prevailed in the hinterland, as land was held in common and regulated by rules on access and modality of use, and was not conceived as something “owned” by individuals. Thus, the principle of the inalienability of land from those who had “preferential domestic usufruct” over it was recognized. Accordingly, in the hinterland the Sultan’s authority over the land was mostly symbolic. Therefore, the Sultan or his representative could play an adjudicatory role in conflicts over land only when solicited by hinterland residents. • Regulated open access, which could be obtained by special permission from, or through elective kinship arrangements with, the collective owners of the land. The Sultans’ assertion of dominion rights over the land of the entire island was merely a de facto claim, which they could exercise only through tribute extraction. In fact, they could not dispose of the land at will, especially in the hinterland as

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the pastoralists had primacy over territorial access and use. This was because the inhabitants of the hinterland were the aboriginals whose presence preceded that of the Sultans on the island. As one observer put it, when referring to the pastoralists’ territory, “it does not seem that the Sultan could alienate any of the land at will. The Scots Law terms come to mind at once: the Sultan may be feuar, but the Bedu has the dominum utile” (Brown 1966). • Private property was operational mostly, if not only, on the northern coast, where the Sultans initially acquired the land through conquest in the fifteenth century, and subsequently allocated it to the members of their privileged entourage (e.g., Mahri tribesmen, the Arab merchants among others). During the Sultanate, the fourth type of property regime—state property—was unknown. It was introduced after the independence of South Arabia from the British in 1967. Republican Decree No. 7 was promulgated in December 1967, which called for the confiscation without compensation of the traditional elites’ land to be allocated to rural migrants (see Chapter 7). In Soqotra, this decree affected mostly coastal areas and was instrumental in generating migration from the hinterland to the coast and the large-scale mutation of pastoralists into fishermen. The tributary political economy of the Sultanate was founded on a symbiotic relations with the hierarchical social structure (see Chapter 4 for details), which was articulated as follows: The first group, the “notables,” was made up of the Sultan’s relatives and a privileged group of ´ . arÒ who controlled land and many date planclients known as the Sh tations as well as slaves, and had tax farming privileges and authority positions in some regions of the island. The second group could be called the “mercantilists,” who were from the Arabian Gulf and from Hadhramawt, and constituted the intermediaries of the island’s intercontinental butter-oil trade, and the middlemen of the local barter economy between local products and imported goods. Their privilege consisted of being granted monopoly rights by the Sultan to trade in some commodities (e.g., oyster shells), and over the export and import of goods. In this way, this group was able to live off the profits from the traded goods produced by the pastoralists and coastal residents. The descendants of some of these merchants are the main local businessmen on the island today. The third group was the “rentier class” who constituted the political and administrative elite, as some were the members of the Tribal

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Council (see Chapter 7). On behalf of the Sultan, they collected the taxes from the ports, negotiated the granting of monopolies (e.g., pearl fishing, hiring of transport animals, etc.), intermediated between the Sultan and the British, and received commission payments from the latter for the provision of labor gangs for the occasional local public works they carried out (Serjeant 1992: 166). 3.3.2

Demographic Distribution: Land Occupation Strategy

The tribute extraction regime of the Sultanate was a key contributing factor to the dispersed configuration of the island’s population, as it expanded the land under productive activity and thus increased the number of villages as tribute generating units. In addition, Soqotran pastoralists’ extensive herd management strategy, which was based on the exclusive reliance on natural forage in the absence of cultivated fodder, contributed to their dispersed land occupation strategy. The resulting settlement pattern revealed a land-use rationality that configured the island’s landscape into a constellation of ecologically opportunistic micro agglomerations enduring a relatively autarkic existence. This spatial configuration of settlements was the manifestation of a territorial imperative to accommodate the pasturage requirements of the animals of different clan members, and that had to adapt to the necessary seasonal alternation of residence between wet and dry areas as well as cold and hot climate, and the accompanying change in residential altitude from highland to lowland pastures and back again that is associated with the mђzhíro-mђrqíyo transhumance movement (see Chapter 5). The changing seasons and varying climates determined the use of multiple alternative animal pastures, and the constraining effect of a minimally developed material culture made a necessity out of the reliance on natural protective enclosures (i.e., caves) as human habitat. Consequently, during the Sultanate the initial settlement pattern was characterized by extreme isolation, as the primary habitat was initially mountain caves, and makeshift structures built in widely dispersed hamlets occupied by a few people. Indeed, Soqotrans’ predilection for “mountainous asylum” within caves or remote hamlets as their prevailing residential modality was observed in the 1950s: [They] choose to live in places like these caves … high up the crags, [and] in villages so shut in by mountains… [A] world cut off from the rest of

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humanity for countless centuries, hemmed in, absurdly remote and unreal, living out its own strange and incommunicable life. (Botting 1958: 173)

These natural habitats offered a secure living space for them and their herds, and afforded greater accessibility to natural resources for their livestock. Furthermore, the quest for livelihoods dependent on environmental resources exercised a centrifugal social force on settlement patterns. Consequently, Soqotrans’ occupation of the island’s landscape seems driven by an “atomization imperative” given the wide dispersal of settlements. The alternative settlement to the caves was not much of an improvement, as was observed by a visitor to the island in 1877: “The houses are of the rudest description, being built of rubble walls, with a flat roof of earth, which is supported on rafters and branches of trees” (Hunter 1878: 369). Caves remained in use until the 1980s as permanent residence and until the 2000s as seasonal residence during transhumance. This atomized settlement pattern was made necessary by the geographic distribution and seasonal availability of the island’s livelihood-sustaining resources. There were other forces shaping the establishment of these micro encampments. This is evidenced in a two-prong process of village, or more accurately hamlet, multiplication: The first was an horizontal dispersal motion due to a combination of natural population growth and the formation of new family units occasioned by marriage and the corollary process of setting up new households and the partial re-allocation of the herd as well as the sub-division of the clan depending on spatial and resource constraints. This horizontal dispersal process was perhaps related to the fission of clans into sub-sections that spread over a territory, as a means of meeting spatial requirements and resource needs for their animals as well as to assert their territorial grazing rights. The second was a vertical dispersal process partly induced by a combination of socioecological factors where both the people and the environment of their territory were impoverished, and were compelled to migrate to another clan’s territory where there was greater availability of land and environmental resources as well as the need for labor (e.g., in date plantations). This led to the emergence of Soqotra’s environmental migrants, namely the mah.alliy¯ın: They emerged from an intra-rural migration process in which clans or individual families engaged in a cross-territorial displacement, as they abandoned their native territory and moved to another

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as temporary settlers on the basis of an agreement between the original owners of the land, and subsequently became permanent residents. All of the above-discussed land occupation vectors were animated by the quest for livelihood survival, which sustained the population’s permanent subdivision into scattered micro-settlements. Moreover, this settlement pattern was maintained by the limited economic opportunities in the coastal towns, which restricted rural-urban migration. This led to the relatively low population density and to the predominantly rural demographic distribution (see Table 3.1). In light of the above, the nature of Soqotra’s demographic distribution and the resulting territorial organization can be called a clan autarky: This is a land occupation strategy partly driven by ecological constraints and the spatial requirements of a pastoralist livelihood in a landscape populated by “poor remote communities… which were little more than a loose assemblage of small, local, autonomous groups [that] hardly ever operated as wholes” (Hoyland 2001: 116). Accordingly, Soqotra’s clan-based territorial organization emerged from a situation characterized by chronic food insecurity, low population density, dispersed settlement patterns that accommodated a pastoralism based on an extensive land use strategy. The latter transformed each village, or the territorial domain of a particular clan collective, into an insular encampment practically forced into living a socially autarkic existence. The resulting atomistic distribution of clans around the island was a default condition imposed by environmental constraints and the centrifugal push of livelihood making, which were reinforced by the Sultanate’ pastoral surplus extraction regime. Table 3.1 Historical data on Soqotra’s population Year

Population

Density (km2 )

1835 1903 1966 1994 2004

4000 9000 11,200 37,623 44,120

1.1 2.48 3.1 10.3 12.17

Data type

Source

Conjectural Conjectural Conjectural Census Census

Wellsted (1835) Doe (1992) Brown (1966) CSO (1995) CSO (2004)

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Communal Social Structure: Clan and Locality vs. Tribe and Genealogy

The Soqotran community’s social structure, which is based on atomized clans instead of aggregated tribes, resulted from the symbiosis between the island’s physical geography and the constitution of its social geography: That is, the natural human habitats made available by the island’s physical geography have engendered the demographic dispersal and residential insularity of its social geography and led to the autarky of clans. The structuring principle of clan autarky is aptly expressed as follows: “The more the social units are simple and isolated, the simpler and more fragmented the public memory will be, with fewer benchmarks and fewer levels of ascent [i.e., genealogical tracing] to the beginning of time” (Douglas 1986: 80). In fact, the defining differences between what constitutes a clan as opposed to a tribe is that a clan is territorially, while a tribe is genealogically, structured. Another key differentiating criterion between clan and tribe is what Fried called the “essential element of the concept of tribe,” namely the “transcendence of the individual community… [as] tribalism consisted in functions aggregating otherwise discreet villages into an interacting whole” (1975: 39). Indeed, Sahlins’ description of a clan captures the absence of genealogy, the lack of transcending capacity and the intrinsically atomistic nature of a communal polity of clans: The clan in traditional usage is a unit of “putative” rather than “demonstrable” common descent: the people believe in their unitary origin but cannot trace it… [M]embership in a clan is verified by parentage, not ancestry… [Moreover, a clan] is not a group but an uncoordinated category of people… [who] never act as a collectivity. (1968: 52–53)2

Similarly, in Soqotra a clan is made up of a limited group of households united by a common interest in survival, and occupying a collectively owned territory inherited from their putative common ancestors, and whose criterion of membership is not common descent but common geographical origin from a shared territory (called dábar in Soqotri). Noteworthy, is that dábar means “pasture” (Naumkin et al. 2014: 525), but is metaphorically employed to mean “homeland.” Even the Soqotran’s definition of clan captures the symbiotic nexus between environmental context and social organization, as the term shat.r (meaning: part, section, segment), which is borrowed from Arabic, and is attached

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to a Soqotri suffix, gives the following word: shat.rihir, which means strips from a cloth. In effect, it describes the amoeba-like sub-division process of Soqotra’s clan formation as well as evokes the image of a cloth being torn apart continuously into ever-thinner strips, partly to accommodate the spatial requirements of grazing herds as part of an extensive form of pastoralism. Soqotrans are very aware of their incompleteness as “tribes,” as one of them noted using the Arabic term fakhdh (“thigh”) to point out that “Soqotran tribes are not complete” (mush k¯ amil ). To compensate for this lack of genealogical pedigree, geographical origin on the island is used as the authenticating marker: The hinterland was, and still is, regarded as the territorial domain of indigenous Soqotrans, while the coast was considered the exclusive domain of those with foreign origins. This is buttressed by a hinterland-anchored territorial self-conception that is animated by a kind of topophilia (i.e., a strong attachment to place). The latter is manifested in a detailed knowledge of, and keen attachment to, clan geography, which induced a sensibility about the spatial location of people as an index of the authenticity of their indigeneity. Furthermore, Soqotrans’ attachment to a territorial self-conception is evident in the naming of villages and areas, which is done through a toponymous designation that employs an idiom of locality/territory, instead of an eponymous one, which employs an idiom of ancestry or descent. Moreover, the designation ibn or bin (son of) was never used among Soqotran clans, except among the Mahri/Arab tribes and their descendants today, as a means of self-introduction that linked an individual to his tribal eponym. Instead, Di (meaning: “from” or “of” in Soqotri) was, and still is, used and is usually linked to a specific locality. All of these affirmations of differences served as a means of preserving their social autonomy and cultural distinctiveness. More importantly, these territorially-based distinctions reaffirmed their primacy over the land and served as the means to contest attempts at land dispossession by their political overlords. The latter were mostly coastal residents who constituted the island’s socio-political (Sultan’s tribe), religious (al-ashr¯ af ), and economic (al‘Arab from outside) elites (discussed in Chapter 4). These coastal elites, in contrast, privileged a genealogical self-definition given their concern to maintain their social distinction and tribal identity as part of a status stratification system that conferred privileged access to the island’s resources, and which was used to legitimize their rule. All of whom traced their genealogical descent outside of Soqotra.

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In spite of their collective awareness that they do not constitute tribes, Soqotrans still invoke the concept of “tribe” as an idiom of selfidentification, in its Arabic version qab¯ıla. However, tribe is unrelated to the conflict-laden segmentary practices and the elaborate protocols of belonging usually associated with tribal formations (see section below). When Soqotrans are asked to explain its significance, they refer to the Qur’anic verse 13 in chapter 49 “The Dwellings” (al-H at ): “Oh . ujar¯ mankind! We have created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations (shu‘¯ ub) and tribes (qab¯ a’¯ıl ) that you may know each other.” Invoking a Qur’anic verse was perhaps an attempt to confer the highest legitimacy to a tribal identity as the mediating marker across which one encounters and acknowledges others. However, this is a belated postfacto rationalization, as Soqotrans’ identity preceded their very recent familiarity with the Qur’an (see Vol. 2: Chapter 4). As the Qur’an does not promote tribal values but advocates the unity of the Muslim nation (al-umma). In fact, the use of the term “tribes” occurred only once in the entire Qur’an as quoted above. As Landau-Tasseron noted, “the Qur’¯an does not even reflect the fact that pre-Islamic Arabian society was a tribal society” (2005: 365). Beyond the invocation of a Qur’anic justification, the use of tribe as a self-identification is partly the legacy of the introduction of the nidh¯am mash¯ayikh in the 1990s, which attempted to reconfigure clansmen into tribesmen. In Soqotra, however, “tribe” does not designate an exclusive collective identity whose social boundaries and cohesiveness are maintained by “balanced opposition” between tribal groups, which is supposed to constitute the structuring principle of social formations in which tribes are the basic unit of social organization (Salzman 2008). Instead, “tribe” articulates a set of meanings that emphasize the bonding factors of clan membership: It anchors territorial belongingness into an ancestral hearth, a family cradle, and a livelihood fount; it demarcates collective property rights over a shared territorial domain and thus confers the primacy of use-rights over its environmental resources; and it certifies local origin and lends social legitimacy, by ascertaining the authenticity of community members’ civil paternity: that is, the person who has a known native father who belongs to a specific hinterland location, and thus not a sociocultural orphan. Relatedly, the symbiosis between clan membership and territorial location serves as an authenticating criterion of indigenous status through the designation of the hinterland as the exclusive domain of authentic Soqotrans, which is usually associated with those who claim Arab descent;

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while those whose birthplace are the coastal areas are denied an authentic Soqotran identity, which is associated especially with Soqotrans of African descent (al-muwallad¯ın). The descendants of Arabs from “across the sea” (South Arabia, Oman and the UAE) have a more ambiguous status (see Chapter 4). Moreover, clan affiliation is crucial in terms of socioeconomic security, and not in politico-organizational terms, given the chronic absence, both in the past and present, of a socially responsive centralized or local political authority toward Soqotrans’ well-being, especially in the hinterland. Finally, given the Sultanate’s preference for a disaggregated polity as a means of maximizing the number of tax extraction units and the extensive pastoralism practiced by Soqotrans, the need to develop a “transcendence” capacity never materialized. As a result, Soqotra’s clans never aggregated but rather sub-divided themselves into scattered micro-settlements with the following characteristics: (a) the absence of a conflict-prone culture, and of its corollary institution the blood feud3 ; (b) a minimally elaborated socio-political hierarchy; (c) the small number of members within a clan; and (d) the episodic display of “a collective spirit” through recourse to the mutual aid institutions (see below). Lastly, if the concept of “tribe” has any applicability in Soqotra it is only, in Naumkin’s (1993) term, as a “territorial clan collective”: An agglomeration of nucleated families occupying a multiplicity of localities loosely aggregated into a territorial domain linked through kinship relations partly established through enforced endogamy due to the wide distances between, and thus near total isolation of, villages. In sum, the Soqotran community’s organization into clans was primarily a product of ecological and topographical constraints, and did not emerged from genealogy-structured and kinship-based social relations as is the case with a tribal formation. 3.3.4

Self-Governance: Traditional Institutions of Mediation

The nature of traditional governance institutions in Soqotra differed substantially from the more complex tribal governance system on the mainland, which was organized around a hierarchy of shaykhs representing the rural polity at different levels (village, region, and confederation) and their retinue of aide-de-camp (e.g., mu‘¯ awin: assistant, ‘¯ aql: “wise man”). Their relations are mediated by an elaborate set of regulatory mechanisms (qaw¯ a‘id), which include: sh¯ ura (consultation between tribal members), ‘aqd (inter-tribal protection agreement), bay‘a

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(oath of allegiance between tribal shaykh and tribesmen), the feud (th¯ a‘r), and the payment of blood money (d¯ıya), among others (see Weir 2007: 143–225). These are neither the traditional governance nor conflict resolution institutions of Soqotrans. Indeed, Soqotrans’ lack of belligerence and the absence of an external inducement to coalesce into warring tribal formations obviated the need for these institutions. This was noted by Brown back in 1966: The Socotran Bedu does not turn himself into a Christmas tree of lethal weapons and conduct himself with a mixture of swagger and cadge, like an eighteen century bully-boy with pockets to let…. The Socotran has long been able to evolve and abide by a social code that renders those charades unnecessary.

Instead, during the Sultanate period in Soqotra, relations between the Sultans and the overwhelmingly rural population were mediated by two institutions that were minimally hierarchical and unencumbered by elaborate norms: (1) “meeting with the Sultan” (Etíhi di-sát.ahan), which also served as a conflict resolution mechanism and was subsequently referred to as sulh (s.ulh.), and (2) the office of the muqaddam as the sole representative of each clan. These two institutions are briefly discussed below. The first institution was preceded by the intermittently held subregional inter-clan meetings, which were called mishreb, prior to the formal transfer of the Sultanate’s capital from al-Mahra to Soqotra in the late nineteenth century. After the transfer, they became known as Etíhi di-sát.ahan (“meeting with the Sultan”). The multiple meanings of the verb Etíhi capture the purposes of such meetings: “to assemble or unite; disputers to meet; problem to be discussed and solved; all to agree to a solution, share a meal together” (Miranda Morris pers. comm.; for a poetic account of such a meeting see Naumkin et al. 2018: 312–315). It was the main, if not sole, communal conflict resolution mechanism through which justice was administered and communal problems settled. The place at which such a meeting was held was called masilhim (or msilihim) in the east and merqada in the western part of the island. This type of meeting was the main island-wide mechanism of rule under the Sultanate, as it served as a “roving parliament” (see Chapter 7). In the late period of the Sultanate, to accommodate the changing political context on the island, the term sulh was adopted: It is a mode of settling

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disputes by mutual agreement, based entirely on public debate mediated by a committee of impartial individuals selected for their moral authority from outside the community, and in which persuasion was the sole means deployed in a process aimed at the gradual rapprochement and ultimate agreement between the parties. Historically, sulh was a pre-Islamic practice that figured among pastoralists’ customary law regulating the settlement of tribal feuds, and that has since become a traditional institution of conflict resolution in the governance systems of West Asia and North Africa involving different types and levels of actors. At the communal level, sulh represented a form of “amicable settlement” of a dispute over property, or other types of conflicts between individuals or groups, in which agreement through some form of compromise is pursued through means of persuasion. Also, it referred to the settlement of tribal feuds. At a higher level, it involved a state entity and a dominion, where sulh was used as an instrument of subordination in which the dominion agreed to pay tribute to the state in exchange for its relative autonomy and safety (see Lewis 1988: 78–79). Indeed, Soqotra seemed to have entered into such an arrangement with Oman back in the eighth century (Wilkinson 1981). In Soqotra, in spite of a succession of regime changes, the sulh has remained the preferred modality of conflict resolution, especially in the rural areas, where it is used to settle conflicts over access to land and the communal use of ecological resources. However, its current practice has been modified with the participation of representatives from “modern” institutions such as local councilors, and the police, but without the presence of nonSoqotran state representatives. It remains an exclusively Soqotran affair, and it constitutes the actual and effective communal conflict management mechanism of the hinterland (see Fig. 3.2). Noteworthy, is that in spite of a transition from traditional institutions of reconciliation to modern institutions of legal adjudication such as the ny¯ aba (prosecutor’s office) and the mah.kama (court) that were introduced by the South Yemeni state in 1967, recourse to sulh was temporarily marginalized but not entirely abandoned. Following the unification of North and South Yemen in 1990, these modern institutions were complemented by the adoption of tah.k¯ım (arbitration), which is a court-mediated conflict resolution mechanism that was first introduced in 1981 into the body of laws of the Yemen Arab Republic in the north. Tah.k¯ım’s main difference with sulh is that it is a more formal process whose decisions must be registered with the court to be valid; while

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Fig. 3.2 A Sulh assembly

sulh is outside the court system. In effect, there evolved a geographic division of institutional relevance: tah.k¯ım remained more appropriate to settling urban problems between individual litigants, while sulh persisted as the preferred institution of the rural domain where litigants are social collectives (e.g., villages or clans). The second institution is the office of the muqaddam, as clan leader. The term is a lexical borrowing from the mainland where it variously referred to a community mediator, a tax collector or a labor gang leader in Aden during the British occupation (see Ingrams 1966: 214). In Soqotra, the muqaddam was an agent of political control and fiscal extraction on behalf of the Sultan. Also, he was the primary representative of the members of a clan as well as the first intermediary between the clan and all external entities. As such, he was the principal mediator of all aspects of village life and inter-clan relations. One of the important functions of his role as principal mediator was communal land management, in which he performed the following tasks: determining the grazing areas to be rested; sharing out limited water resources; granting permission to access pasture

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land to external transhumant pastoralists facing drought in their territory; and approving requests to build housing on the land. In making the above decisions, the muqaddam liaises with all of the concerned parties. In effect, the office is the institutional gatekeeper of the clan structure and the pivot of the social organization of community life. In sum, the two pillars of Soqotra’s traditional governance system—the sulh and the muqaddam—were not only for the socio-political management of the community but also for the collective management of the island’s environmental resources. The latter was based on the principle of reciprocal rights between Soqotrans and their environment that ensured their mutual well-being. This principle informed a menu of rules regarding (a) the criteria of participation that articulated the conditions under which resources could be accessed and their mode of use by whom, when, and how; and (b) the enforcement protocols that specified reciprocal obligations and compensation (see Chapter 5). The rule-based ecological practices included the following: (a) prohibition of the cutting of green wood, allowing only the collection of dead wood; (b) regulation of grazing and the cutting of vegetation as fodder; (c) conservation of fruit bearing trees; (d) management of water resources through local mechanisms of collection and conservation; and (e) communal allotment of individual tenure of designated plots to exploit local plant species (e.g., aloes and frankincense trees).

3.4 Cultural Geography: Space-Mediated Identities The territorial atomization of Soqotrans’ settlements has engendered a convergence between spatial location and cultural identity. This convergence is embedded within a demographic distribution sundered into a topographic polarity (mountain vs. coast), a geographic dichotomy (east vs. west), and a residential cleavage (rural vs. urban). The logic of this multi-layered identity formation is partially captured in the following observation: “Cultural identity of any group depends not so much on the content of its culture as on the social boundaries that define the spaces of social relationships by which membership is attributed to one or the other… group” (Stavenhagen 1998: 6). There are two spatial dimensions that have become ingrained into a folkloric topophilia constituted by natural boundaries of socio-cultural differences among Soqotrans: (a) a topographic polarity along a mountain vs. coast axis that expresses

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divergent occupational identities based on altitudinally differentiated residential locations and related livelihood practices and (b) a geographic dichotomy, in terms of an east vs. west distinction, which ascribes either an intrinsic barrier, or an inherent openness, to cultural enlightenment depending on geographic location. These two dimensions of the spatiality of identity were, and still are, emblematic of some significant and enduring aspects of the Soqotran community, and constitute the bases of divergent cultural identities between the rural and urban areas, which are discussed below. 3.4.1

Topographic Bifurcation: Domains of Livelihood Differentiation

The topographical characteristics of the island are linked to particular ecological milieus, which afford different modes of subsistence. These entailed specific social relations of resource appropriation, which produced divergent self-concepts and contrastive social preferences vis-àvis others occupying different milieus. However, the topographic contrast invested with the most socially significant differentiating properties was the one between mountains and coastal plains. As Naumkin noted, “The contrast between up and down – mountains and lowlands – is generally of much greater importance than many other terms of opposition.” The persistence of this topographical bifurcation is, according to Naumkin, “due to the presence on the island, of two cultures, of two ways of life, of two types of economy, and of two main population groups—the mountain-dwelling pastoralists and coastal population” (1993: 159). The Soqotri terms for this spatial differentiation are di-s.a‘anhen, which refers to any place that is located in an elevated place, and di-jamah, which refers to any place that is located downward. This sundering of Soqotrans’ spatial identification between the people of the coast (al-s¯ ah.iliyyah) and the people of the mountains (al-jabaliyyah) has a long historical pedigree among Arab scholars. Ibn al-Muwajir writing in the thirteenth century had already noted this distinction: “It is an island with the Mountain running round it… In the Mountain live tribal mountains folk (qawm jibaliyyah) opposed to the people of the low-lying country” (quoted in Serjeant 1992: 41). This topographical division has bequeathed a permanent cultural legacy to subsequent generations, as the mountain-coast polarity mutated into the al-b¯ adiya (rural hinterland) vs. al-mad¯ına (city) opposition, or the

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backward herdsmen/modern townsmen residential division. The latter is symbolized in a litany of comparative deficits, which their respective residents ascribe to each other. That division is best exemplified in the contrast between the Diksam area located in the island’s central upper plateau, as representing the b¯ adiya; and on the other hand, representing the mad¯ına is Hadiboh, Soqotra’s main town and civilizing epicenter. One pastoralist from Diksam offered a contrastive definition of the divide: The b¯ adiya was defined by the relative absence of progress, where cars were few and most people had to walk and carry things on their back, while the mad¯ına was characterized by the availability of the social amenities missing from the hinterland: cars, shops, restaurants, electricity, running water, government offices, etc. The disparity in social conveniences, which is linked to the different types of economy that prevail in the urban and rural areas, has engendered a persistent divergence between Soqotrans’ rural and urban codes of conduct. These divergent codes are discussed below through their main differentiating aspects: hospitality ethos, solidarity orientation, affective relations, and existential tenet. Regarding the rural domain (al-b¯ adiya) livelihood was pursued under a kind of nature-imposed socio-economic autarky, which was regulated by a shared set of behavioral protocols that exemplified an ideal of communal virtue. These are briefly described as follows: First, there prevails an open hospitality ethos toward visitors from anywhere. This virtuous social etiquette is born of an environment where food and shelter are available only through other households when travelling. Hence, it is driven by a sense of obligation toward, and expectation from, others in the rural domain. Second, there is an inherent commitment to an ethic of obligatory reciprocity as part of a domestic security network dedicated to livelihood survival that relied on mutual aid as a currency in interhousehold relations in the rural areas (see below). Third, there is an indelible human–animal bond of affective coexistence, which is based on the fact that the animals provide the ultimate raison d’être for dwelling in the b¯ adiya. This is the umbilical cord that no amount of environmental adversity (e.g., drought) seemed able to sever. The ultimate reward for the many months of herding and spending money on animal feed is the advent of the milk season during the months of October to February. For Soqotran pastoralists, indeed all Soqotrans, have an obsession with milk consumption, which seems to renew their determination to pursue this socially ineradicable cultural practice but economically non-viable livelihood (see Chapter 6). And fourth, this privileging of the well-being of

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animals over that of their human herders has imposed an ethic of selfsacrifice on living standards in the b¯ adiya. This ethic is marked by a willingness to endure a chronic existential hardship in the hinterland because of its suitability for the animal herds. For living there requires the virtues of extreme patience and self-denial of “comfort,” as these are pre-requisites to replenish the stock of essential food items procured from Hadiboh and carried along footpaths on steep mountain slopes by slow moving donkeys and camels. Indeed, in the island’s west the human back had to take over, as camels were not available and donkeys were shunned. (The new asphalted roads that traverse through their territory have brought some welcomed relief in the performance of these tasks.) In contrast, the urban domain (al-mad¯ına) is characterized by the relative deficit in communitarian values, which is manifested as follows: First, the open hospitality ethos of the b¯ adiya is replaced by a pecuniary ethos in the mad¯ına due to the prevalence of a cash prerequisite to social intercourse. Therefore, urban hospitality is circumscribed to relatives or special acquaintances. As a result, there prevails an absence of reciprocity between urban residents and visiting pastoralists unless they are linked through the social exchange relations of mah.rif (see below). Second, the urban-based solidarity orientation is family-bounded given the large size of families, the monetization of the urban economy, and the absence of the web of cooperative informal institutions as in the rural hinterland. Third, despite the mad¯ına’s inhabitants’ affectation of an air of superiority given their occupational and other symbolic markers of distinction, they share the hinterland pastoralists’ deep affinity toward the pastoral herd. Accordingly, they engaged in the cultural mimesis of the pastoralist’s lifestyle through the enactment of a “goat complex,” as almost every household in Hadiboh town owns a small herd. And, fourth, Soqotra’s urban life is caught up in an interstitial location—no longer traditional yet not fully modern—that engenders alienation from their rural past, as urban residents reject the ascetic exigencies and socio-economic deprivations of life in the b¯ adiya. As a result, there is an openness toward imported cultural practices animated by a leisure seeking syndrome in an entertainment-deprived social environment and the urban ennui it has engendered (see Vol. 2: Chapter 3).

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3.4.2

Geographic Dichotomy: Eco-Cultural Divide

The mountain vs. coast topographic bifurcation that was naturalized into a livelihood-based distinction was complemented, if not exacerbated, by the east/west geographic dichotomy. As the latter was enlisted as a justification of claims to a hierarchical cultural division between Soqotrans in the east and those in the west of the island. The defining marker of that geo-cultural division was the use of the term Saqat.rí (pl. Saqát.ira) to designate exclusively the inhabitants of the western and central parts of the island. As Naumkin observed during his fieldwork in the 1980s that the “bedouins are always called saqotri” (1993: 160). However, this designation connoted a negative cultural evaluation, as the term saqat.rí was a demeaning marker for the socio-cultural division of the island between bad¯ awa (bedouin’s domain) in the west vs. h.ad.¯ ara (civilized milieu) in the east. This dichotomy was evocative of the long-standing binary categorization of social groups within West Asian and North African societies. Similarly, the term saqat.rí was reminiscent of the condescension attached to the nomadic pastoralist Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula who were regarded as the civilization-deprived dwellers of its desert fringe (see Ibn Khaldun in Rosenthal 1967: 91–122). Accordingly, it was used exclusively with reference to the residents in the isolated mountainous habitats in the central and western parts of the island. In contrast, the inhabitants of the eastern hinterland did not have a collective self-reference but referred to themselves by their individual clan or territorial names (see Chapter 4 for details). This geo-cultural dichotomy engendered an internal socio-cultural ranking based on openness to change, especially the willingness to attend school, toward which those from the west showed great reluctance. Consequently, the pastoralists from the western region were stigmatized as constituting a social category (bad¯ u ) that was irremediably beyond the culturally redemptive effects of h.ad.¯ ara. To be fair to western residents, however, this regionally demarcated cultural dichotomy was not an intrinsic condition, but a gradual divergence over time from a commonly shared disposition between both westerners and easterners toward modern secular classroom-based education, which was a novelty to both. This shared disposition is epitomized in the following observation on the prevailing attitude on the island during the early days of the socialist administration, which betrayed skepticism toward the usefulness of school learning: “A vocation in one’s hand is better than a certificate

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on a tree” (Zabal 1971: 16). Moreover, this cultural dichotomy was not entirely based on the ideological banter of the easterners, who perceived themselves as the better half of the island, in terms of education, religious upbringing, and exposure to the world, and who consider western residents to be deficient in all these aspects. Instead, it was more reflective of a situation where differences in ecological milieu provided the breeding ground for genuinely distinct cultural attitudes. In effect, the east-west regional bifurcation is an ecologically determined geographic division, which has reinforced both the cultural division as well as the economic imbalance between the two regions. Indeed, back in 1834 Wellsted observed the stark environmental contrast between the western and eastern parts of the island: While the former [western part] is destitute of verdure, has scanty pasturage, and, with the exception of some places near the sea, has no other water than what is retained in natural reservoirs, the latter [the east] is supplied with frequent streams, its valleys and plains afford luxuriant grass, herds of cattle are numerous, and the scenery in many places is equal to that of our own country. (1835: 194)

Moreover, the subsequent political division of the island into two administrative entities one eastern district and a western one, has unintentionally reified the existing imbalances between the west and the rest of the island into a political reality. Moreover, it established a de facto partition between an ecologically better off and a worst off part of the island. This is because this administrative division is asymmetrical, as the western district encompasses only one third of the island. Thus, the division seems not to be based on geography but topographical contours, as the formal entrance to the western plains and elevated plateau areas is through terr d-itrur (“the door of doors”), which is demarcated by a wadi bordered on both sides by two mountain formations. It is a natural topographical enclosure, a dividing door, allowing entrance into a physical domain and communal existence that are impoverished both in cultural and ecological endowments: chronic water scarcity due to very few wadis, date palm cultivation is limited to two areas only (Qalansiyah and Qeysoh), and the herd is made up of mostly goats with very few sheep and no cows. In addition, the west was similarly deprived of beasts of burden (donkeys and camels) to use as means of transportation, thus the people walked to wherever they had to go. Today, the difference in access to means of transportation persists, as there are fewer cars in the west than in the east.

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In light of the above, the easterners’ claim to cultural superiority is not an indication of their intrinsic propensity toward h.ad.¯ ara, but is based on the plenitude, or baraka, of their region’s natural endowment in contrast to nature’s frugality, or khamshal, toward the western part of the island. In spite of the disparity in the environmental resources endowment between the western and eastern regions of the island, both are prey to chronic seasonal deficiencies; hence, the need for risk-mitigating arrangements in the form of traditional institutions of mutual assistance against recurring threats to livelihoods, which are discussed below.

3.5 Community-Making: Social Cooperation Over Biological Affiliation In the social science literature, the bases for community-making, or the self-reproduction of a social formation, are attributed to one of the following three factors: (a) biological kinship relations, (b) classbased economic relations, and (c) political solidarity and/or religious faith-based relations (see Godelier 2009: Chap. 2). The discussion below will proffer a fourth basis of community formation, namely social kinship forged through mutual aid institutions fostered by topographic constraints and resource scarcities. This goes against the prevailing argument that privileges biological kinship relations as the social structuring vector in what are called “simple societies” that Soqotra exemplifies, especially prior to the 1970s. The assumption is that in the absence of the formal state-based regulatory institutions that are common in more “complex societies,” it is biological relations that provide the basis of social organization in simple ones (Schneider 1984: 187). This assumption informs the conceptual repertoire with which West Asian social formations are described due to an anachronistic academic consensus, which insists that their pre-state socio-organizational modality still prevails within the modern state. Accordingly, such a conceptual repertoire presumes the prevalence of paternal autocracy as an integral component of state governance that prioritizes kinship loyalties based on a genealogical framework that determines the boundaries between relatives and foes. This is the result of the analytical fetish made of tribes, as discussed above, which are seen as the pillar social category, and whose social interactions are bound to a progenitor-progeny dialectic. The biological kinship network that evolved from tribal relations is assumed to constitute the exclusive foundation of social organization of

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communities or nations in the region. This assumption was adapted to Soqotra by Vitaly Naumkin, who performed a speculative archaeology of kinship relations by tracing their evolutionary course to the pre-existing typologies of kinship systems emanating from the ethno-epistemology of the nineteenth-century precursors of anthropology. This was done through a lexical inventory of Soqotri terms, which produced a list of forty-nine possible kinship relations that did not elucidate the actual socio-organizational practices of Soqotrans (see Naumkin 1993: 281). This biological genealogy of belonging is not determinative in Soqotra’s kinship relations. Therefore, the analytical tradition of privileging biological relations as the primary, if not sole, basis of kinship will not be honored here. Instead, the argument is that kinship is socioenvironmentally contingent and not biologically determined. Indeed, biological kinship relations were not the catalysts in structuring the social organization of villages in Soqotra. In fact, “spatial contiguity and residence proximity provide[d] the bases of kinship relations” (Sahlins 1968: 22). Moreover, residential proximity was complemented by cooperative practices that were made compulsory by the ecological constraints on livelihood-making; and thus together exercised a structuring effect on kinship relations. To put this metaphorically, one could assert that the exigency of sharing pasturage and other scarce environmental resources determined blood ties. Therefore, social kinship was forged through situational imperatives (e.g., drought, resource scarcity, hunger) that necessitated social cooperation, which not only took precedence over, but ultimately produced, biological kinship. Accordingly, the focus of analysis is not on modes of kinship based on biological relations, but modes of social cooperation based on mutual aid institutions that mediated the formation of kinship relations. Therefore, the use of kinship analysis through its grid of preconceived typologies is avoided, in order to focus on cooperative social arrangements and their environmental context. This enables an understanding of social relationships as forms of social kinship divorced, at least partially, from biological determinants. This environment-induced social kinship not only constrained domestic organization for food security, but also informed sociobiological reproduction practices that manifested themselves in contingent modes of family organization. The latter was based on considerations of domestic security risks, such as the need to preserve the family’s territorial domain through the non-subdivision of the land and animal herds, and the reticence to give away female labor hands in marriage to external

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villages. Two types of family organization were identified by Naumkin during his fieldwork in the 1980s that seem to remain valid, at least in the hinterland, based on what I observed in the field: The first is the “complex family”: It includes collateral relatives with several married couples, linked by common residence, and constitutes a community of production and consumption. The other organizational form is the “fraternal family,” which is composed almost exclusively of married brothers with their spouses and children. This arrangement is based, according to Naumkin, on the search for “economic stability and necessity, more than on the closeness of relationships between the individuals concerned.” Moreover, the fraternal family functions as a single economic unit. It is characterized by a “high degree of cohesion… and is based on economic community as well as traditions of solidarity, mutual assistance, support, rescue, protection and collectivism” (Naumkin 1993: 294–298). Both forms are largely motivated by economic necessity mediated by pastoralist cooperative customs that are dedicated to the survival of the clan, which depends on the need to preserve the family herd and the collective ownership of the pastures. The modalities of cooperation discussed below refer to mutual aid practices, which have constituted the institutional basis of an island-wide solidarity network. They encompassed the island’s atomistic settlement pattern within a web of kinship relations, which linked together the constellation of hamlets in the hinterland and the scattered coastal villages. Moreover, they articulated the moral framework of both the pastoral and agro-pastoral economy as they embodied a relational ethos animated by the principle of mutual reciprocity as a means of ensuring communal survival against the island’s chronic resource scarcity. These institutions were the repository of the communal obligations in a socioeconomic context that was, and still is, vulnerable to the vagaries of nature. These mutual aid institutions and their repertoire of cooperative practices have deep historical roots on the island, as they emerged out of a long experience of chronic social agony induced by the perpetual threat of hunger (sháqer in Soqotri). Seasonal food deficit was the defining feature of life on Soqotra and hunger was the perennial companion of the islanders. Its alleviation was the all-consuming preoccupation of the population until the end of the Sultanate. Livelihood was pursued under a kind of nature-imposed semi-autarky, and barter was the predominant mode of internal exchange. This was complemented by external trade of a limited number of locally produced,

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or naturally available, goods. To this situation of intrinsic scarcity was added the seasonal trade embargo imposed by the monsoon winds, when maritime contact with the island came to a standstill for nearly six months. Indeed, these nature-induced scarcities imposed an austere mode of consumption on Soqotrans, which became a public ethic during the Sultanate period and informed the nature of these mutual aid institutions. It was partly as a means of ensuring mutual survival during these “hungry times” that Soqotrans adopted a menu of cooperative practices that enabled them to hone their nature-using skills with environmental conservation effects. These informal institutions fulfilled a number of critical functions: (a) provided the regulatory framework for sharing sustainably the island’s environmental resources; (b) underpinned the social solidarity between far-flung settlements across the island’s topographical barriers; (c) palliated the always imminent risks to Soqotran livelihoods associated with the seasonal vagaries of environmental resources; and (d) alleviated the human existential sufferings from the endemic scarcities of their ecological milieus. The main mutual aid institutions that are briefly described in Annex 3.1 have incorporated Soqotrans into a community of necessity, linked through a network of cooperative exchange, based on a system of coordinated reciprocity, in which all aspects of their subsistence livelihoods involved some form of reciprocal obligation. These institutions were the repository of the communally shared solidarity obligations and remain the pillars of a tacit communal social contract between residents. Today, there is continuing reliance on mutual aid as a currency of social exchange, even though the scope of some of these practices is confined to hinterland inter-household relations, partly due to the inability of many rural Soqotrans to fully participate in the cash-mediated modern economy.

3.6 Socio-Ecological Change: Inherent Condition In my quest to understand the communal ramifications of the humanenvironment nexus in Soqotra, I pursued a broad contextual reconnaissance that included the following: the selective lexical inventory of the island’s physical contours and environmental resources; a brief historical excavation of the underpinnings of its territorial organization; an analytical reconstruction of its geo-spatially mediated identities and cultural practices; and the environment-brokered genealogy of kinship relations

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across the island. Beyond the primary aim of depicting the prevailing human-environment relations during a transitory historical period, the secondary aim is to highlight the appropriation of such relations as the virtual frame of reference for the formulation of development and environmental conservation plans that were adopted subsequent to the designation of the Soqotra Archipelago as a biodiversity preserve in the 1990s. The pre-1970s period provided the basis of the primitivist exoticism discourse for the United Nations-led experiment in environmental conservation on the island. The foundational assumption of this conservation experiment is best expressed as follows: (a) that “a technologically simple society lives in a state of equilibrium with its environment,” and that (b) “the continuation of practices that worked in the past will be adaptive in the future” (Netting 1986: 93). This assumption led not only to the ascription of Soqotrans as inhabitants of an archaic pastoral abode, but also to the prevalence of a narrative about Soqotra’s environment and community that conflates social and environmental change with inevitable ecological degradation. Consequently, this assumption generated an anachronistic quest to recreate an “ecological community” based on “environmental practices of eons.” In effect, this “ecological community” was a fossilized mode of life from the past that is to be rehabilitated into a model of the island’s future. This rehabilitation was pursued through the adoption of a preventive conservation policy for Soqotra that was disproportionate to the community’s negligible ecological footprint. This policy assumed that the prevailing human-environment ethic is still based on a relationship of commensality, according to which livelihood is intrinsically guided by the judicious consumption, sharing and conserving of environmental resources as a communal virtue. However, by the time the UN intervened in the mid-1990s, the nature of the human-environment relations in Soqotra had already changed. From the early 1970s onward, the state partially substituted itself for nature and thus shifted Soqotrans’ dependency from the environment to its institutions, which modified their relationship with the environment. Moreover, this period heralded the establishment of an urban and coastal-based parallel economy that offered alternative means of livelihoods with a regular salary instead of the cashless subsistence pastoral livelihood of the rural economy. This initiated an inexorable shift in economic orientation: from an environmental dependency to a cash dependency that has been accelerating ever since (see Chapter 6). This obliviousness to the historically contingent nature

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of the human-environment nexus has enabled a “chronological primitivism,” which assumed the cultural continuity of ecological praxes from “2000 years ago.” This change averse predisposition led to the adoption of a modernization-prevention conservation strategy that far exceeds the non-endangered status of most of Soqotra’s endemic species and ecological assets. This conservation strategy not only violated the minimum prerequisite for Soqotra’s communal development, but also consecrated it as an experimental station for the global conservationist enclosure movement. The unexamined assumptions and the multiple ramifications of this conservation policy are discussed in Vol. 2: Chapters 6 and 7.

Notes 1. The discussion in this section is partly based on my own collections of terms and complemented by the encyclopedic text of Miller and Morris (2004). Their book, however, makes no systematic attempt at articulating the underlying principles of a classification scheme of a distinctly Soqotran ethnobotany (as Berlin [1992] did with the indigenous peoples of South America). As the authors affirm, it uses a “traditional taxonomic approach” into which Soqotri terms are incorporated. Indeed, a reviewer described their approach as “set in the purely descriptive and colonial ethnobotanical traditions dating back to Linnaeus and before” (Salick 2004: 806). Nevertheless, the book attests to the sophistication of an indigenous botanical knowledge, as well as constitutes a historical documentation of a knowledge repertoire that is being gradually abandoned through disuse, as a new generation of Soqotrans pursues other means of livelihood. 2. However, a comparative glance to the clans in Somalia highlights the particularity of the Soqotran clan. Sahlins’ definition of clan confirms that provided by Ioan Lewis for clans in Somalia in terms of their uncoordinated nature: “The six major divisions of the [Somali] nation did not combine together to confront the world, nor did they regularly act as stable or autonomous political units within the Somali political system.” However, in contrast to clans in Soqotra, each clan in Somalia was organized on the basis of both territory and genealogy, since “At every level, groups were formed on the basis of descent traced… from common ancestors” (Lewis 2008: 27). 3. Worthy of note, is that the German naturalist Georg Schweinfurth, while visiting Soqotra back in 1881, observed the lack of conflict among Soqotrans, which led him to formulate a Darwinian natural selection hypothesis: The absence of predatory animals on the island was conducive to the evolution of non-aggressive behavior as an adaptive response, hence Soqotrans’ peaceful nature (Schweinfurth 1993).

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Annex 3.1: Mutual Aid Institutions of Soqotra Communal Safety Net These mutual aid institutions constitute the pastoral economy’s moral underpinnings as they embody an ethical framework animated by the principle of mutual reciprocity that structured the quotidian existence of Soqotrans. This ensemble of cooperative practices is differentiated in terms of context, scale, and purpose, as they are undertaken at the intra- and inter-household levels, the village and inter-village levels, and linking different regions of the island as well as its diaspora. Mah.rif : Affective Exchange Relations

Gírif: Communal Self-Help Ethos

Gírif refers to the solicitation of neighbors’ contribution toward a major expense (M. Morris pers. comm.). Accordingly, it entails a form of self-help undertaken by both rural and coastal communities to assist one member when a task necessitates the collective input of all members. A gírif can be called for any activity whose scale requires communal input, and sometimes for the organization of some of the major life events such as building a house, organizing a wedding. When the benefit is not collective, the organizer assumes the responsibilities and costs associated with it, and the participants contribute their labor or expertise. When it is for the provision of a public good (e.g., building a mosque, establishing a water pipe for the village, or constructing a road), the participants share the costs in Its current practice serves primarily to addition to contributing their labor. reinforce the bonds of friendship with the The gírif approximates the practice occasional gift of a goat or sheep from the awun (Arabic for cooperation) visiting pastoralists to their counterparts of ta‘¯ on the coast. The affective bond that on mainland Yemen. A gírif tends informs the mah.rif has mutated into to address the challenges to livelihood social networks of sharing that are linking within a particular ecological milieu. members of a trans-local community For example, in places where access to through relation of migration between water is a problem, a gírif might be organized for the construction of a water Soqotra and its diaspora. reservoir (kar¯ıf ). Its practice is now being gradually restricted to close-knit communities, as people now prefer to be paid in cash. Mah.rif refers to “patron” or more broadly acquaintance in Soqotri. The institution of mah.rif entails reciprocal exchange of necessities between residents from the hinterland and those from coastal villages. As such, it not only established social bonds across topographical barriers, but also forged relations of social kinship. Hinterland residents shared butter-oil, hard dry cheese, goat or sheep to slaughter for marriage or circumcision (etc.); and coastal villagers would share dried fish (maqdad), dates (timhir), and maize (maqdere). Also, there was exchange of hospitality, as pastoralists could find respite on the coast during the long dry season (horf ), while the coastal villager would be invited to the hinterland during the rainy season (s.e¯reb) when milk was plentiful (Morris 2002: 150).

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‘Itim: Inter-Household Assistance ‘Itim is the nominal form of the Soqotri term meaning “sharing out,” usually of food (Miranda Morris pers. comm.). It involves mutual borrowing of food items for later reimbursement, and the sharing of meals between interhousehold members. However, the term is used here as an umbrella concept to encompass various forms of sharing that relate to the temporary alleviation of insufficiencies. Biological kinship plays a relevant role, but not an exclusive one, since sharing is among members across households of close acquaintances, or members of a village structured as a family of extended families.

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Qenhe: Solidarity across Space and Status Distinction

Qenhe refers to a number of childrearing practices: (a) foster parenting, (b) a mother who rears children from another family, and (c) “milk mother” through breast-feeding of a recently born baby by a surrogate mother (see Altorki 1980; Parkes 2005). It designates the practice of giving a child to another family for nurturing for a certain period and under certain conditions. It was practiced between the relatively comfortable families in Hadiboh and the relatively poor ones in the hinterland who received food payment. The Sultans extensively practiced it by giving their own infants During periods of hunger in the into the care of slaves on the northern hinterland, ‘itim mutated into a form of coast and pastoralist families in the alms seeking, as the most affected villagers hinterland. went around other villages soliciting food. This practice led to the establishment Also, there is a variant of this practice that specifically related to emergencies of a social bridge based on a within the pastoral economy when, for permanent bond of elective kinship example, livestock perished due to disease between Soqotrans of different social or drought and neighbors contribute backgrounds, dispersed geographical and divergent ecotoward replenishing the herd. Today, the locations, availability of imported food has lessen occupational niches. The practice dependence on the whims of nature; of qenhe was reportedly widespread hence, the soliciting of food items is now on the island that linked families and replaced by the pooling of resources to villages across different regions of solve a variety of modern-day problems. the island. Families became relatives through this institution, and have maintained their reciprocal obligations. Its practice has become less frequent but not entirely extinct, partly undermined by the availability of milk powder, and the economic burden that raising a kid represent under the current monetization of the economy.

CHAPTER 4

Communal Identity Mutation: From Status Hierarchy to Ethnic Ranking

This chapter examines the historical mutation of the Soqotran polity’s collective identifications as part of a state-mediated communal identity transformation process. It locates the vector of this transformation of communal identities within a state-community dialectic driven by changes in the state’s adoption of different polity formation strategies. This process is recounted through a description of the initial social structure of Soqotra Island under the Sultanate, and traces its mutation through the emergence of new modes of ethno-political identification under an evolving incorporation process and the influence of trans-regional political and cultural forces. This is done through a structural anatomy of Soqotra’s changing social structure as an indigenous community and a lexical genealogy of the collective identities ascribed to, or assumed by, Soqotrans in the form of a series of discreet ethno-social enclosures produced by the polity formation strategies of a succession of political regimes from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The chapter portrays the Sultanate’s initial ascriptive hierarchy as a system

A different version of this chapter originally appeared under the title “Communal Identity Transformation in Soqotra: From Status Hierarchy to Ethnic Ranking.” Northeast African Studies Journal, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2016), 23–66. Reprinted by permission of the publisher Michigan State University Press. © The Author(s) 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45638-2_4

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of occupational specialization linked to distinct ecological habitats, and which continues to mediate the integration of Soqotrans into the emergent modern social formation. Also, it shows how communal identity mutated into an ethnicity-based hierarchy of collective identifications in response to externally imposed ethno-political exigencies. Finally, the chapter highlights the dynamic relationality between communal identity transformation and political and historical contingencies, and thus shows that a collective identity is not an ontological fatality but an evolving by-product of changing historical conjunctures.

4.1

Identity Transformation: State as Vector

Soqotra’s location on the threshold of two continents (Arabia and Africa), and on the inter-continental maritime traffic nodes and cultural crossroads of the Indian Ocean trade between Europe and West Asia, made the island the obligatory stopover for all sea-faring nations in that part of the world, and the residential abode for visitors of varying duration starting, at least, from the first millennium BCE, which gave rise to an admixture of people (Rose and Petraglia 2010; Strauch 2012). The resulting kaleidoscope of human contact spanning millennia has constituted the island into an interstitial ethnocultural space as a haven for a human mosaic. This demographic miscellany with its haphazard combination of dissonant ethnicities and phenotypic métissage provides the implicit background for the discussion of the process of political incorporation and its effects on communal identity transformation starting from the nineteenth century with the rise of state-like organization of a Soqotran polity and culminating into the twenty-first century. Indeed, the principal vector of this identity mutation process is the changing polity formation strategies pursued by successive political regimes and their social structuring effects on communal identities. It is a process in which the state directly mediates the social and cultural legitimacy of a community’s political belongingness to the nation, and engenders dilemmas of identification and citizenship within a heterogeneous polity. What this entails is a complex ensemble of competing and/or complementary forms of collective identification partly engendered by the state’s political project of polity formation through its classificatory practices of citizen selection, and identity ascription. This process of state-mediated collective identity transformation has generated a transition in communal identity from a passively inherited or ascribed identity to an actively fashioned one (still in progress).

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This transition is discussed as part of Soqotrans’ agonistic accommodation to a state-authorized mono-ethnolinguistic framework of national belonging. Accordingly, the analytical focus of identity transformation is not on discreet acts of affirmation of “individual differentiation” in fashioning a self-image—although there are individual personifications of such biographical itinerary—as they are not relevant as the collective selfrepresentation of Soqotrans. Instead, the focus is on the fraught process of “collective assimilation” in asserting a communal identity in a political context where there is a persistent ambiguity about the legitimate cultural anchors of such an identity (Jenkins 1996). Identity transformation is conceived as the effect of a “recursive relationship” between the state’s polity formation strategy and the islanders’ reaction to it. The cumulative end result of the state’s political mediation of the transformation process of communal identity is an ethnocultural ranking that partly resonates with the unitary state’s ideological preference in which corporatist and traditional norms trump individualist and modern identifications. In spite of its transformational ramifications, political incorporation was unable to bridge the lack of a territorial contiguity between mainland and island, and the intrinsic ethno-linguistic incongruity between Soqotri and Arabic, which engendered a chronic disjunction between a communal and national identity. This disjunction was exacerbated (a) by the state’s sporadic interest in the island as a peripheral administrative unit, and (b) by its inadequate transmission process of a national identity through the haphazard civic education and the expedient institutional integration of Soqotrans, especially since the unification of the northern and southern Yemeni states in 1990. Consequently, the notion of the Yemeni nation-state as a source of identity and object of loyalty remains a matter of deep ambivalence among Soqotrans. Moreover, the process of political incorporation has introduced alternative considerations in identity formation through brokering the emergence of a new set of communal self-conceptions that have expanded the range of possible self-identifications from the confines of local clan encampments to beyond national borders. In this chapter, I perform a structural anatomy of Soqotra’s evolving social structure and a lexical genealogy of the categories of classification of its demographic components, through an inventory of the social and semantic mutations engendered by different polity formation strategies that alternatively employed traditional socio-occupational categories and modernist ethno-corporatist labels. Accordingly, the remainder of the

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chapter is structured as follows: The next section describes the status stratification that prevailed until 1970 in the form of an ascriptive hierarchy as a system of ethno-occupational specialization linked to a territorial segmentation along divergent geo-ecological niches. The subsequent section describes how communal identity is being leveraged by national and regional ethno-political exigencies, and thus leading to a hierarchy of ethnicity-based identities. The last section sums up the current status of Soqotra’s traditional social groups and highlights the dynamic relationality between communal identity transformation and political and historical contingencies.

4.2 Status Hierarchy as Social Geography: Coastal vs. Hinterland Enclaves Soqotra’s communal order emerged out of a synergistic combination of social and geographical factors, which were mediated by a catalytic historical event in the 1890s, namely the transfer of the political capital of the al-Mahra Sultanate from the village of Qishn to Soqotra’s main village, Hadiboh, along with its political regime and its social order (Elie 2004a). Under the Sultanate (1890s–1967), the nexus between status distinction and occupational specialization was the foundation of the local order, which sustained itself on an extractive regime based on pastoralists’ products and the labor of slaves. This necessitated the preservation of internal social boundaries, which were sundered into a series of discrete socioeconomic enclaves that were grafted to an atomized polity. The latter was organized around primary associations based on widely dispersed clan hamlets and preoccupied with eking out subsistence livelihoods assisted by mutual aid institutions. These enclaves were structured around an internal social boundary based on a topographic dichotomy between residents of the hinterland’s mountains and (northern) coast that articulated an antagonistic relationship between tax-paying mountain-dwelling native pastoralists and tax-extracting immigrant settlers on the coast. This order generated tradition-enforcing and social mobility-suppression effects that sustained the reproduction of the traditional polity. The latter was abetted by the British as the island’s absentee overlord with their colonial policy of “indirect rule” that, in effect, ensured the sustainability of the patrimonial social order.

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This transfer engendered a transition in the island’s political economic function: From a peripheral tributary outpost whose indigenous population was subjected to occasional tax collection raids from representatives of the al-Mahra Sultan, to a settler regime as a proxy of British colonial interests that led to the island’s formal political incorporation and territorial occupation and its division into revenue fiefs allocated by the Sultans to their retinue of privileged clients constituting a coast-based settler minority community of migrants from the South Arabian mainland. This transformed Soqotra into an economic colony of the transplanted alMahra’s elites, who regarded the island’s territory and resources as their eminent domain and were to be compensated through tax payments by the indigenous majority in the hinterland. This tax extraction regime granted the pastoralists only usufructuary rights over their collectively owned lands. Also, it introduced an ethnocultural division that sundered the island into two population enclaves interacting through antagonistic socio-political relations: a heterogeneous coastal zone speaking Mahri, Arabic, and even Swahili among the slaves, and a homogenous rural zone speaking Soqotri with regional variations. Soqotra’s communal order, however, was a simpler version of the one on the mainland with a relatively shallow hierarchical division among the different social segments (see Annex 4.1 for a comparative overview). Noteworthy, is Naumkin’s claim that the status “hierarchy was much more rigid in Mahra than in the other regions of the continental part of South Yemen, being more similar to the existing system in North Yemen” (1995: 99). In contrast, Soqotra’s status hierarchy was structured around a minimal repertoire of status markers. Prior to the formal transfer of the seat of the Sultanate to Hadiboh, Soqotra lacked the intricate and long-standing social protocols that regulated the interactions between the constituent social categories on the mainland. Moreover, given the limited distribution of the residential enclaves of the Sultan and his entourage, the status hierarchy was not replicated throughout Soqotra, but was operational mostly in the main northern coastal settlements in Soqotra, especially the towns of Hadiboh and Qalansiyah. Outside of these places, and within the overwhelming number of hinterland villages, there was neither status nor socio-economic differentiation among their inhabitants. Accordingly, status differentiation was manifested primarily in the relationship between ´ . arÒ , and al-‘Arab) residing some of the social groups (Bin ‘Afr¯ ar, Sh primarily but not exclusively in Hadiboh, the Sultanate’s seat of government, and the rest of the island’s hinterland residents. Symbolically this

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status hierarchy served as the communal order’s coercive social taxonomy that was actively maintained by an externally-imposed regime of political domination and economic exploitation. The social order imposed on Soqotra’s was configured into a hierarchical relationship between ascribed social categories and circumscribed occupations. The structural anatomy of this hierarchical social order highlights the rationale underpinning the status of each of the constituent groups as follows: Bin ‘Afr¯ ar (the Sultans’ tribal lineage) claimed a distinctive tribal genealogical pedigree as their entitlement to a monopoly over political authority; al-ashr¯ af used their presumed descent from the Prophet’s family to constitute themselves into a priestly aristocracy; the ´ . arÒ relied on their ennoblement from a vassal status through their selecSh tion as the Sultan’s protégés; al-‘Arab was associated with occupational specialization in the intermediation of the island’s trade; al-n¯ ub¯ an, an ethnically distinct immigrant family who parlayed their scribal competence into becoming the primary cadres of the Sultanate’s embryonic administration; al-bad¯ u , as the island’s indigenous primary producers occupying the pastoral hinterlands were designated the fiscal pillars of the Sultanate as main taxpayers; al-akhd¯ am, a sub-group of al-bad¯ u, whose chronic destitution drove them into becoming self-indentured laborers for the above groups; and the imbu‘ileh (African slaves), the ethnicity-marked conscripted labor from the coasts of East Africa (Kenya and Tanzania) who served the island’s northern coast-based elites. Beyond the socio-geographical articulation of the status hierarchy on the island, the town of Hadiboh with African slaves as the majority population required its own accommodation to this status hierarchy. The two major ethnic groups that made up Hadiboh’s population were separated into two groups: The Arabs were aggregated into a “white group” (firqat al-b¯ıd), and the slaves were separated into a “black group” (firqat al-s¯ ud). Each¯ had separate political representation in the form of a muqaddam (group leader) for each group selected by the Sultan. In addition, exclusionary practices regulated their interactions, such as the prohibition of intermarriage and burial in different cemeteries (Serjeant 1992: 166). All of the social categories discussed below with the exception of al-bad¯ u and their sub-category al-akhd¯ am were regarded as “foreigners” by residents of the hinterland, or in Soqotri parlance men rinhem (“from over the sea”).

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Bin ‘Afr¯ar: Hereditary Nobility

The bin ‘Afr¯ar’s tribe, which originated from al-Mahra located in the southeastern part of the South Arabian Peninsula, constituted the pinnacle of Soqotra’ social pyramid and all of Soqotra’s Sultans were its members. Indeed, the bin ‘Afr¯ar seems to have been the Sultanic tribe in al-Mahra since Soqotra became its tributary in the 1480s. What is certain, however, is that the main interlocutor of the British in their attempt to secure the purchase of the island back in 1834 was a Sultan from the bin ‘Afr¯ar’s tribe and his descendants have ruled Soqotra until the 1967 revolution in South Arabia. The transfer of the South Arabian patrimonial order to Soqotra with its status categories led to the enshrinement of genealogy as a means of legitimizing the bin ‘Afr¯ar lineage’s claim to hereditary rights over authority position on the island, and to consummate their dynastic rule, hence my use of the term “hereditary nobility.” The first resident Sultan of the bin ‘Afr¯ar dynasty after the transfer of the Sultanate’s capital from al-Mahra to Soqotra was Salem bin Hamad (1890–1910). His successors were as follows: ‘Abdallah bin ‘Isa bin Hamad (1910–1932), ‘Ali bin Salem bin Hamad (1932–1944), Hamad bin ‘Abdallah (1944–1952), and the last Sultan ‘Isa bin ‘Ali bin Salem (1952–1967) known in Soqotra in the honorary nickname of “Sid (Sayyid) Salem.”1 The dates are all approximate, except for the last two Sultans. Besides the Sultans’ inherited status distinction and their properties their lifestyle was minimally distinguishable from that of their subjects. All of the Sultans were illiterate tribesmen, except the third one, walked barefooted and even looked after their herds as a hobby. The patrimonial order these Sultans presided over was an opportunistic social adaptation to Soqotra’s already existing social categories, in order to facilitate the pursuit of tax extraction from a politically subordinated and economically exploited indigenous population. Their occupational priority seemed to be supervising the care of their animal herds and date plantations, if only occasionally and by choice, while the governing of their Soqotran subjects was a ceremonial event that was performed occasionally (i.e., Etíhi disát.ahan). As communal governance was delegated to an administrative system composed of members of some of the groups discussed below and who relied on a network of locally selected and Sultan-appointed muqaddams who served as representatives of their clans and wardens of their hamlets. The Sultans’ way of living was indistinguishable from their

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subjects, and this was not part of a ruling strategy that involved a display of contrived commonality, but the only lifestyle known to them. Similarity in lifestyles, however, should not detract from their ascriptive status and the privileges it afforded. In addition to status differentiation, there was a history-inscribed “ethnic” distinction, according to which the Mahris insisted on distinguishing themselves from Soqotrans, as the Arab geographer al-Hamdani writing in the tenth century noted: “If a Mahri is addressed as ‘Ya Suqutri’ he gets angry.” And responds, “Socotra is of the Greeks (al-Rum) only who were there… [until] they entered into the lineage of al-Qamar tribe of Mahrah” (quoted in Serjeant 1992: 137–138). Noteworthy is that the reference to the Greeks has some historical precedent, as the first century CE text, The Periplus, contains the following description of Soqotra’s population: “The inhabitants, few in numbers, live on one side of the island, that to the north, the part facing the mainland; they are settlers, a mixture of Arabs and Indians and even some Greeks, who sailed there to trade” (Casson 1989: 69). Moreover, while the Mahris were from mainland Yemen, they were neither regarded as Arabs nor considered themselves as such. As Harold Ingrams observed back in the 1930s: “The Mahras seemed a foreign people by their language, clothes, and customs. Their neighbors in the West scarcely regarded them as Arabs, though they themselves consider they are of the pure stock of Himyar” (1966: 207). Indeed, Mahris in Soqotra were not included in the category of “al-‘Arab” discussed below, which referred to merchants. In effect, status stratification in Soqotra was a justificatory social organization for economic exaction, as the Sultan’s arrogated status legitimated the enforced production of a surplus that was appropriated as tax. Even prior to the formal transfer of the seat of the Sultanate to Soqotra, the al-Mahra Sultans used it as a tax farm as its inhabitants became tax extraction units. This practice continued afterward to sustain the social elite and to subsidize the minimal governmental apparatus in Soqotra. In this light, the Sultans and their relatives were a largely parasitic group whose social function was primarily ensuring their existential comfort and social reproduction through the appropriation of the goods collected as taxes from the pastoralists, and the selling of monopoly rights to the class of notables and merchants, while relying on the free labor of African slaves for their domestic needs. Prior to the rise in importance of Hadiboh as the island’s main urban center—its old section is still a residential enclave

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for the Sultan’s descendants—the Sultans resided in Hawlaf, Kam, and Ilha (Ilehe), where they held court and distributed food to solicitors. 4.2.2

Al-Ashr¯af: Sacerdotal Retinue

They hold the highest rank in the traditional social hierarchy in Yemeni society. They are endowed with genealogical primacy, as they claim descent from the Prophet’s family, and on the basis of which they assert a spiritual nobility. However, in Soqotra they occupied the second rank because the island was not a theocracy as the Imamate in North Yemen, but a kind of parodic monarchy. They originated from the towns of Tarim in Hadhramawt whose ancestors the Alawi sayyids migrated from Basra in Iraq between the tenth and twelfth centuries (Ho 2006: 60). The eponymous progenitor of Soqotra’s al-ashr¯ af (shar¯ıf sing.) is claimed to be al-H af in Hadhramawt . am¯ıd whose genealogical linkage to the ashr¯ is unclear (al-Anbali 2007: 102–103).2 They constituted the religious class (called Eshrof in Soqotri), who provided spiritual protection and religious legitimacy to the Sultan’s rule, as they are said to possess innate supreme spiritual authority (al-sult.a al-r¯ uh.iyya). They inspired superstitious fear in all Soqotrans regardless of status as provoking their displeasure was believed to lead to ominous consequences. They seemed to have dispensed “cures” to the spiritual and physical ailments of ordinary Soqotrans. Indeed, in Soqotra their reputation was not based on their knowledge of the Qur’an, which was probably minimal and further handicapped by their illiteracy, but on their presumed possession of miracle making powers. Also, they brought along with them their Sufi saint-worshiping and tomb visitation practices. A brief comparative overview of the differences between the Zaydi s¯ ada of North Yemen, the Sufi s¯ ada of Hadhramawt, and Soqotra’s ashr¯ af will better illustrate the role of this group in Soqotra: In North Yemen the s¯ ada occupied the summit of the traditional social status hierarchy in Yemen and they considered themselves a spiritual aristocracy of the learned as well as the exclusive custodian of the faith’s doctrinal heritage. They distinguished themselves by a cult-like dedication to religious learning and embodied a doctrinal commitment to khuruj, i.e., rising against an unjust ruler. Finally, the Zaydi s¯ ada are affiliated to a particular form of political regime, the Imamate, over which they are the hereditary rulers (vom Bruck 2005). In contrast, Sufi s¯ ada of Hadhramawt were ritual specialists and some of whom upon their death achieved

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sacral status and thus became spiritual intermediaries whose veneration through the tomb visitation ritual imparted blessing (baraka) to their followers based on their ascribed intercessory powers. The Sufi ashr¯ af ’s political attitude is one of quietism as they do not seek state power. In Soqotra, the ashr¯ af seemed to have been mostly illiterate—as was the case among the ashr¯ af from Hadhramawt, but not with the Zaydi s¯ ada of the northern highlands—and thus did not have any pedagogical function as scholars vis-à-vis the population, but were regarded locally as specialists in esoteric knowledge who acted as spiritual intermediaries to the Sultans proffering them exclusive protection against inauspicious forces; while most Soqotrans had access only to these ashr¯ af ’s dead ancestors as pilgrims to their burial sites, which outnumbered the number of mosques on the island until the 1970s.3 The ashr¯ af in Soqotra seemed not to have performed the key functions associated with their counterparts on the mainland, especially the Zaydi s¯ ada: (1) establishing spiritual hegemony over the polity; (2) arrogating the right to advise the political leadership; and (3) arbitrating disputes (Stookey 1981: 357). Traditionally, the ashr¯ af resided outside of Hadiboh, as they had a strong preference for a confessional enclave within a particular ecological niche that would ensure their physical segregation from the rest of the population. Accordingly, their initial places of residence in Soqotra was Kidђ he, ‘Ad¯uno, and Di-Negђ hen as they met all of the criteria of an idyllic agropastoralist abode: Animal husbandry was possible; date palm trees could be cultivated; clean water was available either directly from a wadi or a well. These villages’ location was away from the ethnic and cultural mélange of Hadiboh, and away from the sea, which they preferred to avoid, and where they could live in relative social isolation and meditative solitude that reinforced their local aura of otherworldliness. Also, they distinguished themselves from the rest of the islanders by their special clothing: reddish turban from India, shirt, belt, and colorful sarong. Soqotra’s ashr¯ af were exclusively agro-pastoralist. Traditionally, they lived off the milk of their cows, the meat of their sheep and goats, and the dates of their palm trees.4 All of which they husbanded themselves, with the occasional assistance of slaves. In addition, they were provided with tax farming privileges from the Sultan. They lived a relatively ascetic lifestyle, as none of them engaged in business or practiced fishing. Under the socialist administration the practice of tomb visitation (ziy¯ ara) and the associated rituals were prohibited, and thus the demise of their social function as intermediaries between Allah and the population

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of supplicants; henceforth, the performance of their miraculous powers was no longer in demand. In spite of their social demotion, the ashr¯ af have adhered to some traditional markers of distinction. For example, the continuation of their residential exclusivity, as they resided mostly in villages in the suburb of Hadiboh. Also, until the early 2000s, the adult population of al-ashr¯ af have abstained from business and fishing, and worked mostly as local government staff and as odd-job holders. 4.2.3

´ arÒ: Sultans’ Protégés Sh .

They were initially a non-tribal group belonging to the social category of da‘¯ıf or “weak” group who migrated to al-Mahra from Oman’s southern ¯province of Dhofar. Sh ´ . arí ), derives from ´sh.Er, which means ´ . arÒ (sing. Sh ´ . ar¯Et [shahri] language; hence, “monsoon affected mountains” in the Sh ´ . arÒ (or Shahro) are the people from the monsoon affected mounthe Sh tains. In Oman, they were a minority indigenous population of non-Arab ethnicity, who are believed to be the aboriginal inhabitants of the mountain ranges from the southwest of Oman into southeastern Yemen in al-Mahra province. They had once an honorable pedigree and were associated with the founders of the legendary ancient city of Eriot, the “Atlantis of the sands,” of which no trace has been found. Thomas described them as follows: [B]y universal consent [they are] the most ancient tribe in these parts [i.e., Qara mountains], and local tradition derive them from Shaddad son of ‘Ad [the prophet from Hadhramawt mentioned in the Qur’an]. Today they are weak, disunited, none else giving them in marriage, a dwindling race now numbering scarcely four hundred men who live in groups among their Qara overlords, hewing their wood and drawing their water. (Thomas 1932: 46–47)

Their region of Oman was taken over by the incoming warrior tribes of al´ . arÒ . According to Mahra and Qara regions, who virtually enslaved the Sh ´ . arÒ was a “pejorative term applied by the sections of Dhofar Johnstone, Sh society of high social standing to those people living in the mountains, who were serfs by status” (Johnstone 1975: 3). In Dhofar and al-Mahra, they endured a number of proscriptions: They were not permitted to carry arms, own lands, exact revenge when wronged, use certain names, and marry the women of al-Mahra and Qara tribes (although the latter

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could marry their women). They were initially cow and goat herders and perhaps occasionally frankincense tree cultivators who were dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods, and subsequently were employed as herdsmen and laborers for the tribes who subjugated them (Al-Tabuki ´ . arÒ were politically subordi1982: 52–53). Paradoxically, while the Sh nated and economically exploited by their conquerors, the latter were ´ . arí culture as they adopted the language. culturally absorbed within Sh Similarly, the Mahris, in spite of their political and economic hegemony in Soqotra, succumbed to Soqotran culture as their descendants adopted the Soqotri language. ´ . arÒ , through elective kinship In a reversal of fortunes, in Soqotra the Sh conferred on them by the Sultan, became members of an exclusive patrimonial aristocracy. This magnanimous gesture of social emancipation from domestic servitude was likely motivated by practical considerations such as the need to shore up the demographic deficit of the bin ‘Afr¯ar tribe with trusted associates when they settled in Soqotra. Also, their “promotion” into a higher social category was perhaps facilitated by the absence of social ostracism against them in Soqotra as was the case back in al-Mahra and by the availability of African slaves to perform their former role. Hence, they became the privileged protégés of the Sultans who could marry into the Sultan’s family, and acquired land owning rights as well as large date plantations, and had tax farming privileges. They were reputed to be not only persuasive and skilled speakers (´s¯ ofek. in Soqotri), but also of high moral rectitude, which enabled them to perform adjudicative functions in communal conflict resolution. Also, they were major patrons of mah.rif , which was an island-wide mutual aid system of exchange of food and other items between hinterland and coastal inhabitants (Miranda Morris pers. comm.). Today, some of their descendants (Bin Selmin, Bin Hamudish, Bin Hazim) live in the village of GÒ‘o di Salat.ini, located in the eastern part of the island, which is their residential bastion and that of the Sultans’ descendants who intermarried with them. The mosque of that village was the biggest on the island until the state’s construction of a major mosque in Hadiboh in the mid-2000s. Undoubtedly, that mosque represents an architectural ode to the memory of the Sultanate, if not simultaneously a symbolic political statement.

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Al-‘Arab: Immigrant Merchants

In the middle, were al-‘Arab (the Arabs) who constituted a class of economic migrants turned merchants from various parts of the Arabian Peninsula, from Hadhramawt on mainland Yemen, the British Protectorates that were called then the “Trucial States” (today’s Emirates), and Oman. They settled in the main urban settlements on the northern coast of Soqotra, namely Hadiboh and Qalansiyah. The term ‘arab was not associated, then, with an ethnicity as it would be subsequently, but was seen as an embodiment of wealth based on their occupation as merchants. Indeed, the local definition of an ‘arab was that of someone who owned date gardens and engaged in trade, while Soqotrans neither owned date garden nor traded, but relied exclusively on livestock herding and bartered animal products for cereals and cloth (Morris 2002: 143). In general, trading was the defining activity of Arabs as they mediated the export of local products to regional markets—especially butter-oil, Soqotra’s primary cash crop. Schweinfurth’s observation during his tour of the island in 1881 confirmed their mercantile role: The Arabs who have settled on the northern coast of Socotra, in some small villages, came over from the opposite South Arabian coast and from Muskat [Oman]. They act as merchants and buy up the products of the country, and thereby facilitate the intercourse of the island with the outer world and the trade with Oman and Zanzibar. (Schweinfurth 1993 [1897]: 190)

In the last decade of the Sultanate a more complex portrait of the Arabs emerged, as wealth accumulation over time allowed their internal social differentiation into three groups with partially overlapping membership. In Chapter 3 their multiple functions within the Sultanate’s politicaleconomy were discussed. Here a brief overview is provided about their social position and of the term’s semantic mutation. Initially al-‘Arab could be divided into three groups: The first group was the “notables” made up of Arabs from the mainland from prominent Mahri tribes, who were the tribal kins of the Sultan, and constituted the social elite. The second group could be called the “mercantilists,” who immigrated from the Arab Gulf and parts of mainland Yemen, and were the main trade intermediaries of the island. The third group was the “rentier class” who constituted the political and administrative elite who managed the revenue generation activities of the Sultanate. This

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commercial middleman function continues to be performed by Arabs today; however, the main difference is that they are all from mainland Yemen who migrated to Soqotra after the unification of north and South Yemen in 1990. Since then, these immigrant merchants are no longer referred to as ‘arab, but as al-shimaliy¯ın (northerners) to designate their geographical provenance from the mainland, and not their ethnic heritage. Soqotrans have since associated the term ‘arab with a higher order of symbolic significance (see discussion of ‘arab¯ı in the next section). Indeed, it was not their Arab ethnicity that mattered to Soqotrans but their economic functions, which have not only diversified but remained central to the local economy today. This population is largely transient as its residence on the island is contingent on the availability of economic opportunities. Furthermore, this group rarely intermarries with Soqotran women and thus has remained on the socio-cultural margins of the communal order. However, the progeny of South Arabian migrants who settled on Soqotra during the Sultanate and under the socialist administration are locally considered Soqotrans, even if their pedigree is regarded as inauthentic (see below). 4.2.5

Al-N¯ ub¯an: Clerical Intermediaries

The local group designated as al-N¯ ub¯ an is presumed to have originated from the Sudan. However, their exact origin in Sudan as well as how they came to the island remains a matter of conjecture among Soqotrans. Local folklore locates their origin in Bani Thaqali, a peripatetic tribe from Nuba Mountains located in the Kordofan province of Sudan. In fact, there is some plausibility to this story if only on the basis of the phonetic proximity of the word Thaqali with Tagale, which refers to a Muslim ethnic group from the Nuba region who speaks Tegali a Niger-Congo language (Stevenson 1984). According to the rather vague recollection of their local descendants, the N¯ ub¯ an’s presence on the island is presumptively dated from the seventeenth century when they first came in contact with Soqotra as shipmates on the dhows plying the trade routes between East Africa and the Arabian gulf. Subsequently, they settled almost exclusively in the two northern coastal towns of Hadiboh and Qalansiyah, where they practiced fishing, became the Sultan’s soldiers, and were known as the most successful cultivators of date palm trees. Their religious denomination is originally Sufi of the Qadariyya .tar¯ıqa. The N¯ ub¯ an engaged in

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mixed marriage with the different groups of the population, so it is difficult to recognize them on the basis of distinguishing physical features. Their historical fame is due to the achieved status of one among a group of three brothers who migrated from Aden to Soqotra under one of the Sultans as businessmen. They distinguished themselves by becoming literate through Qur’anic education. The business acumen of one of the brothers, Ibrahim bin Khaled al-Thaqali, caught the attention of the last Sultan. This eventually led to his assumption of the title of “Waz¯ır,” the second highest office on the island after the Sultan, which was the equivalent of the rank of Prime Minister of the Sultanate of Soqotra (see Botting 1958: 64–65). Waz¯ır Ibrahim’s siblings performed the functions of secular clerks of the Sultanate government, as they provided secretarial and administrative services among other functions. They exemplified a social category that was based primarily on achieved social standing, which was due to the fact that the Sultanate’s rudimentary administration was not a patrimonial one: that is, staff recruitment was not based on kinship with the Sultan. As a result, they occupied function of a higher social status than their social origin would have normally allowed. The Waz¯ır and his siblings have bequeathed an elevated status to the N¯ ub¯ an as a whole and the term has since been associated with his progeny on the island. It is fair to suggest that without his achieved status the N¯ ub¯ an would be merely be a footnote in Soqotra’s history. Today, the Waz¯ır’s son is the most prominent and trusted Soqotran shaykh (religious leader) on the island, as head of the local branch of an international apolitical and moderate Islamic group of missionaries known as al-Tabl¯ıgh (see Vol. 2: Chapter 4). His preferred orientation to Islam and his remarkably pious demeanor may have a lot to do with his father’s fate, and thus symbolizes the embodiment of a public message of forgiveness to the accomplices in his father’s politically motivated execution. In light of the above discussion, a brief profile of Waz¯ır Ibrahim is apropos here: He was originally from Qalansiyah and by virtue of his stature in the former Sultanate as well as his achieved status on the island, which was singular among his fellow Soqotrans, as conveyed in the local Arabic expression of individual fame: f¯ı al-bar wa al-bah.r (“over land and over sea”). He resigned from his post of Waz¯ır in 1965 just prior to the departure of the British, and perhaps as a sign of his unwillingness to cooperate with the island’s imminent political overlords. His former stature as the principal agent of the Sultan’s regime made him a target of

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the local representatives of the mainland’s revolutionary regime who were animated by “anti-feudal” sentiment and had prepared a list of the people to be tried and executed. He along with twelve others were among the first to be made into anti-revolutionary exemplars of the former regime. They were expeditiously tried and sentenced to death by a “revolutionary tribunal” and were executed by firing squad. This act of infamy is memorialized in a modest monument on a mountain pass known as Heybak on the airport road in the west of Hadiboh. The memorial is merely a cement wall around the site of execution and burial with a plaque that reads: “Cemetery of the Martyrs of Friday Morning of 1974.” 4.2.6

Al-Bad¯ u: Aboriginal Tributaries

The bad¯ u (sing. badw¯ı) are considered the aboriginal inhabitants of the island, if not the most “authentic” Soqotrans, given their more ancient roots in Soqotra’s hinterland. Their ancientness seems to be corroborated by the molecular genetic study of a sample of Soqotra Island’s hinterland population, which suggests that it was settled in the late Holocene period, some 3000 years ago, by way of colonization from South Arabia, or more specifically from the southeastern parts of today’s Yemen: Al-Mahra and ˇ Hadhramawt (Cerny et al. 2009, 2011). Worthy of note, is that this residential particularity was later endowed by modern Soqotrans with symbolic capital, as the primary source of social legitimacy and cultural authenticity of hinterland inhabitants (see discussion of Saqat.rí below). Historically, the bad¯ u were regarded as a socially undifferentiated mass separated geographically from the other social groups on the coast. Their interaction with coastal settlements was occasioned only by the need to procure items related to their existential necessities: Barter of butter-oil for imported items from the Arab merchants and the reciprocal exchange of a basket of goods with coastal residents as part of a system of mutual assistance for survival (mah.rif ). The bad¯ u were the pillars of the Sultanate’s rent extraction regime, as they were the primary producers of butter-oil, which was the main export item and thus the “foreign exchange” earning commodity on the island, and therefore, they were the main taxpayers in the Sultanate’s tribute-dependent economy. While Soqotran pastoralists are not nomadic bedouins, it is the Arabic term for bedouins—bad¯ u —that was, and is still being, used locally to refer to them; although more as a cultural epithet than as an occupational description. The term bad¯ u, however, is an exonym as it is an externally

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imposed designation on the inhabitants of Soqotra’s hinterland. It seemed to have been borrowed from the established social taxonomy of the Arabian Peninsula, where the word was always associated with residents of the desert fringe or the hinterland separated from the urban or coastal settlements. Indeed, the Mahri tribes who occupied Soqotra were from the coast, and thus their use of bad¯ u to designate Soqotra’s mountain dwellers was a taxonomic transposition of the term used for al-Mahra’s hinterland inhabitants who were truly bad¯ u (i.e., nomadic pastoralists). The subsequent social profiling of the inhabitants of Soqotra by foreign visitors to the island was based on a bi-polar classification of the island’s topographical domains: coast and hinterland. The latter was regarded as the exclusive domain of the bad¯ u. Wellsted’s testimony illustrates this point: The inhabitants of the island may be divided into two different classes, those who inhabit the mountains, and the high land near the western extremity of the island, who, there is every reason to believe, are the aborigines – and those who reside in… [the coastal zones], and the eastern end of the island. The latter are a mongrel race, the descendants of Arabs, African slaves, Portuguese, and several other nations. (1835: 206)

Testimonies, thereafter, not only affirmed the coast/hinterland bifurcated classification of the islanders, but also insisted that the “bedouins” were the only authentic inhabitants. For example, Balfour declared the Bedouins, “the true Socotrans, and alone possess any great interest ethnologically” (1888: xxviii). However, there was at least one dissenter from the prevailing bedouin fetishism in the person of Colonel Brown. He was a resident adviser in the colonial administration of Aden, who visited Soqotra in 1966, and rejected the adequacy of the use of bad¯ u in the Soqotran context. As he puts it: I have put the term ‘Bedu’ in quotation marks as, although commonly in use, it can be misleading. The islanders themselves use it; but they also often speak of ‘Sahrieh’ and ‘Jebelieh’ – Plainsmen and Hillmen – a much truer classification. The Socotri Bedu … may trace his kindred to nomadic, or formerly nomadic, tribes of the mainland … There the resemblance ends. (1966: 8)

Subsequently, the term bad¯ u was officially adopted by the socialist administration after the 1967 Revolution, as it named the first boarding school

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on the island for the hinterland population as madrasa Salmin li-l-bad¯ u ruh.h.al (Salmin School for Nomadic Bedouins). Noteworthy, is that in the Soqotri language, the word for pastoralist merely denotes an activity and does not signify an identity: re‘hi (plural re‘hiyitin), which means one who looks after livestock (Miranda Morris pers. comm.). Ultimately, a term that was initially an exonym ascribed by outsiders was appropriated as an indigenous collective self-reference (i.e., endonym) by those dwelling in the central and western parts of the island’s mountainous hinterland. 4.2.7

Al-Akhd¯am: Self-Indentured Laborers

The bad¯ u ’s exclusive dependence on the environment for their livelihood was punctuated by seasonal hunger, which compelled them to offer their services to the Sultan and his kins as well as to the wealthier members of the other groups who came “from over the sea” in exchange for food and clothing. This situation engendered a sub-category of pastoralists called akhd¯ am, or voluntary “bedouin” servants. (The term is a Yemeni dialectal derivation from the Arabic khudd¯ am [pl. of kh¯ adim] and is a lexical borrowing by Soqotrans, for which I was unable to find any Soqotri equivalent.) They volunteered their services to the urban groups, as herders for urban dwelling absentee owners, and as guards (‘askar) to the Sultan in exchange for a part of the herd, food, and an annual gift of clothes. Young impoverished pastoralist males resorted to this form of indentured labor to accumulate enough animals or other forms of property to return to their village to set up a household of their own (Miranda Morris pers comm.). The functional distinction between the slaves and the bedouin akhd¯ am was important, in that the latter were free to leave whenever they could afford to, while the former were not able to. In Soqotra, it is worthy of note, that the akhd¯ am constituted a transitory class of self-indentured laborers and never became an ethno-culturally defined, and occupationally circumscribed, “vassal caste” subjected to permanent social exclusion, as was, and still is, the case of the akhd¯ am on mainland Yemen.5 4.2.8

Imbu‘ileh: Conscripted Labor

The imbu‘ileh (sing. mabh.il in Soqotri) was the term used to designate the slave population of Soqotra and is etymologically associated with the meaning “to be owned.” They came as involuntary migrants from East

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Africa. It is not clear when this human trade in East African slaves specifically started in Soqotra; although Botting (1958: 90) asserts that they “were imported from East Africa during the nineteenth century.”6 Oman was the leading slave-trading state in the region from 1698 when it took over the island of Zanzibar from the Portuguese until the British turned it into a protectorate in 1890 (Bhacker 1992). Local elders confirmed this view as they recounted that the slaves were brought by Omani sailors in big wooden dhows from the port city of Suh¯ar that transported the goods traded between East Africa and the Gulf, by way of Soqotra. The captains of these ships lured destitute young boys found in the coastal cities of East Africa, Zanzibar in particular, to come on board, with promises of being well fed and well kept, and were kidnapped. It was these young boys who were later sold into slavery in Soqotra. They are said to be from the miyassa (Massai) tribe in East Africa.7 However, this genealogical ascription was a contrived tribal origin, which sought to palliate their social orphanage on the island, since to be without a clan affiliation in Soqotra (especially in the hinterland) is to be an illegitimate social category that belonged nowhere. They were bought by the well-to-do social categories on the island who had date palm plantations and herds of livestock, and needed labor. They were kept as domestic labor paid in food and were looked after as extended members of the families who bought them. In general, they worked a number of occupations including agricultural laborers in date plantations, fishermen, soldiers, house servants, and especially as the Sultan’s executioner of the sentences from shari’a style justice (e.g., limb amputation and whipping). Regarding the treatment of slaves on the island, Wellsted (1835: 215) observed that “contrary to the custom of the east, the Socotran Arabs treat their slaves with great harshness; they work them hard, and feed and clothe them but indifferently.” More than a century later, Serjeant confirmed this assessment when he described the manner in which a corvée was organized in June 1967 to repair a broken dam in Hadiboh: [T]he Blacks came in procession, followed by the women singing and dancing to drums …, the men dancing in ranks of three, four or five. Sultan ‘Isa bin ‘Ali does not pay for services of this type, nor is a meal provided for the men. The workmen are summoned to work and the penalty for not turning up is sixty lashes with the rib of a palm frond. (1992: 167)

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Throughout the nineteenth century until the end of the Sultanate, African slaves constituted the majority population in the two major coastal settlements of Hadiboh and Qalansiyah. In 1956, Botting estimated that their descendants numbered about 2000, most of whom lived in Hadiboh, which he described as an “African colony.” Their demographic preponderance in Hadiboh began to decline only in the aftermath of the island’s take over by the revolutionary forces of the new south Yemeni state in November 1967. This decline was occasioned by the new administration’s introduction in the 1970s of the policy of urbanization and sedentarization of the hinterland population, which brought in a new influx of rural migrants into Hadiboh. Subsequently, the term imbu‘ileh dropped out of the contemporary Soqotri lexicon; however, its Arabic equivalent ‘abd is occasionally and politically incorrectly used in private conversations among some self-designated ‘arab Soqotrans to refer to the residential areas around Hadiboh in which Afro-Soqotrans are the exclusive or majority population as mak¯ an al-‘ab¯ıd (the slaves’ place). There is another social category that performs the same functions as the imbu‘ileh, namely al-H ash¯ıya with an important distinction in that .¯ they were “free” but they were the progeny of a black father and a Soqotran mother. They are said to be of Somali or Swahili origin. They resided in rather remote areas vaguely referred as Il-FiIJdђhan (the mountain). The term, however, is Arabic, which is normally used to designate members of the entourage of an important person, which would be in Soqotra the Sultan and his class of protégés. Al- H ash¯ıya worked for food, money, and .¯ sometimes half of the dates from the date palm plantation they worked in (Miranda Morris pers. comm.). The above discussed ascriptive socio-cultural categories constituted the structural matrix in which locational difference (rural vs. urban) was indexical of cultural cleavages and of social differentiations that predetermined the biographical itineraries and the socio-economic fate of individuals who belong to each of those categories. Since the end of the Sultanate the traditional roles once performed by some of those social categories were only partially modified, but not eliminated, as they are being gradually subsumed within a new set of valued identifications in the form of corporate ethno-political identities. The latter are discussed in the section below.

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Ethnic Reconfiguration: Centrifugal Paradox

This section inventories the cumulative social structural legacy on Soqotrans’ collective identifications from the polity classificatory practices of the political regimes in the post-Sultanate period—namely the socialist and the post-unity regimes from the 1970s until the early 2000s—and the resulting reconfiguration of the status hierarchy of the patrimonial social order into the modern state-mediated ethnicity-ranked polity. This reconfiguration process is an effect of the intensification of the modernization of the Yemeni state that began in earnest with the end of the Sultanate in 1967. Initially, this took the form of a nationalist recuperation of Soqotra and of its reconstruction as a locality in which the state asserts its role in defining the ethnocultural content of citizenship. This recuperation process initiated a transition in communal lifeways: From a mode of life characterized by unmediated proximity to, and total dependence on, the natural environment for livelihoods, to an urbanizing social environment mediated by bureaucratic structures and an economy partly based on government jobs and imported goods. A brief overview of the nature of the polity formation strategies pursued by the socialist and the post-unification regimes and their effects on the communal polity follows: • The state that arose from the 1967 revolution in South Yemen (1967–1990) and its socialist administration launched Soqotra’s incorporation into a modern nation-building process. This entailed the establishment of a public sphere and a civil society sector within a formerly atomized polity of clans by introducing for the first time institutions of mass mobilization (e.g., schools, civic organizations, political party, military service, and economic associations) that conferred political agency on a largely inert population. This incorporation process was guided by an egalitarian ethos, which led to the social homogenization of the previous ascriptive hierarchy with the following effects: the abolition of slavery, the erasure of status distinction, the promotion of gender parity, and thus the fomentation of social equality among all social categories. Furthermore, it launched the Arabization of the culture as an expedient means of combating pervasive illiteracy, the strategic Islamization of the society as a transitional policy of weaning the local population from its endemic superstition, and the political socialization of Soqotrans

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as citizens of a nation-state. Finally, it introduced an economic policy that sought to eradicate rural-urban inequalities, indeed all social inequalities. Paradoxically, its progressive policies engendered an internal cultural boundary that symbolized a geographically differentiated capacity and/or willingness to embrace change between residents in the east and west of the island that persists today: Easterners claim an intrinsic aspiration to civilization (h.ad.¯ ara) while westerners are ascribed an exclusive preference for their “Bedouin” sanctuary (bad¯ awa) as was shown in Chapter 3. • The patronage regime of the post-unity government (1990 to the present) led to the reversal of the modernizing trajectory of the island’s polity formation process through the re-primordialization of its social organization. This led to the demobilization of the embryonic civil society sector initiated by the socialist administration into primordial political units through the tribalization of the local polity with the introduction in the early 1990s of the nidh¯ am mash¯ ayikh (shaykh system). The latter created for the first time in Soqotra the post of “shaykh” as the political leader of a tribe that sought to reorganize the system of clan leaders (muqaddams ) established under the Sultanate into tribal fiefdoms. The enactment of the Local Authority Law in 2000 sought to rekindle Yemen’s abandoned transition from a primordial socio-political order to a modern one. Moreover, the government sponsored a collective identification scheme that was partly driven by the political imperatives of a national and supra-national identity formation process, which led to the following social structuring effects: the consolidation of the use of Arabic not only as Soqotra’s lingua franca, but more importantly as the linguistic prerequisite to being an authentic Muslim; the promotion of an Islamic sensibility partly to delegitimize allegiance to the secular ideals of the previous socialist regime; and the prioritization of Arab ethnicity as the exclusive basis of citizenship (see Chapter 7 for details on these regimes). The resulting identity transformation from these political regimes reflects a deepening of Soqotrans’ integration into modernity and the multiple bases of identity formation that are being made available to them. The multiple mediations of Soqotrans’ identity are engendering a transition from internally differentiated group’ self-conceptions rooted in ecological, territorial, and geographical referents, to ones that are

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anchored in more symbolic moorings mediated by trans-local forces. In contrast to the above discussion, which focused on traditional status-based social distinctions, the present discussion of the symbolic reconfiguration of Soqotran identity is not only based on the state’s political mediation of the socio-cultural divisions that previously structured the interactions between different groups on the island, but also takes into consideration the trans-regional ethno-religious influences. The end result is an ethnicity-ranked social ordering of Soqotra’s communal polity on a descending order of valued ethno-cultural identifications. This ethnocultural ranking is an effect of the implicitly mandatory accommodation of ethnically diverse sub-national communities to the ethnocratic imperative (i.e., adoption of a singular ethnicity-based national identity) that prevails in Arab majority societies and its stigmatization of non-Arab ethnic groups (see Al-Azmeh 1996: 80–100). Each component of this ethno-cultural ranking is discussed in terms of the underlying justifications and the related changes in intra-communal mode of relations and affiliations: ‘Arab¯ı, is a supra-national category that represents the compulsory transnational ethno-religious affiliation to the Arab and Islamic umma; Yaman¯ı, is a member of an evolving political consociation of reluctant national subjects whose political commitment to the unitary state and civic loyalty to the national identity are still subject to negotiation; Saqat.rí, is a communal cluster that symbolizes the contestatory grafting of an indigenous communal category into the national lexicon of belonging; and al-muwallad¯ın, is a sub-communal minority that embodies an ascribed euphemistic identity as emblematic of a marginalized ethno-cultural group and permanent economic underclass. These ranked identifications represent discordant identities that share simultaneously unifying and differentiating features that push and pull in different directions, and yet are juxtaposed in a non-conflictual relationality that I call centrifugal paradox. This refers to a social order in which these groups are together as in one hand, but separate and different as the five fingers. 4.3.1

‘Arab¯ı: Pan-Ethnic Membership

Soqotrans’ assumption of the collective self-designation ‘arab¯ı (singular of al-‘arab, and customarily use in the self-identification phrase ¯ an¯ a ‘arab¯ı: “I am Arab”) is a relatively recent event due primarily to the

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ideological effect of political incorporation rather than the voluntary affirmation of a pan-ethnic identity, given the absence of a traceable genealogical affiliation with Peninsular Arabians. Indeed, political incorporation in the post-Sultanate period entailed the formalization of Soqotra’s status as a sub-national polity, which required communal accommodation to the state’s prerequisites to national membership. These obligatorily include the adherence to the foundational pillars of state formation in the Middle East: al-umma al-‘arabiyya (the secular idea of the Arab nation), in order to rightfully claim their membership into the Arab nation; and al-umma al-isl¯ amiyya (the Islamic concept of a universal religious community) in consolidating their confessional identity as Muslims. In fact, adhering to these two parameters of national belongingness—namely Arab ethnicity and Muslim identity—was not an individual politico-cultural option, but a constitutional edict (see first article in Yemen’s constitution). In spite of the rhetoric of legal equality in multiple clauses of Yemen’s constitution (and in that of Arab majority societies) socio-cultural biases negate constitutional commitment to equal citizenship. This is evident in an endemic proclivity among all Arab states, which is known as the “Kabyle complex”: It is a politico-cultural phobia toward the ethnic, linguistic, and religious minorities among the population, and who are ascribed by the state an “unassimilable otherness.” Consequently, they are made the target of discriminatory government policy and of a culturally ostracizing attitude from the majority population. In Soqotra, the state’s aversion toward ethnic diversity has had unintended coercive adjustment effects, such as inducing a kind of ethnic enfranchisement through the adoption of a “situational ethnicity” through the subsumption of a communally-endowed ethnicity into a state-promoted and politically dominant one (Eriksen 2001: 266–267). As a result, Soqotrans are in the throes of a dilemma about the adequacy of their diverse ethnic heritage to fit within the exclusionary ethnocultural framework of the Yemeni nation-state. This is further exacerbated by the perceived contradiction between the prevailing view that they are of Arab origins and yet their mother tongue is Soqotri. Indeed, this apparent contradiction has led to the development of a cottage industry among Soqotran intellectuals to rationalize it through an imaginative reconstruction of the evolution of the Soqotri language as a dialect of Arabic, and the contrived retracing of the ancient Arab genealogy to include Soqotrans. In fact, Arabic is a recent import into the island, and

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therefore, it is a “stepmother tongue” for the overwhelming majority of the island’s inhabitants. The adoption, in the post-Sultanate period, of the politico-cultural dogma of belonging to the Arab nation seems to have been interpreted locally as requiring the retroactive ethnic homogenization of the island’s population and cultural traditions. Accordingly, Soqotrans are being advised by some of their local intellectuals to reclaim exclusively their original Arab identity at the expense, at least partially, of their Soqotran heritage. In effect, they seem to be advocating a strategy of cultural disavowal, which discriminates between a mother tongue (Arabic) and its alleged dialectal offspring (Soqotri), which unwittingly discourages the latter’s recognition as an autonomous language. The end-result is an unintended denial of cultural legitimacy to Soqotri as the vernacular basis of a viable ethno-linguistic identity (see Vol. 2: Chapter 2). Moreover, this Arab ethnicity-based exclusive worldview seems to promote an “artificial homogeneity” that entails a symbolic erasure of linguistic and ethnic diversity. One manifestation of this homogeneity is Soqotrans’ discontinuation of the use of Soqotri names in favor of Arab ones. Also, Soqotrans who consider themselves to be of Arab descent regard the equal recognition of the cultural traditions of Soqotrans of African descent to be an affront to the primacy and authenticity of what they consider as the island’s dominant Arab cultural heritage (i.e., Islam and the Arabic language). The absence of a state-enabled culture of tolerance for linguistic and ethnic diversity has embargoed the official recognition of the Soqotri language, and created dilemmas about what should constitute the legitimate cultural repertoire of Soqotrans, as they pursue their integration not only into the national society, but also into the pan-regional community of Arabs. Finally, and paradoxically, Soqotrans in spite of their deeply cherished, and if occasionally excessively compensatory, identification with an Arab heritage have hyphenated their Arab identity by drawing a distinction between themselves, as “Arabs” born in Soqotra and foreign ones ђ 8 from elsewhere in the Arab world, whom they label K . and her. 4.3.2

Yaman¯ı: Hyphenated National Identity

The quest for a shared national identity (Yemeni) over a unified territory (Yemen) was an endemic desire among north and south Arabian denizens for generations. However, its achievement in 1990 left a legacy of

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festering regional fault lines and an epidemic of political disaffection that have perdurably imparted a deep ambivalence to the polity’s profession of a Yemeni national identity. The latter is perceived as being anchored to an exclusionary ethno-geographical heritage based solely on northern highlands’ primordial traditions and a troika of northern enforcers: the military, Sunni Islamists, and tribal shaykhs. Indeed, unification was pursued through the political socialization and cultural traditionalization of the unified state according to northern tribal ethos and thus engendered the prevalent perception of the nation as being under the hegemony of a regional chauvinism as constitutive of a post-unification political culture. The latter has privileged a northern rural administrative vernacular (i.e., tribalism) as a national governance modality and conflated particular cultural practices (e.g., q¯at chewing) with national cultural norms as well as substituted a northern tribal identity for a pan-Yemeni identity (see Vol. 2: Chapter 3; Elie 2015). This political incorporation process with its cultural domination and territorial subordination effects led to the exacerbation of centrifugal tendencies in the minimally institutionalized national political community through a reactive regionalization of political loyalties that was manifested in the spread of the socio-geographical syndrome of regionalism—referred to locally as man¯ a.tiqiyya (see Elie 2018a). The central government’s chronic mismanagement of this centrifugal propensity, which it inaugurated with the disenfranchising effects of its “annexationist” approach to unification and exacerbated by the postunification civil war of 1994, further contributed to the pervasive impression of the state’s legitimacy deficit. The ensuing accumulation of political frustrations and economic grievances with the state’s deliberate neglect of some of the country’s regions and of the nation’s urban population—especially the youth—provided the catalyst both to the separatist Southern Movement that began in March 2007 and to Yemen’s Arab Spring launched in February 2011 (Elie 2018a). Consequently, a Yemeni national identity remains an asymmetrically distributed symbolic property among the nation’s regionally sundered polity. For many, a national identity is more of a perfunctory political bond than an intrinsic civic sentiment, hence the notion of a hyphenated national identity, in which national belongingness is qualified by regional identifications. This is the politically and culturally fraught national identity into which Soqotrans are being incorporated.

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In such a context, and given the still existing mainland-island ethnocultural divide, Soqotrans’ claim to a Yemeni national identity seems to privilege an associative relationship that allows access to the benefits of state citizenship, while avoiding an assimilationist adoption of a national cultural identity. Indeed, Soqotrans do not consider citizenship as incarnating a cultural identity as much as symbolizing a transactional political relationship with the Yemeni nation-state, in which there is a quid pro quo between a pledge of political loyalty and allocation of socio-economic benefits. They express this relationship in their routine invocation of the term al-muwat.in¯ın (citizens) as a common self-reference. Worthy of note, is that Soqotrans’ reluctance to assume an exogenous national identity is the historical legacy of their chronic dispossession of political sovereignty over their motherland by external political actors (see Chapter 7). As a result, Soqotrans constitute a communal polity still mired in political anomie. This has bequeathed a civic disposition characterized by (a) a double consciousness about their sense of belonging to the political formations into which they were incorporated; and (b) an intrinsic ambivalence in their political alliances. Indeed, these political alliances—whether to the former southern state or to the subsequent northern-led regime—were always historically contingent associations that were externally imposed, and thus ultimately provisional. The end result was Soqotrans’ perfunctory performance of externally imposed “national identities,” which is partly explained by the alienating expediency with which different mainland regimes’ ideologies of incorporation have succeeded themselves on the island: From disenfranchised clans atomized into an Archipelago of hamlets used as tax extraction units by the Sultanate; succeeded by a proletarianized mass society under the socialist administration’s strict ideological regimentation; subsequently aggregated into an artificially fomented tribally segmented polity under the unity government; and finally to today’s modern individualized citizens, purged of primordial attachments, and imbued with state loyalties. This national political identity represents a qualitative difference in terms of what Soqotrans were familiar with, both in the scale of aggregation it entails (from clan to nation-state), and the basis of identification (from kinship-based to ideology-induced) that requires them to imaginatively leap across unfamiliar spaces and ideas to embrace a mass of strangers as compatriots. Accordingly, its adoption by Soqotrans remains a work in progress given their inherent differences in mother tongues and related divergent cultural sensibilities and historical memory. This is

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compounded by the double consciousness noted above, which hyphenates their national belongingness: their simultaneous ethnocultural embodiment of a Soqotran indigeneity, and political appropriation of a Yemeni nationality. This presents a challenge on how best to negotiate their full politico-cultural integration, as it would require the state’s recognition of Soqotran’s communal particularities. This recognition, however, is complicated by the persistence of the ethnocratic imperative noted above, and by the deeply held political sentiment on the part of state authorities that the official recognition of intra-national cultural diversity would lead to the fragmentation of national unity. 4.3.3

Saqat.r…: Primordial Authenticity

The present attempt by the islanders to establish their authenticity through the re-appropriation of the term Saqat.r… is an effect of the “coercive conformity” imposed by the state’s assimilationist incorporation process. This has led to their affirmation of a primordial sentiment, which “is an older form of loyalty that has been transformed by the state’s coercive definition of citizenship” (Rosaldo 2003: 4). Accordingly, Saqat.r… has assumed the status of an endonym (a self-given name) and is being invested with emotive value that expresses a form of territorial communalism and cultural patriotism, which is informed by a desire for local cultural sovereignty over the island. The term cultural sovereignty resonates with the notion of “internal self-determination”: It refers to a minority group’s quest to preserve its separate identity within the larger national society in the framework of local cultural, as opposed to political, autonomy (Stavenhagen 1998: 16). This quest for Soqotran authenticity (i.e., local cultural sovereignty) is the third phase in a process of redrawing the internal cultural boundaries. The first two concerned a topographical contrast between mountain vs. coastal folks during the Sultanate that naturalized different livelihood specialization, which mutated into a geographical dichotomy between eastern vs. western residents under the socialist administration that signified regionally ingrained cultural pre-dispositions (see Chapter 3). The current redrawing of boundaries straddles a mainland-island dimension that foregrounds a permanent politico-cultural wedge between mainland Yemen and motherland Soqotra. Since unification, and with the intensification of migration from the mainland that ensued, the initial affirmation of a Saqat.r… identity has

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mutated into a demarcation of a socio-cultural space, a kind of internal border zone that differentiates between insiders and outsiders on the basis of territorial ancestry and linguistic heritage. This socio-cultural demarcation exemplifies the process of localization of communal identity discussed in the introduction. Paradoxically, this quest for an authentic identity entails the recuperation of the term Saqat.r… (pl. Saqát.ira, and Saqat.riyy¯ın in Arabicized version) that was once an idiom of derision and cultural backwardness exclusively ascribed as a stigmatic emblem of territorial belongingness to the bad¯ u population of the central and western parts of the island during both the Sultanate and socialist periods. In fact, Saqat.r… was originally an ecologically-mediated and geographically-bounded identity that was reified into a kind of regional-ecological ethnicity. The term referred exclusively to pastoralists with the following markers: (i) those who had to pay the full taxes of butter-oil and goat and/or sheepskins to the Sultan in contrast to those who paid in dates or who were absolved from this tax; (ii) to the pastoralists of the west who were seen as “aboriginal,” “wild,” “backward,” and “goat worshippers”; and (iii) to those who were non-fish-eating, non-agriculturalist, non-camel/donkeyowning, and who were primarily sheep and goat herders. It was not a term of respect or admiration (Miranda Morris pers. comm.). This Saqat.r… identity-based cultural reclamation and boundary demarcation process is manifested, on the one hand, in a defensive affirmation among the adult urban population, and on the other, as a latent structure of feeling among the rural population. Both dispositions are induced by the perception of ethno-cultural homogenization and politico-economic marginalization imposed by the mainland authorities. Accordingly, Saqat.r… is an inherently political idiom as it is emblematic of competing loyalties between island community and mainland nation-state. Indeed, it signifies an ethno-political distinction that establishes the social legitimacy, cultural authenticity, and political primacy of the indigenous population over settlers and external rulers. Furthermore, Saqat.r… confers an “aboriginal priority” to those with a hinterland pedigree on the island, and with it a kind of exclusive “primordial membership” that is not available to, and thus excludes, others without such a pedigree. This exclusive membership has two diacritical marks that identify an authentic Soqotran: linguistic heritage and the birthplace of one’s ancestors with the proviso that a hinterland location on the island is regarded as more genuine than a coastal location. Shared linguistic heritage is reclaimed as the primordial identity anchor,

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as it provides the only indubitable basis of the authenticity of one’s local belongingness, and the palpable proof of being indigenous to the island. The Soqotri language remains the basis of a communal self-definition, in spite of the fact that its mastery is becoming increasingly tenuous, especially in urban centers, as it is in a potentially fatal struggle with Arabic and English (see Vol. 2: Chapter 2). The other diacritical mark is that of a hinterland territorial location and ancestry on the island. This territorial marker symbolizes one’s umbilical cord to the island through the social womb of the clan. However, this imposes intrinsic limits to any claim of extended kinship with mainlanders and local others (i.e., urbanbased Soqotrans of Gulf ancestry and especially al-muwallad¯ın), since the inability to point to any specific location on the island—i.e., in the hinterland—as one’s birthplace, and clan domain, is equivalent to being an illegitimate child. This territorial pre-requisite is the Soqotrans’ substitute for genealogy, which is not practiced by indigenous islanders, except for progenies of the settler Mahri tribes. Finally, while the use of a territorial marker serves the purpose of identifying who is an authentic Soqotran, it has the arbitrary consequence of establishing a hierarchy between the more genuine ones from the hinterland, and those who are considered less so due to their originating from the coast, as in the case of the muwallad¯ın, who are discussed below. 4.3.4

Al-Muwallad¯ın: Ethnocultural Minority

Soqotra’s straddling geographical position between the continent of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula seems to have led to a hyphenated ethnocultural constitution. However, the manner in which this ArabAfrican cultural hyphenation was brought about has left an “indelible stain” in the form of an epidermically-marked sub-communal social group. The social category that emerged from this ethnocultural hyphenation, the muwallad¯ın (sing. muwallad), is an inheritance from their initial status as indentured immigrants to the island, who have been denied the right to claim indigenous status in spite of their several centuries long residence in Soqotra. This is partly because of the conditions under which they were brought to the island (as enslaved labor), and since their arrival they have inhabited non-clan domains, or ethnically mixed places, such as the main towns or coastal villages in the north. The muwallad¯ın are the descendents of East African slaves. This term is a byproduct of the encounters of Arabs with other people during the spread of

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Islam. Initially, it referred to the descendants of non-Arabs who converted to Islam. Subsequently, the term came to have multiple referents: Foreign slaves born and raised among Arabs, or Arabs of mixed parentage or mixed race (Heinrichs and Chalmetta 1978: 809–810). In Yemen, it refers to someone born of an Arab (Yemeni) father and a non-Arab mother or born in another country from such parents, and who is further differentiated by skin complexion, speech pattern, and behavioral idiosyncrasies. It is a status mediated by migration abroad and intermarriage that is locally perceived as miscegenation. During the British colonial period in South Yemen, especially in the Hadhramawt region, the muwallad¯ın of southeast Asian background played a dominant political and economic role in the transformation of that region, and were the privileged interlocutors of the British colonial officers (Bujra 1967; Ho 1997). However, this elevated stature was an ephemeral exception to the norm, for the term is usually synonymous with problems of social acceptance and cultural integration. Moreover, as Ho noted, “color informs hierarchical valuation of persons and places” as in the “binary valuation” in Hadhramawt between the muwallad¯ın from Java Indonesia “Jawa muwalladin,” and those from Africa “Sawahil muwalladin” (2006: 66). In Soqotra the term connotes simultaneously social emancipation and ethnocultural segregation. Accordingly, the term muwallad¯ın is merely a politically correct euphemism, as the population it designates is, in its overwhelming majority, composed of people of unmixed African stock, due to very minimal intermarriage with other groups on the island. Therefore, the real meaning of the term in Soqotra is descendant of ex-slaves, or less socially stigmatizing, Afro-Soqotrans. The social predicament of Soqotra’s al-muwallad¯ın of is a complex one, since they must not only confront obstacles to their economic integration, but also endure Arab-Soqotrans socio-culturally stigmatizing aesthetic sensibility. These two aspects, while they have local consequences (see below), have their genesis elsewhere: First, the constitutional edict that a Yemeni citizen is obligatorily an Arab and a Muslim, has conflated Arab ethnicity with authentic citizenship, which in turn has bred, unwittingly, a benign neglect of the non-Arab component of Yemeni society, as is the case with al-akhd¯ am on the mainland. Accordingly, Afro-Soqotrans as an ethno-cultural minority group is perceived as being “placeless” both within the community given the locational criterion of authenticity, and within the state given its exclusionary mono-ethnic constitutional edict about citizenship. Second, and more controversially, perhaps, is

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the crystallization of an aesthetic sensibility through a complex web of associations of historical and contemporary factors that has become the subliminal repository of Arab-Soqotrans’ epidermis-based calculus, and which entails the stereotypic assignment of identity as an exclusionary gesture. Consequently, this aesthetic sensibility has led to private castelike restrictions on al-muwallad¯ın. For example, the imposition of social constraints on family decision about who can marry their daughters (rare is an Arab’s daughter marrying an African’ son), and relatively segregated social interaction protocols. This aesthetic sensibility has also informed the perception as to which form of cultural expression is considered authentically Soqotran. This is exemplified by the fact that drum playing, dancing, and singing of the muwallad¯ın, the performance of which may be centuries old on the island is still not regarded as indigenous to the island by Soqotrans who claim Arab descent, while Soqotri poetry is seen as an authentically Soqotran cultural manifestation. The cumulative effect of this prejudicial disposition was the de facto institutionalization of the social exclusion of the muwallad¯ın into a separate community living under and a veil of social stigma. This particular internal border zone may prove the most enduring, as the ideological pillars of the state incorporation process tend to reinforce ethnic distinction given the priority accorded to an Arab pedigree. Only under the socialist period did the muwallad¯ın experience an unambiguous, yet ephemeral, sense of communal belongingness. Al-muwallad¯ın as a group identity is still burdened by social marginality and status ambiguity within the local community. Indeed, the host community and the larger society offer a limited range of socially emancipatory possibilities since they chronically occupy specific social and personal niches with very few exceptions. Their current integration into the local economy reflects a chronic perception of servility; therefore, the jobs they hold are the least desirable: manual laborer in the ministries of public works and water as well as any type of unskilled labor that requires a hired hand for the day (e.g., loading and unloading of trucks of 50 kg sacks of flour, rice, sugar, and cement). Intriguingly, al-muwallad¯ın do not work as day laborers on construction sites, as that position seemed to be “reserved” for mostly mainlanders and some pastoralist itinerant odd-jobbers. However, one occupation—fishing—in which they were the primary, if not sole, practitioners is now coveted by other groups. Their ecological niche was always the coastal and urban environment. They live

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in the old section of Hadiboh town, and its satellite villages of Shiq, Sirihin, and in Qalansiyah town in the north-west of the island. However, in spite of the muwallad¯ın’s relative social marginalization as a group, there has emerged an internal socio-economic differentiation among them. This is based partly on residential location, which has determined access to amenities (e.g., school) and opportunities (e.g., apprenticeship): For example, those who are centrally located (e.g., old section of Hadiboh) were able to climb the occupational, if not the social, ladder. Accordingly, some among those residing in the center of Hadiboh has acquired valuable skills (e.g., auto mechanic, carpenter, plumber, electrician, UN project staff). In contrast, those who reside in periurban villages (e.g., Shiq) have remained, for the overwhelming majority, at the bottom (e.g., dock worker at the seaport). As a result, while the muwallad¯ın constitute an ethnically homogenous community, they are internally differentiated socio-economically. In sum, the muwallad¯ın constitute an “indigestible minority” due to the social ostracism-enforced endogamy, which ensures their social reproduction as a separate ethnic group. In addition, they persistently occupy the lower rung of the socio-ethnic hierarchy, which is perpetuated by their lower educational attainment.

4.4

Summation: History-Contingent Collective Identities

The chapter explored the trajectory of the Soqotran community’s collective identity transformation process through the social structuring effects of its political incorporation within the coercive ethno-cultural framework of the Yemeni state. This process of communal identity mutation was shown to be a contingent effect of the evolving relational protocol between the state and community as mediated by an ever changing political context. This process was analyzed in terms of the paradox of the state’s mediation of national identity formation and the resulting dialectical interaction between state nationalization of local identity, and communal reaction by means of the trans/localization of its collective identity. The resulting transition from social status hierarchy to ethnicitybased ranking was predicated on the island’s miscellaneous demographic endowment and its cumulative repertoire of ethno-cultural markers that have sedimented over generations. These markers were reconfigured into socially meaningful boundaries through each of the encounters with the

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political incorporation strategies deployed by successive political regimes from the nineteenth century onward. In concluding this chapter, I provide a brief update on the contemporary status of each of the social categories discussed above: • Bin ‘Afr¯ ar, the descendants of the Sultans’ tribe, no longer occupy the pinnacle of the socio-political hierarchy of Soqotra. Indeed, they are seen as common citizens and not even as “first among equals.” There remains, however, a certain nostalgia among the rural shaykhs (i.e., inter-clan chiefs) of Soqotra for a return to a modified and modernized version of the Sultanate. This nostalgia was manifested in the political movement that was launched in July 2012, as part of Yemen’s Arab Spring, under the patronage of one of the sons of the last Sultan who was a long-term resident in Saudi Arabia and which called for the establishment of a separate governorate for al-Mahra and Soqotra within a federal Yemen (see Chapter 7). • Al-Ashr¯ af have suffered a total collapse of their status, as the new generation abandoned any claim to any distinctive social status markers. This is not surprising as the ashr¯ af in Soqotra were not religious scholars, hence were devoid of a specific tradition to pass on to a new generation. Moreover, the economic exigencies of the modern period left them no choice but to accommodate themselves to the locally available economic opportunities. Accordingly, ashr¯ af youth, both male and female, seek employment wherever it is available: policemen, tourist guide, teacher, travel agency attendants, etc. ´ . arÒ have lapsed into relative anonymity as in the case of the • Sh Sultan’s descendants, since the foundation of their status was their proximity to the Sultan. They seemed to have constituted the village of GÒ’o di Salat.ini, in the east of the island, into an oasis of their former privileged status, given the imposing mosque, a high school among other social infrastructure funded by the Arabian Gulf diaspora. • Al-‘Arab have maintained their role as the island’s socially marginalized but economically indispensable trade intermediaries, in spite of increasing competition from an emergent class of Soqotran microentrepreneurs. More significantly, the term ‘arab had a semantic mutation, as its association with foreign origin and mercantile activities was rehabilitated into a highly prized ethnic, religious, and cultural heritage. Indeed, the term is being recruited into a

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trans-communal politics of identity that strategically invokes a panregional economic and cultural affiliation with the Arabian Gulf countries, especially with the United Arab Emirates, where there is a significant Soqotran diaspora. This is animated by a post-national aspiration, which encourages a selective de-linking from the political and cultural entanglements with the Yemeni nation-state. Al-N¯ ub¯ an have retained their distinction by the continuing presence and activities of the members of the al-Thaqali family. More importantly, the term is invoked as a distinctive marker that differentiates them from the muwallad¯ın whose dark complexion the n¯ ub¯ an share, and which is still evocative of social stigma. Al-Bad¯ u has remained the common self-designation among the pastoralists of the central and western regions. They have been relieved of their status as primary taxpayers, but are now subjected to the benign neglect of the local and national political authorities. Al-Akhd¯ am are no longer a distinctive social category, as they are now subsumed under the category of bad¯ u ; although some still play the role of indentured herders for absentee herd owners sedentarized in villages on the northern coast. Saqat.r… is no longer marked by an unstable status, as the Saqát.ira’s political evolution and maturing self-conception have led to its embodiment into an island-wide identity, thereby transforming a sub-regional and geographically-circumscribed identity into a communally shared one. Indeed, Saqat.r… seems to be mutating into an ethnonym as it is becoming a politicized signifier that is embedded in a unique language and in the island’s UNESCObrokered global acknowledgment of its endemic biodiversity. As a result, Soqotrans are increasingly feeling that their official recognition as an indigenous ethnocultural group, if not a distinctive ethnonationality, within Yemen’s national polity is overdue. Accordingly, Saqat.rí is alternatively invoked as a strategic bargaining chip with the state in negotiating for special political privilege, or as an oppositional communal identity toward the state’s chronic neglect of their cultural heritage. As a result, Soqotrans’ national identity is an unstable hyphenation of a Yaman¯ı and Saqat.r… identity that is vulnerable to the island’s ever evolving political history. The imbu‘ileh have undergone a social mutation as their descendants are called al-muwallad¯ın, which came into use only with the inauguration of the socialist regime in 1967. However, this

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lexical substitution was not sufficient to efface the combination of epidermic marker, and social stigma attached to their ancestors having been purchased into service. Furthermore, the absence of a local ancestral pedigree, in the form of a clan origin in the island’s hinterland, continues to constrain their full social integration in the post-Sultanate communal fabric, hence their relative social marginality and their current status as the economic underclass of the urban economy. The above summation of the reconfiguration of traditional social categories into contemporary ones suggests the persistence of what I described as the centrifugal paradox of the relationship between the different social categories—together in one hand but separate as the five fingers—which attests to an inadequate sociocultural contract between the state and its ethnocultural minorities. Ironically, the factor that symbolizes the unifying “hand” is the Soqotrans’ common self-reference as al-muwat.in¯ın (citizens), which partly expresses a pragmatic accommodation to the fact that the Yemeni state has internationally recognized jurisdiction over them, but also justifies their claims to the privileges of citizenship and their entitlements to political rights, public goods and services. More importantly, the term articulates a cohesive alternative to the internally differentiating social categories and provides a collective standpoint from which to mobilize against the state’s negligence of their communal needs and political entitlements. Beyond these practical considerations, there remain two existential questions: First, will Soqotrans finally accept the demographically mottled profile of their communal polity that history has bequeathed them? And second, will the state ever allow them to live in the interstitial ethnocultural space they have always inhabited? An affirmative answer to both questions would entail Soqotrans’ affirmation, and the Yemeni state’s recognition, of their hyphenated identity. This would reconcile both the Yemeni state and Soqotrans to the fact that a mixed ethnocultural endowment is the islanders’ indelible historical legacy. This processual analysis and structural anatomy of the transformation of Soqotra’s communal identities have challenged the presumption of historical immutability ascribed to the polities of the region. It has demonstrated the intrinsic dynamism of the polity formation process, which is driven by a history-contingent dialectic between state polity formation strategies and communal reaction. Those continuities that

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inform the internal socioeconomic structure and political dynamics of the Soqotran community today are not products of the intrinsic structural rigidities of a “traditional social formation” but rather of the “civic effects” of state politics and policies. Worthy of note is that in spite of Soqotrans’ rapid integration into a cash-mediated and consumptiondriven modern economic sector, which is generating socio-economic differentiation based on uneven access to non-traditional occupational opportunities, class cleavages are still socially embryonic and economically precarious to constitute a basis of collective identity formation (see Vol. 2: Chapter 5). Finally, a new stage in the evolving nature of communal identity transformation in Soqotra was initiated in December of 2013 when it was accorded the status of a Governorate or province. This new status promoted Soqotra from a largely neglected sub-district constituency of a mainland province (Hadhramawt) to an autonomous province with circumscribed, but significant, decisional authority. Indeed, this status put an end to Soqotrans’ chronic sentiment of dispossession of their “sovereign entitlement” over their homeland. Also, this status has engendered an evolving socio-political context in Soqotra that is conducive to the self-fashioning of cultural identities and to the autonomous formation of political subjectivities that will challenge the symbolic hegemony of a mainland-based and state-sponsored singular national identity (see Epilogue).

Notes 1. The fate of the last Sultan under the socialist government was until recently subject to rumors. His son Abdullah bin ‘Isa bin ‘Ali bin ‘Afr¯ar has provided the first public testimony of what happened to his father who was the last to be tried along “with another person who was accused of smuggling my father to the Kingdom Saudi Arabia”: The procedures of his trial took place on a Thursday and they announced his execution to take place in public after Friday prayers. At night, a telegram arrived from President Salim Rubayya ‘Ali (“Salmin”) [1969–1978] with direction to release the Sultan and those who remained with him, and the arrest of the group that carried out the assassinations and executions. On Friday morning in Soqotra people were waiting for the execution of Sultan ‘Isa, instead, the police arrested the group that carried out the assassinations and

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put them in prison, then they were transferred to Aden. But the Sultan was not released and remained in prison, and when he came out, he was sick and then died in Soqotra. Of course, my father, Sultan ‘Isa bin ‘Afr¯ar refused to be smuggled to Saudi Arabia at the time or leave the country even after he was released from prison. (Al-Dumaini 2019) 2. I use ashr¯ af instead of s¯ ada because it is the term employed by Soqotrans. For a detailed discussion of this group in the Hadhramawt context (see Serjeant 1981). Also, for a discussion of the genealogy of the s¯ ada of Hadhramawt since Soqotra’s ashr¯ af emigrated from there (see Ho 2006: 37–47). 3. Back in 1834, during his tour of the island the British surveyor Wellsted found that “two small and insignificant mosques at Tamarida [Hadiboh], and one yet smaller at Colesseah [Qalansiyah], are now the only places of worship for the reception of the faithful” (Wellsted 1835: 218). By 1967, according to Serjeant (1992: 168), the number of mosques in Hadiboh remained the same, although they may have replaced the ones observed by Wellsted. 4. Beyond the nutritional importance of the date palm trees, they have symbolic significance for the higher social categories of the Sultanate (e.g., Sultans’ families and al-ashr¯af). This is epitomized in the fact that the Sultans brought a specific kind of date palm tree, called Kerigi, from the mainland to mark their residences on the northern coast and in the eastern hinterland (Miller and Morris 2004: 393). Also, among the ashr¯af (or s¯ ada as they were called on the mainland) date gardens were a pre-requisite to the establishment of their settlements in Hadhramawt. Indeed, Ho describes the villages inhabited by the s¯ ada in Hadhramawt as date “plantation settlements” (2006: 210). This practice was replicated in Soqotra. 5. As of the late 2000s the term akhd¯ am was replaced by al-muhammash¯ın— which refers to those on the margins of society, or in short “the marginalized ones”—and is the main term used in Yemen’s public discourse today. 6. For a brief account of nineteenth-century slavery in the region see a “Report on Slavery in the Persian Gulf” written in 1842 by the British Assistant Resident in the Persian Gulf, A. B. Kemball, which is inserted as an appendix in Lewis (1990: 157–159). Slavery in Soqotra, however, preceded the nineteenth century. As Thomas Roe, on his way to the Mughal Empire in India as King James’ ambassador in 1615, reported that there were “four sorts” of people on the island. His description of the hierarchical classification of the island’s resident at the time deserves to be quoted in full, even though it may be more imagined than factual, as he

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did not go, or was not allowed to go, on shore. Note that he old English spelling in the quoted text was modified to facilitate reading. [The first sort, are] Arabs his countrymen, who it seems are his strength, and such as are not the ancient inhabitants but come in with the conquest of his ancestors… A second sort are slaves who, when they come to him, kiss his feet, and these do all his work and make his aloes… [He had among his slaves Abyssinian divers]. A third sort are… the old inhabitants of the country (but not the oldest) called bedouins, the same which other historians have called Jacobites, Christians that have long dwelt here; with these he had a war, and dwell in the mountains, very populous, but are now at peace, on condition to live quietly, and to breed their children Mohammedans… The fourth sort are a savage people, poor, lean, naked, with long hair, eating nothing but roots, hiding in bushes, conversing with none, afraid of all, without houses, and almost as savage as beasts; and by conjecture the true ancient naturals of this island. (Foster 1926: 22–23) 7. Botting adds an interesting factor to the mixed descent of some AfroSoqotrans: “Some of the younger generation of African Socotrans are the offspring of French West African troops stationed on the island during the [second world] war. There was considerable lamentation on the beaches when the soldiers embarked for Africa at the end of their service” (1958: 90). areh 8. The etymology of the term k.and ђ her refers to one who wears a k.and¯ ђ the long sleeve robe worn by gulf Arabs (called dishdasha). K . and her has multiple meanings as it can be used in reference to any Arab from overseas; any “white” adult male not from Soqotra and does not speak Soqotri; and also to describe someone as being envious (Miranda Morris pers. comm.). Given the history of antagonistic relations between the indigenous islanders and settlers from across the sea, it is safe to suggest that the term most certainly was employed not merely as a nominally distinguishing label, but perhaps as a disparaging epithet.

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Annex 4.1: Yemen’s Traditional Social Status Stratification Status Hierarchy as Societal Ontology The social formations of the West Asia and North Africa region were described by anthropologists as representing a socio-moral order called a “mosaic society,” in which status hierarchy was the foundational organizational principle. Such a society was constituted by vertically segmented corporate groups in which membership was by birth. These groups were categorized and ranked along residential domains, occupational niche, ethnicity, distinguishing attributes and roles associated with a complex repertoire of symbolic capital, and most importantly genealogical descent. This table illustrates the ramifications of this social order in Yemen. Segmented Social Order: Tripartite Hierarchy The anthropology of Yemen was based on the quotidian activities of these social groups in the following research sites: (a) their performative domains (i.e., mosques, markets, mafraj or d¯ıwan, and places of public rituals or ceremonies); (b) their dwelling spaces (i.e., tents, villages, and towns); and (c) their ecological habitats (i.e., deserts, agricultural fields, and provincial urban enclaves). The tripartite hierarchy has, in varying degrees of elaboration and terminological substitution, constituted the obligatory stage setting and social profiling of Yemeni society: • First, at the apex, is the religious aristocracy that is composed of al-s¯ ada) (sing. sayyid), or alternatively called al-ashr¯ af ) (sing. shar¯ıf) based on genealogical link with the Prophet’s family. Below them was al‘ulam¯ a’, a clerical elite based on achieved status as scholars of religion. And followed by the q¯ ad¯ı judge (pl. qud¯ a ) whose status ¯ ¯ is partly based on jurisprudential learning, and familial reputation.

Occidentalism: Comparative Framework “Occidentalism” is the comparative frame of reference in which caricatures of socio-cultural aspects of Western societies and their archaic remnants, or borrowed models from incommensurable polities, are used as a comparative societal frame for the analysis of West Asian social formations (Carrier 1995). The application of this comparative framework led to the systematic transposition and imposition of the social categorization of Medieval Europe as the representations of traditional Yemeni society, which was portrayed as an immutable agrarian social formation with an enduring archaic mentalité. This comparative practice is exemplified in the Orientalist travellers’ proto-anthropological discourse, and subsequently in the ethnographic accounts of professional anthropologists.

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• Second is the arms-bearing “nobility,” which concerns the qab¯ a‘il (tribes) exclusively, and that are internally stratified by degrees of distinction partly informed by genealogy, and partly based on historical legacy or legend, territorial expanse and population size, and leadership roles: shaykh al-mash¯ ayikh (supreme shaykh), regular shaykh, and ordinary tribesmen. • Third is the hierarchical division of the lower service classes into five occupational groups, which obligatorily do not bear arms, and that are subject to tribal domination: (i) misk¯ın (pl. mas¯ ak¯ın), which refers to a sedentary social category of mostly town or peri-urban inhabitants, and is composed of merchants, artisans, and peasants; (ii) da‘¯ıf (pl. du‘af¯ a ) refers to builder, potter,¯ and field¯ laborer; (iii) muzayyin (pl. maz¯ ayna) encompasses both male and female barber, singer, circumciser, and marriage attendant; (iv) dawsh¯ an (pl. daw¯ ashin) refers to a tribespecific troubadour or messenger within the territorial compass of a tribe; and (v) kh¯ adim servant (pl. akhd¯ am) who is distinguished primarily by ethnicity (African origin), and performs the lowest available tasks. Also, forming an integral part of this status hierarchy is a segregationist paradigm encompassing a public sphere for men and a private sphere for women as the foundational matrix of ethnographic interpretation of Yemeni women’s condition. This was partly justified on the basis of an Islamic code of modesty.

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This entailed the use of genealogies as a means of reconstructing the social order based on pedigree ranking and status distinction, and which approximated the three orders of European medieval society: oratores (i.e., those who pray, and handle the book), bellatores (i.e., those who fight and manipulate the sword), and laboratores (i.e., those who work and use the plow). This social order was read into Yemeni society as follows: The notion of “bayt ” (house) was the repository of genealogical distinction (in the case of al-s¯ ada and al-qab¯ a‘il ), which delineated a social geography of lords and their retinue of serfs (i.e., mas¯ ak¯ın et al.) on their feudal estates; the prevalence of the religious idiom was the primary basis for the legitimacy of rule as well as dominant social ideology; and an ascriptive social structure in the form of interactionally segregated occupational groups. One anthropologist (Dresch 1989, 2009) transposed Louis Dumont (1980) sociology of India’s caste system (jati) and its division of society into four estates (varnas ). However, given his romance with tribes (along with most foreign anthropologists of Yemen) and his enthrallment with segmentary theory prescribed tribe-dominated social order, his analytical emphasis implicitly re-ordered the hierarchical caste-based hereditary enclosures with their unalterable social ontology by placing the warrior caste above the Brahmins as follows: Kshatriyas (warriors = qab¯ a‘il ), Brahmins (priests = ashr¯ af ), Vaishyas (merchants = mas¯ ak¯ın), and Shudras (servants = akhd¯ am). The analytical validity of this discursive practice is further undermined by its iron encaging of peoples within an immutable societal matrix made up of an indelible “trait complex” and inescapable segmentary structures. This anachronistic Occidentalizing practice is still being deployed as an expedient epistemic exercise in symbolic domination and cultural denigration by academic courtesans of empire animated by fantasies of Western civilizational supremacy.

CHAPTER 5

Island Pastoralism: External Entanglements and Internal Entailments

This chapter offers an overview of the changing interactional dynamics between Soqotran pastoralists’ ecological praxes, environmental milieu, and the pastoral herds. Accordingly, it focuses on the transitional processes engendered by Soqotra’s external entanglements and their impacts on Soqotran pastoralists’ way of life. To elucidate the ramifications of these entanglements the chapter first highlights the emergence of an enclosure policy toward Soqotra’s pastoral domain and situates the discussion of pastoralism in Soqotra within the larger context of pastoralism in West Asia and North Africa. Subsequently, it inventories the pastoral domains through a description of the infrastructural underpinnings of pastoralism in Soqotra: the mixed mode of subsistence driven by environmental opportunism; the seasonality and typology of the spatial mobility of Soqotran pastoralists; and the geography of residence in terms of the distribution of clans and villages throughout the island’s sub-regions. It highlights the long genealogy of Soqotra’s pastoral herd to make the case of their constituting an “endemic” species along with its biodiversity, and reviews the policy consequences of environmentalists’ “graze phobia” on pastoralists’ livelihood. Also, it provides

A different version of this chapter appeared under the title “Pastoralism in Soqotra: External Entanglements and Communal Mutations.” Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice 4: 15 (2014), 1–15. © The Author(s) 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45638-2_5

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a provisional inventory of the herds’ population and explains the logic of their distribution around the island. And it concludes with a summary of the resulting mutations in the island’s pastoral way of life from the externally engendered transitional processes.

5.1 Pastoral Domain’s Annexation: Enclosure Threat Soqotran pastoralists have escaped the threats that come in the wake of too active an expression of concern from the community of scholars on pastoralism, and their international financial supporters, and national government advice seekers. Indeed, this discursive neglect of Soqotra’s pastoralism is not to be lamented, since it has spared the island’s pastoral hinterland the banes associated with the inquisitive gaze, and invasive embrace, of external actors, who are seemingly motivated by philanthropic ideals. Too often, however, the pursuit of such ideals leads to misanthropic effects: government policy of sedentarization and land expropriation, and misguided donor interventions into pastoral lands, such as capital intensive approaches resulting in the marginalization of local know-how and the abandonment of locally adapted coping strategies. Instead, Soqotran pastoralists have found themselves in the crosshairs of an emergent threat from environmentalists and their conservation lobby, who are proposing ecotourism as the island’s main economic development strategy. The invasive threat posed by this new problematic is aptly captured as follows: The marginal lands that have previously been the province of pastoralists are increasingly coming into focus as reserves of biodiversity. Their very inaccessibility has permitted the survival of species eliminated in highdensity agricultural areas. Consequently, there is pressure on governments to declare increasingly large regions as conservation areas, both because of the conservation lobby and the potential income from tourism. (Blench 2000: iii)

This environmental enclosure experiment and its associated human and animal exclosure initiatives, which are sundering the island into a series of “Protected Areas,” represent an unprecedented incursion of the state through its international proxies within Soqotra’s pastoral domain. Indeed, it is a domain in which the state, whatever form it took in

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Soqotra’s modern history, has been chronically absent. This was until the Yemeni government opportunistically ratified in 1996 the 1992 UN Convention on Biodiversity Conservation after a four-year delay, and simultaneously declared the entire Soqotra Archipelago a protected area. This declaration effectively established the first ever protected area in Yemen, which allowed the United Nations to operationalize an ecotourism-driven conservation regime over the Archipelago’s entire landmass and marine coastlines. The implementation of this strategy in Soqotra represents, potentially at least, an external threat to the very mode of life it claims to protect, from the influx of car riding, boots wearing, and garbage generating ecotourists (see Vol. 2: Chapter 6 for details). This is in contrast to the prevailing mode of life in the sparsely populated and thus largely unspoiled rural hinterland where the familiar sight is that of mostly barefooted and consumptively ascetic local pastoralists herding their goats, cows, and sheep with their soil enriching manure and minimal eco-footprints. Soqotra’s environmental enclosure is being undertaken in the absence of knowledge about its pastoral domain. This is confirmed in one report: “Despite the fact that the Socotra Archipelago is acknowledged as one of the poorest and most disadvantaged group of islands anywhere very limited information on the traditional major economic activity of extensive livestock production has been investigated and reported” (EU 2000b: 2–1, 2–3). Accordingly, this chapter seeks to remedy the knowledge deficit about pastoralism in Soqotra as is evident in the total absence, indeed its discursive disenfranchisement, from the academic literature on pastoralism around the world. Therefore, the chapter inventories the infrastructural dimensions of pastoralism in Soqotra: First, it situates Soqotran pastoralism in light of the dominant thematic preoccupations of the mainstream literature on nomadic pastoralism. Second, it describes the underpinnings of a mixed subsistence pastoral regime in terms of livelihood practices. Third, it catalogues the seasons-contingent vectors and directionality of Soqotran pastoralists’ spatial mobility. Fourth, it maps the contours of an evolving economic geography and its impact on Soqotrans’ pattern of residence in terms of the distribution of clans and villages throughout the island’s sub-regions. Fifth, it sketches the pedigree of the pastoral herd and provides a provisional inventory of the animal population in light of environmentalists’ reflexive critique of their being a threat to the environment. And lastly, it summarizes the sociocultural changes in the pastoralists’ lifestyle resulting from Soqotra’s entanglement with an externally initiated process of communal transition.

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5.2 Thematic Contextualization: Pastoralism’s Nomadic Fixation It is noteworthy that in the major global or regional survey texts on pastoralism there is no discussion of a community that practices this form of livelihood on an island (e.g., L’Equipe Ecologie et Anthropologie des Sociétés Pastorales 1979; Galaty and Johnson 1990; Barfield 1993; Khazanov 1994; Mundy and Musallam 2000). Indeed, there seems to be an intrinsic bias in the literature in favor of nomadic pastoralism, and the prioritization of countries in the Global South, given their presumed need for “development” interventions. Moreover, it seems that the islands where pastoralism is practiced do not fit the profile—as they are not in the Global South and are non-nomadic—which is privileged by the research funding agencies, and the community of interested scholars on pastoralism (see exception in Heatherington 2001). More importantly, perhaps, is that they lacked the requisite characteristics and thus the romantic allure that have attracted scholars of pastoralism in the Global South: The cohort of communities that dwell in relative destitution, ceaseless vagrancy, and are distinguished by their disdain for state authority, and uncompromising autonomy, while eking out subsistence livelihoods from the world’s peripheral lands. In the case of Soqotran pastoralists, they were relegated to a state of relative discursive neglect, as noted above. And when they were acknowledged, it was not for their rugged pastoralist ethos, but for their softer virtues as artisan botanists and environmental conservationists. In contrast, their Somali neighbors were early on the object of discursive encomia. For example, the Orientalist Richard Burton (1856) called them “proud republicans,” who dwelled, according to one of his intellectual epigone, in a stateless “pastoral democracy,” and displayed “formidable pride,” “extraordinary sense of superiority,” and “firm conviction that he [the Somali nomad] is sole master of his actions and subject to no authority except that of God” (Lewis 1961: 1). In contrast, Soqotran pastoralists were confined to their geographically castaway, spatially constricted, and topographically mountainous island, and lacking covetous neighbors (whether as land-encroaching agriculturalists or extortionist state agents). Therefore, they were assumed to lack the incentives associated with the nomadic compulsion that was engendered by internal social antagonism or external political exaction. Consequently, deprived of the spacious territorial endowment, and of the appropriate

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topography for nomadism, they were bereft of the socio-political impetus that was necessary to cultivate and to flaunt the Spartan ethic, and martial valor of both of their continental neighbors (the Somali nomadic herdsmen and the Yemeni segmentary tribesmen). As a result, they failed to attract the attention of modern-day researchers imbued with a “benevolent populist perception” toward the nomadic bedouin, or his alter ego the indomitable tribesman. Also, the island’s internal social organization undermined the dominant assumption about the conditions of possibility for nomadic pastoralism. This assumption is illustrated in the following formulation about the origin of pastoralism that is considered axiomatic: “Pastoralism in that great belt of people stretching from Morocco to Mongolia can only be understood as the historic outcome of interaction with agricultural peoples” (Ellen 1994: 212). In the case of the Middle East, it is affirmed as an indubitable truism: “The history of the Islamic Middle East can, from its very beginnings, be written to a large extent in terms of the interaction between the nomads and the sedentary and urban populations” (Gellner 1973: 1). Moreover, the population of such a society was said to be distributed within an “ecological trilogy”: Nomadic tribes dwelling in the desert, peasants occupying villages on agricultural land, and urbanites residing in towns. This tendency to encapsulate pastoral social formations within reductive categorizations persists as the indispensable anthropological vernacular. This has engendered a litany of “binary contrapositions” that structured the understanding of such societies: Bad¯awa vs. h.ad.¯ara; nomadic vs. sedentary; desert vs. sown; tent vs. camp; pastoralist vs. agriculturalist; egalitarian vs. stratified; tribal vs. peasant pastoralists; and state vs. tribes. Consequently, pastoralism in Soqotra has remained beyond the pale of the mainstream academic literature, as its contextual particularities do not allow for an adequate articulation with the literature on pastoralism in North Africa and West Asia. This is due to an endemic analytical propensity toward the binary framing of pastoralist practices within an unchanging set of thematic fixations that are inextricably linked to the problematic of nomadism. This menu of orthodox themes includes the following: (a) Whether or not equality is the regnant value of pastoral communities; (b) whether the nature of the state’s political domination strategy is encapsulation or incorporation, or stated differently whether the state cooptative strategy is induced or forced sedentarization, since nomadic pastoralism is axiomatically conceived as a political strategy for

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resisting state encapsulation; and relatedly (c) the a priori expectation of a set of problems such as the contested demarcation of pastoral concession areas to Bedouins engendered by the state’s alternative use of pastoralist land and the encroaching agricultural and urban land requirements. Moreover, there is the inexorable stereotypic profiling of pastoralists in the form of the reflexive conflation of pastoralists with Bedouins who are ascribed an ontological imperative toward wandering as a prerequisite to identity maintenance; hence, nomadism is seen as constituting an innate vital urge, a noumenal force, that engenders the categorical rejection of any external attempt at sedentarization, and thus the impossibility of “Bedouins” to initiate their own sedentarization (Chatty 2006a). Finally, pastoralism is usually articulated within a discourse about a perennial “conflict between the state and Bedouin society,” given the latter’s resilient recourse to adaptive strategies for cultural preservation. These epistemic preoccupations, which were initially motivated by the romantic quest of anthropologists and subsequently driven by the developmentalists’ need for template mechanisms with which to frame ameliorative interventions in pastoralist domains in the Global South, have continued to animate the literature on pastoralism. Indeed, the ultimate aim of this literature is to correct the dominant expectation that Bedouins are inexorably a doomed social category, and to argue that their rejection of “the sedentist outlook and economy” and their commitment to mobility and migration is a highly adaptive survival stratagem, which will guarantee their continued existence in the twenty-first century and beyond (see Chatty 2006b). In contrast, defense of the nomadic lifestyle will not find much sympathy among Soqotran pastoralists, whose value orientation is not defined by a rejection of, but a keen receptivity to, sedentarized economic activities, especially with a guaranteed salary as a relief from their season-dependent income. Moreover, their problem with the Yemeni state is not with arbitrary appropriation of pastoral lands, or its sedentarization policies, which are not relevant to Soqotra, but with its benign neglect of their basic needs (i.e., water, education, health, and income generating opportunities).

5.3 Livelihood Practices: Eclectic Subsistence Regime Soqotrans’ subsistence pastoralism is practiced according to the rhythm of the two monsoons, and the seasonally programmed availability, or scarcity,

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of key environmental resources. Prior to the end of the Sultanate in 1967, hunger was a seasonal fatality as the environmental dependency of the islanders was at its apogee. This dependency was relieved only intermittently, and not always reliably, by the traffic of boats carrying food and other items from East Africa in exchange for the locally produced butteroil. Hence, every nook and cranny of the available territory was explored in search of environmental resources. This quest for resources was not only for pastures and water—although these were critical to ensuring the survival of their animal herds—but also for wild comestible items (e.g., fruits, plants, animals, honey) to supplement the main diet made up of meat (rather infrequently), milk, dates, home-grown millet, and imported maize (known locally as maqdereh), which was subsequently replaced by rice in the 1970s. What was significant about this quest for resources was that it occurred in a context in which survival was a permanent challenge, and where livelihood opportunities have always varied according to seasons. Hence, subsistence diversity was a prerequisite and environmental opportunism (i.e., maximizing the use of all available natural resources) the obligatory means of ensuring survival. In effect, Soqotrans’ livelihood practices encompassed simultaneously those of scarcity-driven occasional hunter-gatherers, weather-contingent semi-nomadic pastoralists, seasonal gardeners of selected crops (e.g., finger millet and vegetables), opportunistic harvesters of aloes’ juice and resin-producing trees, necessityinduced resourceful craft makers of livelihood-enabling implements and household items from date-palm fronds, local clay and livestock hide and wool, and coastal-based artisanal fishers. In such a context, it becomes clear why it is erroneous to assume that “ostensibly predominant subsistence techniques represent total subsistence strategies” (Ellen 1982: 170). Instead, Soqotran pastoralism is described as a mode of subsistence encompassing an ensemble of “subsistence techniques”: The means with which resources are appropriated from the environment. The determinant of when a subsistence technique, or a combination of them, is used is what I call variable geography of livelihood opportunities: As each of the island’s five physio-geographical zones and their particular ecological characteristics and resource endowments allows a different set of subsistence livelihoods (see Chapter 3). It is this ineluctable recourse to multiple means of subsistence that characterize Soqotrans’ livelihood making. Indeed, their ecology-induced indifference toward livelihood specialization problematizes the standard definition of pastoralists, namely: “populations for which livestock-related

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activities are the sources of more than half of total household income” (Swift and Toulmin 1992). In the remainder of this section, I describe the environmentally contingent and historically mediated valorization of subsistence activities, and the resulting alternation between primary and supplementary subsistence practices. 5.3.1

Primary vs. Supplementary Livelihoods: Repertoire of Subsistence Practices

Soqotra’s pastoral regime based on environmentally opportunistic multiple subsistence practices is best explained by differentiating between primary and supplementary subsistence activities. However, these two categories are not stable, as they alternate along three dimensions: geographic location, gendered division of household labor, and historical period. In the following discussion, I illustrate how primary and supplementary subsistence livelihoods vary along these three dimensions: First, a subsistence activity is either primary or supplementary depending on the physiographic areas (i.e., coastal plains, high mountains, high plateaux, interior valleys, and interior plains), their resource endowments, climactic condition, and availability of alternative livelihood opportunities outside the pastoralists’ principal residential domain. I schematically illustrate the alternation between subsistence activities by comparing mostly herding and fishing while neglecting a miscellany of other activities: On the coastal plains, fishing is the primary activity, while date cultivation and herding are supplementary ones. Also, for a proportion of the coastal population, especially in the north, salaried employment is the primary activity with trading as a supplementary activity, and where the cultivation of dates is largely a tradition-bound endeavor, and fishing is either an occasional leisure, or supplementary income, activity. In the high mountains, herding is the primary activity with negligible participation in supplementary activities such as date cultivation. In the high plateau areas, herding is the primary activity in the central region as fishing is not an option and is replaced by the collection of resin from incense-bearing trees, and in the western region some pastoralists migrate toward the southwestern coast for seasonal fishing. In the internal valleys, herding is the primary activity with date cultivation as a supplementary one, but assumes primary status seasonally. In the internal plains, herding is the primary activity, which is seasonally supplemented by fishing on the northern coast. However, the subsistence

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activities, whether primary or supplementary, in all of the island’s areas are regulated by nature’s whims, especially the occurrence of monsoon winds and seasonal rains. Second, a gendered division of household labor further distinguishes primary and supplementary activities. In general primary subsistence activities are the responsibility of men (e.g., herding, milking, date farming, and fishing) while the supplementary ones belong to women (e.g., all household chores: water and wood collecting, cooking, milk churning, horticulture, rug weaving, and pottery making). Worthy of note is that during the Sultanate period the herding of sheep was to be the primary responsibility of women, although males in the western part of the island herded sheep as well. More generally, men were in charge of adult livestock, while women were in charge of immature ones. However, this gendered division concerning the performance of primary vs. supplementary chores, alternated in response to historically induced changes in the rural economy. For example, herding was principally, but not exclusively, a male activity as well as milking, but the processing of milk into different dairy by-products, but most importantly butter-oil, was a female activity. With the discontinuation of the export of butter-oil that followed the demise of the Sultanate, and the increasing importance of fishing encouraged by the succeeding socialist administration in the 1970s, herding, and even the milking of animals were undertaken by women, at least in some places and during the extended absence of men; however, milking remains taboo for women—except in the case of sheep—in certain parts, as in the central mountains region in contrast to the southern coastal plains. In this regard Soqotra seems to be an exception, given that “A constant factor among pastoral populations is the assignation of milk and milking to women” (Blench 2000: 30). Beyond this division of labor, Soqotra’s pastoral economy is free of the pastoralist-agriculturalist or nomad-sedentary occupational dichotomy and the corollary social antagonism that is supposed to animate the political dynamics of pastoral societies. Third, and lastly, whether subsistence activities were primary or supplementary was a result of the different historical conjunctures of Soqotra’s political incorporation. The demise of the Sultanate and the beginning of the socialist administration on the island in 1967 inaugurated the transformation of the island’s pastoral economy. Three key economic consequences can be identified: the reconfiguration of the nature of subsistence activities in terms of a gradual emphasis on alternative income

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sources, as in the transition from herding to fishing; the introduction of new consumption items and a corresponding reprioritization of food resources, as in the case of the substitution of rice for maize after the end of the Sultanate; and the reorientation of the local economy from a nature-dependent and barter-mediated to a service-based and cash-driven economy as a result of the promotion of a new tourism-led economy from the mid-1990s. Yet, pastoralism has persisted as a defining cultural leitmotif, even as it gradually lapsed into a supplementary economic activity. As herding is valued for the social anchor to the land that it confers. Moreover, pastoralism contributes to a subsidiary food production activity (i.e., milk), since the demise of the inter-continental market for butter-oil was not replaced by a market for meat. The absence of such a market has led to a situation in which pastoralists have moved “from living off, to living for” their herds. Consequently, Soqotran pastoralists have become increasingly reliant on odd jobs to make ends meet, which generated a chronic sense of livelihood insecurity among them.

5.4

Spatial Mobility: Seasonal Peripatetics

The nature of pastoral movements—i.e., frequency, directionality, timing, fixed, or variable destination—is the key defining feature of pastoralism, hence the need to specify the type of movements of Soqotran pastoralists. The term transhumance has been used to characterize the movement pattern of Soqotran pastoralists (Naumkin 1993; EU 2000a; Morris 2002). The use of this term is justified by the island’s undulating topography, and the fact that it was first used to describe seasonal herd movements that alternated between mountains and lowland pastures: “During one part of the year the livestock is kept in mountain pastures and during the other parts is driven to lower zones.” The main purpose was to “use other areas as seasonal pastures when they are at their optimum productivity” (Khazanov 1994: 23). Accordingly, transhumance is a spatially limited and seasonally alternating pattern of movement by (some of) the pastoralists and their herds from permanent village bases located in mountains to seasonal encampments in lowland pastures (or vice versa), due to altitudinal and seasonal variations in the availability of pastures. Moreover, transhumance co-exists with other forms of pastoral movement, and thus the need to identify them accordingly. This is the approach that informs my description of Soqotran pastoralists’ movements. Soqotrans seasonally reincarnate into practitioners of

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different livelihoods: Pastoralist, fisherman, date palm tree cultivator, and odd-jobber. This self-fashioning into peripatetics is due to the seasonal constraints imposed on the kinds of livelihood that can be pursued at different periods of the year. It is the exigencies of the seasons that drive livelihood activities on the island, and thus provide the impetus to the different kinds of movement undertaken by Soqotrans that are described below. 5.4.1

Transhumance: Intra-Territorial Migration

Transhumance is the principal movement among the spatial displacement patterns followed by Soqotran pastoralists. It entails a regular longdistance migration to a known destination, and return to an established home base. It determines land use practices as well as settlement patterns across the island because it requires a two-part movement across ecotopographic zones, and geographical regions, which is synchronized with the two monsoon seasons. The first movement is mђzhíro from higher to lowland pastures and occurs toward the end of the SW monsoon season of horf in early October. The return movement is mђrqíyo from lower to higher grazing grounds, and it takes place toward the end of the NE monsoon season of .s¯ereb in January or after the cold weather has subsided at the higher elevation. It is a movement from a home base area of permanent residence to an area of temporary residence and back. The distinctive aspect of this movement is that it takes place primarily within the territorial domains of the clan collective. Transhumance is ultimately dependent on the seasonal variation in the weather, on whether rains have occurred, and thus on the availability of pastures and water in the places of destination, and on the condition of pastures at home base. Given the changing pattern of the weather and its impact on environmental resources, this movement’s timing tends to fluctuate based on push factors from the home base and pull factors toward the destination. The mobility rationales underpinning the Soqotrans’ practice of transhumance are as follows: (a) resource conservation, which involves the differentiation between a general grazing area (mibdihil ) and a clanspecific grazing area (zeribah) that is used mostly, but not exclusively, for cows in the central mountains region, in addition to the cyclical practice of allowing designated grazing areas to lie fallow for its regeneration partly as a means of preventing overgrazing (más.el ); (b) weather avoidance in areas where it gets very cold, such as in the high mountains and

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high plateaux areas, pastoralists migrate to the shelter of lowland areas; (c) follow the rain, which entails moving from dry to wet areas in search of water and pastures when the rains have failed at home base; (d) animal “re-socialization,” which is especially for the goats in mountainous areas or in valleys with dense vegetation cover and must be moved to elevated plateau areas with sparse vegetation where they can be actively herded, and thus prevented from lapsing into a feral state; (e) livelihood alternation for pastoralists located in the high mountain and plateau areas and have access to date palm tree gardens in the valleys below and who move there during the harvesting period; and (f) maintenance of traditional access to land, which is specific to groups of pastoralists who transhume to land owned by others, and the use of which is based on unwritten agreements between elders of generations ago in the different communities concerned (e.g., between villages in the central mountains and the eastern plains). 5.4.2

Situational Nomadism: Cross-Territorial Displacement

The recurrent irregularity of the rainy seasons, and the deleterious effects on pastures and water availability, has given rise to a displacement pattern that lacks the regularity, directionality, or the altitudinal characteristics of the mђzhíro-mђrqíyo movement. This resource scarcity-induced nomadism is a movement that is best understood as a drought management strategy. As affected pastoralists’ quest for pastures occurs not only outside the regular transhumant pattern, but also outside the territorial domain of a given clan collective in search of “drought retreats.” This occasional nomadism is called mat‘ino, and its ultimate destination is unknown as it depends on where water and pastures are found; hence, movement becomes erratic and is no longer restricted to the regular vertical (up-down) motion, but entails an horizontal (east-west) movement pattern as well. This movement takes place usually during the transitional seasons of gyahsh, doti, or serebhen, which are periods of high livelihood stress. A scouting mission to adjoining areas to observe and inquire about the availability of water and pastures precedes the move. If these two resources are found in sufficient quantity, then a formal request is made to the responsible persons (muqaddam) of the receiving village or area. The muqaddam usually grant permission under strict arrangements regarding what land space to be used, and the house to be occupied by

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the family. In effect, the mat‘ino movement represents another form of the mutual aid practices (see Chapter 3). 5.4.3

Agropastoral Movement: Food Harvesting Relocation

This movement not only illustrates the notion of seasonal peripatetics, as it involves the mutation of coastal fishermen and hinterland pastoralists into date farmers, but also the seasonal and historically-contingent alternation between primary and supplementary subsistence activity. Agropastoral movement concerns essentially date harvesting in the regions where there are date gardens. In historical terms date harvesting was the high point in the cycle of livelihood making, as dates were considered the most effective hunger suppression food, and thus they brought relief to the seasonal hunger that befell Soqotrans during the horf season. The movement to date gardens is called yaharuf from the verb haruf meaning “to harvest dates.” This movement takes place just prior to the beginning of the SW monsoon season of horf from the fishermen or the pastoralists’ permanent residence to the date gardens during the harvesting period, which is during the months of June and July. In some places, as in the central region, the people use a relay system, as they go to the date gardens for a few days and return to their village for a period of rest. In other places, such as Hadiboh, date farmers move to their date gardens for the duration of the harvest, at which time Hadiboh is partially emptied of its residents. This movement is still practiced by many people, although it is less extensive than during the Sultanate period (see Elie 2004a). All of the pastoral movements discussed above as well as their associated livelihood activities depend on the interactional synergy between the contingent recourse to a varied menu of livelihood practices, the timing and rationale of pastoral movements, the seasons-mediated availability of environmental resources, and the climactic conditions and their socio-economic ramifications for life on Soqotra. The seasonal calendar presented in Table 5.1 articulates the relationship between all of these aspects. The table is based on fieldwork observations and complemented by personal communication with Miranda Morris especially for the Soqotri terms, and consultation of Morris (2002) and Miller and Morris (2004) for the timing of the seasons, and some of the related socioeconomic activities. Under the “seasons” column, numbers are provided in parenthesis, which refer to the months of the year, as Soqotrans use Arabic numbers to designate months—e.g., month one (shahr wahed),

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Table 5.1

Soqotra’s seasonal calendar

Season

Period

Climate

Socio-economic activities

Qeyat (3-4)

Transitional post-winter monsoon season: from March to April

R ains are sporadic and spotty, but mostly rare. Water and grazing availability is limited Weather is warm to pleasant. Westerly winds affect the southern part of the island

Pollination of date-palm trees wherever they are cultivated

Occurs in the spring, but considered as Soqotran summer

Gyahsh (4-5)

Doti (4-6)

Spring transitional period between the two monsoons: from mid-April to mid-May Overlaps the end of spring and beginning of summer, and buffers the dry doti season

Expected to bring pre-summer rains to some parts of island

Transitional pre-summer monsoon season: from late April to early June

Unpredictable summer rains, mostly in highland areas, are seen as harbinger of whether or not drought will follow

Straddles late spring and early summer

Weather is generally cool and breezy if it rains

R elatively hot, as SW winds die down and before SE winds start

Grazing grounds in wet areas are covered with grasses. Water availability is variable

Celebration of Muslim holiday ¯ıd al-¯ adhh.¯ a, the main occasion for the sale of large numbers of livestock, esp. sheep, male goats (mi’shur), and ram (kub´s ) for obligatory sacrificial ritual. Its seasonal occurrence varies as it depends on the lunar calendar Out of season semi-nomadic movement (mat‘ino) in search of appropriate pastures either in or out of territorial domains End of tourism season Import of animal feed—barley (qahm), flour (sha’ir) and wheat shaft (sabus )—in expectation of absence of rains in the horf season Livestock come into season, and sheep and goats are mated to give birth in .s¯ereb. Prior to this period, breeding would normally be discouraged in order to avoid birth during water and grazing scarce horf season Out of season semi-nomadic movement from dry to wet areas to feed animals prior to the long dry summer monsoon season Preferred marriage season, as sufficient cash was accumulated during the previous .s¯ereb season Extensive out migration of fishermen from coastal villages around the island and of pastoralists from the hinterland to villages in Hadhramawt and al-Mahra for 1 to 3 months to work as fishermen, herders, or construction laborers

(continued)

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(continued)

Season

Period

Climate

Socio-economic activities

Horf (6-9)

S.W. summer monsoon season is the longest on the island. Lasts nearly five months: from mid-June to end of September or early October

Gale force medeh winds averaging 70 mph. Strongest impact on northern coastal plains (CP), and high mountains (HM), and mildest on internal valleys (IV), and internal plains (IP) Hottest period of year and very dry. Absence of rains, thus scarcity of grazing and water

Economically moribund time of year, as sea is closed to fishing and shipping. Some fishermen from the northern and southern coasts migrate to the mainland to work as fishermen, among other temporary occupations

Straddles end of summer and mid-fall

Depleting rainwater catchments (karifs esp. in west and east) are replenished with purchased water trucked in from Hadiboh wells

S.erebhen (9-10)

Autumn transitional period that straddles end of horf and beginning of .s¯ereb. Critical period for pastoralists

Winter rains late in coming, extending further the preceding five month dry season

From late September and mid-October: transitional months between summer and winter

Water levels at their lowest and rangelands are bare, esp. in CP, IP, and HP areas

Closure of school for summer vacation (June–August), and partial migration of residents from northern coast toward hinterland settlements and to date gardens (yaharuf ) Season for date harvesting, drying, and storing for later consumption (esp. during Ramadhan). Also, harvesting of aloes juice (esp. in the west) Main season for honey production by hundreds of bee-keepers in villages around the island, which has partially replaced wild honey harvesting Departure of mainland migrant workers Washing and shearing of sheep wool for weaving rugs, especially in the east where rug production is integral to household activity Onset of mezhi period when medeh winds die down and signals the beginning of the main transhumance movement, mђzhíro: from higher to lower grounds This period serves as catalyst of the mђzhíro transhumant movement, which is usually within the territorial domain of the clan collectives. The severity of water scarcity might necessitate resorting to alternative coping strategies: (a) Activation of mutual aid system, as most affected pastoralists canvass other territories seeking permission from owners to graze their livestock

(continued)

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Table 5.1 Season

(continued)

Period

Climate

Socio-economic activities (b) Purchasing of cereals such as barley, wheat shaft, and flour to feed the herds (c) Selective cutting of particular trees, based on local knowledge repertoire, to use as fodder in the absence of grass R eopening of schools (September–May), and return migration from the hinterland to Hadiboh town especially, but to all coastal settlements

S.e¯reb (10-2)

NE winter monsoon season: from late October to early February Straddles the fall and winter

Main rain season from October to December

R eactivation of economic life, as sea opens for shipping and fishing

R eplenishment of pastures High water availability in most regions, and the replenishment of rainwater catchments (kar¯ıfs and lims )

Ecotourism season begins

Milder .serbihi winds, cold in higher elevation and cool/pleasant in lowland areas

Parturition season (esp. for goats and sheep), and animals are lactating. Main period for pastoralists to sell two-weeks old male kids in Hadiboh Main season for milk production and consumption, which reduces dependence on some purchased food items. Also, production of butter-oil from cow and goat milk for sale in one-liter plastic bottles Breeding season for cattle in central and eastern regions Home gardening activities (planting and caring) start early in the season

Greater availability for odd-jobbing opportunities (e.g., construction, tourist guides, etc.) Preferred visiting period of Soqotran émigrés from the Gulf Migration from the hinterland to the coast for fishing Second honey collecting season depending on rains Buying and storing of food (esp. sacks of rice and flour), as form of food security, to last through the next horf season, when there is usually a shortage in local supply or a substantial price hike

(continued)

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(continued)

Period

Climate

Socio-economic activities R amadhan, whatever the season of its occurrence, which depends on the lunar calendar, is a period of custom-obligated meat consumption. This is followed by ¯ıd al-¯ adhh.¯ a, which is a major occasion for the local sale of livestock R eturn of mainland migrant workers Onset of zuhum period, the end of .s¯ereb, when kids and lambs are weaned. And beginning of meroqihi, and the return transhumance movement, mђrqíyo: from lower to higher grounds. This takes place toward end of January, or later Harvesting of vegetables and fruits from home gardens around the island, which are primarily for sale (and secondarily for home consumption) in Hadiboh, the main market, until end of February

etc. Under the “period” column the seasons of spring, summer, fall, and winter are referred to as a means of identifying the seasonal equivalence with the solstice calendar.

5.5 Residential Modality: Shifting Economic Geography The islanders’ settlement pattern provides a key indicator of the changes in the pastoral mode of subsistence through their adaptation to new economic exigencies, and consequently the transfer of primary status to previously supplementary subsistence activities. The shift in settlement pattern and its linkage to the island’s changing economic geography is best illustrated in the following statistics: In 1966, the year prior to the end of the Sultanate and during which herding was the primary subsistence activity, the estimated population distribution was 83% in the hinterland and 17% on the northern coast mostly (Brown 1966). By

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2004, which is the date of the last official population census, the distribution was nearly reversed with an estimated 60% of the population on the coast and 40% in the hinterland, which confirms that fishing among other non-traditional economic activities have displaced herding as the primary livelihood activity. This history-contingent shift in the island’s economic geography and its impact on Soqotrans’ settlement pattern is illustrated with a brief discussion of the state policy-induced changes in residential modality. Noteworthy is that in contrast to the centrifugal settlement pattern that prevailed during the Sultanate, from the 1970s onward the settlement pattern became centripetal due to agglomerative pressures from state policies implemented by the Southern Yemeni state. These agglomerative pressures were enhanced by the subsequent policies of the unified Yemeni state and by the interventions of international agencies. I will briefly highlight the policy-pull effects on settlement pattern of the socialist administration, since it initially carved the path that was followed by subsequent national and international actors. • The creation of car tracks all over the island through the “roads cutting” initiative (shaq al-t.uruq¯ at in Arabic), which evokes a machete-like space clearing gesture in Soqotra’s wilderness. The network of tracks was as significant as the positioning of wadis or pastures in determining the emplacement of villages. It initiated a specific pattern of internal migration: from inside mountain caves, as pastoralists gradually abandoned their cave habitats for the plains of the hinterland, and from seasonal makeshift encampments in scattered hamlets on the side of wadis, to more permanent built structures in nucleated villages on the plains in the proximity of car tracks, and toward the coast. • The land redistribution policy, which affected the coastal regions, and that was aimed partly at breaking down the clans’ isolation in the hinterland, and was linked to the promotion of fishing and agriculture as alternative livelihoods to herding. This eventually led to the population redistribution from the hinterland to the coast. • The institutionalization of formal education through the establishment of schools, which eventually changed the routines of pastoralists’ families by inducing them to send their kids to school, and thus modified the allocation of household chores, as boys were favored to attend school.

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• The introduction, not only of new consumption items, but more importantly of tools (e.g., iron for knives, agricultural tools, fishing equipment, nails for construction, etc.), which enhanced the material culture especially in housing construction, and thus contributed to a shift from makeshift to more permanent structures. • The initiation of an urbanization process through the creation of an urban-based administrative apparatus with an embryonic civil service and the availability of modern amenities (e.g., schools, health facilities, imported food, and jobs), which encouraged the migratory movement from the hinterland to the coast, especially to the two main urban agglomerations of Qalansiyah and especially of Hadiboh the capital. These policies influenced Soqotrans’ use of space as domains of livelihood and their selection of place as residential locations and thus modified the island’s settlement pattern. However, in spite of the significance of these internal transformations engineered by the socialist administration the population distribution did not appreciably changed from that of the Sultanate, as the 1994 census confirmed the lopsided population distribution: 32,492 (84.72%) in the rural areas and 5131 (1.27%) in the urban areas.1 However, assuming that the population figure of 11,220 that was estimated by Brown in 1966 is accurate, the socialist social policies (e.g., food distribution) led to improved living conditions and thus a population growth of two-thirds between 1967 and 1994, and it inaugurated a population movement pattern that was to be encouraged by succeeding administrations and their international collaborators starting in 1996 with the designation of Soqotra as a biodiversity preserve. Their interventions are already redrawing the current socio-spatial configuration of the island. In effect, the extension of an asphalted roads network around the island is replacing the natural ecological seams—e.g., in the form of naturally occurring dividing line between coast and hinterland, uplands and valleys, forest and plain—that usually determined the placement of villages and the demarcation of borders among them, which could potentially lead to greater population agglomeration and urbanization.

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5.5.1

Geography of Residence: Configuration of Regions, Villages, and Clans

The social organization, the economic underpinning, and the political administration of the Soqotran community are configured by (a) its pastoral mode of subsistence’s diverse repertoire of livelihood practices, (b) the population’s spatial mobility driven by the seasonal availability and alternating topographic location of key environmental resources, and (c) the islanders’ residential modality determined by the shifting geographic location of livelihood opportunities. These factors constitute the logic of the island’s geography of residence, which is articulated in five regions that demarcate (a) the distinctive sociocultural regions of the island, (b) the particular constellation of livelihood niches, and (c) the jurisdiction of traditional local representatives (shaykhs and muqaddams) that encompass 45 areas. The topographic designations of each area reflect the five physiographic areas described in Chapter 3. Each area refers to an agglomeration of villages spread over a given territory, and is named after, but not in all instances, the main village in which a mosque (especially for Friday prayers), a clinic, and a school are located, and for which a regional shaykh is selected. Finally, each area is further sub-divided into individual villages and hamlets shared by clan collectives, and headed by the muqaddam as clan or village leader. All of the above factors are presented in a table at the end of this section and its contents are explained in the following paragraphs. The figures for villages and clans and the island’s population distribution are based on a number of sources: my systematic, but not exhaustive, collection of information directly in the regions; from knowledgeable individuals from the regions; and a systematic review of the data from the 2004 census. The social information is based on my observations, complemented by the testimonies of multiple locals from these regions. Also, the number of villages identified (869) includes hamlets as well as seasonally uninhabited grazing areas used for transhumance, and are just as important to pastoralists as are inhabited villages. The actual number of settlements might be slightly higher than nine hundred, and the number of clans might be nearer to five hundred. In contrast, the census of 1994 was based on 880 villages, and that of 2004 covered 629 villages. This lower number of villages suggests that the uninhabited seasonal transhumant herding encampments were not counted by the census takers due to the timing of the census or due to their increasing abandonment. In the

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Table 5.2, these seasonal grazing encampments, which are most evident in the central and western regions, are identified with an asterisk (*) under the villages’ column. Also, the number of clan collectives (412) does not always include clan sub-divisions, which seems widespread (e.g., in the internal plains of the western region). The term “tribes” is not used in the table as it is more accurate to characterize Soqotrans’ social organization as clan collectives (as discussed in Chapter 3). Regarding the rural-urban population distribution, it is noteworthy that the only two towns on the island have nearly a third (12,407) of the total population of 44,120: Hadiboh (8545 partly inflated by mainlanders) and Qalansiyah (3862). The fact that these two towns are located on the northern coast indicates an inexorable urbanizing, or “coastalizing,” trend in residential patterns. Moreover, by excluding the population of these two towns, and dividing the remaining total (31,713) with the number of villages (629) included in the census, the average population per village (50.4) corroborates my characterization of Soqotra as a clan-based “atomistic community” in which the island’s landscape is sundered into an Archipelago of clans’ hamlets. Indeed, only about 10% of the non-urban population lives in villages of more than one hundred inhabitants. As only 64 out of the 629 villages identified in the 2004 census have more than one hundred inhabitants, which are distributed as follows: North 19, South 9, East 11, West 20, and Center 5. And out of these 64 villages only 22 have population of more than two hundred: North 10, South 6, East 2, West 2, and Center 2. The average population in the overwhelming majority of villages is in double digit figures, which is partly an effect of the land-extensive herd management system. Furthermore, the table seeks to illustrate the phenomenon of mah.alliy¯ın, Soqotra’s environmental migrants, as discussed in Chapter 3. This form of internal migration has occurred in many regions. However, the table identifies only the places where the incoming migrants represent a significant proportion of the total population. These places are marked with an asterisk (*) under the clans’ column with the total number of clans in parenthesis, next to the original number of clans. Finally, the particularities identified for each region are an attempt to provide a succinct and provisional sociological profile of each region. This profile is articulated around the use of two organizing concepts: The first is homogeneity, which refers to a population configuration that is made up exclusively of related clans engaged in herding activities. This kind of activity is accompanied by a settlement pattern that is centrifugal in

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Table 5.2

Geography of residence in Soqotra

Regions

Areas

Topographya

Northern (14,000)

Hadiboh Hadiboh (Suburb) Qadhub Ayhaft Rewjed Di Hamdh Ghubba

Central (3000)

Southern (4600)

Villages

Clans

Coast CP CP HM HM CP CP

Town 38 5 8 23* 12 17

NA NA 12 5 6 (75)* 43 (42)* 17

Heterogeneous clan as well as ethnic composition with approximately 83 clans sharing 103 villages, thus giving it a centripetal settlement pattern. Its share of 32% of the population represents the highest concentration of relatively sedentary inhabitants on the island. They are engaged in diversified occupations (government staff, fishermen, agropastoralists, shop keepers, etc.). There is herding activity of goats mostly. There is higher access to public amenities due to its location as the island’s political and economic center, with airport and main seaport

Diksam Shibhon Da’arho Difshe Di Asmo Klim Hagher (3 parts) Sha’ab Di Alf Sha’ab Di Ilofi

HP HP IV IV IV HP HM IV IV

111* 30* 12 11 10 9 122* 23 18

9 3 1 3 2 5 19 (34)* 17 8

Highly homogeneous clan composition with highest number of villages (358) per individual clans (64), thus strong centrifugal settlement pattern, which reflects the practice of an extensive pastoralism, and on which the inhabitants are highly dependent. Date cultivation is restricted to the IV areas. Has lowest level of population (7%) with a relatively specialized livelihood, as semi-nomadic pastoralists possessing a diverse herd composition, in which cows are the dominant animal. Has the least access to public amenities

Iglisu Serbehe Sirahen Mahfirhen Noged Qa’ara

HP HP CP CP CP

5 7 6 7 11

Moderately heterogeneous social composition with relatively proportionate distribution of clans (36) to villages (53), thus a centripetal settlement organization facilitated by the collective nature of primary livelihood activity, fishing (esp. lobster). This is complemented by agropastoral activities (i.e., date and vegetable cultivation, and herding). Ranks fourth in population proportion (10%) with inhabitants of variable mobility, and inadequate access to public amenities

9 10 1 11 22

Particularities

(continued)

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Table 5.2 (continued) Regions

Areas

Topographya

Eastern (8400)

Ma’abudh Dibna Tentehen Tiyda’ (Shizeb) Sheteh Momi Homhil Qariyyah Halla Irisel

IV CP IP IP IP HP HP CP CP CP

Western (14,000)

Qabhitin Kishin Di Rakbu Shibere Mayha Ma’ala Shu’ab Di Nít Stum Liska Sheteh Qalansiyah Qalansiyah Samh.a Abd al-Kuri

IP IP IP IP IP HP CP CP IP IP IP Coast Island Island

Total

45

Villages

Clans

Particularities

12 4 16 18 21 74* 14 4 11 10

(23) 21 1 (22) 19 10 (30) 25 24 5 13 (22)* 13 (11)* 6

Relatively heterogeneous clan composition with greater number of clans (137) than villages (124), thus having a centripetal settlement pattern. The region straddles multiple topographical terrains, thus population have access to diverse livelihood sources (e.g., fishing, date and vegetable gardening, and herding). This is complemented by (in-kind) remittances from relatives in the Gulf, and local government jobs in Hadiboh. Ranks third in population proportion (19%) with moderate availability of public amenities

32 10 15 10 47* 49* 3 6 4 2 11 Town NA 6

14 7 6 4 16 9 7 (7) 5 7 1 10 NA NA NA

Homogeneous clan composition with relatively unbalanced distribution of clans (86) to villages (189), thus a centrifugal settlement pattern. Population is primarily engaged in goat herding and some sheep, as there are no camels, cows, or donkeys, highly mobile pastoralists due to high water scarcity given the dominant topography of arid internal plains; minimal to non-existent access to public amenities. Ranks second in population proportion (32%). However, this figure is based on the geographical division of the island, and not on its political division which allocates a sizable portion of the west to the Eastern District (e.g., Qabhitin). Some pastoralists undertake seasonal fishing on the northern and southern coasts. The fishing settlements of the western end of the southern plain are made up of people from this region. With the exception of Qalansiyah town and Qeyso village, the region is bereft of vegetable gardens and date cultivation

869

412

a CP: coastal plains; HM: high mountains; HP: high plateaux; IV: interior valleys; IP: interior plains

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orientation. The second is heterogeneity, which refers to a resident population composed of unrelated clans engaged mostly, but not exclusively, trade-related activities (e.g., fishing) and are organized in a settlement pattern that is centripetal in orientation. These two terms are operationalized according to the following criteria: (a) The determination of the homogeneity or heterogeneity of a region’s clan composition is based on the ratio of villages to clans: the higher the number of villages vis-àvis the number of clans, the more homogeneous the social composition, or vice versa; (b) whether the pattern of settlements in a region tends toward agglomeration (centripetal) or dispersal (centrifugal), which is determined on the basis of the same criteria for assessing homogeneity and heterogeneity; (c) ranking in population distribution; (d) nature of livelihood activities; and (e) the availability of public amenities: schools, clinics, mosques, and government offices (see Table 5.2).

5.6 The Pastoral Fauna: Livestock as a Neglected “Endemic” Species Soqotra is endowed with an endogenously evolved pastoral subsistence regime together with its knowledge repertoire preserved in the islanders’ indigenous language, and the associated practices involving the pastoral fauna. These constitute a unique assemblage of cultural assets that are an integral part of Soqotra’s landscape as a form of sociocultural endemism, which was and still is the enabling condition for the conservation of the island’s biodiversity. Indeed, this pastoral fauna with millennia-old presence on the island is an inseparable part of its endemic fauna and flora. Moreover, the ecologically-embedded mode of husbandry practiced without externally-induced modifications until the 1980s has ensured a relation of commensality between livestock and endemic plant species over centuries. In spite of this fact, there prevails a benign neglect of the pastoral fauna among environmentalists specializing on Soqotra, who reflexively invoke the epithet “introduced” to dismiss livestock as an anthropogenic nuisance. Indeed, they seem animated by a “graze phobia” as they are quick to castigate livestock as a threat to the island’s biodiversity in the absence of systematic empirical research. The persistence of this appreciation deficit vis-à-vis the pastoral fauna is an effect of environmentalists’ professional commitment to a notion of endemism that not only betrays an ecological purism as manifested in the bias against the anthropogenic dispersal of fauna, but also privileges the presence of

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species in a given environment that dates from millions of years before the present, and not in millennial terms which is a temporal scale more appropriate to human cultures and livelihood practices. By the latter standard the pastoral herd and the ensemble of associated cultural practices would be considered “endemic.” My use of the term endemic takes on a counter-intuitive connotation, as it does not imply the conventional meaning of exclusive occurrence in a specific place, but privileges the notion of historical longevity—measured in millennia not in millions of years—of the fauna and the accompanying modes of subsistence of Soqotra’s inhabitants. To rectify this widespread sociocultural appreciation deficit among the environmentalists’ community and their prejudices against the pastoral fauna, in the following three sub-sections: (a) I undertake a historical genealogy of Soqotra’s pastoral herds that stresses their ancient pedigree and long presence on the island, (b) I highlight the consequences of the graze phobia associated with the appreciation deficit vis-à-vis the pastoral herds, and (c) I provide a provisional inventory of the herds population and analyze some key aspects about their regional distribution, density and average herd size per household. 5.6.1

Herds’ Genealogy: Millennia of Pastoralism

Pastoralism as the specialized herding of cattle was already being practiced in South Arabia by the middle of the fifth millennium BCE (McCorriston and Martin 2009). It is hypothesized that the Bronze Age (third to second millennium BCE) marks the beginning of the dispersal of MSA language speakers who most likely were practitioners of an “opportunistic mixed strategy” who brought along their cultivars as well as their herds of livestock (Boivin et al. 2009). This demographic expansion into Soqotra was most probably catalyzed by the seaborne incense trade into which the island was fully integrated, at least since the third millennium BCE when the Egyptians sent expeditions by sea to collect incense from the land of Punt and Soqotra (Bulliet 1990: 44). The pastoral herd they brought with them was similarly isolated, as Bulliet notes: “Socotra experienced little introduction of new species after its initial settlement and exploitation as an incense island” (1990: 45). In this light, and by the temporal standard of human culture, Soqotra’s pastoral herds can be considered “endemic” to the island. However, the chronic myopia of the community of natural scientists studying Soqotra’s biodiversity has prevented the

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recognition of the intrinsic nexus between Soqotrans’ cultural endemism in terms of linguistic heritage, cultural traditions and livelihood practices, and the preservation of the endemic fauna and flora, which together constitutes the biocultural diversity of Soqotra. This suggests the need to recalibrate biological endemism and sociocultural endemism into an integrated biocultural diversity conservation policy for Soqotra. This point leads me to a brief profile of Soqotra’s livestock species: Goats: (Capra hircus [irh¯ an plural for female, and mi’shur plural for male in Soqotri]) were first domesticated in the Euphrates river valley among other places in the Near East about 11,000 years ago. They began their migration into the South Arabian Peninsula by the sixth millennium BCE, along with their herds of cattle, camels, sheep, and goats (Blench 2010: 8–9). As already noted they probably migrated to the island between the third and first millennium BCE. Goats make up the majority of ruminant species on the island, and their herding defines the Soqotran identity until recently. This is captured in a prevalent local selfperception as quoted by Morris: “The definition of someone being a Soqotri is that he rears goats” (2002: 317). Indeed, it is customary for every Soqotran family, both rural and urban, to have a small household herd of 3 to 5 goats. Goats are described as “social” because they tend to form “extended families” that roam and graze together and are considered “clean” as they are mindful of where they graze. For example, they avoid sheep pastures whose manure contaminate the grass (Morris 2002: 317–319). They are nimble grazers as they consume only the grass blades and leave the roots, and are finicky browsers as they picked the best leaves. The goat breed of Soqotra is typically a small type averaging 23 kg for a mature adult and has twisted horns about 45 cm (EU 2000b: 2–8). They are differentiated into two basic types according to their pasturage domains and the associated divergent physical characteristics and milking capacity: highlands and lowlands (see Morris 2002: 317–321). Goats are the only ruminant species herded in all agro-ecological zones of the island. Sheep: (Ovis aries [t¯etin plural for mature female and kub´s plural for ram in Soqotri]) were probably first domesticated in Eastern Turkey about 11,000 years ago. Among the four types of sheep, the small thin-tailed type is the one that migrated to the island. In contrast, it is the fat-tailed sheep that is characteristic of the Arabian Peninsula (Blench 2010: 9). In Soqotra an adult sheep weighs on average 23 kg. In contrast to goats, sheep are a low prestige animal, as they are considered “stupid”: If left unattended they may get lost, and are destructive of rangeland as they

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overgraze and uproot the grasses. Indeed, a herd of sheep on a rangeland used to be compared to “a cloud of locust.” Accordingly, they are put to separate pastures. Their milk is considered “inferior” to goats’ and was not consumed by adult unless boiled (Morris 2002: 374). They are primarily, if not solely, women’s property and responsibility. Paradoxically, sheep engender an ambivalent attitude among pastoralists, as they are placed just above the donkey in terms of status. This is in spite of the sheep’s contributions to the pastoral household. Their wool is useful for making rugs; they are readily slaughtered for guests; they are sold instead of the more valuable goats to meet living expenses; and they supply milk, skin, and manure (used as fertilizer in home gardens). Their primary pasturage domains are the lowland plains and especially in the central plateau areas, which, in the past, were called igalis di t¯etin (the sheep regions) (see Morris 2002: 310–317). Cattle: (Bos Taurus [ilhitin plural for mature cow and fa‘ihur plural for bull in Soqotri]) were present in South Arabia in domesticated form by the early sixth millennium BCE (McCorriston and Martin 2009). Among the three major cattle types migrating from West Asia into South Arabia—the humpless H . amitic shorthorn, humped zebu, and the humpless shorthorn—it is the last one that reached Soqotra. It did so by way of “South Arabia with settlers and traders moving westward from Asia along the coastal and inland trade routes” (Gwynne 1967: 41). They migrated to Soqotra probably in the late third millennium BCE (Bulliet 1990: 45). The Soqotran breed is a diminutive humpless shorthorn cattle that weighs on average 200 kg for an adult. Their primary pasturage domains include the H . agher Mountains and its foothills, and the plateaus and interior valleys of the central region, and the high plateau of the east (Momi), which constitute the island’s cow belt. Cattle are, or used to be, reared in a special enclosure system called zeribah. They are not found in the west and only in a few settlements and in insignificant numbers in the south. Milk production is their primary purpose; however, the meat, of bull calves primarily, is consumed during major celebrations, such as weddings. Camels: (Camelus dromedaries [ib‘ar plural for male, and gamahal plural for female in Soqotri]) are native to the Arabian Peninsula and were omnipresent as a wild species. Their domestication may have taken place in late second millennium (1200–1100) BCE. By the first millennium BCE they were an essential part of the subsistence economy, and subsequently they became the indispensable means of transportation for

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an intercontinental trading system across the deserts of the Peninsula and beyond. Indeed, they were instrumental in the rise and economic sustainability of South Arabia’s ancient “incense kingdoms” from the first millennium BCE to the seventh century CE (Boivin et al. 2009: 265). The Soqotran breed is a single hump dromedary similar to the Arabian breed, which probably came to Soqotra prior to 1500 BCE as a result of the island’s participation in the incense trade, and was used to carry the harvested incense from the hinterland’s plantations to the coast for export (Bulliet 1990: 45, 57). They were bred in only a few places around the island: Noged in the south, Momi in the east, and Di Hamdh in the north. However, they were found almost everywhere on the island as camels were until the 1980s the only means of human transportation across the island prior to the onslaught of cars starting in the 1990s. In the past, camels were primarily owned by the political elites and merchants who used them to collect taxes paid in-kind from, and to distribute goods for sale throughout, the hinterland. Currently, they are found mostly on the coastal plains of N¯ oged in the south, and in Di Hamdh in the north. They are still used as means of transportation of people and goods over the steep and rocky terrains of Soqotra’s mountains. Also, camel meat is consumed during major invitations, especially for visiting émigrés from the Gulf diaspora. Today, they are being replaced by an expending network of asphalted roads and the increasing use of cars as the standard means of transportation, hence their rapidly dwindling numbers (see below). Donkeys: (Equus asinus africanus [ah.m¯ıra plural for both male and female in Soqotri]) are the domesticated descendants of the wild ass, which is indigenous to the African continent, where a chain of sub-species was spawn from the Atlas Mountains in Morocco and across to the Nubia region bordering the Red Sea. They were present in Yemen as a wild species from the Early Holocene. Their Nubian and Somali sub-species appear to have been domesticated in late Holocene period in Egypt and migrated south during the incense trade (Boivin et al. 2009: 268). It is hypothesized that the Soqotran breed “is a likely descendant of ancestors originating from a Nubian port, brought in during trading along the Red Sea and the Horn of Africa centuries ago” (Cheung and DeVantier 2006: 141). Unlike the other species in the pastoral fauna, the donkey is exclusively used as a beast of burden, and as a result it occupies the last rung of the prestige ladder in the Soqotran pastoralist’s hierarchy of valued animals. Their primary habitats are in the eastern part, central valleys, and

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the northern coastal plains. While donkeys are still used around the island, they are increasingly seen as a nuisance and the government’s assistance was repeatedly sought to remove them from the island, as mass culling would be unacceptable to Soqotrans. 5.6.2

Graze Phobia: Policy Consequences

Environmentalists’ exclusionary categorization of endemism has engendered a tacit misanthropy toward Soqotran pastoralists as evidenced in their policy proposal to depopulate “protected areas” (see below), and a reflexive species bias against the pastoral herds given their gratuitous ascription as an environmental threat glibly ascribed to “overgrazing.” The reflexive evocation of this term has led to an endemic “graze phobia” among conservationists that promotes the false “public image of extensive rangelands are of pasture land overgrazed by livestock, and therefore in environmental crisis, and threatening wildlife and biodiversity” (NiamirFuller et al. 2012: 2). The resulting cultural appreciation deficit has fed into a local knowledge deficit about the role of Soqotran pastoralists and the utility of their pastoral herds. To be fair, however, that knowledge is available but it is not informing policy. For example, the encyclopedic texts by Miller and Morris (2004) and Morris (2002) have revealed a sophisticated indigenous science associated with the ensemble of practices of animal husbandry, the use of the herds’ by-products, and the social, cultural, and economic functions they play in Soqotrans’ lifeworld. Consequently, the environmental conservationists’ local knowledge deficit has led to their reflexive antipathy toward Soqotra’s pastoral herds. This antipathy has sedimented into a ritualistic lament about the herd’s presence inexorably leading to a “fragile equilibrium between vegetation, man and livestock…. and a downward spiral for the island and its biota as well” (Wranik 1998: 142). This view betrays an eco-centric sensibility that is associated with the antiquarian nature-culture antinomy, according to which human cultural practices, indeed their very presence, are presumed to be destructive of, or at least a nuisance to, the natural environment. This antiquarian nature-culture antinomy has long been replaced by the currently prevailing view that there is an “inalienable link” between nature and culture. Moreover, this antiquarian discourse is complemented by the old paradigm of equilibrium ecology, which wrongly assumes that ecological systems will sustain an ideal state of equilibrium in the absence of human interference (Botkin 1990).

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The reliance on this antiquarian paradigm is leading to policies that could have misanthropic effects on Soqotrans through their exclusion from protected areas, and which would undermine their indigenous livelihoods. This is exemplified in the enactment of Cabinet Decree No. 48 in February 2008, entitled “To limit the potential harmful impacts on the natural environment of the Soqotra Archipelago due to the improper management of livestock and pastures.” This decree was in response to UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee’s request that the Yemeni Government address the impacts of livestock grazing on the island’s biodiversity (Scholte et al. 2008). In contrast to previous policies that merely sought to establish enclosure boundaries for protected areas, this decree sought to impose exclosure zones by intrusively regulating the livelihood practices of pastoralists. Accordingly, it called for the regulation of pastoralist activities in the areas designated “World Natural Heritage Sites” with the following policy strictures: The obligatory formation of herder associations and the restriction of the number of livestock to be owned by herding families. More consequential is the clause calling for the establishment of “fattening farms for their livestock located outside of the World Heritage Site, through a program that supports balanced feeding of livestock… in order to increase the productivity and marketing value of livestock.” This entails the experimentation with trade-based herding through small-scale commercial ranching as a transition from milk-producing subsistence pastoralism and therefore the transformation of Soqotran herders into ranchers with unforeseen consequences for the rural ecology and economy (see Chapter 6). Unbeknown to those who formulated this policy is that they were foisting on Soqotran pastoralist an alien value orientation in the form of the practice of “maximizing of economic returns” on herds as a form of investment in animals as “wealth-assets.” This is in contrast to the prevailing Soqotran norm of “optimizing subsistence” in animals as “subsistence-means” and their sale is constrained by the moral reluctance to let them be part of an unrestricted monetized exchange system. As a result, Soqotran pastoralists’ commodification of their herds is always contingent on the basic needs of households, with all other considerations being secondary (see Chapter 6). Fortunately, however, as in previous cases of policy initiatives formulated in ignorance of local reality and imposed top-down from the outside, this one fell into oblivion soon after the project that provided veterinary services ended in early 2011. As the perfunctorily established pastoralists associations disbanded in the absence

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of external incentives. The above policy initiative was based largely on a seemingly plausible, but an empirically unsubstantiated, threat to the island’s biodiversity posed by livestock, given the inadequate, if not nonexistent, knowledge of the spatial and temporal dynamics of the livestock population as one report acknowledges (see Scholte et al. 2008: 10). In fact, the most basic set of information about Soqotra’s pastoral system is missing: (a) the population and distribution of the livestock herds around the island; (b) the extent to which the once effective pastoral management system is still in use or has become dysfunctional; and (c) the nature of the ecological effects of the above. 5.6.3

Provisional Inventory: Variable Estimations

After two decades of international interventions on the island, there are no reliable data on the composition and distribution of livestock around the island. The continuing absence of a reliable census of Soqotra’s pastoral herds is a testament to the myopia of both the mainland government and the plethora of international agencies, whose focus for two decades of intervention and tens of millions of dollars spent on projects, was and remains almost exclusively on the preservation of endemic species and ecotourism-related activities. For over a generation the information regarding the livestock population has been based on back-of-the-envelope estimations, as is presented in Table 5.3. The varying figures in the table betray the unreliability of these censuses; nevertheless, they offer a comparative glimpse on the historical trajectory of Soqotra’s pastoral herd. While lack of a serious effort on the part of external actors is to be blamed, to be fair, however, this data-deficit is exacerbated by the chronic reluctance of Soqotran pastoralists to share the actual numbers of their herds. There are many reasons given for this reluctance: (a) pastoralists really do not know the actual numbers of their herds given their lack of numeracy; (b) the legacy of secrecy about one’s assets (whether human or animals) inherited from the socialist era when the government “abducted” sons from pastoralist families to be educated in boarding schools away from their villages and parents; and (c) h.asad wa ‘a¯ın (“envy and evil eye”), which one pastoralist described in rather hyperbolic term as the “the Bedouin’s creed” (al‘aq¯ıda al-bad¯ u ) to refer to a primal fear among pastoralists about talking about their herd size due to the ominous consequences on the fate of their animals. However, the justification for this reluctance that seems

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Table 5.3 Census dates

Historical data on Soqotra’s pastoral herds Herds

Notes

Goats

Sheep

1966

19,000

26,000

Mid-1980s

70,287

Early 1990s

Late 1990s

2000

Cattle

Camels

Donkeys

1800

350

500

17,316

1866

501

NA

90,000

60,000

12,000

5000

2000

150,000

80,000

15,000

7000

3000

29,300

7300

2500

400

NA

It may have been the first, albeit informal, census, which was carried out by British colonial officer G. H. Brown (1966), who candidly confessed that “field counts are at best only better than guess work” Cited in EU Sectoral Report: Agriculture and Livestock (2000b: 2–5) without identifying the source These figures are from the unpublished 1994 agricultural census from the Ministry of Agriculture, Soqotra branch Cited in the EU, Soqotra Archipelago Master Plan (SAMP ) (2000: chapter 13:2) Cited in the EU, Soqotra Archipelago Master Plan (SAMP), based on a survey after a major drought, which killed an estimated 60% of the livestock

to capture the essence of the problem was explained in more modern metaphorical terms by an urbanized former pastoralist as follows: “It is like asking people how much money they have in the bank.” Nevertheless, that reflexive reluctance about revealing herd size could be disarmed in exchange for needed assistance (e.g., veterinary services). Today, the actual figure for the population of livestock in Soqotra remains elusive, and the most recent attempt to remedy this situation is still unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, the figures obtained from the 2002

5

Table 5.4

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195

Pastoral herds’ distribution

Districts

Eastern (Hadiboh) Western (Qalansiyah) Total

Herds Goats

Sheep

Cattle

Camels

Donkeys

178,000 274,840 452,840

26,280a 75,246 101,526

10,629 0 10,629

66 0 66

968 0 968

Grand total 215,943 350,086 566,029

a The total figure in this column is a combination of the number of sheep (7825) identified in the

Eastern district’s development report (that seemed too low), and the figures for sheep (18,455) collected by the “Community-Based Livestock Development and Marketing Improvement Project,” which got reliable figures in exchange for vaccination. However, the project intervened in only a few areas within the Eastern district

unpublished agricultural census are presented in Table 5.4 below for illustrative purpose only. They are cited in the official development plans of the two districts of Soqotra: An Overview of Development for the District of Hadiboh (2006: 20); and The Development Report for the District of Qalansiyah (2007: 37). Finally, my use of these figures is due to the fact that they are the only ones available, even though they may be only partially reliable at best. On the basis of these figures three sets of observation can be made about a few key dimensions of Soqotra’s pastoralism: First is the regional variation in herd composition, and the surprisingly higher number of goats and sheep in Qalansiyah than in Hadiboh district, in spite of the latter’s larger territory and higher human population. However, this is compensated by Hadiboh district’s more varied herd composition. These figures, whatever their degree of reliability, confirm the cultural distinction between east and west (i.e., that cattle are neither herded not eaten in the west), and more importantly the enforced herd specialization in the west is due to its greater aridity than the east. Also, the larger number of herds in the west suggests a deliberate strategy of claiming territorial grazing rights, if not land ownership, through the presence of specific clan-related herds on the land, in order to make up for the absence of human residents given the west’s relatively sparse population. This confirms the fact that pastoralism is first and foremost a mode of territorial occupancy in which the value of the herds is primarily as markers of individual pastoral families as shared “owners” in the clan collective’s territorial commons; and only secondarily a system of livestock production. Furthermore, the difference in numbers suggests

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the deployment of a risk management strategy through the “maximumstanding-stock” technique of herding, which entails the maximization of herd size as an adaptation strategy to the west’s chronic deficit of environmental resources in order to ensure the survival of part of the herds in case of resource failure; and not what could appear, from casual observation, as the abandonment of herd management. Second, the livestock population density for the island as a whole is 156 animals per km2 , which is much higher than the human population density of 12.17 persons per km2 . On the basis of Soqotra Island’s landmass as measuring 3625 km2 , the disaggregated figures for the animal density for each district is as follows: For the Eastern district, which occupies less than a third of the island (approx. 995 km2 ), the herd density is 351.9 animals per km2 , and for the Western district, which occupies more than two-thirds of the island (approx. 2630 km2 ), the herd density is 82.1 animals per km2 . This density level might be seen, rather prematurely, as confirming a presumed problem of overgrazing around the island that has been attributed largely on the basis of analytical extrapolation based on observations made through ambulant and haphazard landscape reconnaissance and are not informed by island-wide empirical research (Van Damme and Banfield 2011; Brown and Mies 2012). Third, the average size of the herd per family/household (with an average of 7.59 persons) in the pastoral areas excluding the urban areas is 295.50. The optimal size of herds has not been determined in the context of Soqotra’s grazing resources and of the island’s climatic vagaries (e.g., unpredictable rainfall, and frequent drought); therefore, it cannot be ascertained whether this figure exceeds the island’s carrying capacity— if such a measure can be meaningfully established. This figure is based on taking the total number of families outside the two towns of the island as listed in the census report of 2004 (CSO 2004: 137, 141) and dividing them by the total herd figure. Using the same formula, but disaggregated by district, the breakdown of the average number of animals per rural household is as follows: For Hadiboh district it is 60.56 animals per each of the 3516 rural families out of a total of 4658 families, and for Qalansiyah district it is 530.43 animals per each of the 660 rural families out of a total of 1123 families. These figures are merely indicative, and they are used here to provisionally fill a data void regarding some important aspects of the foundational livelihood of the Soqotran community.

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Coda: Incremental Adaptations

The chapter has shown how the pastoral mode of subsistence in Soqotra has always encompassed multiple means of drawing resources from the environment. Moreover, these means were contingent on (a) the island’s agro-ecological zones, (b) seasonal shifts in intra-household labor allocation, and (c) the economic changes introduced by shifts in the state’s political economy and its associated menu of policies. These policies have engendered population movements, configured settlement patterns, mediated livelihood practices, and induced the marginalization of the pastoral herds. The result is a series of spatial displacements and social mutations, which are briefly highlighted below in terms of the changes in the Soqotran pastoralists’ domains of livelihood, residential location, and socio-cultural milieu: • The territorial domains of livelihood of Soqotran pastoralists have endured a gradual delinking of their traditional livelihood practices from their original geographic milieu. This is manifested in the initial symbiosis between the pastoralist and his grazing grounds through the seasonal performance of the transhumant pattern of mђzhíro and mђrqíyo. This pattern has partially unraveled under the pressure of the inexorable monetization of the local economy, the appeal of salaried non-traditional occupations, the cultural temptations of a modernizing lifestyle, among other factors (see Volume 2). • The residential location of Soqotrans has been the most susceptible to external entanglements through the initial process of socializing troglodytic pastoralists and subsequently of spatial demarcation of the island to accommodate the changing political geography of the different regimes introduced from the mainland. More significantly, the expansion of roads construction and public sector post creation accelerated the shift in the island’s population distribution from the hinterland to the coast. • The shift in socio-cultural milieu is perhaps most significant, since it represents the culmination of a series of state-engendered delocalization initiatives. This shift does not merely exemplify a topographical displacement from mountains to coast, or a spatial relocation from rural to urban, but a cultural reincarnation from the b¯ adiya (bedouin’s hinterland) into the mad¯ına (urban civilization). One of the many consequences of this shift is the conversion of the

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herdsmen into townsmen, as the former seek to accommodate Soqotra’s newly imported way of life (see Vol. 2: Chapter 1). The following chapter details the contemporary workings of the pastoral economy in terms of the processes of production, distribution, and consumption, which were not discussed above. In this way, it complements the above discussion, and together they constitute a comprehensive portrait of pastoralism in Soqotra.

Note 1. The remaining 14% is allocated to “emigrants” (4995 or 4%), which suggest a significant emigration factor, and to an undefined category of “technical considerations” (13,896 or 10%) according to the 1994 census report (CSO 1995: xi). The total population figure in the 1994 census was 56,514.

CHAPTER 6

Pastoral Economy: From Core to Auxiliary Livelihood

This chapter describes Soqotra’s contemporary pastoral economy as the legacy of a transition process engendered by a state-initiated disarticulation between the subsistence economy of the hinterland and the northern coast-based political economy of the state. This process transformed the practice of pastoralism in Soqotra from a core economy to an auxiliary livelihood. This state-initiated process suggests a contrary narrative to the conventional thesis that pastoralism is axiomatically a political strategy employed by pastoralists for resisting state encapsulation or domination. Accordingly, this chapter describes the key aspects of the current functioning of the pastoral economy of Soqotra Island. The introductory section offers a brief historical narrative of this disarticulation process through a synoptic description of the political economy of four mainland-imposed regimes on the island. The second section briefly explains the origin of the mistaken identification of Soqotran pastoralists as “Bedouins.” Subsequently, the chapter details the workings of pastoralism as an auxiliary livelihood through an analytical description of the three key spheres of activity in any system of livelihood: production, distribution, and consumption. Finally, it concludes with a brief

An earlier version of this chapter originally appeared under the title “Soqotra’s Pastoral Economy: From Core to Auxiliary Livelihood.” Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice 4: 16 (2014), 1–19. © The Author(s) 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45638-2_6

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exploration of the sustainability of pastoralism by considering the likely future scenarios about its prospects on the island.

6.1

Pastoralism in Transition: Economic Disarticulation

The fate of Soqotra’s pastoral economy mirrors the historical trajectory of pastoralism at the global level: from a dominant geopolitical system to a subsidiary economic activity under the tutelage of other politicoeconomic regimes. Until the late 1980s pastoralism constituted the “core economy” as the totality of primary socio-cultural and politico-economic institutions and related activities revolved around attending to the needs of the pastoral herds. The overwhelming majority of the island’s inhabitants were dedicated to the survival and reproduction of pastoralism as a communal way of life. As such, they were agents of reproduction of pastoralism through the intergenerational transfer of its knowledge repertoire, which constituted the ensemble of reproductive practices that sustained the community and ensured its continuity. The main economic objective of animal husbandry in Soqotra was not the conventional production and sale of meat, but the production of milk and its conversion into a series of milk-related products, but especially of butter-oil, which was used as an inter-regional trade product. As the island’s main exportable commodity, butter-oil served as the wealth generation means of the state and the subsistence needs of the pastoralists who used it as a bartering currency in local and trans-local exchanges to procure the essential food items and other basic goods not available in the pastoral domain. The shifting fortunes of pastoralism in Soqotra can best be understood as resulting from the disarticulation of the subsistence economy of the hinterland, that is the “ways that households are maintained through everyday activities,” from the political economy imperatives of the state. The nature of this political economy is determined by “the ways in which surpluses are mobilized to support political activities, lifestyle, and institutional operations of an elite segment” of society (Earle 2002: 83–84). Moreover, the conventional conception of pastoralism as a strategy driven by active resistance to state domination (Chatty 2006; Khazanov 1994) cannot be invoked as an explanation of the dynamics of pastoralism in Soqotra. Indeed, since the Sultanate’s demise, Soqotran pastoralists did not have to resist the Yemeni state as it was chronically absent in

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their pastoral domain, but sought to participate opportunistically in the state-sponsored economy on the coast to sustain their pastoral economy. This emergent urban-oriented, coastal-based, and state-managed political economy was driven by the modernizing nation-building imperatives of the new state, which entails, among other tasks: (a) the recruitment of institutional cadres for the local governance of a communal polity in-formation, and (b) the preparation of a productive labor force for a modernizing economy. Indeed, Soqotran pastoralists were situationally predisposed to become willing participants in the Yemeni state’s selective promotion of the hinterland population into its political and economic agents who could be instrumental to its nation-building and economic development objectives. I illustrate the operation of the logic of the state’s disarticulation with the hinterland subsistence regime and its selective conscription of the rural population as its economic agents through a summary of the political economy of the different political regimes on the island (see Chapter 7 for details) as background to the discussion of the current pastoral economy as auxiliary livelihood: • A tributary political economy was imposed during the 1890s when the seat of power of the Sultanate of al-Mahra on the mainland shifted to Soqotra under British tutelage until 1967. This period marked the apogee of pastoralism as Soqotra’s core economy. There was a dialectical symbiosis between the subsistence economy of the hinterland and the political and economic interests of the coastal elites. This symbiosis was achieved through a particular taxation regime that provided a coercive production incentive in a noncash economy. This taxation regime is best described, in Earle’s terms, as “staple finance”: The strategy of mobilizing “food items and their local vertical transfer to an elite segment of the polity” who used them as currency to procure the services it needs (Earle 2002: 84). Accordingly, the centrality of pastoralism throughout the Sultanate period was motivated by its political economy imperatives (i.e., institution-maintenance and elites’ revenue generation needs). In effect, the Sultanate’s tributary system inaugurated the recourse to surplus-generating production practices among a greater proportion of the hinterland population. • A redistributive political economy was introduced under the socialist government (1967–1990), which heralded not only the end of the

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Sultanate, but also the gradual marginalization of pastoralism from its status as Soqotra’s core economy to that of an auxiliary economic activity that functioned more as a sociocultural tradition. The state introduced a forced modernization regime that encouraged, if not coerced, part of the population of Soqotran pastoralists into transferring to the coastal and urban areas to be socialized either as a class of urban administrative cadres, fishers, or cooperative peasant farmers. As these socio-occupational categories were the needed agents of an emergent socialism-inspired social order. This initiated the disarticulation with the hinterland’s pastoral subsistence economy, which continued under subsequent regimes. This resulted in the abandonment of butter-oil production and the corresponding decline in the economic utility of the animal herds as they were no longer needed by the subsequent regimes as a source of revenue generation. The socialist government ultimately failed in its attempt to create peasant farmers out of pastoralists, but succeeded in institutionalizing fishing as an attractive alternative, or a seasonal complement, to pastoralism. • A patronage political economy was fashioned by the unity government (1990–1996) through the adoption of government-sponsored growth by means of extensive public sector expenditures—especially in post-creation and social infrastructure development—as an essential tool in the consolidation of the national unification process. In Soqotra, this policy led to an emphasis on increasing the numbers of administrative staff, especially in the health and education sectors, as well as in the police and the army. Also, there was an increased in the hinterland’s social infrastructure (clinics and schools) more as part of a patronage system of client formation among the rural leadership. The later was mobilized through the introduction of the nidh¯ am mash¯ ayikh (shaykh system), which sought to tribalize the hinterland’s atomized clans as part of the regime polity formation scheme. There was no direct assistance to pastoralism except through the recruitment of pastoralists as policemen and soldiers who could use their salary to improve their pastoral households. • A conservationist political economy (1996 to the present) was inaugurated in 1996 when Soqotra was designated an island-wide protected area for biodiversity conservation under international supervision. Subsequently, its environment was to be promoted as an internationally marketable resource through the appropriation of its landscape as an ecotouristic spectacle, which became the island’s

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engine of development. The UN agencies assisted by some bilateral donors, and a few international NGOs took over the preparation of the island’s landscape as a protected area. Paradoxically, these actors prioritized the territorial domain of pastoralists, but in order to exercise external managerial authority over it. Under this regime Soqotran pastoralists were recruited as English-speaking ecotourist guides and promoted as ecologically noble stewards of their island’s environment. The state’s disarticulation with the hinterland subsistence regime and its selective conscription of the rural population as its politico-economic agents resulted in a serial delinking process between pastoralism as the island’s once core economy, and the mainland-imposed politico-economic regimes. This serial delinking process confirms that Soqotrans’ historical experience is one in which their mode of livelihood was always appropriated into an externally imposed dominant political economy. The cumulative impact was the demise of pastoralism from its status as a core economy and its marginalization into an auxiliary livelihood. The latter is increasingly affected by the phenomenon of discontinuity in the intergenerational transfer of pastoralism’s accumulated knowledge repertoire and the associated socio-ecological praxes. The end result is the accelerated shedding of Soqotran pastoralists’ cultural legacy and livelihood traditions while they remain uncertain about the viability of the proposed alternatives. The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows: The next section briefly complements the discussion initiated in Chapter 4 about the inaccurate description of Soqotrans’ occupational agency as “Bedouins.” The subsequent section describes the current functioning of pastoralism as a parallel economy to the emergent urban-based economy (see Vol. 2: Chapter 5). This is done in terms of the production-distributionconsumption nexus, which encompasses the spheres of activity crucial to the social reproduction of a way of life. The last section considers the future prospects of pastoralism in Soqotra.

6.2

Pastoralists as Badu¯ : Mistaken Identity

Historically, the Soqotran pastoralists were always regarded as a social category entirely outside the pale of urban life, as they inhabited mountain caves and rudimentary shelters made out of rubble on the plains. Indeed,

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as recently as 1967 they were still being described as “timid troglodytes” (Doe 1992: 31). The term bad¯ u , however, is not originally an indigenous collective self-reference, but a conceptual imposition by the island’s external political overlords. As one observer noted, “The Socotri Bedu … may trace his kindred to nomadic, or formerly nomadic, tribes of the mainland … There the resemblance ends” (Brown 1966: 8). Nevertheless, the term bad¯ u has sedimented into an established nomenclature prior to, and since the demise of the British administration. Ironically, Soqotran pastoralists in the hinterland have taken up the term bad¯ u as their selfreference. A case in point is the winning poem in the 2010 Soqotri poetry competition, which was entitled “The Soqotran Bedouin” (badw¯ı di min Saqat.rí ). The poet is a semi-literate pastoralist from the island’s central region. From an historical perspective, this affirmation may be considered a misnomer, but its use has become a deliberate affirmation of the social legitimacy and cultural authenticity of the hinterland’s inhabitants that coastal residents are deprived of (see Chapter 4). Today, however, the term bad¯ u is not used in official government documents (decrees or reports), but pastoralists ra’ah (ra’y sing. in Arabic) is employed as an occupational designation. In spite of this mistaken identity, scholars have engaged in a debate about the nature of the process of the “bedouinization” of Soqotrans: According to Brian Doe (1992), Soqotrans became “Bedouins” from being initially agriculturalists in the aftermath of the decline of the incense trade, which caused a transition in the dominant political economy of the island. Doe’s thesis is that Soqotra’s initial economy was founded on the basis of large but privately held cooperative farms producing incense resins that was sold to something resembling a central agricultural purchasing board owned by the Kingdom of Hadhramawt. His extensive archaeological research revealed “The foundations of the ancient farms and their boulder lined fields, sometimes vast irregularly shaped tracts of land, remain as a testimony of the period when Socotra was an important producer of luxuries desired by traders for the wealthy countries of those ancient times” (Doe 1992: 12). The transition from this plantation economy based on a cooperative agricultural mode of production to pastoralism took place around the fourth century CE through an organic process of ecological adaptation. When demand for frankincense dwindled and the incense trade in South Arabia declined, the islanders who remained after the exodus of migrant workers back to South Arabia had

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to rely on their own resources as fishermen, goat herders, and subsistence farmers. Subsequently, upon the invasion of the coastal zones of the island by the Mahris from the Southern Arabian mainland, in the late fifteenth century CE these farmers retreated to the hills and mountains of Soqotra and became full-time herders whose descendants are the “bedouins” of the island. In contrast to Doe’s hypothesis about the bedouinization process in Soqotra, Vitaly Naumkin (1993) argued that pastoralism in Soqotra not only preceded agriculture, but that it persisted as the dominant mode of subsistence even when the inhabitants of the island worked as agricultural laborers in the incense-bearing tree plantations. Indeed, he insisted that the cultivation of incense-bearing trees was always a supplemental activity to the traditional pastoralism of the island’s inhabitants. Indeed, he hypothesized that from the seventh century BCE to the first century CE, “the island had a cohesive original culture with a powerful autochtonous base. This applies equally both to the material and the spiritual domains, and this is confirmed by the continuity and longevity of Soqotra’s two basic economic-cultural types: the herders and the fishermen” (Naumkin 1993: 363–364). In sum, Doe’s arguments suggest that pastoralism in Soqotra is an internally generated transition process engendered by economic and political exigencies from the outside after the fourth century CE and further consolidated in the fifteenth century, while Naumkin claims that it was introduced with the first migratory wave of South Arabians to the island during the first millennium BCE, who were practitioners of an “opportunistic mixed strategy” of agropastoralism depending on the agro-ecological niche in which they settled on the island. However, this debate represents a clash of divergent interpretive preferences based on inconclusive archaeological evidence (for a review of archaeological research on South Arabia including Soqotra see Seland 2014; Strauch 2012). Theories about Soqotrans’ “bedouinization” aside, the pastoralists have always made up the majority of the population enduring the austere living conditions of the hinterland, as if in a state of permanent socioeconomic orphanage from external assistance, a situation that persists today. Indeed, their economic exploitation during the Sultanate has mutated into a benign economic neglect from the political authorities at the local and national levels. Today, the pastoralists are the least integrated in the cash economy. This is partly due to a tradition of strong attachment

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to their lifestyle as well as a chronic absence of, or delayed and inadequate, interventions (e.g., schools, or employment generation schemes) in their territorial domain by governmental agencies until recently. The end result is the rise of a peculiar cultural-economic category namely the transitional pastoralist: drawn by the pull of the cash economy of the town into the calling of an itinerant odd-jobber, and driven by the push of an increasingly uneconomic pastoralist livelihood due to the vagaries of the environment and the limited market opportunities for their livestock. Yet the pastoralist is unable to abandon one for the other, as both occupations are contingent on seasonally available economic opportunities.

6.3

Parallel Economy: Patching up Ethos

The parallel economy refers to the pastoral economy of the hinterland that has yet to be, or may not be, integrated into the emerging nontraditional economic sector (see Vol. 2: Chapter 5). This traditional economic sector’s mode of operation is partly determined by the seasonal rhythm that all activities on the island must inexorably mimic, but also by its dependence on non-pastoral food items, and the ripple effects of the increasing monetization of the island’s economy. Accordingly, rural Soqotrans whatever their ecological niches or primary means of livelihood are, by necessity, multiple livelihood pursuers driven by a chronic economic opportunism in quest of cash. This opportunistic pursuit takes the form of a kind of economic vagrancy compelled by the intrinsic insufficiencies of their subsistence livelihoods, caused by environmental conditions as well as an economic situation describable in the nomenclature of scarcity: A chronic precarity of environmental resources (e.g., water and pasture) and seasonally variable exchange rate between pastoral by-products and the food basket made up almost entirely of imported items. The only available recourse is to be on the constant lookout for remunerative activities (e.g., odd jobs especially in the construction boom in Hadiboh town) that depend on the seasonal cycle. Consequently and paradoxically, rural Soqotrans who were not nomadic seem to have become nomadic, or at least compulsively peripatetic, in their manic attempts to make ends meet in the current economic context. This context has produced a latent feeling of existential insecurity toward environmental conditions that are perceived as God given, and thus beyond preventive action, and to be dealt with through faith-induced adaptation. This adaptation is illustrated through the invocation by some of my pastoralists’ interlocutors of the Qur’an’

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Sura 29 Al Ankabut (The Spider), Ayat 22, which says: “And so many a moving (living) creatures carries not its own provision! Allah provides for it and for you.” The point is that if an ant has the capacity to find food to remain alive so why not a human being? This is to suggest that come what may, God will provide, which serves as a morale booster. Since the end of the socialist period, nature’s rhythm seems to have been thrown out of kilter. Seasons come and go without bringing the expected rains, resulting into a chronic depression in the ecosystem’s productivity in terms of environmental resources (Scholte and De Geest 2010). Soqotrans have interpreted this situation to be the end of baraka (plenitude from God’s blessing), brought about by climactic unpredictability and resource scarcity and thus the end of the virtuous cycle of production and consumption within the pastoral domain. This has engendered a social disposition characterized by an obsessive self-reliance through creative coping with the deficiencies of the pastoral economy, in the absence, or inadequacy, of support from the state, or the short-term and whimsical attention from international agencies. The local concept for this disposition is ¯ıraqqa which means “patching up,” and it is a metaphoric reference to the miscellany of odd jobs that pastoralists must seek out to make ends meet, and complemented by mutual aid customs (see Chapter 3). The term is Arabic, but Soqotrans have appropriated it for their own metaphoric deployment: It refers to patching up a punctured tire, as part of the continuous maintenance of that one wheel of life, in the absence of a spare, so that it can keep turning. In fact, ¯ıraqqa was the way a pastoralist described his way of making a living in an exasperated tone, after a series of questions that sought to reduce his way of life to monthly budget figures. He momentarily abandoned the restraining decorum when addressing a stranger, as he confided, “If we were not ashamed we would go begging sometimes.” In effect, “patching up” is the only viable strategy to deal with the contextual contingencies generated by the environmental uncertainties and resource insufficiencies (natural and financial) that structure the quotidian existence of Soqotran pastoralists. In fact, raqqa al-h.ay¯ ah (“patching up life”) is almost an automatic refrain among pastoralists in discussion about making a living in the b¯ adiya (hinterland).

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6.3.1

Auxiliary Livelihood’s Mechanisms: Production, Distribution, and Consumption

The preponderant feature of this traditional pastoral economy is the mutually reinforcing symbiosis between the norms of sufficiency and the absence of an accumulative logic, or more generally the lack of a culture of stored wealth. There is no conception of savings or even the possibility for accumulation to palliate the inevitable vagaries of the coming season. The one exception is the storage of 25–50-kilogram bags of rice, flour, and sugar imported from the mainland and the UAE. The acquisition of these items is the main justification of any productive and exchange activity. There seems to be no concept of a surplus economy, or more accurately stated: The resource endowment of the rural economy does not afford opportunities for generating a surplus. For the Soqotran pastoralists the herd is not seen in terms of exchange values but in terms of subsistence security (e.g., milk production for household consumption exclusively, and animals are for occasional, and indeed reluctant, sale to make ends meet). This symbiosis is the equivalent of the Soqotran “pastoral rationality,” which is expressed in the scattered individual economic behaviors in which subsistence prevails over maximization of benefits, and that constitutes a way of life as well as a system of production. Indeed, Soqotran pastoralists are straddling a transitional threshold, as their pastoral economy seems caught in-between the hinterland as a precapitalist social formation and the urbanizing northern coast, primarily Hadiboh town, as a proto-capitalist periphery of the mainland’s economy. Therefore, Soqotrans’ pastoral rationality is experienced as an inexorable and burdensome adaptation imperative to the environment’s whims, and the demands of the ever widening monetized exchange circuit. Accordingly, Soqotra’s traditional economic sector can be seen either as operating within the bounds of a virtuous circle inspired by an environmentally conscious ethic of frugality or caught within an infernal impasse of a permanently delayed gratification. The first interpretation of the traditional economic sector might reflect the sentiment of an older generation of Soqotran pastoralists in the central and western regions, while symbolizing the UN’s eco-conservationist fantasy. The second reflects the realism of the emerging generation of disillusioned rural Soqotrans who have been exposed to the conveniences of urban life. This exposure has induced a gradual change in consumption desires and expectations regarding standards of living. In this light, the un-severed umbilical cord

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to a pastoral quotidian existence driven by tradition-regulated routines that afford access only to the simple necessities of life is not due to a lack of desire to be detached from it, but to the absence of viable economic alternatives. Pastoralism as the pillar of Soqotra’s rural economy will be discussed using the conventional tripartite division of an economic system: production, distribution, and consumption (see Gudeman 2001). However, the concept of economic system in Soqotra is problematic given the absence of a market mechanism to integrate the internal articulation between these three constitutive components. Soqotra’s economy can be divided into two spatially delimited domains of economic activity with minimal overlapping spheres: The first domain, the rural economy, encompasses the subsistence livelihoods of the hinterland, which is the geographically preponderant part of the island where needs satisfaction is the dominant value orientation, and is characterized by the absence of market-oriented production. The second domain, the urban economy, encompasses the coastal strips of the island—especially the north where the only market place (i.e., Hadiboh town) is located—and constitutes the only domain where market-dependent economic activity takes place (e.g., fishing), and where the exchange of commodities for a profit is the dominant value orientation (see Vol. 2: Chapter 5). The discussion below is concerned primarily with the traditional or rural sector of Soqotra’s economy, which represents the livelihood infrastructure of a significant proportion, if not a majority, of Soqotrans and that has persisted—although in successively modified form—under the different political regimes and their economic policies as summarized above and elaborated in Chapter 7. This rural economic sector is descriptively analyzed in terms of three dimensions: (a) production, which entails an artisanal “mode of use” of local resources; (b) distribution, which is underpinned by a subsistence ethic that constrains production for market exchange and thus restrains the market supply of pastoral products; and (c) consumption, which is characterized by a frugality that is tantamount to a situation of chronic nutritional insufficiency, and of relative deprivation in the case of non-food items. Noteworthy, is that the vagaries of the productiondistribution-consumption nexus provide a barometer of the sustainability of pastoralism in Soqotra in the long-term.

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6.3.1.1 Production: Artisanal Bricolage Livelihood activities in the rural economy (e.g., herding, date palm tree cultivation) that constitute production are all subsistence oriented and are guided by the “norms of sufficiency”: according to which the “level of effort is regulated to suit the desired level of satisfaction, and the latter is brought in line with the level of effort people are willing to make” (Gorz 1993: 61). Wherever such a norm prevails, production does not entail formal organization of productive labor beyond the household level, and whatever passes for production is done according to nature’s rhythm. As Soqotrans seem merely to strategically harness their environment’s providential whims, as nature assumes almost entirely the burden of production. In such a context, the notion of “mode of production” cannot be used to explain the nature of traditional economic activity on the island. Instead, “mode of use” of the island’s environmental resources is more applicable. In the pastoral domain, there is no consistently organized production that is aimed at a local or external market, honey harvesting being the recent exception (see below). This is in sharp contrast to the prevailing situation under the Sultanate, when butter-oil production was a trade-dependent activity enmeshed in an inter-continental trade network as it was exported to regional markets in the Arabian Gulf, western India, and eastern Africa. Historically, Soqotra was a mono-economy in terms of the local production of exportable goods; albeit supplemented by miscellaneous auxiliary livelihood activities. Some of the main products exported at different historical periods included the following: Frankincense and aloes in Antiquity, dried fish during the thirteenth century onwards, butteroil during the Sultanate, and fish again from the socialist period until today. Paradoxically, the pastoral herds, which have always constituted the majority of the island’s inhabitants—estimated livestock population of over 566,000, with a human population of over 50,000—and represented the foundation of the communal economy, have never been the objects of production for an external market. In fact, the primary aim of pastoralism in Soqotra—with its complex system of livestock management encompassing a plethora of tactical steps (i.e., breeding, pasturing, watering, and transhuming) that constitute the repertoire of know-how of animal husbandry, which initially motivated Soqotrans’ acquisition and accumulation of an encyclopedic compendium of ethno-botanical knowledge about the island’s environmental resources (see Miller and

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Morris 2004)—is solely dedicated to the maximization of milk production. Indeed, observers have noted that “breeding females constitute the main age and sex group for all ruminant species … [which] ensure that the conversion of available range vegetation to milk is maximized” (EU 2000b: 2–10; Morris 2002: 310). Pastoralism in Soqotra has persisted as a milk-subsistent livelihood. This is partly a legacy of the production of butter-oil as export commodity, which was once a thriving cottage industry on the island. Soqotrans had developed a menu of dairy byproducts, as the large quantity of available milk was transformed into, at least, seven milk by-products, as a means of preserving and extending consumption (discussed in Chapter 3). Today, however, milk consumption is merely a seasonal delicacy, and the amount available allows, at the most, three dairy by-products. The decline in the marketability of the pastoral economy’s by-products, butter-oil being the main one, and the non-development of livestock production for an external market was due to the nature of government economic policy. For example, the socialist administration seemed to have regarded pastoralism as an economic dead-end as well as an obstacle to cultural emancipation, and thus was relatively neglected. This led to the abandonment of the production and export of butteroil. As a result, Soqotran pastoralists’ role as primary producers lapsed into that of a seasonal proletariat dependent on odd-jobs outside the pastoral domain. This shift in their occupational role contributed to their demise as full-time pastoralists, since they became both partly dependent on non-pastoral economic activities and entirely reliant on an imported food supply for their sustenance. Furthermore, the island’s environmental vagaries have reduced their herds into a source of expenditure instead of income, since the animals have to be fed cereals, given the frequent unavailability of natural fodder. Consequently, pastoralism as a way of life has mutated almost entirely into an embodiment of a subsistence ethic and a repository of cultural symbolism. In such a context where pastoralism is economically moribund, but still culturally essential, the utility of the herd is conceived in two ways: First, as a source of seasonal food substitution, namely milk, which reduces dependence on some imported food items as well as minimizes the corollary cash expenditures; and second, it constitutes the main anchor to the land and provides the fundamental basis to the rationale about maintaining a way of life and preserving the means of socio-cultural reproduction. Moreover, this cultural preservation ethos regarding livestock is reified in a

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widespread sentimental reluctance among pastoralists to sell them. In fact, the selling of livestock is usually an act of last resort. For them the sale of their livestock is solely to meet basic needs, such as buying other food or medicine, and not to make money for its own sake. Indeed, Soqotran pastoralists betray an affective resistance toward the development of sustainable income generating activities from their livestock. Their socioculturally mediated production practices have sedimented into a set of deep-seated norms that have inhibited the accumulation of a critical mass of livestock for an export market. Some of the norms that have hindered the productivity of Soqotra’s pastoral economy include the following: (a) The overwhelming majority of male kids are sold usually between two weeks to three months. This is partly because they do not produce, but consume, milk during that period, which makes them competitors with their herders for whom milk is an elixir of nature and the very raison d’être of pastoralism in Soqotra. As one report explains, “The long period of milk consumption by the calf, kid or lamb explains why the pastoral people prefer to eliminate young males at an early age in order to minimize competition for milk preferred for human food” (EU 2000b). Hence, the sale of kids is more of a strategy of getting rid of food competitors than an income generating one. (b) The nonnegotiable refusal by Soqotran pastoralists to ship their animals alive due to their obsessive concern about mistreatment during transport. This is because of the widespread belief that if the livestock were mishandled during transportation, and later killed incorrectly, this would bring bad luck to the owner.1 Accordingly, they insist that the animals should be killed prior to being shipped to an external destination. And (c) the increasing impatience of pastoralists toward a long-term view of the pastoral economy—engendered by the corrosive conveniences of the modern economy—as attempts to persuade them to participate in the development of local nurseries of the local plant species to be used as fodder have not been successful, thus far. In addition to these “cultural” obstacles, there is also a litany of misperceptions by potential external buyers: For example, goats and sheep from Soqotra are believed, falsely, to be fed with fish thus palatably unacceptable to mainland consumers; they do not have enough body fat and thus have no taste when cooked; animals are cheaper from Somalia and Ethiopia where they are shipped alive. These are complemented by the fact that all buyers prefer livestock alive, and thus are unwilling to buy dead ones from Soqotra. It is this combination of internal and

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external factors that have undermined Soqotran pastoralists’ commitment to an income generating, instead of the current milk subsistence, pastoralism, and have created obstacles to the implementation of projects aimed at making pastoralism into an economically, or even commercially, viable source of livelihood. For example, the pastoralist project of the Soqotra Conservation Fund, “Community-Based Livestock Development and Marketing Improvement” (2008–2011), which sought to initiate the commercialization of animal production in Soqotra, had to abandon its marketing objective. The project was unable to convince Soqotran pastoralists to compromise on their cultural prohibition against the sale of live animals. A local proverb, although expressed in Arabic, captures well the sentiment of Soqotran pastoralists toward their herds, as it captures the prevailing sentiment, indeed moral injunction, against using livestock as commodities for sale: “Don’t consider her as your capital [source of financial gains] and don’t send her away from your home” (l¯ a tahsubh¯ a r¯ as m¯ alak wa l¯ a taba’dah¯ a ‘an d¯ arak). The end result is that Soqotran pastoralists have obstinately refused to make the transition from considering their livestock as a resource to be used only toward meeting their basic needs, to seeing them as a commodity to be sold for financial gains. There is an emergent auxiliary production activity undertaken by an increasing number of pastoralists, namely beekeeping. The occasional activity of collecting wild honey from beehives in the trunk of trees, but more commonly caves and holes in cliff faces, by using fire to drive away the bees—and which not only destroyed the beehive but also contaminated the honey with a burned aftertaste—has been transformed into the organized production of honey, since the launching of a beekeeping project by a French NGO in 2004. In contrast to most, if not all, microscale projects undertaken on the island, which are abandoned once the external funding faucet is turned off, beekeeping has scaled up from an externally assisted pilot project that trained an initial 350 beekeepers, to a locally managed economic activity in which are engaged literally thousands of pastoralists in hundreds of villages throughout the hinterland. The numbers of beekeepers as well as the number of villages where beehives are kept are too numerous for an exact count, but the rough figure is that between one to three thousand pastoralists are engaged in honey production, according to the former local project coordinator. The latter is now the owner of the island’s main honey shop (Soqotra Honey Center), which is the only shop with quality insurance equipment. Also, it is the primary, but not sole, purchasing agent of the honey produced on

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the island, as he guarantees a minimum price (6500–7000 YR or $32 in 2014) per liter, which is much higher than the average price of a goat or sheep. A liter of honey is normally sold at 8000 YR, so most non-honey producing Soqotrans are priced out of the market. Nevertheless, they buy honey as an obligatory gift item when visiting acquaintances outside the island and not to consume it themselves; hence, honey is sold mainly to foreign visitors and exported to the mainland. Each beehive can produce 7kgs per season depending on environmental conditions. The end result is that honey production is emerging as the new cash crop of the pastoral economy as butter-oil was in the past. And it is the hinterland’s equivalent of fishing on the coast. The figures and dates on the production of honey are provided for illustrative purposes and to serve as baseline data for future comparison. Moreover, in the absence of data on total production of honey, the amount of honey purchased by one shop, out of a total of four shops, is used as a proxy measure. For the two seasons of July to September 2013 and November to February 2014, production was equivalent to 2¼ tones for a monetary value of 14,625,000 YR ($68,023) to 17,500,000 YR ($81,395). The main honey production areas are in the interior valleys of the central region (shi’ib di Ilofi, and di Alf), and the interior plains of the western region (Qabhitin and Mayha). Paradoxically, beekeeping may well become a substitute for the sale of their herds, given Soqotran pastoralists’ inherent reluctance to part with them. Accordingly, they would prefer to use money from the sale of honey among other income generating activities to maintain their herds (see below). In effect, honey production is emerging as a core activity among increasingly large number of pastoralists, and thus further relegating the economic value of the herds, but more importantly preserving their other functions such as anchor to the land and source of milk. Beyond herding and bee-keeping, the local production performed by Soqotrans is restricted to the following activities: handicrafts (e.g., rugs, pottery, and dry palm leaves by-products) for local use and for occasional sale to tourists; seasonal home gardens’ production of vegetables with tomato being the main cash crop as it constitutes over half of the vegetables planted in these gardens, especially in the vicinity of Hadiboh (see Ceccolini 2002) and fruits (e.g., banana, papaya, lemon, and melon), in addition to tamarind, Ziziphus spina-christi fruit and wild oranges, which are sold in the local market in Hadiboh; collection of aloes juice and resin from the Dragon’s Blood tree for the occasional shipment to

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the mainland and the Gulf countries. All of these productive activities are exclusively household-based and conducted by women. There are, however, other local economic activities (e.g., lime production, cutting and selling wood for construction, and firewood collection for sale to urban-based consumers due to frequent shortages of cooking gas cylinders) but they are of secondary importance in terms of scale and number of participating Soqotrans. 6.3.1.2 Distribution: Self-Delivery and Provisioning Distribution refers to the gathering of locally produced goods and sending them to market for sale or more generally to a dedicated place for economic transactions. There are two types of distribution mechanism: a marketplace, which is a physical location where goods are traded; and a market system, that is the institutional organization of economic activities. Presently, there is nothing that resembles an organized market system in Soqotra as far as the sale of pastoral products is concerned. The non-availability of such a local market is due to two factors: First is the nature of production itself, which is for subsistence and thus there is a relatively meager surplus to be distributed for sale; and second is that the conventional logic of supply and demand between producers in one sphere responding to consumers in another operates differently in Soqotra’s pastoral economy. For Soqotran pastoralists, the supply of livestock is determined by their consumption needs, and not by the demands for meat from consumers in the urban center. Accordingly, there is no weekly market for the sale of locally produced items, except for the irregular carload of goats and sheep brought to Hadiboh for sale by a muq¯ awil (contractor) who collects livestock from certain regions of the island: Momi in the east, Noged in the south, and Diksam in the center. However, there are three major occasions that provide the only sustained period for regular market transactions in livestock: The first is the period of Ramadhan, during which Muslims are required to be generous among themselves, and meat is an almost obligatory item on the menu after the fast. The second is ‘¯ıd al-¯ adhh.¯ a (Feast of Sacrifice) that takes place three months after the end of Ramadhan, which obliges the ritual of sacrificing an animal. Both these periods provide the most significant opportunity for market transactions in livestock (primarily goats and sheep, as cows are consumed during weddings and large invitations), and when distribution becomes less haphazard. These two occasions allow the

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pastoralists to sell livestock for extra cash with which to properly participate in these two mandated religious rituals. The third occasion is the season of .s¯ereb (October–February), which is the parturition season when there is a significant increase in the supply of animals for sale, as the pastoralists try to “get rid” of their male kids. This seasonal “glut” is combined with the demand generated by the high season for foreign and mainland tourists, as well as the visiting émigrés from the Gulf lead to increased meat consumption and thus distribution. During these three occasions, the number of stalls and butchers increased as there are pickup trucks almost daily bringing goats and sheep from the hinterland for sale in Hadiboh. With the exception of these three periods, the concept of a weekly market is applicable only to an imported product, namely q¯at, a mildly narcotic leaf that is chewed, which is flown into Hadiboh from the mainland weekly and is the object of a lucrative activity for the sellers who are all from the mainland (see Vol. 2: Chapter 3). Finally, whatever organized distribution does exist, it does not involve local products but imported goods that are stocked in the honeycomb of shops scattered around the unpaved alleys that make up the marketplace in Hadiboh, which is the central economic hub of the entire island, with the other main town Qalansiyah a very insignificant second (see Elie 2004a). As in the case of production, the development of a local market in livestock is similarly constrained by certain practices and factors regarding their sale, which include the following: First, as already noted above sale is unrelated to market demand, but to the pastoralists’ need to replenish their limited basket of goods. Second, it is contingent on the alternation between wet and dry seasons with different sale calculus for each, which is partly related to the limited size of herds: During the wet season the focus is on selling only the male kids as milk production is at its peak, and during the dry season the threat of the lack of natural fodder and thus preventing the death of the animals is the driving sale motive. And the third constraining factor is the inadequate size of the local market given the limited number of restaurants, and the equally meager demand from local consumers. As the most frequent buyers of meat are the local residents from the mainland and not Soqotrans who cannot afford meat most of the time, and thus consume it infrequently (see below). In the absence of these three seasonal factors—the high consumption season of .s¯ereb, Ramadhan, and the ‘¯ıd holiday—the normal means for the distribution of livestock for sale on the island is the lone pastoralist either riding a taxi minivan from the rural areas carrying an animal or two, or

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trekking along steep mountain paths with one or two goats trailing him, and perhaps with his donkey on his way to Hadiboh to sell them. At destination, the pastoralist becomes an ambulant salesman going door to door to the local restaurants, or loiters around the butcher stall until he finds a buyer. The proceeds will be used to purchase the standard items (see list below), which will be taken back to his village either on the back of a donkey or in a mini-van taxi for a specific fee per item. Regarding the other auxiliary distribution activities in the pastoral economy, the harvest from date farming is unpredictable and usually insufficient for the year, and therefore, local dates are exclusively for household consumption. In sum, the marketing of products from the pastoral economy is constrained by the subsistence motivation of the pastoralists, and the local population’s limited disposable income. Moreover, the limited supply of locally produced goods available for distribution is mirrored in the frugality of the consumption pattern of Soqotrans, both in the urban and rural areas, but especially in the latter, which is discussed in the next section. 6.3.1.3 Consumption: Ascetic Food Substitution Strategy The entire livelihood system of Soqotran pastoralists, and the associated consumer attitude, is based on a scarcity-induced ethic of renunciation that is manifested in the suppression of the desire for consumption. Botting confirms the longevity of this disposition when he observed that “The people seem to get along on remarkably little food… I would never say that any of them looked undernourished and yet their diet seems to consist of dates and milk during the day and meqaderih [maize] at night. Occasionally a goat is slaughtered, but only for the chosen few” (1958: 203). The motto of this ascetic ethos is best expressed in paraphrasing Gudeman’s (1978: 40) characterization of the consumption ethic of peasant farmers: self-maintenance over self-indulgence. That is, the conscious limitation of what is consumed based on their hunger suppression value. This partly explains the continuous consumption of tea throughout the day. The basic items in the limited and standardized basket of goods are as follows: rice, flour, sugar, oil, tea, tomato paste, spices, and powdered milk. In addition, to this standardized list there are variations according to agro-ecological zones. On the coast, fish and imported vegetables, fruits, poultry products among other items are available although infrequently consumed, since they are not always affordable. And in the hinterland milk is consumed seasonally and meat only occasionally, as the pastoralist is most reluctant to deplete his herd

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capital. The keen reluctance to part with the herd is eased in the case of the male kid, which is usually sold within three months, or consumed at a lunch for guests. The end result is that what people actually eat on the coast is rice supplemented with a fish sauce merely for taste as the quantity is minute compared with the number of mouths to feed, and in the hinterland rice with tomato paste or milk according to season. In the b¯ adiya, breakfast consists only of a few cups of tea, followed by rice for both lunch and dinner. In the urban areas, bread and tea with milk is served for breakfast and supper. Of course, consumption may vary depending on the financial capacity of individual consumers. However, this ascetic consumption ethos was occasionally deferred in the past as well as today by a variety of social functions for which the slaughter of animals was obligatory: the culling of male kids as a herd management strategy and their consumption (today they are sold); weddings and funerals (where some half of the dead person’s animals were slaughtered) where all could come and eat and many travelled miles to do so; circumcision ceremonies; slaughter after a woman has given birth; cooperative labor (g¯ırif ) for which the one gaining benefit had to give his co-workers meat; clan gatherings, etc. (Miranda Morris pers. comm.). Noteworthy among the occasional deferment of the ascetic ethos is the rufda ritual, which is performed exclusively in the b¯ adiya: It entails the collective giving of gifts of livestock to the groom by all the neighboring clans resident in the area where the wedding is to take place. This custom is a form of competition between clans as to which one would be the most generous in their offerings. It is an act of generous solidarity that is embedded in a system of reciprocal gift giving during the major life-cycle events: birth, marriage, and death. This consumption substitution strategy allowed Soqotrans to adapt to the cashless economy in the hinterland since wealth was in the herd and not always willingly converted into cash. Moreover, the adoption of this ascetic consumption ethos was an imperative given the chronic insufficiency of disposable income among households with large families in both rural and coastal areas. Beyond this ethic of renunciation, there seems to be at work what Galaty and Johnson (1990) called an “optimizing subsistence” strategy, which encompasses both production and consumption, and entails the following tactical maneuvers: (a) Meat consumption is sacrificed for the long-term availability of milk; (b) sale of animals is contingent on maintaining stability of herd size, if not marginally

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expanding herd growth; and (c) as noted above, recourse to the systematic culling (in the past) for household consumption and for sale (today) of male animals (especially goats and sheep) within three months of their birth. In the rural sector, this ascetic ethos, as a chronic involuntary frugality, is not limited to consumption habits, but seems to have induced a leveling of expectations, as if a form of social resignation has set in, induced by the inability to envision a way out of the eternal pendulum swing from a hand to mouth existence in the pastoral hinterland. There is a recognition of living under conditions of relative deprivation, but it has not mutated into a self-pitying awareness of poverty as a defining self-concept. However, with the increasing monetization of the economy, and the resulting socioeconomic differentiation within the population, poverty may well become a self-defining notion. Indeed, by established standards of poverty, Soqotran pastoralists emblematize socio-economic deprivation. Yet they are not begging in the streets of Hadiboh. In this regard, Sahlins’ observation seems pertinent to the Soqotran situation: They may “have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status” (quoted in Fried 1975: 44). This is echoed in Botting’s remark that “On the island where almost everybody is poor, and there are as yet no foreign standards to shame and disturb them, poverty is accepted without degradation” (1958: 77). It is perhaps a blessing in disguise that the UN interventions on the island have been under the banner of environmental protection and biodiversity conservation and not under that of poverty alleviation, which could have suggested itself as the “paradigm of self-definition.” The latter would have engendered the construction of underdeveloped subjectivities among Soqotrans, as they sought to accommodate themselves to the signifiers of poverty and the accompanying plethora of deficiencies that such a paradigm privileges in its discourse, in order to obtain assistance from UN projects. However, while poverty as a self-defining concept may not have achieved paradigmatic status, it is the defining characteristic of the population with 49 percent under the poverty line. And the iron grip of the subsistence ethic and its ascetic consumption pattern has reinforced the symbiotic linkage between low productivity and low consumption in the pastoral hinterland. Soqotran pastoralists’ commitment to this ascetic consumption ethos was honed during a period when pastoralism was the

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core economy and was guided by the practice of a “moral community of subsistence,” which entailed an ecologically sustainable mode of coping with nature’s vagaries. The initial conditions that sustained Soqotrans’ practice of this ascetic ethos of consumption and its related subsistence milk pastoralism and their salutary ecological effects are gradually disappearing. Consequently, these practices will have to be adjusted if Soqotran pastoralists hope to be actors in shaping their own destiny in light of the encroachments of an invasive internationally-sponsored conservationist political economy in which their communally shared commons is appropriated as a resource for external beneficiaries and placed under international management.

6.4

Future Scenarios: Divergent Trajectories

In Soqotra’s pastoral economy, livestock seem to have a culturally assigned path within the spectrum of production, distribution, and consumption. As their entry into the commodity stream of the exchange circuit is based on a “restricted system of commodity flow,” which is contingent on the following criteria: (a) weather and season; (b) the herder’s consumption needs; and (c) the availability of alternative means of satisfying these needs without resorting to the sale of animals. Accordingly, herds are subject to a restricted circulation, as they enter the distribution circuit in a manner that is evocative of a barter mode of exchange, in which money is merely a “measure of equivalence” based on the value of the goods to be acquired after the animal is exchanged (cf. Appadurai 1986). Perhaps, this sums up the Soqotran pastoralist’ economic rationality. Indeed, from the discussion in the previous section it seems that the future of pastoralism in Soqotra does not include a shift from a subsistence emphasis of an extensive pastoralism to an exchange mode through the intensification of livestock production and its commercialization. Instead, the future of pastoralism may lie in a continuation of the “patching up ethos” through the opportunistic diversification of sources of income generation outside the pastoral economy. While Soqotran pastoralists in the hinterland are still attached to the ascetic ethos of self-maintenance as opposed to the consumerist ethic of self-indulgence, they are not impervious to change. Indeed, the above discussion has shown their adaptability to different politico-economic regimes. However, the current conservationist regime encompassing

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Soqotra’s pastoral economy is excessively proscriptive regarding Soqotrans’ traditional socio-ecological practices. This conservationist political economy is embedded within a transnational eco-fundamentalist vision, which seeks to preserve the entire island as an Arcadian bioregional enclave. This eco-centric vision of the island and its “graze phobia” is challenging not only the “resilience quotient” of pastoralism as a mode of livelihood, but also the cultural viability of the rural community of pastoralists. This is manifested in an emerging disequilibrium between the following two sets of factors: (a) the declining adaptive and reproductive capacity based on a viable knowledge repertoire and a functioning intergenerational transfer mechanism and (b) increasing vulnerability generated by the impact of the chronic deficit of environmental resources. These two factors are further exacerbated by the socioeconomic discontinuities engendered by the institutional modernization initiatives of the encompassing political economy (e.g., inadequate introduction of formal schooling in a non-indigenous language) and in the economic realm (e.g., emphasis on creating new remunerative opportunities in non-traditional occupations). This is producing disjunctive effects on pastoralism’s adaptive and reproductive capacity by inducing a generational shift as the new cohort of rural residents aspire to occupations unrelated to pastoralism. This shift is undermining the socioeconomic incentives to sustain local knowledge transfer, and thus is accelerating the loss of Soqotrans’ repetoire of indigenous traditional knowledge and the associated ecological praxes. The end result is a generational discontinuity, which manifests itself in a divergence of sociocultural attitudes and occupational preferences between an older and younger generation that threatens the sustainability of pastoralism as the traditional pillar of rural livelihoods. Consequently, Soqotran pastoralists are caught between a rural economy that straddles a transitional threshold, and an experimental state-sponsored and internationally-supported eco-centric economy that is unwittingly encouraging cultural defection among rural residents away from their traditional livelihood practices with promises of new economic opportunities, while being unable to ensure the availability or sustainability of the occupational alternatives. As a result, the pastoral economy is facing an uncertain future as the optimum path forward remains elusive. In this light, what are the likely future paths of pastoralism in Soqotra? Three paths are briefly considered below:

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• From Subsistence to Commercial Herding: This is the Somalia model, where pastoralism was transformed from its former subsistence orientation to one of commercial production for export markets in Saudi Arabia, Yemen among other places, however, with relatively little change in production techniques (i.e., from extensive herding to intensive ranching). Paradoxically, it was the presence of the British in Aden that provided the catalyst to Somalia’s commercialization of livestock trading (Swift 1979). In Soqotra, where the British were the overseers of the Sultanate, there was never any attempted transition from butter-oil production to export of livestock. Given the nature of the economic rationality that has sedimented in the production and distribution practices of Soqotran pastoralists, as discussed above, the window of opportunity for such a transition seems to be permanently closed. • Small-Scale Ranching: This is the approach envisioned by the national and foreign planners of the conservationist regime as part of a deliberate strategy for the gradual disappearance of pastoralism as the subsistence livelihood of the many into a capital intensive enterprise for the few. This entails the selective modernization of pastoralism through the social engineering of a geographically demarcated transition from subsistence milk pastoralism to an investment-based ranching. The targeted domains of intervention are the protected areas where pastoralists will be moved out to designated areas as ecologically-friendly small-scale ranchers, and where they will occasionally become ecotourism entrepreneurs for foreign visitors, while performing their ascribed role as national parks custodians. However, because of the “cultural obstacles” discussed above this ranching strategy may find few takers and is unlikely to ever be implemented successfully. • Diversification: This is the current orientation of Soqotran pastoralists as practitioners of the “patching up” ethos, which privileges a strategy of diversification over intensification. This entails the straddling of the subsistence economy of the hinterland and the urban-based modern economy through working as full or part-time participants in non-traditional jobs with a regular salary that is not contingent on the seasons. The cash earned in the modern economic sector is plowed back into the pastoral domain, which they do not intend to abandon—while not expecting it to provide more than a subsistence income either. The motivation is to preserve their herds,

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to satisfy their passion for milk, and to secure their individual or collective claim over their territorial domain in the hinterland. The chronic attention span deficit of the Yemeni state with regard to Soqotra, the lack of local support for the imported templates, and externally-imposed priorities of the conservationist political economy encompassing the island, combined with the erratic funding for its implementation will ensure, for the foreseeable future, the continuing practice by Soqotran pastoralists of the “patching up ethos” of their auxiliary livelihood.

Note 1. The sensitivity of Soqotrans toward the state and fate of their animals is rather excessive. For example, if an animal (e.g., a goat) dies due to the negligence of its pastoralist owner, he is obligated to perform the penitential ritual of sha’feroh (from eastern/central Soqotra, or shaghfereh from western Soqotra). This ritual is equivalent to the Islamic ritual of repentance, kaff¯ ara: to ask God for forgiveness after violating an oath or committing a wrong. It calls for the sacrifice at least seven goats, as a means of expiation for his cruelty—however involuntary—toward his herd. This number of goats represents an onerous compensation that is meant to warn the pastoralist from negligent behavior toward his animals. This ritual perhaps explains Soqotran pastoralists’ reluctance to export their animals alive.

PART II

Political Incorporation: Constitution of a Sub-National Polity

CHAPTER 7

State-Community Relations: Political History Conjunctures

This chapter reconstructs Soqotra’s historical evolution as a social formation that was driven primarily by a series of acts of political incorporation. These acts brokered Soqotra’s contact with the outside world and structured its internal dynamics as well as regulated the nature and pace of its change process. This process engendered a succession of forms of externally imposed sovereignty that was always claimed on behalf of, and never by, Soqotrans. This claim to sovereignty was based on relations between a peripheral island community and a political center located elsewhere. This constituted the crucible of the island’s historical transformation, as it set in motion the mechanism of change through the constant manipulation and restructuring of its social, political, and economic institutions as well as its cultural practices. The chapter narrates Soqotra’s historical trajectory as a transitional social formation through six conjunctures of political incorporation that it has experienced thus far. The reconstruction of each of Soqotra’s political incorporation conjunctures is done through a description of four vectors of historical change and social transformation: the

A very different version of this chapter originally appeared under the title “State-Community Relations in Yemen: Soqotra’s Historical Formation as a Sub-National Polity.” History and Anthropology 20 (4) (2009), 363–393. Reprinted by permission of the publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd. http://www. tandfonline.com. © The Author(s) 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45638-2_7

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catalytic events that led to the regime’s emergence; the political geography adopted for territorial administration; the structure and operational modality of communal governance; and the economic policy that underpins the development strategy. Finally, the chapter considers the likely outcome of the latest phase in Soqotra’s external supervision. In elucidating all of the above, this narrative simultaneously establishes the broad contours of the still unwritten modern history of Soqotra.

7.1 State Politics of Administration: Chronicle of a Recursive Relationship This chapter offers a narrative of the state’s politics of administration that chronicles the recursive relationship between local community, national society, the state and its international benefactors, and their agonistic socio-cultural and politico-economic interactions. In doing so, it examines the combinatory effects of state politics and policies, of transferred institutions and external actors, and shows how these have shaped the communal context of Soqotrans’ daily existence, and thus of their community’s historical trajectory. It explains how the communal polity was restructured through successive projects of political subordination, cultural assimilation, and socio-economic enclosure undertaken by various mainland-based political regimes from the late nineteenth century to the present. Soqotra’s earlier historical relations with foreign states from antiquity to the twentieth century are discussed elsewhere (Elie 2006a). The local political order was continuously mediated by a dual authority structure: a manifest, but arbitrary, authority imposed by exogenous peoples from across the seas who arrogated political hegemony over an annexed territory; and the tacit, but legitimate, authority of an indigenous people who hold prior historical occupancy and possess primacy of tenure over their ancestral territory. This situation bequeathed a persisting condition of political heteronomy, which induced a chronic political ambivalence toward the state that has permanently problematized Soqotrans’ perception of, and relations to, the Yemeni nation-state as a political community of belonging and commitment. Consequently, Soqotrans’ experience of their community’s progression as a political formation is through a tortuous path of a polity à la dérive, as they were involuntarily engaged in an externally directed quest for a final, yet elusive, political resting place.

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Soqotra’s Modern Trajectory: A Conjunctural History

This chapter operationalizes the concept of conjunctural narrative that was described in Chapter 2. Accordingly, it performs a structural anatomy and a historical biography of Soqotra’s political incorporation process through six politico-historical conjunctures: from the period of enforced socio-economic stagnation under the settler Sultanate during the nineteenth century; followed by the independence of South Yemen in 1967, and Soqotrans’ inauguration into modernity and nation-state citizenship; subsequently under the national unification government in 1990, which initiated the transfer of North Yemen’s tribal ethos; this unity government was succeeded by a post-unification regime that heralded the institutional “modernization” of governance and an international economic integration process through biodiversity conservation at the dawn of the twenty-first century; the Arab Spring launched a moment of communal political awakening in the second decade of the twenty-first century that promised Soqotrans sovereignty over their homeland; and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) imposed a humanitarian protectorate that prematurely aborted Soqotrans’ experiment with indigenous rule. These six conjunctural shifts in Soqotra’s political incorporation and the associated administrative regimes not only represent the major markers of the island’s recent historical evolution, but more importantly establish the broad contours of the modern history of Soqotra, which has yet to be written. The discussion of each phase is structured around four aspects that together convey a comprehensive overview of the nature of the governance systems and their structuring effects on polity formation in Soqotra. These four aspects are the following: (i) historical context, which sets the stage by identifying the catalytic events that led to the emergence of a new political regime and its re-organization of the communal polity; (ii) political geography, which characterizes each regime’s idiosyncratic territorial organization of the island for political administration; (iii) administrative structure, which describes the institutional mechanisms that articulate the mode of governance and identifies the units of administration or political offices that underpin the communal polity’s governance system; and (iv) economic policy, which identifies the regime-specific development strategy and their social ramifications. These four aspects are the vectors of historical change and social transformation through which the state produces and reproduces national and sub-national polities. In effect, this

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Table 7.1 Historical conjunctures in Soqotra’s political supervision Regime types and historical periods Settler PostSultanate: Revolution Proxy Administration: Colonialism Socialist ** Transformation 1890s – ** 1969 1969–1990

National PostUnity Unification Government: Regime: Republican Administrative Tribalism State ** ** 1990–2000 2001–2012

Arab Spring Awakening: Communal Sovereignty ** 2013–2015

UAE’s Humanitarian Protectorate: Compassionate Guardianship ** 2016–

policy agenda generates the “field of opportunities” within these domains, thereby channels the potentials of individual members of the polity, and determines the fate of the state’s sub-national communities. Moreover, changes in the state’s leadership generate changes in the nature of the political regime and in the policy agenda, which in turn lead to shifts in the community’s historical conjunctures (see Table 7.1). A caveat about the method used in this narrative reconstruction of Soqotra’s political history: It is not a traditional archive-based historical account partly because such an approach tends to foreground foreign actors’ agency as determinant of local life. In contrast, my approach prioritizes local perceptions of the key events that marked the community’s historical trajectory. Nevertheless, I have consulted the 16 volumes work entitled Records of the Yemen edited by Doreen and Leila Ingrams (1993), which contain “confidential” archival materials from 1798 to 1960. The resulting narrative is a historical contextualization of Soqotra’s transformation based on my notion of fieldwork as a recursive movement between places of observation and all relevant textual sources. As such, I have relied on recollections gathered from face-to-face encounters with local actors who are the ambulant archivists of their homeland’s past and present. In addition, I have made use of newspaper reports, the pertinent secondary literature in various disciplines, and social media postings that are the sources of public sentiment about the key recent events in the island’s life. Furthermore, my analytical approach does not share traditional anthropology’s foundational assumption that the domain of micro-relations between individuals or groups is the primary generative source of social reality. This assumption leads to the elision of the larger contextual factors (e.g., history, role of the state, and nature of the economy) that structure such relations. Accordingly, I do not employ biographical vignettes

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to illustrate the individual impact of historical events, since the analytical focus is on trans-local processes and their impacts on the Soqotran community as a social collectivity. Indeed, I consider that the individual is the sentient artifact of the collectivity’s shared horizon of possibilities allowed by the prevailing state-community covenant, and that this covenant incubates the social opportunities around which everyday life is organized. Accordingly, my analytical focus is at the meso-level (role of institutional actors and structures) and the macro-level (encompassing national/international matrices) of state-community governance. Finally, this “conjunctural” approach to history offers a counternarrative to, and thus challenges the historical plausibility of, the postmodernist theory-led interpretivist approach of foreign scholars who insist on mediating the local “politics of historical memory” with their own exogenous idioms of historical interpretation. The end result is the mystifying instrumentalization of research subjects’ historical experience through the following discursive practices: the idiosyncratic historicization of the nation-state, the interpretive decontextualization of local facts, and the theoretical dis-embedding of research subjects from their local structures of experience (e.g., Wedeen 2008; Willis 2012).

7.2

Settler Sultanate: Proxy Colonialism

The formal presence of the bin ‘Afr¯ar Sultanate of al-Mahra, located in the southeastern coast of mainland Yemen, was rather haphazard on Soqotra until 1480 when Mahri tribesmen disembarked from a flotilla of ten ships to formalize as well as to militarize their heretofore informal presence on Soqotra in their attempt to forestall the colonial ambition of their perennial rivals: the Kath¯ır¯ı and Qu’ait¯ı Sultanates in Hadhramawt (Serjeant 1992: 161). They established a fort at al-Suq, which was then the principal village, and the island’s main trading port, where a garrison of armed Mahri tribesmen was maintained to collect the tribute imposed on the pastoralists in the hinterland (Beckingham 1949). The Portuguese temporarily unseated the representation of bin ‘Afr¯ar Sultanate in 1507, but the latter reasserted its sovereignty upon the abandonment of the Portuguese short-lived colonizing venture in 1511. However, the new Mahri political overlord of the island seemed to have been present only intermittently and used it for two purposes: (i) as a temporary refuge from their political enemies, as ibn Majid, writing in the fifteenth century, explained, “to rally in it when they are weak and in danger from the

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Sultans of Hadhramawt and others [e.g., the Omanis]”; and (ii) as a tax farm, which was the island’s principal purpose. As ibn Majid confirms: “In our time the mash¯ayikh of Mahra built a fort there, and governed over some of its inhabitants, imposing unpaid labour on them, taking from each man a mound of ghee, and from each woman a rug” (quoted in Serjeant 1992: 144). This set a pattern in which the main northern coastal settlements were used primarily as tax collection nodes: Hadiboh, Qalansiyah, Qadhub, and Di Hamdh. In the early half of the nineteenth century, Soqotra was the first territory to have attracted British colonial interest. As one British observer puts it, “Socotra was the bellwether of British intentions in the Gulf of Aden area” (Gavin 1975: 198). Indeed, Soqotra’s strategic location made it a coveted territorial possession of great geopolitical importance. British geopolitical anxieties fomented by its imperial ambition to control the sea lanes and maritime traffic in the Gulf of Aden and beyond led them to make an offer in 1835 to purchase the island from the Sultan Amer bin Sa‘ad bin Tawary bin ‘Afr¯ar of al-Mahra (d. 1857), but it was rejected. This rejection engendered a chain of events that culminated in the occupation of Aden in 1839 and the creation, beginning in the 1880s, of a protectorate system incorporating a motley of political entities (i.e., Emirates, Sultanates, and shaykhdoms) in the western and eastern parts of South Arabia. 7.2.1

Dynastic Fiefdom: Imperial Outpost

Even prior to the start of construction of the Suez Canal in 1859 and after its opening in November 1869, the imperial powers of the nineteenth century sought to lease or buy Soqotra. For example, the Austrian Imperial Government in 1857 sent Admiral von Tegetthoff on a mission to purchase the island. His negotiations in Hadiboh led to a purchase price ranging from 10 to 12 thousand Thalers (the silver coins used as international currency at the time). However, the Austrian Empire’s preoccupation with challenges at home abandoned the idea (see Dostal 1998). Also, the Italian government wanted to acquire Soqotra for a penal colony; a French company sought purchase it; and even Egypt’s Khedive was suspected of similar intentions. The covetous disposition of foreign powers occasioned British imperial anxieties that compelled them to abandon the idea of purchasing Soqotra and to settle instead for a Protectorate Treaty in 1876 for Soqotra specifically. As the Sultan was

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made to “pledge and bind his heirs and successors, never to cede, to sell, to mortgage, or otherwise give for occupation, save the British Government, the Island of Socotra or any of its dependencies – the neighbouring islands.” Subsequently, the British signed with the Sultan of al-Mahra on 23 April 1886 a “Protectorate Treaty” that effectively incorporated both al-Mahra and Soqotra into “The Mahri Sultanate on Land and Soqotra” as the British Empire’s dependencies. These two treaties, which were merely symbolic displays of territorial possession as a means of preempting other powers’ from doing so, were followed by the Protectorate Treaty with the Mahri Tribes in 1888, as a pledge of allegiance by the tribes to British authority (see Ingrams and Ingrams 1993, vol. 4: 160–185). As an imperial outpost, however, British rule in Soqotra resembled “home rule” avant la lettre—the transitory neo-colonial governance arrangement under the distant supervision of the colonial power over its appanage prior to full independence—as the Sultan was free to rule his subjects as long as he did not allow other nations’ access to Soqotra. All three treaties were signed by Sultan ‘Ali bin ‘Abdallah bin Salem bin Sa‘ad bin Tawari bin ‘Afr¯ar (d. 1890?). These three treaties had the following ramifications: (a) guaranteed al-Mahra’s territorial integrity from its rival neighbors and secured internal peace among the Mahri tribes, and (b) formalized the sovereignty of the Mahri settlers over the indigenous residents of Soqotra. In effect, they facilitated the shift of the administrative center of the Sultanate from the village of Qishn to Hadiboh (called Tamarida then).1 On 30 October 1886, the Sultan’s son Salem bin Hamad accompanied the British to Tamarida, as Hadiboh was referred to then, for an official flag-raising ceremony. On that day, “the Union Jack was formally hoisted, saluted on shore by a guard of Marines and from H.M.S. Penguin by a Royal Salute of 21 guns” (Hunter and Sealy 1886: 115). The transfer of the official seat of the Sultanate to Soqotra seemed to have occurred after the death of Sultan ‘Ali bin Abdallah, when Sultan Salem who was the intermittent “resident governor” in Soqotra seemed to have taken permanent residence on the island. The Sultan’s decision to change the capital of the Sultanate, however, was not voluntary. Given the British geostrategic interest in Soqotra over al-Mahra and their need to have a figurehead on the island, the Sultan was perhaps coerced into changing residence. Nevertheless, Soqotra did have some attractive features: (a) the guaranteed income from the British annual payment of protectorate fees and (b) an easily enforced taxation

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scheme, as the island was a natural enclosure with a “captive” population of pastoralists who were unarmed and intrinsically peaceful, and thus easily subjugated to the Sultan’s tax collection regime.2 Ultimately, this transfer led to the imposition of a politico-economic regime that approximated an estate system structured around vertical relations of dependence between a coastal elite made up of Mahri political settlers and Arab economic migrants from mainland South Arabia and the rest of the Arabian Peninsula, and an indigenous population of pastoralists in the hinterland. These pastoralists were dispersed throughout the island into hundreds of self-contained household economic units, each paying tribute to the coastal elite in the form of pastoral products (e.g., skins, butter-oil, and dates). Moreover, it engendered a transition in the island’s political status: from a peripheral outpost whose indigenous population was subjected to occasional tax collection raids from representatives of alMahra’s Sultan, to the total territorial annexation of the island through a settler minority’s expropriation of the political sovereignty from the indigenous majority. This annexation led to an improvised political order encompassing a hybrid social formation interstitially located between a tributary patrimonialism and a system of settler colonialism. The transfer of the tributary regime that was practiced in al-Mahra entailed the appropriation of a surplus from the pastoralist economy through in-kind taxation (Ingrams 1966: 215). Accordingly, the Mahri Sultans and their retinue of Mahri tribes and other privileged clients divided the island into revenue fiefs as they regarded its territory and its resources as their eminent domain and were to be compensated through tax payments for the islanders’ use of these resources. Moreover, given that the protectorate system established throughout South Arabia was under British imperial tutelage, the transfer of the Sultanate’s center of political authority to Soqotra was encouraged, if not coerced, by the British. It led to the transplantation of a hybrid social formation that I call proxy settler colonialism: It combined an economic base constituted by al-Mahra’s tributary regime of systematic fiscal extraction from the indigenous population’s pastoral production and a political superstructure controlled by a minority class of expatriate rulers as British colonial proxies who insisted on maintaining their genealogysanctioned markers of status distinction as the rationale for their mandate to rule and to assert settler sovereignty over the island. Indeed, Soqotra’s settler colonialism was a structural effect of British protectorate policy of supporting the political hegemony of the bin ‘Afr¯ar dynasty since the

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nineteenth century. However, the political endgame envisioned by the Mahri settlers was not driven by the “logic of elimination of natives” that usually entailed mass demographic displacement and large-scale land dispossession as was the case elsewhere, but that of their permanent political subordination and economic exploitation (Veracini 2010). This political order was founded on relations of conquest, which engendered a reciprocal animosity based on a taxpaying indigenous majority population in the hinterland and a rent-seeking foreign settler minority on the northern coast.3 This hybrid governance regime was exercised through a kind of “Wandering Sultanate”: a state-like political entity that incorporated a transhumant pastoral population under the absolute rule of a Sultan who had no permanent roots in the town and was assisted by a small bureaucracy to manage the agropastoral surplus collected through in-kind taxation. The Sultan ruled through constant movement, political manipulation, and religious prestige conferred upon his authority by a sacerdotal caste (cf. Hourani 1990: 306). The Sultan’s peripatetic displacement throughout the island was partly motivated by the pursuit of a series of polity formation practices: (a) the consummation of strategic, and often serial, conjugal alliances with individual clans; (b) the granting of special privileges to selected clans as a means of cultivating or consolidating their political loyalty; and (c) the selective farming out of male infants to pastoralist families to raise for a certain period as a means of expanding the Sultan’s network of elective kinship relations (see discussion of qenhe in Chapter 3). However, the main coercive means of this “Wandering Sultanate” seems to have been the Sultan himself. One former muqaddam under the last Sultan ‘Isa bin ‘Ali (1952–1967) described him as an absolute ruler who brooked no disobedience and none was shown to him: “All he had was a wooden stick and a camel. There was no army or guns, yet he ruled absolutely.” Indeed, there was an oft-repeated phrase among Soqotrans: “Allegiance and obedience to His Excellency the Sultan our ruler” (sama‘¯ an wa .t¯ a‘a li jal¯ alat al sult.¯ an wa wal¯ı ¯ amran¯ a ). This mode of governance also brought along an ascriptive social status hierarchy, which engendered mutual perceptions of ethno-social differences between local groups. In Soqotra, this social stratification was based on a descending hierarchy of economic privileges and diminishing prestige of social functions, and was articulated in a division of labor based on an ascriptive relationship between status and occupation. Since these groups were already discussed in Chapter 4, they are briefly listed below:

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Bin‘Afr¯ ar, the tribal lineage of the Sultan’s family who claimed dynastic political hegemony based on their exclusive tribal descent; al-ashr¯ af , the sacerdotal caste who legitimated the Sultanate’s nominal Islamic identity; ´ . arÒ , who were originally from a low status group in the Dhofar region Sh of Oman and became servants of the Sultans in al-Mahra and were subsequently upgraded in Soqotra as the Sultan’s privileged clients; al-‘arab who constituted a class of economic migrants turned merchants from various parts of the Arabian Peninsula, who mediated the trade between the island, the Arabian Gulf, and East Africa; al-n¯ uban, an extended family said to be of Sudanese origin, who emerged under the last Sultan as the administrative cadre of the Sultanate; al-bad¯ u (Bedouins), transhumant pastoralists dwelling in the hinterland and who were the main taxpayers; a destitute sub-category of al-bad¯ u, especially from the more environmentally impoverished western part of the island, who were called ¯ akhd¯ am, free “Bedouin” servants, and volunteered their services as irregular guards (‘askar) or herders to the Sultan; the imbu‘ileh, slaves from East Africa who worked for some of the above groups. 7.2.2

Minimalist Apparatus: Invisible State

During the Sultanate, Soqotra was a clan-based polity with a sparse population estimated at 11,220 in 1966. However, Soqotrans’ experience of being part of a communal polity beyond their status as individual members in isolated clan-based hamlets was an episodic one, which occurred only during tax collection periods and irregular meetings with the Sultan. The population was thinly and widely dispersed throughout the island and was congregated in caves and hamlets of a few rudimentarily built structures occupied by clusters of extended families constituting a clan collective. It was a settlement pattern that was suited to a form of pastoralism that entailed the extensive use of land as grazing ground, and which sundered the landscape into an Archipelago of isolated clan hamlets. These clan hamlets were not the infrastructural political units of a tribal superstructure, which did not exist in Soqotra. Instead, they primarily served as the basic fiscal units of the Sultanate. Footpaths and camel tracks provided the only communication grid between the regions of the island (Wellsted 1835; Bent 1900; Botting 1958; Brown 1966). The governance apparatus was not based on an elaborate administrative organization of the island, since tax collection was the main governmental function. In 1834, Wellsted observed that, “they do not possess

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throughout the island a constituted authority either civil or military, or of any description whatsoever” (1835: 205). The treaty of 1876 provided an incentive to establish a more sustained presence on the island by the Sultanate’s “resident Governor” in order to maximize tax revenues. By 1877, the British Assistant Political Resident in Aden, while on a visit to the island, “found that the execution of the treaty had strengthened the Governor’s hand, and that the revenue had doubled” (Hunter and Sealy 1886: 113). The “Advisory Treaty” signed by the last Sultan with the British in April 1954 seemed to have led to the investiture of the Sultanate with state-like accouterments. For example, the printing of an official letterhead as well as stamps with the emblems of the Sultanate, the issuance of passports, and the dispatch of envoys in some of the neighboring countries. The availability of passport enabled Soqotrans to travel to the British protectorates throughout the Arabian Peninsula. This eventually led to the rise of labor migration as a “significant export” in response to demand in oil-producing countries of the region and to the practice of “leasing” labor gangs to external contractors for work in neighboring countries (see Dostal 1998: 268). Also, there was the consolidation of an administrative structure that encompassed central, regional, and local levels. It is this administrative structure that was captured in Douglas Botting’s description of the system of governance during his visit to the island in 1956: “The two of them [ministers ‘Isa bin Thani bin Ghanem may have been the deputy and Ibrahim Khaled ‘Ali al-Nubi was the wazir] directed an administrative system consisting of four principal Muqaddams, or headmen, administering four principal tribal districts, and thirty to sixty lesser Muqaddams administering the sub-districts” (1958: 65). He observed, “The remarkable thing about this administration was that it was practically invisible, either because it was so smooth and secretive or because it was so simple and perfunctory.” Botting’s description is briefly elaborated upon below: At the central level, which is in Hadiboh the capital village located on the northern coast, there was no shaykh system and therefore no shaykh al-mash¯ayikh, as was the case on the mainland. In contrast, there was a Tribal Council (majlis al-qabal¯ı), which approximated a “cabinet of ministers” that was composed of at least eighteen members representing the most important areas of the island, and headed by Wazir Ibrahim until 1965 when he submitted his resignation and was replaced by Salem Hasan Said Al-Jimhi. The members of this Council were selected by the

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Sultan based partly on the importance of their areas as strategic locations within the tax collection network, and they were not necessarily linked through kinship. As only three members were from the Sultan’s family, three were al-ashr¯ af , and the rest were representatives of the northern coastal villages that were used as tax collecting nodes given their proximity to the central and western hinterland, which are the main regions for the production of butter-oil that was taxed and exported. The places represented in the Council were the following: Hadiboh (4), Qadhub (4), Di Hamdh (2), and Qalansiyah (1), and one representative of the British from al-Mahra who attended occasionally (based on interview with the shaykh al-mash¯ayikh of Soqotra). There was a special office for the Council’s meeting as described by a colonial officer who visited the premises in Hadiboh in 1963: “The Sultan had in his Council chamber at Hadibu a fine Axminster carpet and a large table and chairs… The whole suite had been salvaged from a freighter which had gone aground on the Abdal-Kuri islands, west of Socotra” (Hinchcliffe et al. 2006: 138). At the regional level, there was a main representative of the Sultan, acting as regional muqaddam. They assumed authority on behalf of the Sultan and over the clan muqaddam at the sub-district level in some regions. This post seemed to have been occupied by notables from Mahri tribes, or someone with an elective kinship to the Sultan usually achieved through marriage, as is evident in the names of the following regional representatives: Qalansiyah (Bin Ham¯ud clan), Qabhitin (Bin Marjan clan), and Momi (Shibnihi clan). Finally, at the village level, the main office was that of the muqaddam, as clan leader. He was selected by members of a clan or group of related clans in each of the island’s clusters of villages organized into clan collectives. Thus, each cluster of related clans and the villages they encompassed had its own muqaddam, and he would serve as the political representative of his clan, police officer, tax collector, conflict mediator, and manager of access to, and use of, natural resources. The social mobilization effect of this administrative apparatus was to consecrate the office of the muqaddam as the institutional gatekeeper of the clan structure, which made the clan the organizational pillar of Soqotrans’ communal life, and thus permanently configured the island into an atomized clan-based polity.

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7.2.3

239

Roving “Parliament”: Order Maintenance Mechanism

The legal basis of government was an idiosyncratic combination of hukm ‘urf¯ı (tribal law) derived from al-Mahra, without its institutional underpinnings and corpus of tribal regulations (qaw¯ a‘id), improvisionally adapted to a clan-based polity. When I inquired about the legal foundation of the Sultanate, I was told that it was the Qur’an. In practice, this entailed a rudimentary recourse to shari’a (Qur’anic law), which was primarily used in determining the punishment for crimes (e.g., livestock theft), as Soqotra was only nominally an Islamic Sultanate with a religious class (al-ashr¯ af ) whose authority was based more on ascribed virtues than religious learning. In fact, the practice of Islam was not widespread, as it was mostly confined to the settlements on the northern coast and in a few enclaves in the East and West where the few mosques on the island were located. The Sultan had the final word in settling most issues or problems, except those related to Islamic law such as inheritance, which were within the jurisdiction of a q¯ ad.¯ı (judge). An appropriate comparison is the nature of governance under North Yemen’s Imamate in the ninth century as described by Stookey: “the rules applied… were simple and derived solely from the Qur’an and h.ad¯ıth; under the imam’s close guidance, a fairly rudimentary knowledge sufficed for their interpretation and application” (1978: 112). While Hadiboh had its Tribal Council, which was preoccupied with revenue generation from trade and with external relations, the rural areas had their own major institutional pillar, namely the Etíhi di-sát.ahan (“meeting with the Sultan”) (discussed in Chapter 3). This meeting took the form of a roving parliament as the Sultan presided over inter-clan meetings at designated locations (called masilhim) in different regions of the island. In effect, the Etíhi was an event that consecrated the Sultan’s authority as part of a political ritual that sought to police the polity through occasional bonding exercise between two topographically insulated domains of existence: the mountainous hinterland where the overwhelming majority of the population endured constant deprivation and the coast where the Sultan and his entourage of clients lived in relative comfort. The occurrence of the Etíhi was rather haphazard, as it depended on the request of a region’s muqaddam whenever he felt that a problem merited the Sultan’s attention, or on the whim of the Sultan who as a pastoralist wanted to renew his ties with his folks and flocks. This meeting was the major act of governance of the Sultanate, which had a

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multiplicity of functions: conflict adjudication, which is one of the etymological connotations of the term; public consultation with the Sultanate’s subjects; communal celebration, as clansmen brought along animals for the public feast that followed those meetings; authority maintenance, as it served as a forum for the public demonstration of the Sultan’s resolve to exercise his authority and to reinforce the fear that maintained the obedience of his subjects. Above all, the meeting was the main public order-maintenance ritual, during which the Sultan’s power of coercion was put on public display as a dissuasive strategy: Limbs of thieves were amputated, and whippings were carried out, among other fear-inducing acts (Al-Anbali 2007: 105–108; Naumkin et al. 2018: 312–315). Indeed, fear was a fundamental part of the Sultanate governance strategy, which was complemented by the widespread belief in witchcraft (sah.r), which led to the dominant role played by the mekoli (traditional healer), who had the power to determine who was a witch as well as the ability to remove witch spells (see Naumkin 1993: 315–323; SimeoneSenelle 1995). In effect, witchcraft “functioned as a security valve by channeling discontent and frustrations away from the social order… towards individuals who became scapegoats” (Eriksen 2004: 143). In Soqotra, it was exclusively women who were accused of witchcraft, and those found guilty were exiled to Suhar in Oman and the United Arab Emirates, where they unwittingly became the founding members of a now thriving Soqotran diaspora. In sum, order maintenance was a challenge given the extreme deprivation of Soqotrans, who were plagued by perennial food insecurity and the constant threat of seasonal hunger, which animated disputes over ownership of date palm trees and the persistence of animal theft, and land dispute. The latter two were intrinsically related to each other: Theft was a hunger-driven coping strategy, as people were stealing each other’s animals to survive while protecting their own herds. The land dispute arose out of counterclaims over the construction of animal housing, which served to protect the animal from thieves. It was this context that made the Etíhi indispensable, as there was a constant need to dispense swift punishment if the social order was not to be overwhelmed by internal rebellion against the austere living conditions, which the Sultan was unwilling or unable to improve.4

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7.2.4

241

Primitive Accumulation: Taxation as Surplus Generation

The Sultanate pursued a two-prong strategy of surplus generation, involving a combination of tax levying, which served as a production incentive for the pastoralists out of fear of incurring the wrath of the Sultan for not paying taxes, and a form of petty mercantilism pursued through a system of selling monopoly rights to the Arab merchants who intermediated the export and import of goods. These local revenue generation strategies were accompanied by the introduction on the island of “development” schemes by the British during the Second World War. Ever since Soqotra became the official seat of the Sultanate, tax farming was institutionalized and pursued systematically. Indeed, villages were essentially tax generation units for the Sultan, as the barter dominated and cashless herding economy restricted revenue generation to in-kind taxation of the main locally produced items: dates, butter-oil, and livestock. Two Soqotri terms were used to differentiate the nature of the taxed items: ‘¯ asher wa geyri was used to designate taxes on dates and butter-oil, and the term migereh was used to refer to taxes on livestock (Morris 2002: 43). Tax collection was done in a manner that deferred to the social status hierarchy, and thus was socially differentiated as well as regionally uneven. Moreover, the incidence of taxes varied according to the capacity to pay and seasonal availability of the taxed items, as both were contingent on nature’s whim (e.g., rain). The pastoralists bore the brunt of taxation. There was a relative regional specialization in terms of the main items taxed due to the varying resource endowment of, and the related livelihood activities in, the different agro-ecological zones of the island. Accordingly, in the eastern part of the island, where most date palm trees were cultivated, the villagers paid with dates, although they were not exempted from supplying butter-oil as well, if they owned a sizable herd. In the western part of the island, where livestock was the main resource where butter-oil was produced in large quantity for export, villagers paid taxes in butter-oil, sheep, goat, and animal skins, which were used as containers (for dates, milk, water). Indeed, it was in the west, the location of Soqotra’s dedicated pastoralists, that taxes were collected more systematically. The timing of tax collection varied according to the items: In the case of dates, it was linked to harvest time during the horf season (JulyAugust); in the case of both butter-oil and livestock, it occurred during the .s¯ereb season (October to May) when animals were lactating and milk

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production was at its peak, and for livestock, it was the parturition period for sheep and goat (see seasonal calendar in Chapter 5). In principle, taxation amounted to roughly 10% on dates, butter-oil, and animal herds. For example, in the case of dates for every one hundred trees, the Sultan would receive the harvest from ten trees, or alternatively, one branch (‘ashka) from each tree would be collected as taxes. For butter-oil, six ratals (pounds) were collected from every household. For animals, sheep, and goats, one or two were collected from every fifty heads. However, sheep (an immature female) was preferably given as tax, since its milk was not used in the production of butter-oil; in contrast, goats, whose milk was the primary source of butter-oil, an immature male was given as tax, in order not to adversely affect stock reproduction and butter-oil production. Hadiboh and some of its satellite villages constituted tax-free zones, as a self-serving economic measure for the Sultan and his entourage who were the main owners of the date plantations there. Trade was a form of barter mediated by Arab merchants. It entailed near contractual relations between the pastoralists who provided butteroil, the main but not exclusive exchange item, and the merchants who exchanged it for requested imported items, cereal and cloth being the main but not exclusive goods. Trade used a system of value equivalence between the different kinds of goods (for the rates of exchange, see Serjeant 1992: 178–180; Morris 2002: 144–145). However, the standard bearer of value was maize (maqdere) imported from East Africa and that was exchanged for butter-oil. The class of traders represented a relatively small number of families of economic migrants from the Arabian Peninsula designated as al-‘arab. They were all congregated in a few settlements on the northern coast of the island, with Hadiboh, Qadhub, and Qalansiyah being the most important locations. Together, they made up the entire business community, as they constituted the main, if not sole, middlemen between Soqotra’s products and external markets. They operated from stores within their residence, from which they collected the local goods from the pastoralists and coastal residents and sold them abroad and purchased in return the goods they requested. Also, they used a system of itinerant representatives, called bishkar, who travelled on the back of camels throughout the hinterland to collect butter-oil in exchange for imported goods (see Morris 2002: 144; Wellsted 1835: 179). The main destinations for Soqotra’s exports and imports were the following: Muscat (Oman), which received pearl-shells, Dragon Blood tree resin, butter-oil, and aloes and sent back dates. Zanzibar (Africa) received salted

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fish and butter-oil and sent maqdere and coconut oil. Finally, Bombay (India) received Soqotran rugs, butter, and Dragon Blood resin and sent back cloth, spices, and cosmetics (see Morris 2002: 149–150). It was in this context that the allocation of monopoly rights and the imposition of custom duties were operationalized under the supervision of the Tribal Council. Regarding “development,” it was under crisis condition that its discourse and minimal practice were introduced on the island. This was occasioned by the disruptions in the Indian Ocean traffic of dhows supplying the island caused by the military activities of Italian and German sub-marines. Indeed, the transient interest in Soqotra’s development was forced upon the British between 1939 and 1945 when the island “was reoccupied by British, South African, Dutch and Canadian forces and used as a base for convoy escorts and anti-submarine patrols” (Peterson 1985: 33; Johnston 1964: 92–94). These allied troops were stationed in a garrison at M¯ur¯ı on the northern coast. The resulting food deficit, and the famine condition it engendered, led the Sultan to pester the British for grain donation or to submit requests for the purchase of cereal abroad. Also, beggars and prostitutes camped out in front of the garrison, which became a public nuisance. It was this combination of factors that seemed to have led the British to engage in the occasional humanitarian food assistance in times of extended drought to alleviate famine condition, and to undertake missions to look at ways of reducing the island’s dependency on food imports. This led to the formulation of project proposals on agriculture and fisheries by British officers visiting from Aden, which were never implemented (Hartley 1944). In spite of the chronic nature of unemployment and income deficit on the island, the British never encouraged the economic transition from the export of butter-oil to the export of animals or from subsistence to market pastoralism. In contrast, it was the British presence in Aden that provided the catalyst to Somalia’s commercialization of livestock trading (see Chapter 6). The main “development” impact of the British was limited to a few haphazard employment or income generation initiatives: occasional public works (e.g., airfield maintenance, and some roads construction); renting of animals for overland transport; and the purchase of vegetables produced from home gardens in the villages neighboring the garrison (see various reports in Ingrams and Ingrams 1993, vol. 9: 731– 772). Noteworthy is the mode of operation of the British public works in Soqotra as an employment generation policy, as recounted by an elderly

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muwallad who was a participant. The British used a rotational system to recruit African slaves and some pastoralists from the coastal towns of Hadiboh and Qadhub as laborers with the permission of the Sultan who was paid a commission. Gangs of twenty-five laborers each from these places would be hired on a weekly basis. The workday started at dawn and lasted until midday. At the week’s end, they would be paid in cash in a currency called “qirsh sham¯ı” or with Indian Rupee, which was the main currency in Aden. Two weeks’ salary could purchase a year’s supply of the basic food items and even some clothes. The British haphazard presence on Soqotra only led to a virtual approach to the island’s development. In effect, the non-pursuit of “development” in Soqotra was related to its diminishing relevance in the British Empire-maintenance scheme, which was above all the raison d’être of “development.” This is clearly expressed in a 1957 letter from William Luce, then governor of Aden Colony, to his superior in London about a more effective alternative to military action in pacifying the protectorate: “[F]or the maintenance of our position, we must, I am convinced, look to a programme of development” (quoted in Ingrams and Ingrams 1993, vol. 13: 657). During the British Empire, “development” was pursued through the British government’s funding agency for colonial development: the “Colonial Development & Welfare Scheme” (CD&W). In the British protectorates in South Arabia, the CD&W’s budget was chronically insufficient as attested by one former colonial officer in Aden about Soqotra’s utter neglect under British rule: “In 1966, George Hilton-Brown was sent to Socotra to carry out a survey of the social and economic conditions and to identify possible projects for funding by CD&W. He spent four months on the survey and visited much of the island on foot or camel. His report is dated 16 July 1966, and in the 15 months remaining before independence, it was not possible to follow up any of his recommendations. It shows how few resources the British administration of the Eastern Aden Protectorate had at its disposal that nothing had been done earlier” (Hinchcliffe et al. 2006: 138). Noteworthily, Brown’s 1966 report is more useful today as a source of historical data than it was then. In light of its colonial master’s neglect, Soqotra’ small-scale tributary administration sustained itself as a parasitic apparatus of fiscal extraction. As it was superimposed on an indigenous population of transhumant pastoralists as tax tributaries dwelling in the hinterland, and the labor of African slaves residing in the coastal villages in the north. In effect,

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pastoralists were constrained into relations of economic exploitation and political domination, in which the Sultans and their clients took advantage of them, either through their ascribed role as tributaries to the coffers of the Sultanate, or as defrauded participants in an unequal exchange of local products for imported goods. Indeed, as Serjeant observed in referring to the Sultan and his entourage, “There is no opening for an able man apart from this group. The Sultan and his servants and the merchants are well off but not the rest” (1992: 166).

7.3

Post-Revolution Administration: Socialist Transformation

“For 129 years they left our country, and especially our countryside, without the most basic features of modern life: roads and means of communications, schools, health units, and drinking water wells were virtually non-existent” (Ismael and Ismael 1986: 110). This statement was the South Yemeni government’s assessment of the legacy of British rule, but it aptly describes as well the situation of Soqotra after 91 years of British “indirect rule.” The latter was a euphemism for the perverted practice of arrogating political authority without assuming the social welfare responsibilities it entailed, or as one scholar put it, an “imperialism of interference without responsibility” (Lewis quoted in Anderson 1987: 5). This is confirmed by Sir Humphrey Trevelyan, who was the last high commissioner in Aden and oversaw the British withdrawal from South Arabia: “Our period of occupation did the country little permanent good, for all the selfless work of many devoted Englishmen and so many good intentions” (quoted in Hinchcliffe et al. 2006: 1). Soqotra was an apt example of “little permanent good,” as Soqotrans’ needs were entirely neglected by the British and the Sultan. The British had conveniently assumed that Soqotrans were the responsibility of the Sultan, as any demonstration of concern on their part would be tantamount to interference with the Sultan’s prerogative. After all, they had already fulfilled their responsibility by paying a yearly rent of $360 per year to the Sultan and for the use of parts of the island. Only a few opportunities for short-term employment through public works were provided during the construction of the infrastructural installations needed by the British military garrison located on the northern coast and were used as a base for allied forces during the Second World War.

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One British observer let out his exasperation at his government policy of neglect in South Arabia generally, which aptly characterized the case of Soqotra, when he exclaimed, “[H]ad any other nation been masters of Aden, some more tangible result of our stay would have been shown… [I]t is the overseas portion of our Protectorate that has been so long and so systematically neglected” (Jacob 1923: 281–282). Indeed, this neglect of the development of South Arabia’s hinterland and of Soqotra was to remain a chronic feature of British policy until independence (Halliday 1974: 153–177). One old pastoralist aptly captured the essence of British policy by referring to it in the metaphor of a renegade herder: “It was like the owner of a sheep who ties the animal under the sun, not in the shade, and without water or food.” It was this chronic policy of neglect practiced by the absentee landlord of Soqotra that was brought to an end on 29 November 1967, when an armed guerrilla contingent of the radical National Liberation Front arrived on the shores of Hadiboh as the island liberation forces. This was one day ahead of the official departure of British troops from the mainland on 30 November 1967, which is the official date of South Yemen’s independence. 7.3.1

Undoing Indirect Rule: “Revolutionary Decolonization”

The new administration that was eventually set up initiated the transformation of the island through a “revolutionary decolonization” process that engendered a mode of polity regimentation, which seemed to have been driven by a martial disciplinary ethos. Accordingly, it sought not only to coerce Soqotrans into the modern world, but also to drastically reconfigure the island’s communal life through the following initiatives: removing the embargo against modernization that the British were complicit in enforcing; banishing the Sultanate’s medieval social status hierarchy; and sundering the symbiosis between status hierarchy and economic inequality. The emergence of this socialist administration was a politically agonizing process within the newly founded southern state, and its spread to Soqotra was contingent on its progress on the mainland. Indeed, the first step toward the modernization of Soqotra (i.e., roads, schools, health clinics, and water storage) began in earnest after 1969. The year 1969 was a politically turbulent one in South Yemen, as the Fourth National Congress of the National Front adopted a radical program that subsequently engendered political conflicts between leftist and centrist forces over policy goals and control of state power (Stork

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1973: 8). An armed confrontation between leftist and centrist factions culminated in the “corrective step” of June 1969 when the centrist President was ousted, which brought the National Front faction at the helm of the state and Marxism became the basis of state policies (Stookey 1982; Halliday 1990; Lackner 1985: 60–78). This date marked the transition between two states with different political ideologies: The first state was established in the immediate aftermath of the British departure from the south on 30 November 1967 and named the People’s Republic of South Yemen (PRSY) under the President Qahtan Muhammad AlSha‘abi, which espoused a centrist nationalist ideology, and lasted until the coup d’état of 22 June 1969. That event led to the mutation of the South Yemeni state into the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) under President Salim Rubiyya ‘Ali (1969–1978), which espoused the Marxist ideology of “scientific socialism” and lasted until unification in 1990. Under this regime, the socialist transformation of South Yemen and by extension Soqotra was initiated. Article 28 of the 1970 constitution of the PDRY promised that: “The state shall work for raising the standard of the underdeveloped areas with the aim of gradually obliterating the differences in the standard of living between the various parts of the republic” (Lackner 1985: 127; Stookey 1982: 69–71). The implementation of this constitutional clause, among others, in Soqotra heralded a period that Soqotrans described as the “coming of civilization” (h.ad.¯ ara), which was spread by a contingent of change agents from South Yemen. In effect, the South Yemeni state launched Soqotrans’ inaugural socialization as citizens of a modernizing nation-state through the deployment of a series of social engineering tools dedicated to the cultivation of a “socialist ethic” through redirecting the verticallocal loyalties of the pre-existing “feudal” polity into horizontal-national fealties as part of its polity formation strategy for the new nation-state: the introduction of compulsory secular education; the initiation of Soqotrans’ training in new occupations (teachers, farmers, policemen); the conscription of young male into military service; the abolition of slavery that led to the emergence of a new social group of former slaves and their descendants, al-muwallad¯ın; the promotion of women’s emancipation through their obligatory participation in all state institutions; the eradication of rural-urban inequalities; the imposition of Arabic as the communal lingua franca to facilitate the socialization and local administration of the population.

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These policies engendered a series of transformative consequences: (a) fomented the generalized social inclusion of previously disenfranchised social categories, which led to the demise of the Sultanate’s ascriptive status hierarchy and of its proxy settler colonial order; (b) reconfigured the Soqotran community’s internal socio-cultural boundaries from a spatial differentiation between hinterland and coast as an expression of divergent occupational identities, and a geographical bifurcation between east and west as indicative of contrary regional cultural propensities, toward a generalized participation in the cultural modernization initiated by the socialist administration; and (c) initiated a state-sponsored language replacement process through the Arabization of the exclusively oral Soqotri culture that engendered a transition, still in progress, from a Soqotri-based culture of orality to an Arabic-based culture of literacy (see Vol. 2: Chapter 2). Subsequently, Soqotra began its gradual emergence from what the state regarded as a feudal enclave toward its still evolving modernization path. This community-wide comprehensive make-over process was animated by the political conviction that modernization could not be achieved through the agency of subsistence agropastoralists or cave dwelling “Bedouins” unaided by an urban-based vanguard. This conviction was abetted by a Marxist theory inspired-ideological antagonism toward the traditional social structure, which was seen as a major impediment to the state’s quest for the transformation of a territory sundered into centrifugal regional social formations into a centripetal socialist national polity. This ideological antagonism had devastating consequences for the upper echelon of the traditional social structure, especially the Sultan and his family. One of the sons of the last Sultan speaking publicly for the first time about these consequences described what happened: The National Front put our parents in prison and confiscated all our money, including our houses, which they turned into government offices. All our belongings were looted. Even the archives of the Sultanate were burnt under heavy security for three days. All the proof of the Sultanate’s existence, documents and papers were destroyed, and the contents of the two palaces in Soqotra and another one in al-Mahra were looted. The livestock and palms that we owned were transferred, in an absurd way, to the state represented by the Ministry of Agriculture. After that, arrests and executions were carried out. (Al-Dumaini 2019)

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Beyond the targeted political exactions, the South Yemeni state’s political project of citizen formation inaugurated the national acculturation of Soqotrans through a kind of ethnocultural homogenization that was to continue under successive political regimes. This political project promoted an inextricable linkage between hegemonic language (Arabic), dominant ethnicity (Arab), and a pan-regional politico-cultural identity (Arab nationalism) within a modernizing nation-state. 7.3.2

Rural-Urban Nexus: Territorial Remapping and Population Socialization

Soqotra’s landscape provided the socialist administration with a territorial reorganization challenge to its vision of the island’s new political geography. As it was confronted with a residential pattern in which Soqotrans were distributed into hundreds of hamlets, each with a micro-size population eking out subsistence livelihoods isolated in their respective ecological niches by a forbidding topography, accessible only by foot or camel. In this context, the administration sought to develop urban nodal points in a rural-urban grid with Hadiboh town as the strategic center. The town was reorganized into an embryonic urban agglomeration to symbolize its importance in a new political geography of the island as well as to herald the inclusion of Soqotra into national history. This was done through the creation of neighborhoods named after the dates of major historical events that marked the nation-building itinerary of both Yemeni states: h.¯ ara 26 September, to commemorate the 1962 revolution in North Yemen against the Imamate; h.¯ ara 14 October, the anniversary date of the Revolution in South Yemen; and h.¯ ara 30 November, the departure date of the last British soldiers from Yemeni soil in 1967. This was to serve as the myth of origin of the newly incorporated community as part of a common national culture and shared political history (Elie 2004a). Beyond Hadiboh, there was Qalansiyah in the west as the other embryonic town, which was to act as attracting poles to the hinterland in an attempt to partially drain it of its surplus population. The development of these urban centers was accompanied by the reorganization of villages within re-configured regional areas, as part of an island-wide integration process that would link isolated clans to larger communal groupings administered from Hadiboh under the supervision of the mainland state. These preliminary steps toward the socio-spatial re-configuration of the island were linked to the state’s need for a bureaucratic apparatus to carry

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out the administrative functions (e.g., census taking, local elections, and committee creation) to prepare Soqotrans for political citizenship in the new state. A crucial part of this opening up process was the construction of the first island-wide network of car tracks, through the shaq al-t.uruq¯ at (roads cutting) initiative, for transportation and communication link between rural and urban parts of the island. This engendered an internal migration from the mountains to the plains of the hinterland, as the pastoralists gradually began to abandon their cave habitats for built structures in the proximity of the tracks. Complementing this population transfer strategy from rural to urban, there was the institutionalization of formal education, as the new administration sought to propel Soqotrans, almost forcibly, into the modern period through socialist transformation. Formal schooling was a radical departure from the previous regime, where learning was restricted to home-based Qur’an lessons. Only in 1963 was a ma‘al¯ ama (Qur’anic school) established in Hadiboh under the supervision of a Qur’an teacher. Under the socialist government, this Qur’anic school was converted into the first elementary school in Hadiboh. In 1971, it had a contingent of five teachers and 120 students (Zabal 1971: 99). The educational strategy of the socialist administration was pursued with disciplinary zeal, as children in rural areas were forcibly rounded up to attend newly established rural primary schools. These schools were established through a state-supported schools-building competition between villages, as schools became an emblem of prestige in villages and a marker of participation in “civilization” among villagers (Vladimir Agafonov pers. comm.). These rudimentary constructions were built through the use of the mutual aid institution of gírif (see Chapter 3). However, not everyone welcomed the arrival of “civilization” that schools represented. Women, in particular, were affected by the loss of labor hands in the household, as this rather poignant stanza in a poem recorded by Vladimir Agafonov (pers. comm.) in the 1970s from pastoralists women in the western part of the island, in which they proclaimed hyperbolically their willingness for the ultimate sacrifice if the state leaves their daughters alone: “the women say: /let me die instead of you President/if you don’t take our girls (to school).” Following a preparatory period in these rural primary schools, students were sent to the “Salmin School for Nomadic Bedouins” (madrasat S¯ alm¯ın li-l-bad¯ u al-ruh.h.al ), which used the nickname of President Salim Rubayya ‘Ali (Salmin). It was located in Muri on the northern coast, the

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catchment area for the western part of the island, which was regarded as the sanctuary of what the state designated as Soqotra’s “Bedouins.” It was one of the first boarding schools for the rural population established in the early 1970s. The establishment of boarding schools for “Bedouins” was a national policy of “cultural revolution” in the rural areas, which was based on the assumption that changing the kinshipcircumscribed loyalties of rural residents could only be achieved “by putting them [Bedouins’ children] in boarding schools… [so that] in a few years’ time, they will become missionaries to their parents for social and economic change” (Cigar 1985: 44). The school was administered by the Ministry of Defense not the Ministry of Education, and students were subsequently sent to Aden for military training, which was obligatory for all young men. This disciplinary ethos was institutionalized in the Law of National Military Service (q¯ an¯ un al-khidma al-‘askariyya alwat.aniyya), according to which every male either 18 years of age or who has completed secondary school was to enroll in the military for a period of two years without exception. 7.3.3

Local Self-Rule: Hierarchical Committee System

Hadiboh was designated the capital of the newly constituted district (mud¯ıriyya) of Soqotra. It was within the jurisdiction of Aden, the first out of the six provinces, or governorates, of the new state in South Yemen. The head of the district was the Governor (m¯ am¯ ur), who was initially occupied by, and has until the late 2000s remained, a mainland Yemeni, and was assisted by two Soqotran deputies. This troika administered the island through a hierarchical committee system, linking the central, regional, and local/village levels: At the central level, there was the District Committee of the Socialist Party (lajnat al-mud¯ıriyya li-l-hizb al-ishtir¯ ak¯ı), made up of about twenty Soqotran members with overall responsibility for the island, which constituted the executive committee assisting the Governor in its governing tasks. The district was divided into two administrative centers (markiz idar¯ı), Hadiboh and Qalansiyah, and the two deputies of the Governor were responsible for them. There were two more committees: The first was the Central Committee for Popular Defense (lajnat markiz al-dif¯ a’ al-sha‘ab¯ı), composed of about twentyfive members selected from all over the island, which was, in effect, the island’s political security and ideological correctness oversight authority.

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The second was the Neighborhood Committee (lajnat al-wah.da alsikaniyya) with seven members, but only for Hadiboh and Qalansiyah, as the two urban agglomerations. For the rural areas, there was the Village Committee (lajnat al-qariyya), headed by a locally selected chairperson with a deputy and about five additional members. There were nearly forty such committees representing the different sub-regional areas of the island. This committee was an area-wide entity agglomerating a group of villages as well as clans within a region. This was intended to undermine the previous local administrative structure based on clan affiliation. However, the traditional political office of muqaddam remained the foundation of the committee system. The administrative system described above was adapted to the Soqotra context from the one established throughout the territory of the South Yemeni state. It was a model encompassing influences from other socialist regimes, such as the Soviet, Chinese, and especially Cuba (see Ismael and Ismael 1986: 42–78). Its ultimate aim was the formation of a national/communal polity in which every member is imbued with a socialist ethic, which entailed the construction of a national economy animated by the principles of national service, cooperative spirit, socio-economic justice, and collectivism over individualism. This system fomented inclusive participation, partly in order to dissolve the previous ascriptive hierarchy and its ethnic boundaries. However, the discriminatory social status hierarchy of the Sultanate was replaced by a hierarchical political management. More important, perhaps, was the need to institutionalize the new system in a manner that would ensure its social reproduction. This was attempted through the creation of a “civil society” by government-sponsored mass organizations that served as promotion “centers of loyalty” to the state in the form of women’s union, youth union, and defense union. Their role was to be the catalyst for the spread of a revolutionary consciousness. This fostering of social inclusion through the ideological regimentation of Soqotrans seemed to have been mainly intended to achieve maximum political control by the center. This centralizing urge was motivated by a surveillance imperative, induced by a phobia of imagined enemies of the revolution. There was a hierarchy among these enemies of the state within the population: al-barjwazi (the bourgeoisie as capitalist exploiters of the masses and their petty bourgeois sympathizers), aliqt.¯ a‘iyyin (feudal land owners), and al-imperialiyyin (foreign powers and their local stooges). One organizational manifestation of this phobia of

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counter-revolutionaries was the creation of the “Base Organization” (almunadhama al-q¯ a‘idiyya), with compulsory women membership, which was implanted all over the island as branches of the Central Committee for Popular Defense. Operationally, they were the equivalent of the mainland’s neighborhood popular defense committees that were “designed to combine educational and social welfare activities… with security duties” (Halliday 1979: 12). In Soqotra, these “base organizations” were dedicated to the maintenance of “security and stability” (¯ amn wa ¯ıstiqr¯ ar), or more broadly, civil peace and social order, which were a euphemism for politico-ideological conformity. The local self-rule that was being promoted turned out to be on behalf of the state and in response to its paranoia of sovereignty and control, which were unrelated to the quotidian existence of Soqotrans. This paranoia of sovereignty was symbolized in the 1975 State Security Law, which made it an “an offense for a Yemeni to speak with a non-Yemeni without official approval” (Halliday 1979: 10; 1990: 228). This political gag on the citizenry, or this “anti-fraternization” injunction, was also operational in Soqotra, as I was told by local interlocutors. It seems that ideological harassment was the price to pay for being rescued from the socio-economic orphanage of the Sultanate. This ultimately undermined the development of democratic norms that were being promoted by the socialist administration and led to the partial dissipation of the social capital it had accumulated through its progressive social policies. Nevertheless, the regime had differentiated impacts on the local population, and thus, its legacy is differently recollected. For example, one religiously disposed Soqotran described the socialist period as hukm shum¯ ul¯ı (totalitarian rule); in contrast, one muwallad recalled that “It was the first time we felt as full members of the community.” The latter positive appreciation of the socialist period seems to have prevailed, as the local remnant of the Yemeni Socialist Party won the first parliamentary elections held in 1993 after unification. 7.3.4

Subsidized Consumption: State-Led Redistribution

The socialist administration adopted a comprehensive social policy framework, which encompassed the following priorities: (a) compulsory primary education for all children, (b) generalized access to essential foodstuffs and basic consumer items, (c) land redistribution as a means to employment generation through the commercial exploitation of natural

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resources (e.g., agriculture and fish), and (d) infrastructure development (Ismael and Ismael 1986: 110–128; World Bank 1979; Couland 1984). These priorities were framed within a societal vision of accelerated modernization of both rural and urban areas. The implementation effects of some of these socio-economic goals on the Soqotran community are highlighted below: The introduction of a system for generalized access to essential food items (e.g., sugar, rice, tea, flour, milk, and cooking oil) in order to end the threat of hunger that Soqotrans chronically endured under the Sultanate, and to basic consumer goods (e.g., teacup, water jug, and plates), as well as agricultural tools and fishing equipment. Most of these goods were previously unknown to the vast majority of islanders. However, the role of the Sultanate’s Arab merchants was constrained by the state’s aversion to private sector commercial activities; and thus were allowed to participate in the selling of these new items at regulated prices from 1967 to 1975. As of the latter date, a branch of the National Internal Commercial Company was established for the distribution of essential food items throughout the island. The Company served as the national delivery mechanism for a constellation of state-controlled corporations throughout the territory of the southern state, and it governed all aspects of the economy, as it had exclusive monopoly on sale of all basic food commodities (World Bank 1979: 44). Four distribution centers were established around Soqotra to facilitate access to these imported items at subsidized prices. The availability of the food items engendered change both in local consumption habits and in the production of Soqotra’s cash crop (butter-oil), which was exchanged for imported goods. The symbiotic nexus between production and consumption in the pastoral economy was broken when the importation from East Africa of one of the key food items in the Soqotran diet—i.e., maqdere (maize)—was discontinued, as the Sultanate’s trade with East Africa was abandoned by the socialist administration in favor of rice imported from elsewhere. This resulted in the discontinuation of butter-oil production for export and the corresponding relegation of pastoralism from primary to supplementary economic activity. However, in the absence of any direct intervention in the pastoralists’ territory, besides making available subsidized food, the socialist administration established the Company for External Trade, which was dedicated to the purchasing of local products (e.g., aloes, resin of the Dragon Blood Tree, locally made rugs, and even butter-oil) from pastoralists and selling them elsewhere. Both of these state companies

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stopped their operation after the civil war of 1994 as the Socialist Party’s governance of the island was formally ended when army troops from North Yemen took over Soqotra and forced the m¯ am¯ ur at the time into hiding and subsequently into exile. Another pillar of the socio-economic policies of the socialist administration was employment generation, which was linked to a land redistribution policy and was based on the land dispossession clause in Article 19 of the 1970 Constitution: The properties of the Sultans, Amirs, Sheikhs and rulers of the expired regime and the properties of all persons stated in the agrarian reform law shall be sequestered without compensation. The land shall be utilized by farm workers, poor farmers and citizens migrating from the towns and deserts. (Ismael and Ismael 1986: 84)

The previous southern state of PRSY had already promulgated the dispossession of all the ruling families of the South Arabian Protectorates established by the British with Republican Decree No 7 of 11 December 1967. However, it seems that under the PRSY land dispossession of the Sultan and his kinsmen as well as that of relatively well-endowed families was not carried out as the state’s leadership was nationalist. In contrast, in 1970 the state leadership espoused a radical leftist ideology and the introduction of Article 19 in the PDRY’s constitution of 1970 confirmed that the policy of dispossessing the landed classes would be maintained and pursued more systematically. The dispossession of the Sultan that was discussed above seemed to have happened after the enactment of the 1970 constitution. The land redistribution policy that the constitution authorized led to an internal population redistribution, albeit not on a massive scale, from the hinterland to the coast. This engendered the reconfiguration of the population composition, especially of villages on the northern coast. The population affected was not a poor peasantry, as there were none, but poor pastoralists. Indeed, the policy seemed designed to encourage the pastoralists’ transition from cave dwellers to occupants of built settlements. Besides the fulfillment of an ideological imperative (equality of access to the means of production), the purpose was to allow pastoralists to supplement their precarious livelihood with other activities. One consequence was the rise of the seasonal practice of a tri-modal livelihood: fishing, pastoralism, and agropastoralism (vegetable gardening and date palm tree cultivation).

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In this context, fishing and farming were promoted as alternative means of livelihood to an increasingly moribund pastoralism. Accordingly, the transformation of fishing from a subsistence activity to an economic exchange activity was initiated in the 1970s, following the government’s organization of local fishermen “uprisings” (intif¯ adh¯ at alsay¯ ad¯ın),5 when the Ministry of Fish Wealth began to support the development of a fishing sector through the establishment of “Soqotra’s Fishing Cooperative” through which the fish was purchased for sale on the mainland or elsewhere. This guaranteed an income to fishermen and made fishing an attractive alternative to pastoralism. Indeed, fishing was promoted as an integral part of local folklore through the official annual celebration of the “Day of Fishermen Uprising.” Fishing, however, was already a commercial activity in Qalansiyah, as it was the main port “for ships heading from the Gulf to Africa. [It] is known as the shark graveyard and its odor is everywhere.” Indeed, it “exports 50,000 pieces of dried shark ‘meat’ to the African countries and India” (Zabal 1971: 104–106). In addition to fishing, the socialist administration launched in the early 1970s an agricultural experiment in Soqotra, as mandated by the agrarian reform law that model farms be established “to encourage peasants and co-operative societies to undertake collective works” (Ismael and Ismael 1986: 85). However, in Soqotra, it was not about encouraging, but of creating, the non-existent social category of peasant farmer. Salim Zabal, who was on a six-day reporting mission to Soqotra witnessed the preparation of the ground for the establishment of an agricultural farm in the N¯oged plains in the southern part of the island in early 1971: “The smoke of the fires rises everywhere. The fires devour the wild weeds which will be replaced by large-scale farming for the first time in the history of the island.” The Director of the Ministry of Agriculture at the time declared confidently in an interview with Zabal: “After two years, the center of gravity will move from the north of the island to the south … to Nujed, which will become the beating heart of Soqotra” (Zabal 1971: 103). That farm grew into 600 hectares, in which all sorts of vegetables were grown as well as some fruit trees. There was also a sheep farm in N¯oged, which started with 400 sheep and grew to 1200. The farms employed about forty people. Among them were professional farmers from the mainland, especially from Abyan and Aden, who came to provide technical assistance to local farmers. At least twenty Soqotrans were sent to the town of al-Fay¯ush, famous for its agriculture in the Tuban district of Lah.ij Governorate, to undergo three to six months’

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agricultural training. All agricultural experiments were riddled with problems. The most important and persistent problems were the insufficiency of water for the farms, as the rains were inconsistent, and the inadequate availability of pasture for the animals. By the early 1980s, all cooperative agricultural experiments were terminated.6 Subsequently, interventions reverted to traditional small-scale agricultural activities such as home gardens. These gardens have become the exclusive focus of agricultural development assistance, especially since 1997 when new government and internationally supported initiatives were launched. In sum, while the economic policy of subsidized consumption of imported goods was necessary in the short term, given Soqotrans’ extreme state of deprivation, the long-term impact has been the weaning away of Soqotrans from primary dependency on their herds as their main source of livelihood and the consequent abandonment of their rigorous animal husbandry system. Given the failure of agriculture and the small-scale nature of the fishing cooperatives, no sustainable economic alternative was provided to the subsistence pastoralism that continued to sustain, albeit inadequately, the majority of Soqotrans. Moreover, the socialist economy had a strong urban bias, which benefited the new class of urban-based bureaucrats that was created to run the administrative machinery. Indeed, a job in this bureaucracy was guaranteed to all secondary school graduates. However, it failed in its attempt to transform Soqotran pastoralists into peasant farmers, and thus, the majority of them continued to live by the meager productivity of their herds, the occasional public works jobs, and through local recruitment into the army and police.

7.4

National Unity Government: Republican Tribalism

The long-deferred dream among mainland political actors of a unified Yemeni state was finally realized in May 1990. The consolidation of this unified state brought out a sigh of political relief from Soqotrans, as they no longer had to live under the threat of suspicion of having divided political loyalty. The relief was, however, temporary, as they had to endure a “tribal rite de passage” through the overhauling of their political and institutional set up with the introduction of the nidh¯ am mash¯ ayikh (shaykh system), which was part of a state-led tribalization process as a civic incorporation strategy that would re-structure Soqotra’s communal

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polity. However, Soqotra’s fate was a microcosmic instantiation of what happened in the south of the mainland after unification, which merely expanded the jurisdiction of the northern state’s leadership. The latter was devoid of a nationally integrative ideology, as it was made up of an opportunistic aggregation of rural-urban corporate groups dominated by a military strongman as head of state in collusion with tribal shaykhs as regional warlords. This unification “elite” was primarily endowed with a cooptation ethos backed by coercion when necessary. Moreover, this elite’s ideological vacancy incentivized factional competition over territorial sovereignty and thus sustained the regional fragmentation of the country and polity. Consequently, they failed to pursue national polity integration and the structural transformation of society (see Elie 2018a). Accordingly, the south, including Soqotra, was administratively incorporated on the basis of the north’s vernacular of political organization: republican tribalism. The latter entailed the incorporation of the unified national polity based on the tribal administrative practices of northern civic tradition that promotes a polity organized into tribes. The end result was an atrophied institutional modernization and the re-tribalization of the southern polity and its enforced pietization by the northern state’s Islamist proxies. In the case of Soqotra, this led to the wholesale transfer of North Yemen’s tribal social structure in which its civic tradition is based on an administrative vernacular of tribes and shaykhs, as a means of agglomerating the muqaddam-led clan system into shaykh-led regional tribal groups. In effect, this transfer sought to transform Soqotra’s organic clanism into an instrumental tribalism in order to foment a new tribal consciousness infused with state allegiance. While republican tribalism constituted the organizing principle of the unified state, tribal libertarianism provided its operational logic. The latter entailed a form of political allegiance that was a private contractual obligation with the state as the dominant or monopolistic agency, and where public law is substituted, at least in part, by a network of private agreements between the state and groups of clients (cf. Rawls 1996: 262–265). To confound matters, this hybrid regime of republican tribalism and tribal libertarianism was articulated with the practice of multi-party electoral politics that unleashed the state’s generalization of clientelist politics as a national polity formation strategy. Republican tribalism remained Yemen’s prevailing mode of governance until it was integrated with the Local Authority Law that was introduced in 2000.

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State-Fomented Tribalism: From Organic Clans to Synthetic Tribes

In Soqotra, the newly introduced shaykh system represented an experimental search for an effective incorporative modality for an unfamiliar political formation, and it was based on North Yemen’s experience with nation-state building following the 1962 revolution, which engendered a tribe-dependent political formation. The prevalence of tribalism in the mainland’s north was not due to an inexorable cultural determinism, or ontological fatality, intrinsic to the Yemen’s traditional social structure (as argued by Dresch 1989, 2001, 2009). Instead, it was the structural effects engendered by the political decisions taken by state leaders reacting to the prevailing national socio-political conditions at a particular historical conjuncture (see Elie 2018a). One such condition was the overwhelmingly rural nature of the polity of the new state, which obligated the recourse to tribalization as the preliminary means of establishing the rudiments of a local administration and as the social infrastructure of national polity formation. Indeed, the urban population of North Yemen in 1960 was a mere 3% of the total population (UNDP 1990: 160). Such lopsided population distribution constrained the new state to focus its social mobilization strategy toward the rural sector at the expense of the tiny population of urban residents. The unintended consequences of this tribalization strategy were the social mobilization effect in terms of the enhanced power of tribes, the institutional consolidation of their primordial organization, and subsequently the state chronic dependency on their support. Within a month after the 1962 revolution in North Yemen, the government promulgated a number of decrees that sought to institutionalize the role of tribes within the state. The establishment of the Supreme Defense Council gave a prominent role to the “warranty shaykhs” the senior tribal leaders of the north. The following year, more tribespromoting institutions were established: The Supreme Council for Tribal Affairs was created and placed under the chairmanship of the President of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR); tribes were required to establish Tribal Shaykhs’ Councils throughout the new Republic at the governorate and at the district and sub-district levels. In addition, there were the Central Committee for Tribal Affairs and the Ministry of Tribal Affairs. The latter was replaced in 1968 by the Department of Tribal Affairs, which is still today the main liaison entity between the state and

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the tribes (Tarbush 2003). More significantly, the 159 members of the first national legislative institution—namely the Consultative Council— established after the first parliamentary elections held in 1971, were overwhelmingly tribal shaykhs. The state’s formalization and incorporation of tribal institutions could be seen as an institutional innovation over the feudal practices of the Imamate’s tribal cooptation strategy (e.g., hostage-taking of the sons of major tribal shaykhs to guarantee their loyalty). The primary aim, however, was to mobilize tribes on behalf of the state in its civil war with supporters of the deposed Imamate. The new republic’s political orientation initiated by these decrees was decried by the emerging left as “Republican Feudalism” or as one foreign observer put it “Republican Tribalism” (see Halliday 1974: 101–130). Cumulatively, these policies engendered a transition from an autonomous tribalism to a state-incorporated tribalism that rendered permanently the indispensability of the tribes as the political guarantor of the stability and longevity of all regimes ever since. For the next three decades, the institutional modernization of the new republic was characterized by the quest for a domestic balance of forces between the majority “traditionalists” forces (al-taql¯ıdiyyun) made up of tribal groups and religious conservatives, and the minority “modernists” forces (al-‘asriyyun) composed of educated professionals and urban residents (Burrowes 1987). However, the dominant political orientation of the new republic was to remain preoccupied with placating tribal forces. This led to the transmutation of tribes from local self-defense associations within their regional fiefdoms, and occasional mercenary force to the highest bidder, to a heavily armed and mobilized countervailing power that was financially subsidized by, and promoted as privilege political interlocutor to, the state. Moreover, the formal ban on the formation of political parties in the first constitution of 1970 that lasted until unification in 1990 consecrated the tribes as the preeminent national power broker in the emergent civil-political society of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR). This preeminence was rivaled only by the emergent Sunni Islamist movement that culminated in the formation in 1990 of the Islamist political party al-Is.l¯ah. (Schwedler 2007). Subsequently, there emerged a triumvirate of political actors—the military, the tribes, and the Islamists— that was to dominate, if not monopolize, the politics of the YAR, and which determined the nature of the unification of the two parts of Yemen through an “annexationist politics” as well as continued to influence the politics of the unified Yemeni state to the present.

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This was the background to the Yemeni state’s use of the nidh¯ am mash¯ ayikh as an encapsulation strategy of the southern territory.7 In Soqotra, the demise of the enforcement apparatus of the socialist committee system led to the political demobilization of the hinterland population and a reversal to its clan organization. This facilitated the introduction of the shaykh system, which was inaugurated with the establishment of “The Council of Shaykhs” (majlis al-mash¯ ayikh) in Hadiboh in 1995.8 This led to the reorganization of village committees into village councils headed by the newly created post of shaykh. The statesponsored shaykh system revised the deferential connotation customarily associated with the term “shaykh”—which was used solely in reference to a religious leader (i.e., al-ashr¯ af ), or as an honorific vis-à-vis the notables—into a political one by linking it to a tribal political leader. This created a new political hierarchy: the shaykh al-mash¯ ayikh at the apex, followed by shaykh al-mant.eqa (regional shaykh), seconded by his personal assistant (mu‘¯ awin), and supported by the village adviser (‘¯ aql ) and the muqaddam. In practice, the shaykh system was an attempt to aggregate these clans into tribal formations and to organize their relationship vis-à-vis the state according to a patron-client model. However, this state-engineered tribalism was not based on the institutional pillars of the socio-political order associated with organic tribalism, as they were non-existent in Soqotra and never took roots on the island (see discussion in Chapter 3). For “tribes” in Soqotra were not organized political entities, but merely mutual aid “kin assemblages” made up of territorially contiguous clans, whose cohesion was based on the ecological constraints of livelihood making in a context of scarce environmental resources. Soqotran clans, which have remained impervious to the aggregative processes associated with tribal formation, were being re-conceptualized into a “brittle honeycomb” of local shaykhs ruling over a plethora of miniscule “tribes.” The non-aggregation of Soqotran clans was, in effect, an ecological adaptation to the spatial requirement of a pastoralism based on an extensive land use strategy in a context of low population density and dispersed settlement pattern. The state’s attempt at transforming Soqotran clans into a segmentary polity that would aggregate isolated clan hamlets into a constellation of geographically demarcated “tribal” areas under the jurisdiction shaykhs and integrated into a patronage system that foments competition over the redistribution of state resources was not successful. This was because of (a) the lack of financial incentives

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available from the state (except for the occasional water reservoir, clinic or school building), since Soqotra was not an important economic prize (i.e., non-availability of surplus to be appropriated or natural resources to be exploited), and (b) the absence of political coercion as the islanders did not constitute a potentially significant political threat to necessitate the distribution of state resources as part of a mass cooptation exercise. Consequently, the state-engineered socio-organizational metamorphosis of Soqotrans into a tribal polity was not realized. However, it complicated communal administration. 7.4.2

Territorial Segmentation: Shaykhdom Formation

The political significance of the territorial organization of the island into geographical regions demarcated into sub-regional areas agglomerating clusters of villages, which became important during the socialist administration in its territorial reconfiguration strategy, was to assume even greater importance in the tribalization of Soqotra’s clans. In effect, the nidh¯ am mash¯ ayikh represented a counter-permeation strategy, as every previously established structure was reclaimed by the new system. The formalization of this system was through the central government’s approval and remuneration of shaykhs for each of the 43 sub-regional areas of the island (see Table 5.2 in Chapter 5). However, the demarcation of the island into segmented shaykhdoms did not create a segmentary polity, but only engendered a level of segmentary political competition, not between clan collectives, but between individual men who presumed that their personal status or prior political experience earned them the right to vie for the position of shaykh. This lent an aggressive and anarchically competitive dimension to local governance, as former chairpersons of village committees began vying for the post of shaykh. One end result was the relative anarchy in the selection process, as politically entrepreneurial individuals in “tribal” areas began to purchase stamps on the mainland, which they used on correspondence to officialize their shaykh status, in order to compete with the officially recognized shaykhs in their respective areas. This arbitrary self-selection process was partly encouraged by the three main political parties (Yemeni Socialist Party [YSP], the Yemeni Congregation for Reform [al-Is.l¯ah.], and General People’s Congress [GPC]) that began competing for a local following. Accordingly, each party seemed to have formulated its own list of shaykhs

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for the different areas to be represented, since shaykhs were responsible for mobilizing voters at the village level. Consequently, the number of shaykhs increased beyond the official number of the sub-regions. Moreover, the political instrumentalization of the shaykh system by the mainland regime attracted people seeking position of authority for its own sake and not dedicated to serving their community. This attitude led to the following dysfunctions: Partisanship trumped impartiality in decision-making; lack of adjudicative skills undermined the success of the traditional conflict resolution mechanism (sulh) and led to recourse to the courts; endemic opportunism among self-select individuals made them susceptible to aggressive patronage seeking and thus zealously subservient to the governing party’s interests. The structure of the shaykh system was as follows: At the base was the ensemble of muqaddams, as clan representatives, who performed the same functions under all previous regimes, and remained the traditional and foundational pivot of all governance systems on the island. At the middle level is the regional shaykh who is selected by the muqaddams in each of the designated sub-regions of the island. The regional shaykhs’ main function was the maintenance of social order through conflict resolution. The selected regional shaykhs would, in turn, select a supreme leader of all of them on the island called shaykh al-mash¯ ayikh (supreme shaykh). The supreme shaykh managed the entire system by maintaining the official list of all regional shaykhs, assisting in their selection, distributing salary, and liaising with the Department of Tribal Affairs in Sana‘a’, which has oversight responsibility for the NM in the whole of Yemen (World Bank 2006: 35–39). Finally, one of the most important functions of the shaykh system is the mobilization of voters on behalf of political parties, which tends to favor the ruling party. 7.4.3

Shaykh Rule: Rural Periphery over Urban Center

The restructuration of the local governance system into a shaykh system that was controlled from outside the island established a dual system of parallel rule. Operationally, the shaykh system was a local variant of indirect rule on behalf of the political interests of the national government, or more precisely the executive branch of the state. It introduced a parallel governing institution to the district-level administrative machinery, which was devoid of any means of local representation except through the shaykhs. All links with the rest of the island were taken over by the shaykh system. This created an internal wedge between the island’s administrative

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center in Hadiboh and its rural periphery. As a result, the shaykh system permeated the society more thoroughly than the formal government machinery. The shaykh system provided the only local organizational infrastructure upon which the island’s local government in Hadiboh had to rely, while simultaneously being independent of it. Indeed, the General Director of Soqotra had no authority to intervene in the management of the shaykh system. For example, if a change of shaykh was required, he could not participate, as that was the prerogative of the supreme shaykh and his fellow shaykhs to take the initiative in cooperation with mainland institutions not local government. The Department of Tribal Affairs located in Sana‘a’ managed the shaykh system in Soqotra, as everywhere else in Yemen. It had 25 branches throughout the country and was the equivalent of a welfare agency for tribal shaykhs. As it distributed monthly stipends to registered shaykhs in all governorates, as state loyalty-inducing subsidies. Prior to, and since, unification of the two Yemens in 1990, the dominant concern was with the politics of internal security, thus the strategy toward nonstate power centers was either police action or cooptation, and hence the Department’s location alternated between the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Interior and that of the Presidential Office. Its main responsibilities were to officialize the list of locally selected shaykhs, the preparation of the individual stamps that is the main symbol of an official shaykh, the distribution of honorarium, among other political tasks related to the furthering of the interests of the ruling party. In effect, the shaykh system was a scheme of indirect rule by the central government that was driven by the political imperatives created by the emergence of party politics after unification and thus of the need to enhance the prospects of the ruling party’s hold on power. Indeed, during elections, it betrayed its partisan nature, as regional shaykhs openly organized on behalf of the ruling party. It was in reaction to this unfair advantage that opposition political parties began to sponsor alternative list of shaykhs. 7.4.4

State as Economic Driver: Public Sector Growth

The imperative of stabilizing the fusion of the two divergent administrative systems that underpinned the newly unified state led the unity government to adopt an economic policy of employment generation through government posts creation. It was a form of over-employment strategy, in which the governmental posts of the two administrations

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were maintained to ensure job security, as a cooptation strategy that would minimize opposition to, or at least palliate the disruptive economic consequences of, the unification process. In the case of Soqotra, the implementation of a government-sponsored growth policy, which was implemented after the civil war in 1994, had the following ramifications: First, it led to the expansion of the social services sector through accelerated recruitment of teachers, health workers, and office clerks who had completed secondary school, and the expansion of the police force, which attracted pastoralists with primary school education from the hinterland escaping the arduous life of a “Bedouin,” and the underclass (al-muwallad¯ın) in the coastal areas seeking an additional source of income to seasonal fishing. It was during this period (1994–2000) that the public administration system expanded rapidly. The end result of this public sector employment generation strategy was the “Soqotrification” of the public sector workforce and thus the creation of a permanent class of local government functionaries. Second, the construction of public buildings (i.e., schools and clinics) in rather haphazardly selected sites on the island. This was part of the patronage politics of resource distribution linked to the shaykh system, where local social services delivery or development initiatives took on the appearance of gift exchanges. That is, public buildings were by-products of occasional visits by national authorities at the presidential and ministerial levels during national holidays or prior to important political events such as elections. Not to be neglected was the role of the shaykhs and their lobbying efforts driven, first, by the desire to enhance their reputation and position, and second, the socio-economic improvement of their constituencies. The end result was a few local “white camels,” in the form of health clinics and school buildings that were built but without the financial, human, and institutional resources that would ensure their effective and sustainable use. In effect, they were forms of donation to induce political loyalty and were unrelated to any development strategy. This was part of a policy of haphazard gestures of cooptation toward a population perceived as politically innocuous and economically dependent. Third, was the development of major infrastructural works (i.e., airport, asphalted road networks, and seaport). Although important to improving the livelihood of Soqotrans in the long term, their very scale seemed disproportionate to the absorptive capacity of the island and thus more intent on underpinning the presence of the state and to signify Soqotra’s incorporation into a larger political entity. Moreover, whether

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or not these activities met the political expectations of their state sponsors, they generated new opportunities for Soqotrans to become contractors or sub-contractors in construction works, and the spawning of new service providers such as water sellers and transport services. Also, these generated new opportunities for locals to acquire new skills or modernized old ones (e.g., electrician, masonry, and car mechanics). Even the pastoralists of the hinterland began to acquire a taste for the cash economy, as they became an occasional proletariat, in the form of an itinerant odd-jobber on the prowl for economic opportunities thrown up by these activities. Finally, the unity government lifted the economic restrictions imposed by the socialist administration on private sector activities. This sector, which was made up of a handful of home front stores under the Sultanate, and was slightly expanded but tightly regulated under the socialist administration, was allowed to expand after unification. The latter inaugurated a period that Soqotrans called al-infit¯ ah. (“the opening”), which occasioned a minor exodus of surplus labor from all over the mainland, as migrants sought to take advantage of the new economic opportunities on the island. Consequently, Soqotra became the Eldorado of the marginalized from the economy of the mainland. The end result of their influx was the plethora of micro-capitalist ventures symbolized in the ubiquitous presence of grocery stores or variety shops in almost every built structure in Hadiboh, and to a lesser extent in Qalansiyah. Their trading activities have brokered the gradual, yet inexorable, integration of Soqotrans into a monetized consumer economy.

7.5 Post-Unification Regime: Administrative State At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Government of Yemen enacted into law a comprehensive reform of its governance system, namely the Local Authority Law (LAL) of 2000. This reform was aimed at decentralizing the administrative apparatus and delegating authority and power to locally elected representatives. The impetus for the adoption of this Law was not solely a matter of national political will to decentralize and democratize the management of local affairs, but also, if not primarily, the result of international pressure. This pressure was manifested through the wielding of a new policy instrument, namely the “governance conditionality,” whereby the international community constrains recipient countries “to shift power from governments to their own citizens” (Collier 2008:

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110). With the parliament’s approval of the LAL in February of 2000, the government declared its formal adoption of the internationally sponsored discourse on good governance and democratization. In April of 2001, elections were held in all of Yemen’s districts (333)—including Soqotra’s two districts: Hadiboh and Qalansiyah—to select members of Local Councils at the regional and local levels. In effect, the Law institutionalized the Local Council (LC) system as a relatively new form of political administration since unification. The law’s key objectives are spelled out in Article 4: This Law shall be based on the principles of financial and administrative decentralization, and shall operate on the basis of broadening popular participation in decision making and in the administration of local affairs in social, economic and cultural development through the elected local authority.

This administrative reform sought to replace the prevailing statecommunity governance strategy that was based on the hereditary rule of tribal shaykhs in collusion with the executive branch of the state with the institutionalization of electoral politics at the Governorate and district levels. In practice, however, the LAL merely consolidated the hegemony of the executive branch over all other national branches of government (legislative and judiciary), including the administrative mechanisms linking the central government with the regional and communal institutions of governance, thereby institutionalizing a rather dysfunctional administrative state. 7.5.1

Path-Dependent State-Community Governance: The Primordial-Modern Continuum

The LAL represents the culmination of the path-dependence process of Yemen’s nation-state formation, which constrained the institutional configuration of state-community governance. This path-dependence process is the legacy of strategic decisions made during pivotal historical conjunctures that have had lasting seminal effects on the politics and institutions of state-community relations (see Elie 2018a). How Yemen’s political and institutional evolution got stuck in a path-dependent trajectory is aptly expressed as follows: “by organizing actors in particular ways at the outset of a new political dispensation, leaders create structures that

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assume a momentum of their own” (Slater 2010: 18). This momentum was manifested in a two-prong government strategy that sought to institutionalize state control over both the rural and urban polity through their organizational cooptation as the regime’s popular civic base. The first prong entailed the strategic use of the subsidiarity principle, which relied on primordial tribal institutions and their customary law (al‘urf al-qabal¯ı) as a cooptation strategy of the tribes and their leaders. The first use of the subsidiarity principle was by necessity in the aftermath of the 1962 revolution in North Yemen due to the state’s administrative weakness, and tribal shaykhs were given responsibility to manage the rural polity on behalf of the state. Subsequently, during the 1980s, it became de facto state policy that was tactically deployed as the state weaned itself from its fiscal dependency on the rural population due to the availability of carbon rent. By the 1990s, the state’s complete fiscal autonomy from the population was consolidated into the strategy of monopolizing control of the center and resource-rich parts of the periphery while authority over the rest was shared with, if not relegated to, regional primordial elites. During the 1990s, the subsidiarity principle served as a tactical decentralization of power through the establishment of a vertical relationship between the state and regional tribal fiefdoms. In effect, the state abdicated its responsibility toward the majority of the national polity through shared territorial managerial responsibility with elite corporate groups. It exemplified a form of indirect rule by the Yemeni state, as local authority was delegated to traditional elites, which entrenched their primordial rule and feudal privileges in the rural areas (see Elie 2018a for details). The second prong in this local governance through state cooptation strategy was through the deployment of modern legal means (q¯ an¯ un). This entailed the political subordination and organizational cooptation of independent local initiatives to establish autonomous governance mechanisms to catalyze development in towns and villages in North Yemen. This struggle for primacy between the center (state) and periphery (local communities) began in the early 1960s with the establishment of the Local Development Associations (LDAs) on the basis of remittances from rural émigrés to Saudi Arabia. They consolidated the rural areas’ political sovereignty and institutional independence both from the state and the primordial leadership of tribal Shaykhs. Different regimes have sought to coopt their economic independence and political autonomy (see Elie 2015 for details). In the 1980s, ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Saleh’s regime enacted a series of laws and decrees that coopted the LDAs’ “civic activism”

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by merging them into “Local Council for Cooperative Development” (LCCD) which was a government-controlled local administration system. In effect, this transformed an autonomous community cooperative movement into a “corporatist project of the state” (see Carapico 1998; World Bank 1981; Blumi 2018: 124–131). The chronic unwillingness of the central government to effectively decentralize fiscal and political authority to local government was displayed soon after unification in 1990. In 1991, Law 52 replaced both LCCDs and the former southern government’s “local popular councils with local councils defined as branches of a new Ministry of Local Administration.” And again, after the 1994 civil war, decentralization was explicitly repudiated through a constitutional amendment that required local councils to implement the policy of the state, thereby abrogating any form of local autonomy (Carapico 1998: 133–134). The end result of this two-prong governance strategy on the mainland was the local transfer and implementation of the LAL as a hybrid modality of governance that combined North Yemen civic tradition based on an administrative vernacular that prioritized the role of tribes and the personal mediation of shaykhs with the “good governance” grammar of rational administration and law-mediated impersonal relations between the state, its institutions, and citizens. This engendered the formation of a hybrid national polity and a modernization-prevention societal configuration: A majority rural polity of tribal members subjected to the personalist politics and ritualistic mediation of tribal shaykhs constituting a powerful lobby of mostly petty agrarian oligarchs, or self-serving rural patriarchs, as the venal retainers of the patronage network of a cabalistic state; and a minority urban polity of state citizens as a disempowered electorate whose participation in elections is induced through mass clientelism (see Elie 2018a for details). This is the governance arrangement that the introduction of the LAL was supposed to replace by a modernized version of the subsidiarity principle using modern legal means. The ultimate aim, however, was the entrenchment of the ruling party’s political and administrative hegemony at all levels of government throughout the national territory. The presidential elections of 1999, which were the first since unification, provided the strategic opportunity to do so. The elections established the supremacy of the ruling party (GPC) with 60.5% control of Parliament and conferred legitimacy on the 1978 coup d’état leader ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Saleh as the democratically elected President of the republic with 96.3% of the votes. This “popular mandate” made the LAL possible.

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7.5.2

Election-Mediated Geography: Subsidiarity Principle Modernized

The LAL, as the regulatory framework for state-community relations, reenacted the guiding principle in the history of state-local associations’ relations, both prior to and since unification, which was characterized by a reluctance to grant genuine local autonomy by alternatively sponsoring, manipulating, and ultimately undermining the aspiration for local self-government (see Carapico 1998: 133). The LAL represents the institutional modernization and perversion of the principle of subsidiarity as the state’s center-periphery governance strategy. Nevertheless, it marked a transition from the traditional use of the subsidiarity principle when the state delegated to shaykhs the responsibility for the rural polity to its modern use as a procedurally transparent mechanism of governance between the state and its sub-national constituencies that conferred primacy to local political authority in decision-making. The LAL’s purpose was to restructure the political administration of Yemen’s national territory through a Local Authority system (LA) based on legally sanctioned and publicly vetted decision-making processes and that also integrated the norms of multiparty electoral politics at all levels of government. The main objectives of the introduction of the LA were: (a) to integrate the parallel shaykh system within the mainstream administrative machinery by making them a counterpart of, if not to subordinate them to, local councilors in the political supervision of the demarcated sub-districts in their respective jurisdiction; (b) to introduce an electoral system in the selection of local representatives in lieu of the politically arbitrary appointment process; (c) to establish a local planning and managerial capacity for government funded and internationally supported development projects; and (d) to decentralize decision-making authority as well as to provide the financial means to implement the decisions taken. The LA sought to institutionally subordinate, but not eradicate, the traditional mechanism of local governance (i.e., the shaykh system) and to incorporate it into a streamlined local governance system with more democratic procedures. The institutionalization of this LA system constituted a new era, as it provided the fundamental frame of reference for the island, as it consecrated electoral politics as the privileged means of selection for public office, and led to the administrative reconfiguration of Soqotra’s landscape. The control mania of the socialist administration with

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its micro-organizational urge to include every comrade into its socialist experiment was replaced by an electoral mania of the post-unity regime with its phobia against the exclusion of potential voter-citizen, although this was primarily motivated by the government’s quest for political legitimacy. The island was sundered into two districts: The Eastern District, with Hadiboh as its capital, encompassed three fourth of the island’s territory (2701 km2 ) as well as population (34,011), and the Western District, with Qalansiyah as its capital, was allocated the remaining space (1002.5 km2 ) and inhabitants (10,109). The division heralded the end of Qalansiyah’s status of poor cousin dependent on the political whims of Hadiboh, as it made possible direct financing from governmental and international sources for the district’s development needs. However, the bestowing of district status upon Qalansiyah was a kind of political confirmation and status officialization of an asymmetrical territorial division in terms of spatial scope, demographic size, environmental resource endowment, and economic assets (see Chapter 3). This new fetishism of elections led to the reconfiguration of Soqotra’s political geography. Its division into two districts (mud¯ıriyya) had to be further demarcated into councilors’ jurisdictions. The number of councilors per district was based on a formula in the law that stipulates that “A district with a population of 35,000 people or less shall have a local council of 18 members.” In spite of Soqotra’s population deficit, it was allocated eighteen councilors per district; therefore, a total of thirty-six councilors’ wards had to be created. The responsibility for demarcating the councilors’ jurisdictions was assigned to the Supreme Electoral Committee in Sana‘a’ according to Article 60 in the Local Authority Law. Accordingly, each district was unevenly organized into sub-district centers (mar¯ akiz al-‘uzlah) with each center encompassing clusters of villages (qariyya) for the purpose of demarcating an electoral base and identifying the jurisdiction of members of the local council. In the eastern district, there are twelve centers with varying numbers of councilors: Hadiboh, as the district center (markiz al- mud¯ıriyya), was allocated three sub-district centers for a total of eight councilors. The remaining councilors were allocated as follows: Qadhub (1), Di Hamdh (2), Momi (2), Qariyya (2), Go‘o (1), Diksam (1), Noged (1), Qara‘a (1), and Qabhitin (1). In the western district, there are 6 centers: Qalansiyah was the district center and was allocated eight councilors. The rest was distributed as follows: Shu’ab (2), Mayha (4), Ma‘ala (2), Di Nít (1), and the other inhabited islands of the Archipelago Samh.a and ‘Abd

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Al-Kuri (1). The selection of these centers was apparently done on the basis of their geographical location within the district, their infrastructural resources (i.e., mosque, school, or clinic), and population density. Just as important, although operational only during elections, are the voting centers, of which there are sixteen throughout the island: twelve in Hadiboh district and four in Qalansiyah district. This election mediated geographic re-configuration of the island led to the super-imposition of thirty-six councilors’ wards over the fortythree areas under the jurisdiction of the shaykhs and the hundreds of muqaddams and their clan collectives distributed through the island’s 629 villages and hamlets. However, these shaykhs and muqaddams were not formally recognized in the law and without whom the electoral process could not function. Indeed, this exemplifies what Scott noted about the state’s dependency on informal institutions for its political viability: “formal order … is always and to a considerable degree parasitic on informal processes, which the formal scheme does not recognize, [and] without which it could not exist” (1998: 310). The number of council members is the only symbol of parity between the island’s two districts. In effect, this form of parity served to palliate the westerners’ chronic perception of their relative neglect in governmental attention. For example, the installation of a central electric generator and the extension of an asphalted road to the west occurred years after they were achieved in Hadiboh. In spite of this election-mediated geographical reconfiguration of the island, elections are largely perceived as a transient and perfunctory ritual of state-community bonding as part of a state-mandated ritual of citizenship re-affirmation. Indeed, Soqotrans’ participation in them was partly induced by the shared sentiment that their national loyalty might be under scrutiny by mainland political authorities in the case of dereliction of their civic obligations. 7.5.3

Simulated Decentralization: External Supervision Entrenched

The public administration system that emerged from the LAL was hampered by the institutionally endemic centralization of power in the executive branch, which prevented the actualization of its decentralization objectives. As one World Bank report explains, the reason for this “is rooted in the regime’s central dilemma: how can the political leadership guarantee that the reform will be carried out properly and the results serve the purpose of maintaining the regime?” (World Bank 2007: 18–19). As

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a result, the institutional ecology created by the LAL merely replicated the administrative culture within the mainland state. The state’s institutional architecture and operational logic suffer from an intrinsic structural asymmetry. This is established in a bifurcation between the government (al-h.uk¯ uma), which represents the visible state apparatus made up of appointed cadres, and the power (al-sult.a), which is the shadow state constituted by members of the patrimonial elite, which is the exclusive network of the head of state’s immediate and extended family members and a plethora of strategically selected associates who control everything (see Elie 2018a). The chronic centralization reflex of the central government was replicated in the relations between regional and local governments. For example, at the regional level, there is the local council of the Governorate of Hadhramawt, which has executive oversight over all of the twenty-nine districts including Soqotra’s two districts that are within the Governorate’s jurisdiction. This LA system mediates all decisions between the central governmental branches and the districts. No district can petition directly the central government. For Soqotrans, the LA system engendered a shared sentiment of double marginalization (a) by geographical distance and (b) by an added administrative layer, which deprives them of direct access to the central government and engenders chronic delays in the provision of government services. The Local Authority system introduced by the LAL is structured as follows: The term “Local Authority” refers to two levels of government: At the regional level, there are the governorates that are headed by a Governor and at the local level there are the districts headed by a General Director and sub-districts that are the jurisdiction of elected local councilors representing aggregated villages. Both levels of government are made up of three organizational structures: The first level is the LA’s five-member secretariat who are the only paid individuals in the local council system and meet every two weeks to carry out the decisions of the Local Council. The second tier is the District’s Executive Office whose membership includes all of the Directors of the local branches of line ministries represented locally (43 in Hadiboh and 15 in Qalansiyah), which are responsible for service delivery in socioeconomic sectors (e.g., education, health, agriculture, and water). Members of this Executive Office meet once a month. It is the only forum where government staffs are expected to account for the responsibilities assigned to them. The third tier is the Local Council with its eighteen elected members per district, which constitutes the representative forum

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that gives legitimacy to public decision-making. A plenary session of all its members is held every three months. The introduction of the LA system was supposed to generate a number of potentially transformational outcomes at the local level: First, it would de-institutionalize the mediation function of tribal shaykhs by spreading political responsibility, and thus engendering a balance of power, between them and other civil society actors. Second, it would shift state-community relations from its current practice of elite-centric patronage politics that consolidates local primordial rule and marginalizes the citizenry, in favor of a people-centric public service politics that enhances democracy and is dedicated to meeting the livelihood needs of the population. Third, it would restore the civic health of communities through revitalizing the neglected institutions of self-help and conflict resolution, to enhance trust, solidarity, and civic engagement. However, its actual implementation in Soqotra had different outcomes: First, the LAL did not replace the nidh¯ am mash¯ ayikh, which was the primary beneficiary of the subsidiarity principle, but merely overlaid it with newly elected councilors who became dependent on the shaykhs for the support of their constituencies. Second, it established the indirect rule of the central government, indeed of the executive branch specifically, through a centralized and hierarchically integrated national administrative system, which served as a mechanism for trans-local supervision. For example, the main office-holder at the district level, the General Director, is selected not through election but by political appointment. Article 81 of the Local Authority Law stipulates that “Every district shall be assigned a General Director for the district to be appointed by a decree by the Prime Minister based on the nomination of the Minister [of Local Administration].” And third, the “new” decentralized local authority system reproduced the centralizing logic of the old one. At its apex, there is an anomalous structural arrangement in which a democratically elected local council is ultimately subsumed under a politically nominated decision maker, who is accountable to the ruling party and not to the communal electorate. To palliate this egregious institutional anomaly that this contradictory combination of appointment and election represents, in 2008 the government introduced Law No. 18 that discontinued the central government’s appointment of Governors and allowed for their elections by an electoral college constituted by members of regional and district councils. However, the deputy governor and the district’s General Director could still be appointed by the central government. In this way, the

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central government could maintain its local control, while constraining local autonomy in decision-making. Ultimately, the subsidiarity principle, which is the pivot of a decentralized administrative system, was not modernized but perverted in the implementation of the LAL. Consequently, the LA system constitutes an institutional web of insufficiently coordinated functions, uneven resource (human and financial) allocation, and a chronic discrepancy between centralized authority (political and budgetary) in the executive branch and diffused responsibility (service delivery and monitoring) in the public bureaucracy at the regional and local levels. The local effect of these organizational inadequacies was an administrative mode of operation characterized by the state’s chronic recourse to politically expedient tactics (e.g., episodic promulgation of Presidential or Ministerial decrees as remedial policy tools) in the topdown management of the politico-cultural assimilation of the island as a sub-national entity. In sum, the Local Authority Law may have granted Soqotrans individual political rights to participate in the management of their community. This participatory entitlement, however, was ultimately circumscribed, if not rescinded, by the central government’s appointment of the Director General without consulting with Local Council members while expecting their post facto acquiescence. This undermined the democratic representativeness of the only political institution that could redeem the state’s legitimacy deficit at the local level. In effect, the government was legislating democracy, while undermining its institutional operationalization and therefore discouraging its local practice. Chapter 8 elaborates on the dysfunctional ramifications of the local governance system established by the LAL. 7.5.4

Eco-Conservationism: Spectacle Economy

As the post-unity government sought, or more aptly was constrained, to integrate the international financial system, the economic policy that brokered its political consolidation in the immediate aftermath of unification was considered a liability to the country’s economic solvency soon thereafter. This led to the adoption in the mid-1990s of a World Bank and IMF supervised comprehensive liberalizing economic reform program, which has remained ever since the government’s guiding economic frame of reference (World Bank 1995; IMF 1999). Henceforth, the political rationale for development through governmental post creation was

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rendered economically illegitimate, as the government funding faucet was to be reduced to a trickle if not turned off entirely—at least in principle. What this means, however, in practice is that the ability of the government to use public funds as a tool with which to generate employment as a means of political cooptation has been curtailed, or more aptly, has become more selective and surreptitious in favor of the more powerful. Subsequently, state-society relations were to be increasingly mediated by market principles; thus, communities had to lower their expectations of government and to depend more on international development assistance and private sector initiatives. Soqotra had a comparative advantage that could facilitate its adaptation to this new economic context, namely its endemic flora, which earned it the rather hyperbolic designation “the Galapagos of the Indian Ocean.” It was Soqotra’s ecological mystique that the government sought to promote as an internationally marketable resource, when it ratified the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1996. To operationalize this conservation experiment, there seems to have evolved a division of labor between, on the one hand, the Government of Yemen, which assumed responsibility for laying the infrastructure, and, on the other, the international community represented by the UN agencies, some self-selected bilateral donors, and a few international NGOs, which have taken over the preparation of the island’s landscape for ecotourists. Accordingly, the government’s local economic strategy shifted from employment generation through public sector jobs to infrastructure development: A new airport with the longest runway in the country was completed in 2004; an extensive network of asphalted roads around the entire island was under construction; and a feasibility study for a major seaport was carried out. Intended or not, this strategy is gradually burying the myth of Soqotra as a pristine replica of a pre-capitalist past. The implementation of this infrastructure development strategy was conducted under the grudging toleration of the UN project staff who sought to regulate it with an artisanal approach to environmental impact assessment. In the case of the international community, the UN has adopted ecotourism as the island’s “engine of development,” and it was to be managed as an internationally-led “social business” model. The latter refers to a type of economic intervention that is market oriented, but is motivated not only by profit maximization, but also by “doing good for people and the world” (Yunus 2006).

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The preparation of the island as an ecotouristic destination was launched partly as a means of spreading economic benefits beyond the urban and coastal zones that would simultaneously promote local employment generation and preservation of the island’s biodiversity as a global commons. This unleashed the entrepreneurial spirit of locals who established the infrastructure of a service economy dedicated to the tourism industry and created new local service providers (e.g., hotels, ecotourism associations, environmental protection NGOs, and travel agencies). Also, it attracted a plethora of bilateral donors and research institutes reflecting their interests in which Soqotra merely serves the following purposes: an experimental milieu for testing pet theories about development and conservation; an opportune environment for experience-seeking recent university graduates through NGO jobs; a convenient research station for European university students pursuing post-graduates degrees; and an employment generation scheme for expatriate conservationists. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), launched Soqotra’s conservation experiment in 1997 through the implementation of Soqotra’s first environmental conservation project. The latter formulated the “Conservation Zoning Plan for Socotra Islands” (ZP) that proposed a binding environmental regime for the island and that was decreed into law in 2000. This decree consecrated a conservation experiment under transnational supervision that imposed a disciplinary environmental regime inadequately informed by local environmental sensibilities and arbitrarily modified the relationship between locals and their livelihood domains. As a result, it was pursued through the virtual reconfiguration of the island’s physical geography, in which its vernacular landscapes were re-envisioned as a series of anthropological reserves that prioritized the interests of ecotourists, biodiversity specialists, and bio-marketers over the livelihood concerns of Soqotran pastoralists. Chapters 6 and 7 in volume 2 give a comprehensive biography of this internationally-led conservation experiment that is beginning its third decade of implementation with very little success to show thus far.

7.6

Arab Spring Awakening: Communal Sovereignty

The cumulative effect of the above-discussed political regimes and their distinctive polity mobilization strategies was the undermining of a shared

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sense of collective belonging to the mainland nation-state among the sub-regional communal polities. This endemic belonging deficit was exacerbated by the regime’s power-deprivation local authority system that institutionalized the marginalization of local stakeholders in the management of their community, and thus weakened state-community cohesion. The end-result was the chronic socio-economic disenfranchisement of non-elite groups and the permanent political marginalization of some regions of the country, which sundered the nation into an Archipelago of politically alienated regional enclaves. In such a context, democracy atrophied into a procedural ritual (periodic elections and popular suffrage) and never fulfilled its substantive promises (freedom of political agency and socioeconomic well-being). This contributed to the state’s failure to constitute a national polity based on equal citizenship, which undermined its legitimacy and engendered an ambiguous loyalty toward it as manifested in the widespread demand for regional autonomy occasioned by the Arab Spring in Yemen. In effect, the Yemeni state never institutionalized the nation and never integrated its regions and localities, and thereby condemned national polity members into straddling discordant political identities and oppositional agencies. The significance of the Arab Spring was its promise to engender the demise of the region’s exceptionalism in terms of its stereotypical representation as a political and cultural milieu inimical to the viability of modern democratic institutions of governance, given its association with the millennial tradition of tribe-centric patriarchal regimes and their polities’ chronic accommodation to the pathological rule of autocrats. The crossing of a historical threshold was aptly formulated by a Soqotran writer as follows: This stage of our contemporary history is considered a turning point between two different eras: The long winter of hibernation, and the mental, cultural and intellectual coma that prevailed in the past; and the era of awakening, the intellectual and cultural awakening which has started to emerge and develop. (Al-Qalansi 2011)

In Yemen, the pervasive desire to escape the “winter of hibernation” unleashed centrifugal tendencies that accumulated during Yemen’s dysfunctional nation-state formation process (see Elie 2018a). The most consequential of these centrifugal tendencies is man¯ a.tiqiyya (regionalism), which entails the demand for autonomous regional formations.

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This quest for regional autonomy reflected not only an endemic resistance to being subordinated to the central state, but also a strong desire for separate regional identifications based on distinctive confessional or cultural factors over a national identity that since unification was assimilated into an exclusively northern tribal identity. However, in Soqotra’s case, the desire for an autonomous communal formation was animated by (a) a history of state-community relations mediated by administrative subordination to external intermediary regional authorities, and (b) the non-recognition of their indigenous status and the corresponding state neglect of their ethnocultural heritage. The end result was the prevalence of a lack of sovereignty over their indigenous homeland and Soqotrans’ affliction with what I call an annexation syndrome (see below). The Arab Spring provided an opportunity to remedy both afflictions through a communal quest for cultural and political sovereignty over their islandhomeland. Indeed, the Arab Spring in Soqotra had the unintended effect of launching an indigenous sovereignty movement. 7.6.1

History’s Agents: Annexation Syndrome Renounced

The political incorporation practices employed by the four previous regimes engendered a kind of political trauma within the communal polity that was manifested in what could be called an “annexation syndrome”: a shared feeling of being permanently at the mercy of the whimsical and politically expedient disposition of the island’s self-selected administrative overlords vis-à-vis the islanders’ fate. This has led to an ingrained skepticism on the part of Soqotrans toward their political benefactors, as the fulfillment of their declared good intentions or promises seemed forever postponed. Since the post-unification regime, Soqotrans have adopted a skeptical spectatorial demeanor toward the change process underway, while nurturing doubts about the benefits that will accrue to them ultimately. Some older Soqotrans jestingly blame the Sultan’s absence of foresight about the well-being of his subjects, for not having sold the island back in 1834 when the British offered to buy it. Others have expressed the wish with obvious mirth that whoever is next to annex the island would, at least, be able to afford to take care of their needs. Soqotra’s chronic relegation to the administrative oversight and benign neglect of intermediary governmental entities was always resented locally, as it was seen as an onerous and superfluous additional layer of bureaucracy. Soqotra changed jurisdiction three times: from its subjection to

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the settler rule of the Sultanate of al-Mahra as a British colonial proxy; after the independence of South Yemen in 1967, it was attached as a district to the first province of Aden under the direct supervision of the Prime Minister’s office; and finally, it was transferred to the Hadhramawt Governorate’s jurisdiction in 1999 based on Republican Decree No. 23. This accumulated experience as an administrative political football has undermined Soqotrans’ faith in ever getting a fair share or a fair hearing from the mainland. As a former Member of Parliament for Soqotra explained rather hyperbolically: “The government ratifies projects for Soqotra, but 90 percent of these projects are allocated to Hadhramawt governorate.” The former Member of Parliament is categorical on the regional government’s administrative dereliction: “Hadhramawt has neglected Soqotra completely and the governor evaded his responsibilities to care for it. We hope Soqotra will become a separate governorate so as to be able to follow up on projects. This will make the people of Soqotra feel like they are Yemeni nationals” (Yemen Times, 15 October 2013). The locally universal rejection of this subordinated status to other governorates is reflected in the statement of the National Youth Council of the Soqotra Archipelago (NYCSA), which was a youth-led and urbanbased civil society organization composed of mostly High School and College educated youths, and advocated for a federal system for Yemen in which Soqotra would be an “autonomous province with full powers.” For them, this period of subordination was one of “suffering for Soqotra and its people during the years of dependency, which were devoid of what they dreamed of” (NYCSA 2011). This endemic sentiment has animated their desire either to be placed under the direct supervision of the Prime Minister’s office in Sana‘a’ or to have their own governorate. Soqotrans’ preferred political status for their homeland is best captured in the words of an advocate of the Arab Spring’s youth revolution in Soqotra: To make Soqotra an independent region with full administrative and financial authority. Also, to enact specific laws that authorizes Soqotra to deal directly with the central government without any broker or custodian from the south, north, east or west; and for Soqotra to be able to communicate directly with Arab and Western organizations and countries without going through the center. (Badahin 2012)

Indeed, this locally universal demand for a separate governorate, or ideally a fully autonomous region, was the rallying cry for the

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Archipelago’s entire political class and citizenry long before the Arab Spring, but subsequently became a non-negotiable ultimatum. As the 2011 NYCSA manifesto declared, “It is unfeasible and unacceptable for the Archipelago to be, once again, under other regions as in the past, because the failure of this experience of dependence in all aspects of life… of the citizens of this Archipelago has been proven beyond discussion” (NYCSA 2011). This categorical rejection of a subordinate status is based on the widespread conviction among Soqotrans that whatever resources (funds, jobs, equipment), and from whichever source (national or international) that are allocated to Soqotra through the Hadhramawt administration, are skimmed off by the latter. These grievances have animated Soqotrans’ quest for political autonomy during the Arab Spring. 7.6.2

Indigenous Sovereignty: Political Agency Asserted

The ramifications of the Arab Spring in Soqotra exemplified a pivotal historical conjuncture, as Soqotrans sought to reclaim their dispossessed indigenous sovereign entitlement over their homeland. This heralded the unraveling of the local political status quo and the dawning of a new political consciousness among the members of the communal polity. Soqotra’s Arab Spring began in earnest in the immediate aftermath of the incident of 18 March 2011 that took place in Sana‘a’, when fiftytwo protestors were killed by the regime’s security forces during a protest march. This was the catalytic event that turned Yemen’s Arab Spring into an international issue by galvanizing the intervention of the stabilityconscious regional monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council and security-minded Western capitals. In Soqotra, it led to mass demonstrations in Hadiboh that became weekly occurrences. This was manifested in Soqotrans’ en masse participation in reclaiming their public sphere with their self-organized secondary associations that were authentic civil society organizations given that their aim was to generate public deliberations over their community’s future. This bottom-up mobilization was in reaction to the upcoming Comprehensive National Dialogue Conference (NDC) that was eventually held from March 2013 to January 2014 in Sana‘a’. The ultimate purpose of the NDC was “to create a participatory future that draws new foundations for a modern civil Yemeni state” that is based on “a new social contract for Yemen,” which represents an “irreversible emancipation” from the past and “lays the ground for a rebirth of our people,” while restoring “the confidence of the people in the State.”

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Moreover, it called for the devolution of the state as the ultimate solution to Yemen’s current centrifugal political tendencies: “The transfer of powers and responsibilities from the center to the new regional authorities will put an end to the monopoly of power, will ensure equitable distribution of wealth and brings the institutions of governance closer to local communities.” This would establish “a climate of trust between citizens with each other, and with public institutions” (NDC Communiqué 2014). The prospect of influencing the outcome of the NDC led to a flurry of activities that included the formation of political councils, the formulation and publication of detailed and thoughtful position papers, the organization of regular public demonstrations, the holding of political conferences and public meetings, impromptu engagement in informal debates in the micro-social hubs (discussed in Chapter 8), and the establishment, as elsewhere on the mainland, of a s¯ ah.at al-taghyir (“Change Square”) in the form of a tent and a platform in the middle of Hadiboh town. Most significant among these activities was the formation of the “General Council for the Sons of al-Mahra and Soqotra.” Its initial purpose was to lobby the NDC to establish the Governorate of al-Mahra and Soqotra as a separate region. It was, and still is, led by “Sultan” ‘Abdallah bin ‘Isa bin ‘Afr¯ar, who is the third son of the last Sultan (‘Isa bin ‘Ali, 1952–1967) and undertook frequent political mobilization excursions to Soqotra. The Council is not merely a nostalgic quest for the re-establishment of the dynastic Sultanate of al-Mahra and Soqotra, which was a British feudatory from 1876 to 1967. Instead, it represents the strategic instrumentalization of the primordial notion of indigeneity into a political organization dedicated to the creation of a territorially-demarcated and an ethnoculturally bounded regional political community that can preserve the cultural heritage and political autonomy of Yemen’s only extant native ethno-linguistic groups. Since the end of the NDC, the Council has gradually consolidated itself into a proto-political party with a strong following among the rural shaykhs. Its ultimate quest seems to be to attain indigenous sovereignty, if not independent statehood, over the ancestral homelands of al-Mahra and Soqotra. As such, it both represents a major challenge to the monopoly of the mainland-based political parties (especially GPC and al-Is.l¯ah.) over Soqotrans’ political activities and aspirations and expands the range of political possibilities. This maelstrom of political activism not only inaugurated the emergence of a new cohort of political activists, but more importantly initiated

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the embryonic formation of a new generation of a local intelligentsia that might eventually replace the previous generation who is beholden to the mainland-based political parties. Ultimately, the Arab Spring in Soqotra engendered a widespread realization that the communal polity is the ultimate repository of political authority and agency and enhanced Soqotrans’ civic engagement and catalyzed their political agency (see Chapter 8). 7.6.3

Nominal Transformation: From District to Governorate

In contrast to the mainland where the Arab Spring generated postponed promises, in Soqotra it delivered the primary demand: Governorate status. Yemen’s President ‘Abd Rabuh Mansur Hadi’s visited Soqotra on 14 October 2013 during the celebration of ¯ıd al-¯ adhh.¯ a (Day of Sacrifice), to announce that Soqotra will be made into a Governorate. Noteworthily, this date marked an auspicious calendrical coincidence, as it is the commemorative date of the launching of the revolution in South Yemen against the British. This announcement marked the beginning of the end of Arab Spring protest in Soqotra, which ended completely by the time of the formal publication on 18 December 2013 of Law No. 31 officializing the Yemeni state’s investiture of Soqotra as the country’s twenty-second governorate. The latter represents the achievement of the most important political aspiration of all Soqotrans, which finally made them, in the word of the former Member of Parliament quoted above, “feel like [we] are Yemeni nationals.” Indeed, this is confirmed by President Hadi’s own words in his announcement: “You are a part of this country and you have rights and duties and we in the country’s leadership look at all the people in all the provinces and regions equally” (Saba News Press Release, October 2013). The state’s formal recognition of Soqotra as a governorate, which Soqotrans considered a prerequisite of their official citizenship in the Yemeni nation-state, was not a benevolent concession but a strategic maneuver to achieve the following: (a) to pre-empt the growing local perception of the greater reliability and thus political influence, of the Gulf countries’ aid diplomacy, which is the rationale most frequently mentioned in the mainland Yemeni press, which turned out to be prescient (see next section); and (b) to prevent Soqotrans’ increasing political radicalization as manifested in the weekly demonstrations in the streets of the island’s main town of Hadiboh (and occasionally in the secondary town of Qalansiyah) in support of the secessionist Southern

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Movement (al-h.ir¯ ak al-jan¯ ub¯ı) and of the opposition party al-Is.l¯ah.. This confirms the strategic use of citizenship as a means “to outbid the claims of competing allegiances and identities… [as it serves as] the chief agency of inclusion” (Smith 1991: 118). However, the granting of Soqotra’s governorate status in 2013 was partly a short-term tactical maneuver by the state to coopt a communal polity of potential state renegades, as the deliberation over the federal architecture of Yemen was not yet concluded. The strategic aim was to remove from consideration other competing proposals about Soqotra’s political status, as Soqotrans were actively debating a number of options: (a) to make common cause with the southern separatist movement (al-h.ir¯ ak al-jan¯ ub¯ı) the option of last resort; (b) to form a separate region with al-Mahra governorate (al-i’ql¯ım al-Mahra wa Soqotra) within a unified but federal Yemen, which is the preferred option; (c) to join an eastern region (al-i’ql¯ım al-shark¯ı) under the Hadhramawt Governorate, which is the least attractive option; and (d) to call for an independent state (dawlah mustaqillah), which is the ultimate aspiration. Soqotra’s relative freedom from chronic subordination to other regions was short-lived as the new governorate was subsumed under a new regional formation as part of a federal state. In February 2014, the “Committee for the Selection of Regions” that was established by the Yemeni President to formulate the new architecture for the Yemeni state to be renamed the Federal Republic of Yemen announced its decision. The new federal system was to be composed of six “new regional authorities” and Soqotra was included in the Hadhramawt region with its capital city located in alMukalla. For Soqotrans, this decision was similar to returning the island to the status of a district and annulling their recently granted relative autonomy. The statement released in the same month by the General Council for the Sons of al-Mahra and Soqotra captured the sentiment of most Soqotrans: [The decision defied] the consensus choice of al-Mahra and Soqotra people to establish an independent region of Soqotra and al-Mahra based on 1967 borders. This declaration will not be accepted even if we pay with our lives as the price against this injustice and marginalization which was planned in the dark of the night and the people who planned this plot should know that al-Mahra and Soqotra will be a graveyard for their dreams and deceits.

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Soqotrans were not the only ones disappointed by the formation of these new regions, as most political actors rejected the new architecture. Only the then ruling party (GPC) and the opportunistically colluding opposition party al-Is.l¯ah. were in favor of it. Paradoxically, this decision was the catalyst to the unraveling of the “New Yemen” envisioned by the National Dialogue Conference (see Fig. 7.1). However, the operationalization of the federal system was postponed by the Huthi tribal militia’s coup d’état in September 2014 (see Elie 2018a). Therefore, Soqotra continued to function as a governorate, however under the supervision of the Yemeni government in exile in Saudi Arabia, which retained the authority to appoint the island’s political authorities. There was no major reorganization of the political geography of the island. The offices of the governor and deputy governor were merely super-imposed on the districtbased local authority system. The economy, however, began to experience shortages as trade relations with the south of Yemen were impeded by war on the mainland and the Yemeni government in exile was unable to pay local salaries. As Soqotra’s governor at the time explained, “The island became isolated from the rest of the world. It was left without any maritime access: Al Qaeda was in control of the main ports in Hadramout, whereas Houthis and [‘Ali Abdallah] Saleh took over Aden” (Dajani

Fig. 7.1 Protesting government decision (Wall slogan: “No…No…No…to the Eastern Region and the Hadhrami Gang”)

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2018). To get anything from al-Mukalla, the governor had to send an official letter requesting permission to al-Qa‘ida’s “Amir.” Indeed, the seaport located in the city of al-Mukalla the capital of Hadhramawt from which most goods to and from the island are shipped was taken over in April 2015 by the forces of al-Qa‘ida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) who controlled the city and the port and established the “Al-Qa‘ida Emirate of Yemen” until April 2016 when it was ousted from al-Mukalla by the UAE-backed troops of the Southern Transitional Council (STC). Ultimately, Soqotra’s transition to an operational Governorate system, which Soqotrans saw as the crucial first step in a gradual process of consolidating their political autonomy with the aim of renegotiating their relations with the mainland state, was aborted. This brought to a premature end their quest for a politically empowered and financially viable communal self-rule to address local under-development, to promote their indigenous cultural heritage, and to influence the orientation of state policies toward the creation of equitably distributed economic opportunities and the adequate provision of public services. Given the two-year duration of Soqotra as an autonomous Governorate, and the difficult condition under which it was managed, no particular economic policy was formulated by the Soqotrans-led administration that would suggest the development vision of the indigenous political leadership about the island’s future. Hence, I have not included a separate section on that period’s economic policy.

7.7

UAE’s Humanitarian Protectorate: Compassionate Guardianship

As of early 2015, Soqotra lapsed into a political and economic impasse, as there was no effective mainland government to interact with. The public sector which is an important pillar of the local economy (salaries, operational costs of local government, projects funds, etc.) was relatively insolvent, and the population was practically left to fend for themselves as transport to and from the island was unavailable. Aden was under al-Huthi’s control and the port city of al-Mukalla in the Hadhramawt Governorate from which most goods to Soqotra were shipped was controlled by al-Qa‘ida. In February 2015, the Huthis formalized their complete take-over of state institutions in Sana‘a’ with the establishment of “The Supreme Revolutionary Committee” headed by Muhammad ‘Ali al-Huthi, who is the cousin of Abdul Malik al-Huthi the

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¯ .¯ ¯ leader of North Yemen Zaydi’s sectarian movement Ans ar Allah. This Committee became Yemen’s governing body, which forced the remnants of the previous government leadership to take refuge in Aden. In March, the Huthis took over Aden and thereby removed completely the leadership of “the internationally recognized government of Yemen” who went into exile in Riyadh, the capital city of Saudi Arabia. This was the impasse confronting Soqotrans when two tropical cyclones—Chapala and Megh—hit the island in November 2015 and presented an opportunity for regional powers to establish a humanitarian protectorate over the island. Paradoxically, a natural disaster that caused major infrastructural damages and uprooted lives also provided a lifeline to Soqotrans. Soqotra’s regional neighbors were driven by geopolitical imperatives to instrumentalize the disaster into an opportunity for regional influence peddling and territorial annexation through humanitarian assistance and development projects. This led to the establishment by the UAE of a self-serving and patronage-dispensing humanitarian protectorate regime in Soqotra that was ostensibly on behalf of the absentee state government of Yemen, but was tactically seeking to replace it. This humanitarian protectorate began its consolidation in 2016, and given the policing of the information and the selective messaging from the UAE about Soqotra, it is difficult to tell the ultimate intention of Soqotra’s new political overlords. Nevertheless, this section considers whether it is heralding a new conjuncture in Soqotra’s long saga with external supervision. It provides a provisional assessment of the new phase in Soqotra’s constantly evolving social, economic, and political situation: First, it highlights the regional context and the geopolitical motivations of regional state actors; second, it outlines the administrative regime imposed on the island and its corollary social cooptation practices; third, it explains the introduction of patrimonial politics as a means of political mobilization and polity formation; and fourth, it describes the emerging economy. 7.7.1

Territorial Annexation: Natural Disaster as Pretext

Since 2015, Soqotra is simultaneously caught up in a political cul-de-sac and in an uncertain historical conjuncture: First, the internationally recognized government of mainland Yemen was forced into exile by the Huthi’s coup d’état, and its re-instatement seems a distant possibility. Second, Soqotrans’ newly acquired political agency as citizens of a newly declared

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Governorate in 2013 following the Arab Spring was demoted to that of conscripted members of a political dependency under the UAE’s “compassionate guardianship” through a self-assigned “humanitarian mandate” on behalf of the Yemeni government in exile in Saudi Arabia. The UAE’s self-initiated humanitarian intervention took place in the aftermath of two hurricanes that hit the island in November 2015. In February 2016, a delegation representing the Yemeni government in exile in Saudi Arabia visited Soqotra. It was headed by Khaled Bahah, the then Vice President, who was accompanied by four ministers (representing the sectors affected by the hurricanes: environment and water, public health, transport, and youth). The purpose of the visit was to sign an agreement between the Yemeni government and the Emirates Red Crescent (ERC) that would legitimize the UAE’s mandate in Soqotra. The document was entitled, “Convention for the Reconstruction of the Archipelago” (see SahafaNet 2016). The specific aims of the agreement were for the “construction of housing for the affected citizens, and the restoration of electricity, water and roads infrastructure.” This humanitarian intervention inaugurated Soqotra’s de facto incorporation within the UAE’s expanding regional sphere of influence, which the Economist (2017) described as “the Arab world’s most interventionist regime.” In this rather anachronistic bid for regional power status through military expansionism, the UAE has earned the sobriquet of “Little Sparta” from its foreign cheerleaders and enablers. Noteworthily, the UAE is a demographically insignificant and territoriallychallenged congeries of patrimonial statelets whose global reputation is as a hydrocarbon-rent fueled parody of the hyper-modernity and uber-consumerism of Western capitalist societies through its myriad of shopping malls and five-star hotels. Moreover, it is a social formation confronting a series of internal existential threats. For example, a demographic deficit compels its chronic dependence on a largely expatriate labor force, and it is precariously bordered by encroaching desert sand and a rising sea level, which makes it vulnerable to an impending climate crisis. In spite of these intrinsic vulnerabilities, it has recently embarked on an empire building crusade through a colony shopping spree throughout the WANA region. This newly adopted role as regional empire builder betrayed a delusional mimicry of the West’s imperial geopolitics, which the UAE pursued through the following strategies: (a) the establishment of regional military bases as territorial trophies in a regional power tournament; (b) the management of strategically located seaports to

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pre-empt commercial rivals; and (c) the instrumentalization of humanitarian intervention to induce politico-economic dependency as a means of establishing a territorial protectorate or neo-colony as military base. The ultimate aim of these interventionist practices is the spread of neomonarchic regimes through the establishment of “jumlukiyya” states that are republican in form but monarchic in practice, and thus the erasure of democracy throughout the region. This is a long-standing aspiration of the Arabian Peninsula monarchies, which began after the Egyptian revolution in 1952. This revolution inaugurated an “Arab cold war” that pitted ‘Abd al-Nasir’s Republican regime and King Faysal’s monarchy in a competition for the regional supremacy of their respective form of government (Kerr 1971; Badeeb 1986). This is the project that was restarted as a response to the Arab Spring by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt as their coopted client-state. This troika of countries constitutes an “Axis of Autocracy” dedicated to the subversion of democratic movements and the promotion of authoritarian political cultures within their national polities and throughout the region (POMEPS 2011; Ulrichsen 2012). In the case of Soqotra, the incorporation was initiated through the soft power approach of humanitarian intervention. Subsequently, Soqotra emerged as a humanitarian protectorate administered by a directorate of resident administrators officially representing Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Foundation (KBZ Foundation), who is the President of the UAE and the Amir of Abu Dhabi and the ERC. The forced complicity and self-imposed silence of the Yemeni government in exile and the lack of credible reassurance from the UAE government regarding the duration of its presence and the ultimate goals of its intervention in Soqotra have led to a flurry of media reports that suggest that the UAE’s self-assigned humanitarian mandate is a convenient alibi for its de facto “occupation” (ih.til¯ al ) of the island. The prevailing rumors are: (a) The Yemeni government in exile has ceded Yemen’s sovereignty over the Soqotra Archipelago through a 99-year lease with the UAE; and (b) the latter is envisioning the holding of a referendum to have Soqotrans decide whether or not they wish to become the UAE’s eighth Emirate (Tamma 2017). Whether or not these rumors are eventually validated, the UAE’s administrative regime in Soqotra approximates that of a neo-colony using primarily soft power tactics to induce the community’s acquiescence.

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7.7.2

Parallel Rule: Resident Advisory System

As of 2016, Soqotra was effectively under the protective custody of the UAE’s philanthropic organizations (KBZ Foundation and the ERC) that have adopted the resident administrator system. This is reminiscent of the British indirect rule regime administered through the office of the Resident Advisor that was enforced throughout the Arabian Peninsula and elsewhere. In Soqotra, this directorate is composed of a bureaucracy made-up of about ten staff members, some with military background but in civilian clothes, UAE civilians, Soqotran permanent residents (muq¯ım¯ın) in the UAE, and a few local assistants. The delegation is under the leadership of Khalfan Mubarak Al-Mazru‘i, nicknamed “Abu Mubarak,” who represents UAE’s KBZ Foundation in Soqotra. This group is occasionally complemented by advisers seconded to local government ministries. Collectively they constitute a kind of “trusteeship bureaucracy” staffed with “benevolent caretakers” of a communal polity temporarily orphaned by its state government. They are locally known as al-mand¯ ub¯ın al Shaykh Khal¯ıfa (“the representatives of al Shaykh Khalifa”). However, to maintain a semblance of the Yemeni state sovereignty over Soqotra, the government in exile appoints the Governor among other staff in the pre-existing public bureaucracy, which is left in place—hence the notion of parallel rule. The directorate’s local functions, however, approximate those of a central political authority that has subordinated the role of the Local Authority system given their power of the purse: coordinating with, if not supervising, the governorate’s political leadership; monitoring, indeed controlling, the island’s external traffic through the seaport and airport; exercising monopoly over the key economic sectors (e.g., fishing) while engaging in the opportunistic extraction of other resources (e.g., dead sea corals mining on the coasts); training, organizing, and arming the island’s security forces; and establishing a security blanket over the island through checkpoints on its roads network. However, the UAE representatives’ capacity to carry out these functions is constrained by permanent local opposition to their presence in Soqotra. In addition to the Directorate’s political functions, it mediates a number of other initiatives with long-term entrenchment effects of the UAE’s soft power. For example, the encouragement of the emigration of urban-based educated Soqotran youth to Abu Dhabi, under contract to a state-approved labor management company, where they are slated

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to be employed as security guards in shopping malls. This ostensibly magnanimous gesture of offering employment opportunities abroad to the idle urban youth of Soqotra—a situation that was exacerbated by the termination of tourism—could potentially serve a number of purposes: a promotional tactic to build social capital among the local population; a strategic means to depopulate the island of its politically conscious generation and potential dissenters against their self-imposed benevolent guardians; or the socialization of the youths into menial jobs, which impoverishes their aspirational horizons and assimilates them as a new servile class into the UAE’s occupational hierarchy. This socialization strategy was inaugurated in 2017, when a contingent of nearly 300 hundred youths went there. However, only forty got their residence papers and work permits. The others were returned to Soqotra at the end of 2018. Since then, this hope-inducing employment offer has remained open-ended to Soqotran youths willing to try their luck at landing a job as shopping mall security guards or to avail themselves of a temporary escape from the island to sightsee their benefactors’ hypermodern coastal oasis of glass towers. Furthermore, there is an embryonic demographic politics through the sanctioning of marriage between Emiratis and Soqotrans, which is exemplified by a few but highly symbolic instances. For example, the marriage of the main representative of the UAE to a Soqotran girl from a shar¯ıf family (the elite group under the Sultanate). Given the large Soqotran diaspora in the UAE (largely congregated in the Emirate of Ajman), this nascent matrimonial practice could eventually warrant a sociopolitical discourse about shared “national” destinies and provide a pretext for territorial “bonding.”9 The latter is already taking place through land purchases at the individual level and on a small scale, thus far. These interventions were complemented by tactical activities aimed at generating support for UAE’s local rule, which was an extension of a modified version of the strategy used in South Yemen (AbdulAhad 2018). They resemble the practice of “diplomatic bribing,” which uses the endemic deprivation of Soqotrans’ basic needs and frustrated socioeconomic aspirations under the mainland government as targets of political manipulation. This takes the form of the affective manipulation of the communal polity’s allegiances through charitable benefactions that promotes a dependency-inducing strategy of incremental socioeconomic meliorism. In Soqotra, this is being done through (a) the distribution of patronage to the local social elite and political leadership: allocation of

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cars, salaries, study tours and sponsored travel to the UAE, and economic development projects to sustain this local elite sociopolitical primacy and to induce their acquiescence to UAE’s interests; and (b) the provision of philanthropic assistance to the population. The latter was pursued through the placement of medical personnel and provision of equipment to the local hospital, emergency medical evacuation to a UAE hospital dedicated to Soqotran patients (NMC Hospital in Khalifa City), building of residential compounds for the poor (“Zayed City”), school buses with South Asian drivers, mass weddings with each couple receiving a gift of money to establish a household, shiploads of food during the month of Ramadhan, among other public cooptation gestures. 7.7.3

Nidh¯am Mash¯ayikh Restored: Competitive Patrimonial Politics

Unlike the mainland, where armed tribal groups and their shaykhs are willing vassals of the highest bidder, Soqotra is organized into over 500 disaggregated clans. They do not bear arms, have no martial ethos, and are unwilling to aggregate into tribal formations, even though each clan is headed by a shaykh with a muqaddam as deputy. They exercise primarily moral authority and are circumscribed by a specific set of functions. Also, there is a supreme shaykh (shaykh al-mash¯ ayikh) for the island; however, he is a mere figurehead without political mobilization capacity over Soqotra’s overwhelmingly rural polity. This was the situation prior to the arrival of the UAE and its introduction of the politics of “diplomatic bribing” as a patronage distribution strategy, which led to the instrumentalization, indeed weaponization, of the shaykh system introduced by the mainland government in the 1990s. The UAE deployed the traditional tactics of the region’s patrimonial states of selectively coopting the social and political elites of a given social group or community and socially pacifying ordinary citizens with charitable ministrations. The ultimate purpose of these cooptation tactics was the enthronement of a local Amir as a political vassal with island-wide political mobilization influence who could generate the opportunistic acquiescence, if not the genuine political loyalty, of the local population. The UAE’s protectorate regime represents a re-patrimonialization of the Soqotran polity, which reverts Soqotrans to the political regime that prevailed under the absolute rule of the Sultan who was a de facto neocolonial proxy of the British colonial regime in South Yemen.

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An event that was largely of a ceremonial nature turned out to have consequential relevance for the island’s political governance. On 16 March 2015, a new shaykh al-mash¯ayikh—Sulayman ‘Abdallah Shululaha bin Kilshat from Qabhitin village in the West—was selected unanimously by all the shaykhs, muqaddams, and notables of the island and his name was submitted for official endorsement by the then Governor, who approved him through Administrative Order No. 4 in the same month. The selection of a completely illiterate shaykh from a very impoverished region of the island suggests that the role was seen as a mere figurehead. Indeed, his illiteracy was perhaps seen as an ambition-inhibiting handicap and therefore would not challenge the leadership of the Sultan in-waiting ‘Abdallah bin ‘Isa bin ‘Afr¯ar who was the Chairman of the General Council for the Sons of al-Mahra and Soqotra, of which shaykh Sulayman was a member and was expected to be a temporary officeholder. However, as of 2016, with the consolidation of the UAE’s authority, the political dynamics on the island began to change. Given the UAE’s hybrid political formation that combines the patrimonial and the modern with a strong aversion toward republican forms of government, the shaykh system that was introduced in the 1990s under the unity government became a strategic pawn in the UAE’s humanitarian protectorate. As a result, all the shaykhs and notables of the island were the targets of sustained diplomatic bribing by UAE officials. They were catapulted into VIP status and were flown to the UAE to meet its leaders and subsequently were paid a monthly honorarium among other privileges. Shaykh Sulayman became Soqotra’s de facto UAE-sponsored Amir and abandoned his affiliation with Sultan bin ‘Afr¯ar and the General Council in 2016. With the UAE patronage, the shaykh system began to regain the political power it enjoyed in the 1990s as the primary political authority over the rural population. As such, the shaykhs began to act as an alternate source of authority to the established government in Hadiboh under the UAE-supported leadership of shaykh Sulayman. As the shaykh system was revived by the UAE and the position of shaykh al-mash¯ayikh became a strategic post, internal dissent within the shaykh system became public with the holding on 1 January 2018 of an extraordinary meeting among shaykhs and social dignitaries to withdraw confidence in shaykh Sulayman as Soqotra’s supreme shaykh. The reason offered in the published minutes of the meeting was that “His selection was conducted without taking into account the most basic standards required and overlooked the most important procedures and conditions

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that should have been adhered to.” Noteworthily, the attendees of the meeting acknowledged, rather belatedly, an important distinction from the mainland: The position of supreme shaykh of Soqotra is alien to Soqotra and its people and does not fit within the social structure, customs, and traditions intrinsic to Soqotra’s historical roots. As a result, it was accompanied by many drawbacks since its introduction.

They proposed that if the position of supreme shaykh is to be maintained it must be modernized through collective agreement “first on the selection then hold election through ballot boxes and direct voting.” The concluding paragraph of the two-page letter betrayed the political motivation of the meeting, which was to reject the UAE’s attempt to pre-empt the General Council and its Chairman’s vision for Soqotra as a separate region under indigenous sovereignty. As the letter puts it: “The participants unanimously agree that Sultan ‘Abdallah bin ‘Isa bin ‘Afr¯ar is the umbrella that unifies them and provides the basic point of reference for them, and they affirm their absolute confidence in him as an extension of the popular and official support among the people of al-Mahra and Soqotra governorates.” Significantly, the letter had a 37-page appendix with the signatures of 263 Soqotran shaykhs. This rather excessive figure suggests the proliferation of the phenomenon of self-appointed shaykhs over the years, given that there are slightly over 500 clans inhabiting about 600 villages on the island. This situation unleashed a competitive patrimonial politics between the local supreme shaykh and the local supporters of the Sultan in exile, which is challenging the republican form of government based on the local authority system. In effect, the UAE’s restoration of the shaykh system, whose authority was partly circumscribed by the Local Authority Law, constitutes a surreptitious mode of regime change aimed at reinstitutionalizing the primacy of patrimonial institutions over the modern institutions of governance. This is confirmed by the fact that in August 2018 the Governor of Soqotra fired shaykh Sulayman from his post as shaykh al-mash¯ayikh for inciting rebellion against the local authority. The order was not carried out and shaykh Sulayman was still paraded as supreme shaykh at all UAE-sponsored events. Again in December 2018, the Governor signed an administrative order (No. 20) calling for the non-recognition of the supreme shaykh by all parties. Since then,

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local governance has been mired in conflicts over institutional authority between the UAE-sponsored local allies versus supporters of the governor who represents the Yemeni government in exile. It took six months of negotiations among the shaykhs of Soqotra to abandon the UAEsupported shaykh supreme and to agree on a new one, who was finally selected by all, or at least a majority, of the island’s shaykhs and approved by the government in May 2019. The new supreme shaykh is ‘Isa Salem Bin Yaqut—whose name suggests Mahri tribal affiliation and possibly of ashr¯ af descent—is a suit-wearing and travelling diplomat on behalf of a UAE-free Soqotra. By November 2019, however, an attempted “coup” against the supreme shaykh was orchestrated by some externally supported shaykhs from the Qa’ara region in the south of the island. This is according to “Condemnation and Denunciation Statement” (bay¯ an shajb wa ¯ıstink¯ ar) from the Advisor to the Governor on Tribal Affairs denouncing the action of the shaykhs: “some elements … who disregarded customary tribal laws and norms by collecting signatures and seals from what they call notables and social figures to withdraw confidence from the Supreme Shaykh of Soqotra.” His denunciation was supported by a statement from the six shaykhs representing the southern region of Mahfirhen, who portray the renegade shaykhs as dupes of external forces: “We condemn anyone who seeks to stir up discord and to split the cohesive tribal fabric of Soqotra by misleading ordinary people.”10 Under the contested UAE patrimonial regime, “tribal” politics is bound to remain unstable (see Chapter 3: Section 3.3). This instability is intrinsic to the attempt at converting an atomized community of clans into an aggregated polity of tribes in the face of polarizing cooptation pressures. 7.7.4

Philanthropic Ministrations: Polity Mobilization

Patronage distribution to social and political elites and selective charitable acts toward the population were preliminary tactical measures for social mobilization. As they were complemented by the UAE’s pursuit of a comprehensive set of multi-sectoral interventions as the basis of a more sustainable strategy to harness public support for its rule, which straddled the developmental and the humanitarian as well as military and civilian purposes. Beyond the initial reliefs and rehabilitation activities in the immediate aftermath of the 2015 cyclones, the UAE through its two charitable organizations (KBZ Foundation and ERC) and with

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the participation of UAE philanthropists has prioritized the following domains for continuous intervention as of 2017: (1) physical infrastructure: building schools and mosques, airport, seaport, electricity, water, roads, and telecommunications; (2) social infrastructure: school construction, public transport, education, hospital, and public housing; (3) local economy: fishing, agriculture, commerce, and trade; (4) pubic administration: office equipment, modernizing the local authority’s operation, and training of civil servants; (5) civil society support: study tours for some NGO members and scholarship for students; and (6) security: training and equipping local military and police forces (see Aden Al Hadath 2017). These activities are confirmed in the testimony of the former General Director of Hadiboh district through a web posting: Today, we need to benefit from the experiences and experiences of our Emirati brothers who are distinguished in governing their country. And here they are reaching out to help us in all fields, including the improvement of administrative performance, qualification of cadres, establishment of the land registry system, activation of the organs governing the land issues and increase the collection of revenue and clearance of transactions in the framework of the management and supervision of the local authority through the creation of an integrated information system supported by qualified local staff, as well as the development and improvement associated with this process in the fields of health, education, water, electricity, air transport, rehabilitation of youth sector, sports and women, encouraging fishermen and marketing their production, as well as continuing training and rehabilitation and providing the needs of military and security forces, relief assistance and treatment of difficult patients cases and entry to the UAE of the sons of the archipelago by providing them with local ID card. (April 2017)

Collectively, these multi-sectoral interventions launched a gradual but strategic transformation of Soqotra’s society, economy, and inevitably the environment. Moreover, as the mainland economy remains moribund, an opportunistic economic integration was initiated through trade dependency as 70% of the imported goods are from the UAE, according to the General Director of Hadiboh district. To take advantage of these new trade relations, the head of the UAE delegation of Emirati resident advisors opened his own mini-supermarket in Hadiboh. Indeed, besides his role as Chief Advisor of the UAE’s protectorate administration in Soqotra, he is an entrepreneurial “shaykh,” who is widely perceived

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as being associated with all profit-making ventures on the island. For example, the island’s only fish factory is widely referred to as “Mubarak factory” given his use of it as his second office. A number of other projects are envisioned under the UAE’s philanthropic largesse: water production factory, increase output of local date palm trees from 40 kg per tree to over 100 kg as in the UAE, date factory for women workers, dry fish factory, ice production from desalinated seawater, solar-powered water wells, and the distribution of cooking gas cylinders “to prevent deforestation” (see Dajani 2018; Mahmood 2018). These initiatives seem to meet IUCN’s concerns about “promoting appropriate sustainable development for the people of Socotra” (see below). However, skepticism is de rigueur regarding the UAE’s ultimate intention toward Soqotra, as the principal purpose of these projects seems more of a branding exercise to enhance local perception of the UAE’s leadership magnanimous disposition toward a state-forsaken and economically destitute community. In effect, these development activities primarily serve to promote economic dependence as a means of coopting the autonomous political agency of Soqotrans. The UAE’s increasing saturation of the island with “make-over” projects under the banner of humanitarian assistance has generated widespread suspicion about its long-term strategic objectives for the Soqotra Archipelago. These projects led the World Heritage Center (WHC) of UNESCO, which has environmental jurisdiction over Soqotra as a Natural World Heritage Site, to grow suspicious of the UAE’s perceived mission creep from humanitarian assistance into strategic development projects that are threatening the island’s environmental conservation. The General Director of the IUCN, the advisory body on nature to UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, called for the inclusion of Soqotra on the List of World Heritage in Danger. This was due to “uncontrolled developments such as leisure resorts [that] are damaging coral reefs and turtle nesting beaches. Newly re-opened fish export facilities are putting pressure on traditional fisheries and making fish unaffordable to local people” (IUCN Press Release, July 2018). The claim about the potential effects of the commercialization of fishing in Soqotra is plausible, but the existence of “leisure resorts” and their placement are more imagined than real. Nevertheless, this strategy of crying wolf prematurely was necessary given that the UAE has the largest ecological footprint per capita on the planet and environmental conservation in its largely desert territory is a public relations exercise given its hyper

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consumption-driven and carbon-dependent economy. The GEF-UN environment project, however, has yet to propose a strategy for the “appropriate sustainable development for the people of Socotra” (see Vol. 2: Chapters 6 and 7), while the UAE is winning local hearts and minds with its philanthropy-driven economic reconfiguration of the island. However, the UAE’s patronage distribution strategy is being expanded to the sponsors of environmental conservation in Soqotra. The 2019 version of the annual report on the State of Conservation in Soqotra that was submitted by Yemen’s Ministry of Water & Environment to the WHC declared that: “In February 2019, the Khalifa Foundation (KF) and Environmental Protection Agency, Socotra Branch (EPA) discussed environmental activities on Socotra, including KF funding for preparation of a 5-year environmental plan.” The report had the intended effect, as the World Heritage Committee during its 43rd session in July 2019 postponed the decision to place Soqotra on its List of World Heritage in Danger.

7.8

Postscript: From Protectorate to Colony?

The UAE was consolidating its political authority over the island through the cooptation tactics of its soft power approach. It enthroned the shaykh al-mash¯ayikh as its local Amir and neocolonial proxy to mobilize the rural population on its behalf. There remained, however, the parallel rule system, which conferred on the exiled President ‘Abd Rabuh Mansur Hadi the sole authority to select Soqotra’s Governor as well as the staff members of the local government bureaucracy in Hadiboh. In April 2018, the President in exile selected as Soqotra’s Governor, Ramzi Mahrus, who is a member of al-Is.l¯ah. political party, which is considered by the UAE an affiliate of their sworn enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, this deliberate choice reflected the simmering tensions between President Hadi and the UAE because of their sponsorship of the establishment in May 2017 of the separatist group Southern Transitional Council (STC) that has representatives in Soqotra. The choice of Governor was a strategic move to counter the power of the UAE-sponsored groups on the island. This is the backdrop to the visit by the Prime Minister of Yemen Ahmed Obaid bin Daghr along with a delegation of ten ministers, when they set foot in Soqotra on 28 April 2018. The purpose of this visit seemed to be to assert the sovereignty of the balkanized Yemeni state over the island.

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299

“Act of Aggression”: UAE’s Military Intervention

The delegation intervened, perhaps intentionally, into the UAE’s orchestration of a process of neo-colony formation. Indeed, the UAE’s militarized reaction to the Prime Minister’s visit betrayed their intention to transform the island from a de facto humanitarian protectorate on behalf of the absentee Yemeni state into a de jure neo-colony of the Emirati state. As the Prime Minister’s pretentious role-playing as the head of government of a sovereign state was seen as an impetuous performance by his UAE protectors who tolerated his government’s presence in Aden as a convenient alibi for their occupation of South Yemen. The official website of the Yemeni government gave a detailed chronology of the events that became known as the UAE’s “act of aggression” of May 2018, and was signed by the “Council of Ministers” to confirm that the account is the government-approved version of the event. According to the official posting, the delegation was received with full honors: “The delegation was greeted at the airport by the Governor of the province, agents, directors of the public, social and political figures, the commander of the 1st Marine Brigade, the directors of political and national security, officers and soldiers of the defense and interior” (5 May 2018). Unaware that they were trespassing into what seems to have been regarded by the UAE as an infraction of the undisclosed terms of its “99year lease” of Soqotra, their unauthorized presence led to a swift military reaction from the UAE. According to the Yemeni government website: “On the third day [30 April] of the delegation’s visit to the island, the first military aircraft carrying two armored vehicles and more than 50 UAE soldiers, followed immediately by two other aircraft carrying tanks and armored vehicles and soldiers arrived. This event became known to the people of Yemen, and followers abroad, which raised a number of questions, and created a state of anxiety on the island.” Furthermore, “The first thing that was done by the UAE force was to take control of the airport and inform the airport protection and national and political security and customs and tax officials that their services were suspended until further notice, and did the same thing in the only port of Socotra.” The Yemeni government gave its official interpretation of the event: “The government saw this military action as unjustified. The brothers in the UAE have been present on the island in their civil capacity for three years. There is no new situation in the political and military position of

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the island that requires control of the airport and the port. But the situation on the island today after the control of the airport and the port is in fact a reflection of the dispute between the legitimacy of the government and the brothers in the UAE, the essence of which is the dispute over national sovereignty and who is entitled to exercise it.” This parody of a “shock and awe” strategy by a novice empire builder on a colony seizing binge as if it were a recreational falconry tournament was seen correctly by the world as a militarized colonizing grab of the island and was met immediately with local demonstrations and universal condemnation. To arbitrate this dispute over national sovereignty, the government called on Saudi Arabia to send a delegation of mediators who arrived on the island on May 4. Given the significance of this event, a brief chronology of how it unfolded after the arrival of the Saudi team of mediators is offered here: On 13 May, Saudi troops were dispatched to Soqotra as a face-saving measure for the UAE to conduct a joint military training exercise with the UAE and Yemeni forces and to ultimately replace the UAE troops as part of a brokered agreement signed on the evening of the same day; on 14 May, the Prime Minister announced on his Facebook page that “The crisis on the island is over” and left the island; on 15 May, the Saudi Ambassador to Yemen arrived on a four-day visit to officially launched “the start of comprehensive development and relief for Socotra, including all utilities and vital services in all districts and islands with the support of Saudi Arabia”; and on 17 May, the remaining UAE troops and military equipment departed from the island in a three-plane air convoy. The Saudi troops have remained encamped at the airport since then. Noteworthy is that the Saudi Ambassador’s ceremonial launching of a few humanitarian projects as well as the initially symbolic establishment of a local branch of the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center (KSRelief) inaugurated a competition between the new Saudi foundation and the UAE’s Khalifa Bin Zayed Foundation as a proxy struggle for the hearts and minds of Soqotrans through dueling humanitarian and development initiatives in their attempt to replace the Yemeni state’s sovereignty over Soqotra. 7.8.2

Sovereignty Compromised: Foreign Supervision Reinstated

The May “act of aggression,” in effect, belied the existence of a sovereign Yemeni state and reduced the maneuvers of the Saudis and the Emiratis to protect it into a political charade. Indeed, the switch to a hard power

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strategy through the militarization of the UAE’s presence in Soqotra was merely a postponed eventuality. As the same scenario occurred in alGhayda the capital city of al-Mahra province on the mainland: The UAE arrived in al-Mahra in August 2015 as part of a humanitarian mission under the aegis of the Emirates Red Crescent, which gradually evolved into a military mission as they began to recruit and trained tribesmen into soldiers. Relations between the UAE and the Mahris became conflictual as they sought “to place newly formed forces directly under their command and bypass the local authority.” In early 2017, UAE officials were told that Mahri forces would only take orders from the local authority (see Al-Sewari 2019: 15). This led to the withdrawal of the UAE’s presence in al-Mahra. They were replaced in November 2017 by troops from Saudi Arabia under the pretext of combating smuggling across the OmanYemen borders. Since then, “Saudi Arabia controls the governorate’s airport, border crossings and main seaport, and has established more than a dozen military bases around the governorate where it has stationed thousands of its own troops and Yemeni proxy forces imported from other southern governorates” (Al-Sewari 2019: 5). Consequently, the Saudis and the Emiratis have catalyzed anew the North-South geographic trauma of the Yemeni state as well as its territorial balkanization through their attempts at de-linking Yemen’s two most vulnerable provinces. Indeed, al-Mahra and Soqotra are the least populated, the most distant from the political center, the least economically integrated, and the most socioculturally marginalized communities within the Yemeni nation-state. However, they possess strategic assets that are coveted by their regional neighbors. In the case of al-Mahra, it is Yemen’s second-largest governorate by size, and it has 560-kilometer coastline that is the longest of any Yemeni governorate. More importantly, it offers Saudi Arabia with the realization of the long-coveted oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean. Negotiations over this oil pipeline began in the 1980s with the South Yemeni government and continued after unification to no avail and were restarted in 2018 (see details in AlSewari 2019). In the case of Soqotra, it is strategically located at the crossroads of international maritime traffic and is the largest island in the Arab region. However, the intervention of those two external actors has exacerbated these two regions’ intrinsic vulnerabilities by introducing and sustaining internal political divisions within the regional polity of alMahra and the communal polity of Soqotra with potentially permanent destabilizing consequences.

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In light of the above colonizing endeavors of his two regional neighbors, the Prime Minister’s visit to Soqotra was a futile and largely symbolic bid to reassert the Yemeni state’s sovereignty over Soqotra, which brought along the political chaos he temporarily left behind in Aden. The simmering tensions between President Hadi and the UAE because of the latter’s support for the separatist group STC on the mainland were re-enacted in Soqotra. The initial support the Prime Minister received in his stand-off with the UAE was solely based on the militarization of their presence on the island. After his departure and the UAE’s removal of its military equipment, demonstrations have intensified in favor of the UAE’s presence and against the Governor of Soqotra (primarily because of the obstruction of the UAE’s assistance). The May 2018 incident, however, resulted in the postponement, and not the abandonment, of the UAE’s long-term strategy of establishing militarybacked rule over the island. In the immediate aftermath of the May 2018 incident, the UAE intensified local regime change activities through its local proxies among the civilian population and within the political elite, which have continued ever since. Beyond the self-serving actions of sponsored political actors and the monetary-induced mobilization of civilian supporters, there was an upsurge of spontaneous public support for the UAE based on the concrete benefits it has brought, which were seen as major improvements in contrast to life on the island prior to the cyclones. The slogan that invariably animated the demonstrations reflects what the Yemeni state provided only haphazardly and what the GEF-UN projects neglected entirely: “Yes to development and no to obstruction of Emirati projects.” In sum, the Yemeni state’s political control and sovereignty over the mainland and island were usurped by the Emiratis and the Saudis. Moreover, their opportunistic recourse to arbitrary power plays and reckless military excursions into the region’s failing states and their strategic failure to envision an exit strategy from their politico-military quagmires bode ill for the region as a whole (Lynch 2018). The ultimate political design of these two protagonists, and primary beneficiaries, of regional chaos is not only the transformation of these two territories into their political dominions but more importantly the secession of the entire southern region from the Yemeni state through the UAE’s active support of the STC. However, the success of this colonial gambit is contingent on an evolving regional and international geopolitical environment, which may enable or disable the re-enactment of Russia’s Crimea-style territorial balkanization

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of a sovereign state with the complicit silence and active facilitation of some members of the international community. In contrast to the relative failures of these two states’ neo-imperialist excursions and their proxy wars within the West Asia and North Africa region (e.g., Libya, Syria, and Sudan among other places), the case of Soqotra presents a low-hanging fruit opportunity to the UAE. Soqotrans’ chronic discontentment with their mainland government has bequeathed a shared collective memory of the mainland state’s neglectful administration of their homeland (see Chapter 8). It is this collective memory and the simmering resentment toward this neglect that could hasten a collective amnesia about the UAE’s ultimate political intention toward the island, as revealed in its inept attempt at military intervention. Moreover, the communal gratitude toward the UAE’s humanitarian intervention and the subsequent dependence on its financial largesse could encourage the local sociopolitical elite’s collusion to sustain this transient humanitarian administration into a permanent territorial annexation. Given Soqotra’s long history of external political subordination, it may be on the threshold of a new historical conjuncture under a new claimant to the Archipelago’s sovereignty to be established either through an externally sponsored local Amir or through a referendum. Only the travails of history will determine Soqotra’s political status beyond this transitional period.

Notes 1. Although the Sultans of Soqotra were supposed to go to al-Mahra at least twice a year, it is not clear that this was done regularly, and it seemed that al-Mahra may have become a neglected dependency of Soqotra. Indeed, if the behavior of the last Sultan is any guide, then administrative neglect was the modus operandi toward al-Mahra. As one British report explained, the Sultan seemed to have been “careless of his responsibilities in Mahra country … [, as] he rarely if ever visits the mainland and does nothing to foster the loyalty of his subjects there.” In fact, he seemed to have never officially appointed a deputy Sultan for the mainland, as the latter was managed by self-appointed Sultans from the bin ‘Afr¯ar tribes in the two coastal outposts of Qishn and al-Ghaydah, while the hinterland, the northern desert area, was left to the bedouin tribes. The British were guilty of similar neglect toward both al-Mahra and Soqotra, as they were left out of the advisory residency system introduced in the Eastern Protectorate since the 1930s. It was only when the oil company, Petroleum Concessions Limited, sought in the 1950s an oil prospecting lease for

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2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

the al-Mahra region that an “Advisory Treaty” was signed in 1954. The latter aimed at establishing a formal administrative system in al-Mahra and Soqotra similar to that of the Qu’ayt¯ı and Kath¯ır¯ı Sultanates (for details, see Ingrams and Ingrams 1993, vol. 12: 585–611; vol. 15: 749–761). Back in 1834, Wellsted was astounded by the peaceful disposition of Soqotrans: “Notwithstanding the singular anomaly of so great a number of people residing together without any chiefs or laws, offences against the good order of society appear infinitely less frequent than more civilized nations” (1835: 205). This was in sharp contrast with al-Mahra society the Sultan left behind, where internal tribal conflicts and political rivalries with neighboring states were endemic (Ingrams 1938: 309–310). This animosity is aptly illustrated by the German naturalist Georg Schweinfurth’s testimony who spent a month on the island in 1881: “The Arabs, in the places on the coast, jealous of natives’ trade with the strangers, which they looked on as their own monopoly, invariably tried to represent the latter as faithless and thievish people, in order to prevent our employing them. The Sultan, even, warned us against them” (1993: 194). Botting gives an account of such punishment: “During a recent famine the Sultan ordered a mass punishment as a result of a wave of livestock thefts. Forty bedouin from each of the four principal tribes of the island were selected at random and immediately deported, without redress and without hope of return” (1958: 75). This account has the flair of an Orientalist tale, but it is used here to suggest the seriousness of the problem of livestock theft, which usually occurred during the summer (horf ), a period of drought-inducing hunger called sháqer di e’efo, when humans were the most affected instead of livestock (Morris 2002: 499). The intif¯ adh¯ at were initially a land redistribution instrument deployed by politically organized landless peasants against rural feudal landlords in South Yemen after the revolution and prior to the adoption of the second Agrarian Reform Law in November 1970 (Ismael and Ismael 1986: 83–88). It was subsequently used in different sectors (e.g., fishing) and by the political leadership of the state as a means of encouraging mass demonstrations in support of policy changes (see Stork 1973: 11–19; Halliday 1979: 13). This information is based on interviews with an agricultural specialist from Aden and a long term resident of Soqotra who participated in these activities. While the focus here is on the effects of the nidh¯ am mash¯ ayikh in Soqotra, it should be noted that the South had its own experience with tribalization prior to independence. Indeed, Gavin (1975: Chapter 8) provides an illuminating account of how insignificant clans were consolidated into tribes and organized into a congeries of micro-states, as a result of the implementation of the British policy of protectorate formation in

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South Yemen. This tribalization of the south’s hinterland through the establishment of these micro-states—which configured the south’s sociopolitical geography into a cosmopolitan center and a tribal periphery that was further divided by a strong regionalism linked to these states’ territorial boundaries—was part of a broader strategy of using them as “a counterpoise to the urban world of radical, middle-class nationalism… [in] the cosmopolitan port city of Aden” (Cannadine 2001: 82). 8. The delay in introducing the nidh¯ am mash¯ ayikh was due to the institutional inertia generated by the negotiated unification of the Northern and Southern Yemeni states, and the resulting tense political stalemate between the political leadership of the two former states. Consequently, the two divergent administrative traditions merely coexisted until the civil war of 1994 when the northern regime’s preference for rule through the informal institution of patronage replaced the south’s more formal administrative culture (see Chapter 8; Elie 2013). 9. This is precisely the argument of Anwar Gargash, the UAE’s state minister for foreign affairs, who twitted on 4 May 2018 in response to criticisms of his government “act of aggression” (see below): “We have historical and family relations with Soqotra and its people… We will support them in their stability, healthcare, education and living [conditions].” Putting aside the socio-political purposes of such support, the UAE does have a debt of gratitude toward Soqotra. As its formerly impoverished residents, prior to their access to subsidies from the state’s oil rent, were seasonal pearl fishers in Soqotra and many of them married local women. 10. Both “announcements” were published in socotrapost.com on 24 and 28 November 2019.

CHAPTER 8

Politics of Redistribution: Governance Culture and Public Ethos

This chapter examines the catalytic role of the state in shaping a subnational polity’s public values in terms of its members’ affiliative sentiment toward the nation-state, their political agency within the public sphere, and their civic disposition toward fellow citizens. This examination offers a corrective to discussions of a polity’s “national identification” that elide analysis of the state’s institutional apparatus and its culture of governance. Accordingly, it focuses on the mechanism of state governance in the production of a communal polity through a processual analysis of the transfer of the Yemeni state’s patronage culture of governance to Soqotra and surveys the effects as well as catalogues Soqotrans’ reactions. The result is the production, indeed corruption, of the communal polity’s public ethos as manifested in a negative civic disposition, namely amoral communalism. This disposition engendered a politics of redistribution that contests the state’s institutional legitimacy and its local authority through community members’ recourse to infrapolitical practices. The chapter concludes with a summary of the preliminary transformations in state-community politics engendered by Soqotra’s own Arab Spring and how they were aborted by the UAE protectorate regime.

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8.1 Amoral Communalism: Local Political Grammar Historically, Soqotra’s governance was always subjected to the political subordination of, and administrative annexation by, political overlords of external origin. Indeed, Soqotra was governed through a succession of externally imposed forms of sovereignty that was always claimed on behalf of, and never by, Soqotrans. They were tributaries, first of regional powers (Hadhramawt and Oman), and subsequently of European empires (Portuguese and British) (see Elie 2006a). In the modern period, the evolution of Soqotra Island as a sub-national polity of the Yemeni state and the formation of Soqotrans’ political agency and collective subjectivity have been intimately tied to Yemen’s nation-building processes and the modality of the state’s expansion and consolidation of its political authority over the mainland’s and the island’s territory (see Chapter 7). This chapter offers a case study of the formation of Soqotrans’ civic disposition as a communal polity made-up of minimally integrated clanbased hamlets that resulted from its administrative subjection through the transfer of the Yemeni state’s governance culture of elite exclusive patronage. More specifically, it explores the catalytic role of the state’s bureaucratic incorporation of the island in determining the particular public ethos of the Soqotran polity. The chapter shows how the transfer of the state’s patronage culture of governance to a sub-national communal polity institutionalized antagonistic state-community relations, and led to the corruption of the public ethos of its members and made their identification with the mainland nation-state intrinsically ambivalent. This discussion of the formation of a public ethos and of the state-induced amoral constitution of citizens eschews the pitfalls of the hegemonic liberal dogma: (a) its commitment to the unrealistic edict that morality, as Zigon (2007: 232) observes, is “a universal and a priori notion shared by all rational beings,” which is oblivious to the fact that conceptions of morality, as Malik (2014: 8) notes, “cannot but be closely related to the social structure of a community” and not founded on universal first principles; (b) its insistence on the implausible autonomous agency of the individual from the communal or societal collectivity; and (c) its indifference to the enabling functions of such collectivities through the incubation of individual agents, the socialization of their agency through a shared horizon of aspirational possibilities, the organization of their performative contexts, and the provision of their

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agency’s sociopolitical targets. The privileging of the “I” over the “We” is the legacy of the fantasist hypothesis by Thomas Hobbes, among others, who propagated the myth about an original “state of nature” dominated by selfish, violent, atomistic individuals who had to suppress their inborn proclivity toward unrestrained liberty and to submit to a social contract that would ensure the security of their individual existence within the collective social order of the “state of society.” This mythical asocial vision of humanity’s original state is aptly derided by Todorov as the “tired tenant of Western philosophy” (2001: 26). The fact that the collectivity was always the progenitor of the individual is axiomatically formulated as follows: “In the history of human civilization no form of life whose foundations were not laid communally can be found. No human beings ever appeared except in a community of human beings” (Alfred Adler quoted in Todorov 2001: 30). In sum, the fetishism of individualism in Western philosophy (in its bourgeois liberal version) is the end result of a classbased deliberate epistemic non-recognition of the original communitarian bond that prevailed in the “original state of nature.” 8.1.1

Public Values: Locally Emergent not Globally Disseminated

This epistemic aversion to the relational dependence of the individual on the collective is a region-specific and culture-bound ideological mantra belied by social reality everywhere. In fact, the individual and the collective represent alternating socio-political agencies within the spectrum of overlapping relations between the individual, the community, the society, the nation, and the state. The complex intermediation among the different components of this relational web produces the distinctive identities, and allows the relative autonomy, of each component. In sum, the collective moral selves of a polity, the ethical demeanor of its members as citizens, and their national identification propensity are relationally constituted through the state-society nexus. It is an accepted truism of the social sciences that “All modern societies are creations of the states that house them” (Metha 2003: 105). Therefore, moral codes as well as amoral ones “grow out of social structures and needs” (Malik 2014: 58). Furthermore, the self’s autonomy and its moral disposition are always, if only partly, socio-politically determined. Axiomatically, the state, especially through its policies, actively constructs the local citizenry’s affective disposition and inexorably molds the communal polity’s public

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ethos. Indeed, state policies “communicate to citizens their civic identity, and degree of membership within the political community… thereby encouraging engagement, passivity, or even alienation” (Wichowsky and Moynihan 2008: 909–910). This inescapable web of relations constitutes the foundational socialinstitutional matrix for modern collective life. Indeed, it nurtures the national, or communal, polity’s civic sensibility and political agency through the state’s mediation of the public sphere by means of its local administrative institutions that purvey the state’s governance culture. The latter influences the polity’s adoption of a particular civic disposition, constrains the nature of its civic engagement, fosters the degree of its members’ national identity, and thus encourages the community’s ethical flourishing or atrophy. As a sub-national polity within the political jurisdiction of the Yemeni state, Soqotra represents a microcosm of community-society-nation-state relations in Yemen. Consequently, Soqotra’s communal polity is a social collectivity whose constitution is contingent on state mediation. As such, it affords a bottom-up perspective on the consequences of the Yemeni state’s transfer of its governance culture to a sub-national polity and the resulting production of its members’ political subjectivity and agency. Accordingly, the communal polity’s public ethos—that is, the prevailing civic sentiment and the corollary behavioral disposition widely shared among members of a polity—is contingent on the state’s culture of governance. In the case of Soqotra, the emergence of this public ethos in the form of an endemic sociopolitical disaffection among community members is the effect of the state’s exclusionary politics of elite patronage as its primary governance modality. In this light, the public ethos of a given polity is not an osmotic effect of the putative universalism and ethical hegemony of the “global discursive flow” of human rights and liberal democracy, but a civic disposition locally engendered by the state’s governance culture. The latter term refers to an ensemble of constitutive factors: the state’s political regime, its administrative structure, its political mobilization practices, its policy choices and the modality of their implementation, its institutions’ mode of operation, and its officials’ public demeanor. In Soqotra, this transfer engendered a public sentiment of resentment that signified the negation of state power perceived as lacking moral authority and political legitimacy. This resentment is embodied in a public ethos that I call “amoral communalism,” which describes the local political attitude and relational currency (i.e., political grammar) between the Soqotran community and

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the Yemeni state. A caveat: The term amoral communalism is inspired by Banfield’s notion of “amoral familism,” which he coined to explain the absence of “public spiritedness” characterized by the “inability to concert activity beyond the immediate family” (see Banfield 1958: 10). His quest for the explanatory factors to such a condition initiated the social science conundrum about whether to assign causal priority to the community’s intrinsic cultural character or to its extrinsic structural encompassment by the state in determining the polity’s civic disposition. This quest led to the conceptual domain of social capital (see Putnam 1993; Fukuyama 1996). To the adherents of political anthropology’s theoretical quartet— the Gramscian-Andersonian-Foucauldian-Agambian spectrum—discussed in Chapter 2, the choice of Banfield’s term might seem patently antiquarian. However, the term is still invoked, although it is cloaked under the lexicon du jour, as exemplified in Ong’s use of Foucauldian nomenclature “family governmentality” obligatorily articulated with neoliberalism “to describe the everyday norms and practices whereby Hong Kong families place family interests above all other individual and social concerns” (1998: 141). Amoral communalism refers to a kind of communally shared cynical ethos toward the state’s institutions and its representatives that was induced by the local transfer of the state’s culture of governance. The latter undermined the public’s adoption of a positive civic conscience while encouraging the pursuit of its private pecuniary interests. Moreover, it had corrosive effects on intra-communal sociality not only by undermining the ethos of a collectivist solidarity in favor of an individualistic opportunism, but also by fomenting the community’s “citizenship deficit”: That is, a lack of commitment to its affiliative obligations toward the state, the adoption of a transactional demeanor toward its institutions, and an endemic avoidance of civic engagement. Amoral communalism, as a public ethos, is constitutive of the political subjectivity and agency of the members of the communal polity. In fact, this amoral communalism is the standpoint from which Soqotran community members perceive, and relate to, state institutions and political authorities. The adoption of this public ethos has influenced community members’ agency as citizens, which they expressed in what I call the politics of redistribution. Such a politics is pursued through the deployment of infrapolitical practices that contest the top-down elite-centric patronage distribution practiced by the state with a bottom-up people-centric redistribution initiated by the communal polity in order to contest their relative exclusion from the

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state’s largess. The resulting antagonistic relationship between Soqotrans and locally represented state institutions is a direct response to the effects of the state’s politics of differential privilege it accords to different societal groups through the selective inclusion and deliberate exclusion of segments of the polity based on their perceived degree of political threat to state power holders (see Elie 2018a). This chapter draws out the cumulative consequences of the latest phases of the Yemeni state’s politics of administration of Soqotra discussed in Chapter 7. Accordingly, it investigates the state’s “production of a communal polity” through a processual analysis of the dialectical relationship between the Yemeni state transfer of its patronage-driven governance culture by means of a bureaucratic incorporation process and of the effects generated on the community’s civic disposition. More specifically, it elucidates the ramifications of the malignant synergy between the state’s institutional practices and citizens’ attitude and action that was engendered by the perversion of the norms that guide the performance of government institutions and that created an endemic negative civic predisposition within the Soqotran polity. First, I situate the dynamics of state-community political relations within the governance culture of the Yemeni state. Second, I describe briefly the ramifications of the state’s politics on the polity formation process in Soqotra and I illustrate the governance anomalies, the institutional pathologies, and the reactions they engendered in Soqotra’s communal polity. Third, I evaluate the consequences of the above on the formation of local civil society and on the community’s political agency. Lastly, I conclude with a brief assessment of state-community politics in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and of the UAE’s protectorate regime in Soqotra.

8.2 State, Nation, and Community: Failed Symbiosis It is the state and its institutional apparatus that foment socio-political outcomes as manifested in the repertoire of citizens’ civic disposition: their affiliative sentiment toward the state as manifested in an affirmative or negative propensity; their political agency within the public sphere animated either by a collaborative or oppositional spirit; their civil propensity defined by engagement or alienation; and their national identity characterized by a sense of belonging or of exclusion. Indeed, as Smith axiomatically put it: “The state [is] the necessary condition and

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matrix for the gestation of national loyalties” (1991: 59). Therefore, it is pointless to discuss the nation without the state (Hobsbawm 1992: 10). Given the indelible nexus between state and nation, theories that privilege non-institutional factors such as “semiotic practices” in explaining the dynamics of polity formation and national identification may seem interpretively innovative. They fail, however, to elucidate the institutional mediation of, and thus neglect the structural determinants in, state-society relations. This is exemplified in Wedeen’s (2008) dubious thesis that the formation of a “democratic” public sphere through democracy-inducing deliberative performances compensates for the state’s institutional delinquency. This betrays the postmodern hubris of reifying social reality into discursive epiphenomena and the corollary predilection for socially accommodative discourse over politically insurgent practice. Wedeen illustrates her thesis by pointing to the public’s democratic discursive practices in q¯at chewing sessions and unilaterally presumes them to be adequate substitutes for the democratic deficit of the Yemeni state’s institutions—a view that is not shared by the chewers themselves. This implausible explanation is authorized by her interpretation of these sessions as replicas of nineteenth-century European bourgeois salons that in Yemen served as civic education fora to “construct national persons” infused with a “democratic personhood.” In relying on exogenous idioms of interpretation to understand local practices, Wedeen exemplifies the interpretive misdemeanors of travelling theory, as her assertion about the emancipatory effect of q¯at chewing sessions is factually misleading and politically complicit. This decontextualizing interpretation of a local practice betrays an imported and fanciful vision of democracy without institutional underpinning being sustained by politically aggrieved and aspirationally frustrated individuals engaged in a complacent discursive activism that never spills beyond the walls of their salon-like settings. In contrast to the celebratory discourse of foreign scholars, Yemeni researchers and chewers insist that q¯at is the social opiate of the national polity and its consumption within mini assemblies of hedonistic discursive conviviality represents an act of surrender to the state’s fomentation of a politically disengaged citizenry (see Vol. 2: Chapter 3; Elie 2015). As Phillips noted, the Yemeni state “gives citizens the ability to speak with relative freedom, without the ability to act correspondingly” (2008: 6). At stake here are two types of freedom: (a) discursive freedom, which entails the opportunistic performance of pantomimic acts of protest against the state that are societally inconsequential given their

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circumscription within the private sphere, and (b) actionable freedom, which requires institutional mechanisms that can articulate the polity’s grievances and channel actions aimed at the transformation of the public sphere. In fact, discursive freedom presents a minor political nuisance to the state in the absence of an institutional anchor that would transform it into actionable freedom (see Sen 1999: 36–40). Accordingly, the “deliberative impact” of micro-social q¯at chewing gatherings on the macro-political processes of Yemeni society is insignificant, given their incapacity to generate a public transformational praxis from their private democratic lexis (see Gooding and Dryzek 2006). 8.2.1

Public Sphere Formation: Institution over Discourse

In contrast to the prevailing emphasis on discursive practices in shaping “national identification,” I insist on the primacy of institutional factors.1 Accordingly, the key determinant of the polity’s affiliative sentiment is the state’s governance culture and not the citizens’ pre-existing shared cultural affinities or their collective discursive practices. Indeed, the political priority among members of Yemen’s national polity and within its sub-national communities is not to strengthen citizens’ national identification with the state, but to enhance the nature and quality of the state’s relations to its citizens. That is, the primary concern is about political relationality and not national identity. This emphasis on statecitizens relationality requires an institutionally enabling environment for the emergence of “new local imaginaries, relatively free of the discourses of patriotism and nationality, but rich in the discourses of citizenship, democracy, and local rights” (Appadurai 2003: 345). To identify the catalysts to the emergence of these local imaginaries and to explain the changes in state-citizens relations, I foreground the catalytic role of the state through its administrative institutions and political practices. Indeed, state-community politics in Soqotra illustrates an axiom about state-polity relations: It is the quality of the state’s governance culture that determines not only the strength of the polity’s identification with the nation-state, but more importantly the civic character of the political community as a whole. This axiom is evident in the recursive relationship between the Yemeni state and its constitutive regions and communities, which is entrapped within a dysfunctional state governance culture that never operationalized a symbiotic relationality within the state-nation-community nexus.

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In effect, the Republic of Yemen, which emerged in 1990 as a unified modern nation-state, remained a virtual “state-nation”: That is, a political community, which was founded on inadequate state institutions that engaged in the perfunctory enactment of laws that were haphazardly enforced and thus was unable to harness the loyalty of its citizens and to cultivate a national consciousness among its polity. I provide a synoptic narrative of the genesis of modern nation-state formation on mainland Yemen and of its contemporary operational modality, which led to the formation of this virtual “state-nation.” This synopsis serves as background to the nature of the Yemeni state’s culture of governance that was transferred to Soqotra (see Elie 2018a for details). And it elucidates the inaugural vectors of the state’s institutional maldevelopment and their structuring effects on nation-state formation. The revolution of 1962 was the catalyst to modern state-building as it led to the overthrow of the ancien régime of the Imamate that ruled North Yemen for a millennium through feudal governing practices over a primordial polity. However, the political settlement of the civil war changed the balance of power between modernist/nationalist actors and the traditionalist/monarchic ones in favor of the latter, which determined the nature of nation-building in Yemen. Indeed, as a rule, “The balance of power between these actors determines which vision of a legitimate political order and which institutional principles will prevail” in shaping the nation-building process (Wimmer and Feinstein 2010: 769). In North Yemen, “Rather than force a transformation of the [traditionalist] periphery to conform to the modernist centre, the outlook of the centre… [was made] to encompass many of the goals and values of the periphery” (Peterson 1984: 99). This led to the sedimentation of “inertial forces” that relegated the country into a post-traditional trap, which is an arrested societal transition in which Yemen is caught up in a sociocultural pendulum swing between an atavistic primordialism and a vernacular modernity that is accompanied by stagnation in its cultural, institutional, and human development. As a result, Yemen embarked on a contradictory, and ultimately dysfunctional, state and nation-building project, as the key components of such a project combined into a malignant synergy: (a) The effective bureaucratic incorporation of the national territory was disabled by weak institutional development through, initially by default and subsequently by design, the non-modernization of the state apparatus; (b) the formation of the national polity through the integration of the constellation

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of regionally demarcated tribal polities was hindered by the impoverished symbolic resources of the state’s political elite (soldiers and tribal shaykhs), which deprived them of the hegemonic status and cultural legitimacy (as was the case with the Imamate’s traditional ruling class of al-s¯ ada); (c) the state’s political socialization of a modern national polity was undermined by the initial prohibition, and subsequent misuse, of the party mechanism; and (d) the ideological mobilization of the population through the use of nationalism as an instrument for the formation of a collective political will and a shared national identity failed due to its opportunistic invocation as an expedient rhetorical stratagem. These led to the state’s adoption of governance practices that relied on the deliberate fomentation and tactical containment of centrifugal forces in the national polity. Consequently, state leaders were condemned to a permanent legitimation crisis, which forced them to resort to expedient policy-making practices, which ultimately led to the failed symbiosis between state, nation, and community. The legacy was a permanent structural disarticulation between the state, the nation, and its sub-national communities due to the prevalence of dysfunctional operational norms of governance. These norms are summarized as follows: (a) a political ethic that condones elite grafting and mass poaching of state resources as a means of entrapping the national polity into a state-enabled public ambience of corruption; (b) an administrative ethos based on a perverse libertarianism as default managerial practice that deliberately minimizes the state’s intervention in citizens’ lives through the tactical disabling the capacity of state institutions; (c) a policy regime that caters primarily to the state’s political sustainability through elite cooptation while failing to foment its democratic legitimacy through an authoritarian contempt for public support, and thus betrays a cynical neglect of the polity’s welfare; (d) the differential privileging of societal groups through the asymmetric distribution of state resources through state-sanctioned elite capture of the country’s resources and the structural exclusion of the mass of ordinary citizens; (e) an institutional ecology constituted through an asymmetric organizational division between a government elite made up of appointed cadres running the formal state apparatus and a power elite made up of patrimonial groups ruling a shadow state; (f) a social mobilization strategy that is not based on a political ideology but relies on the strategic cooptation of groups endowed with the capacity to threaten the regime’s stability, and which encourages the formation of vertical clientship between the state

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and powerful social groups while neglecting the development of horizontal solidarity across the national polity; and (g) a system of political financing to sustain the regime’s support network based on the distribution of “carbon rent” that creates clientelistic strata within the national polity, the formation of a crony capitalist class through “fiscal contracts” that parcel out the national economy into sectoral monopolies, and the mobilization of “aid rent” from the international community of donors that circumscribes the state’s national development strategy to parodying externally-mandated economic liberalization schemes. These operational norms have engendered endemic antinomies of governance that have transformed the relational norms within the polity into conflictual relations between all segments of the nation-state: nation vs. state, state vs. government, formal state vs. shadow state, power elite vs. government elite, elites vs. ordinary citizens, executive branch vs. line ministries, center vs. regions, institutions vs. society, northern vs. southern regional identities, and dominant vs. minority ethno-linguistic communities. These antinomies of governance have bequeathed a dysfunctional political grammar in state-community relations throughout the national territory. Moreover, these antinomies reveal not only the state’s perfunctory commitment to national integration, but also the perversion of the state-society relational protocol. This contributed to the corruption of the national polity’s civic disposition and the corrosion of its social cohesion. As a result, the state failed to foment a “relational connectedness” within the national polity between state, nation, and community, which led to the demotion of the state as the object of citizens’ “primary terminal loyalty.” This affective spurning of the state abetted post-national aspirations by inducing a shift in the horizon of citizens’ allegiance from its confinement to state loyalty to a preference for communal autonomy within, and even territorial secession from, the state’s jurisdiction. The defining characteristics of the transferred state patronage culture of governance include the following: (a) an elite-centric policy regime, (b) a local autonomy-prevention legal framework and administrative structure, and (c) a chronic neglect of ordinary citizens’ needs due to the state’s elite exclusive patronage and selective clientelist politics. These produced a local social ecology in which prevailed a community-wide sentiment of exclusion and an opportunistic civic disposition that mediated intracommunal interactions and state-community relations. This sentiment of exclusion engendered Soqotrans’ attempt, either out of economic necessity or elite emulation, to raid this exclusive patronage network through a

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communal politics of redistribution. Indeed, their lack of political threat capital has relegated them into the marginalized groups within the state patronage system. Consequently, they suffered from a cooptation deficit, which compelled them to search for appropriate means of distributional redress. It is this experience that has driven Soqotrans into flirting with the cynical features of a venal polity: their adoption of a clientelistic disposition toward the state (e.g., acquiescence to political cooptation, or self-entrapment through acts of petty corruption); their accommodation to social relations characterized by a pervasive pecuniary quid pro quo; and their conditional loyalty to the state depending on the material benefits it provides. In effect, the failed symbiosis between the state, the nation, and the community is a national one. As the Yemeni state never institutionalized the nation and thus never integrated its sub-national communal formations. The 1990 unification of the two states of Yemen was supposed to have permanently fused the state with the nation and its constitutive communities. As an optimistic assessment at the time put it: “there seems little doubt in Yemenis’ minds, wherever they are from, that the state now is properly a nation-state. Whatever criticisms may be made of government, the nation it claims to represent is not in question” (Dresch 1993: 67). Subsequent history has shown that the state which claims to represent the Yemeni nation was always “in question.” Indeed, this has been the case since unification as the fault lines upon which it was founded were never addressed and were exacerbated by the 1994 civil war and its aftermath. The case of the Soqotran community’s relation with the Yemeni state is a case study of how this failed symbiosis happened, as I show in the remainder of this chapter.

8.3 Resenting Power: Contexts of Muted Activism The transfer of the Yemeni state’s culture of governance through the administrative subjection of Soqotra’s communal polity led to their malformation as administered citizens of the mainland state. The end result was the uneven and incomplete transformation of Soqotrans into a nationally integrated communal polity, which was left with an ambiguous national identification. This partial integration resulted from the Yemeni state’s mode of polity formation, which was driven by the expedient establishment of the bases of the Yemeni state’s political hegemony through:

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(a) the chronic recourse to politically expedient decision-making, through central government decrees that are honored in the breach; (b) episodic exhortation campaigns (e.g., official visits and election campaigns) to induce Soqotrans’ loyalty to the state that are inadequate substitutions for building institutions that would sustainably cultivate the Soqotran community’s national allegiances; (c) the strategic cooptation of local political opposition leaders groups (e.g., influential local members of the former Socialist Party), to undermine political mobilization against the ruling party; and (d) the deployment of culturally alienating tactics such as the selective appropriation of local symbols (e.g., the selection of Soqotra’s iconic Dragon’s Blood tree as the national tree), while refusing to recognize the Soqotri language as if its repudiation was a pre-condition for Soqotrans’ acceptance as the nation’s citizens. These expedient political strategies produced a deeply skeptical, if not actively oppositional, political disposition among the population. Moreover, they led to the constitution of a communal polity animated by the perception of their being accorded a provisional citizenship status (contingent on repudiating their ethno-linguistic heritage) and thus were afflicted with a national belonging deficit. Indeed, the state’s culture of governance undermined its own legitimacy and induced an ambiguous communal loyalty toward it, which, in turn, led to the prevalence of a community-centric identification and a diaspora-reliant disposition. Moreover, the Yemeni state’s political expediency in the administration of Soqotra has left the islanders in a quandary about their place in the national polity. This engendered the political alienation and existential anxieties, which Soqotrans have sought to palliate through the politics of redistribution that strategically conceded the state’s claim to political sovereignty, but tactically contested its effects through the practice of an infrapolitics (see below). In this context of socio-politically fraught intra- and inter-communal relations, state institutions have become the key objects of contestation by members of the communal polity due to the centrality of their local functions, even if not performed satisfactorily: political arbiter and economic provider. Both of these functions are carried out under the central government’s undivided sovereignty and episodically contested political hegemony by the opposition political parties, which constitute weak countervailing forces. Moreover, the private sector’s and international donors’ contribution to the local economy is comparatively too

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insignificant to constitute an alternative to the government’s preponderant political and economic roles. Therefore, interacting with, indeed relying on, state institutions is an unavoidable experience for most Soqotrans. A caveat is apropos here: The discussion of Soqotrans’ political activism does not always specify their social position; however, it does not assume a monolithic population, as they occupy at least three interactional locations in their dealings with state institutions: (i) the voluntary public servants, who are the elected local councilors and constitute the local political authority; (ii) the salaried civil servants, who are the staff of the ministerial branches that make up the local public administration system; and (iii) the ordinary citizen service seekers, who represent the general public. These groups are differentiated by uneven privilege and access to governmental resources, and thus have different stakes as well as different intensity of allegiance to the political status quo. They share, however, a generalized low level of expectation from it, as well as the negative perception that the Yemeni state is not a moral arbiter standing above society that can be called upon to dispense justice. Indeed, the state is perceived as passively condoning, if not actively generating, social injustice. The discussion in the three sub-sections below is organized as follows: First, the introduction of the Local Authority Law is discussed as an attempt to consolidate the legacy of a politics of external supervision through local institutions grafted from those on the mainland; second, the effects of the transfer of the mainland administrative practices on the behavior of civil servants is exemplified; and third, the communal polity’s resentment toward this imported administrative culture is described through the deployment of a series of infrapolitical tactics. 8.3.1

Local Governance: Power Deprivation Scheme

The Local Authority Law’s (LAL) introduction of a “modernized” local authority system perpetuates the island’s subordination to external rule. As discussed in Chapter 7, the LAL was enacted by Yemen’s Parliament in February 2000 and became operational in 2001. It was the “new” legal framework to regulate state-community relations through the establishment of a Local Authority system (LA) based on elected Local Councils (LC) in all of the twenty-two governorates and their 333 districts that constitute the national polity. Historically, decentralization reforms were “launched as tools for the legitimization and political

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strengthening of the regime” (Romeo and El-Mensi 2008: 15). Accordingly, the Law merely led to the cosmetic institutional modernization and superficial democratization of state-community relations. More importantly, the LAL’s implementation perpetuated Soqotra’s limited political and fiscal autonomy through its chronic administrative supervision by, and financial dependence on, external entities. Indeed, the LAL consecrated the external supervision regime and thus the political hegemony of the central government, as all state-appointed regional and local leaders were obligated to represent the interests of the central government at the expense of local priorities. Article 10 is unambiguous about the subordination of all local authorities to the central state: “Every one of the administrative units and the local councils is deemed to be an integral part of the state authority.” Among the many objectives of the LAL, two are worth noting in Soqotra’s case: to increase the proximity of the state to local communities through the integration of communal-level councilors in political decision-making at the district level and to decentralize administrative authority and access to financial resources in order to ensure efficient service delivery at the district level. However, the Local Authority Law did not allow the pursuit of such objectives. In effect, it sustained the pre-existing fragmentation of the local administration system and thus reinforced its structural dysfunctions: First, the Law conferred administrative responsibilities on the local councils but with minimum capacity for revenue generation and without full control over fiscal resources generated locally. The budgetary resources of the Local Authority are from three sources: (1) fiscal transfers from mainland central agencies; (2) joint resources from the Governorate; and (3) local revenues that are insufficient to meet local administrative tasks. Second, local councils have no authority over the local government bureaucracy, as the local branches of the central ministries that carry out the actual administrative functions of government are still under the control of mainland central ministries and are independent of the Local Council authority. Consequently, the political autonomy to pursue those objectives was never granted, as the Local Authorities are essentially political franchises of the central state and thus are constrained to replicate its dysfunctional governance culture. Hence, in practice, the LAL engendered a number of administrative dysfunctions: (a) the failure to generate greater resources and opportunities for local self-government and local development; (b) the imposition of conflicting demands for accountability on the politically appointed districts’ General

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Directors between their local constituencies and the central government; (c) the consolidation of the autonomy deficit and dependency surfeit of the local authority on the central government; and (d) consequently, the entrenchment of the communal polity’s disappointment with the state. Furthermore, the Law deliberately restricted the Local Authority’s prerogatives: (a) politically, it remained merely a consultative body and never became a governing one, as it had limited delegated authority to influence the welfare of the community; (b) administratively, the LA could not hire or fire the staff of the branches of line ministries, but could only recommend their dismissal; (c) fiscally, it could generate only 15% of its revenues and had to rely on fiscal transfers from the central government to pay for all recurrent costs of the district’s administration; and (d) developmentally, the LA could propose plans but neither had any local control nor the funding and the technical capacity to implement them, which forced the LA to rely on sub-contractors, a source of corruption. The resulting chronic fiscal deficit constrained Socotra’s LA to adopt a redistributionist budgetary politics: the rotational allocation of available funds for each fiscal year to local councilors for the construction of public buildings in their sub-districts. However, since these funds were never sufficient, the buildings were usually not completed, and even when completed, they were unused due to the absence of staff or equipment. This led to the multiplication of “white camels” in the form of unused public buildings (clinics and schools) around the island. This budgetary politics seems to serve two purposes: to equalize sub-district access to insufficient fiscal revenue and to legitimize the councilors’ status as community providers. In light of these intrinsic administrative deficiencies, the ultimate purpose of the LAL was to provide the legal rationale for the strategic disabling of democratic governing institutions that the regime claims to promote. These deficiencies are the effects of a deliberate power deprivation strategy to effectively prevent communal polities from ever achieving political autonomy and local development. In effect, the LA system served as the institutional mechanism that would perpetuate the ruling party’s hegemony as a countervailing strategy to the threat of losing power posed by the legalization of multiparty electoral politics. Also, in Soqotra’s case, the LA system served to allay international concern about local managerial transparency. The latter was the sine qua non for donor funding of environmental conservation projects in Soqotra, since the government declared the island a protected area in 1996 and called for international assistance. This decision subcontracted the management of Soqotra’s

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entire territory, not just its environment, to a foreign receivership regime. In 2008, the GEF-UNDP launched a project to institutionalize the supervisory role of conservation agencies in the local administration system. However, they were unaware that the ultimate purpose of the LAL was not to decentralize but to entrench the central government political control (see Vol. 2: Chapter 7). Ultimately, the LAL’s implementation generated social frustration, which promoted public cynicism toward the state. In sum, the politics of external supervision and its relational asymmetries have not allowed Soqotrans to make the transition from periodic participants in state-sponsored political events (i.e., elections) to active stakeholders in the affairs of the island. This failed transition induced an endemic ambivalence about their status as citizens and reinforced a pervasive doubt about their membership in the nation-state. These grievances are also shared by most, if not all, regional authorities, as they are generated by the state’s legal framework, which sanctions asymmetric center-periphery relations. This perpetuates the autonomy deficit of all regional and local authorities through their political subordination to, administrative subservience toward, and fiscal dependency on, the central government. 8.3.2

Administrative Disorder: Corrosion of the Work Ethic

One of the many debilitating administrative consequences of the transfer of the state’s culture of governance is the entrapment of government employees at all levels into the perfunctory performance of work-related tasks as the state feigns a blind eye through the deliberate absence of management or intentional failure to discipline professional delinquency. Through the deployment of this administrative disorder-inducing stratagem, the state entices community members to abandon their moral qualms and to become its clients. The result is the corrosion of civil servants’ work ethic. This leads to the mutation of government employees into ethically compromised citizens unable to denounce the state without incriminating themselves. This situation is an effect of the antinomies of governance noted above, in which the functioning of administrative institutions is unrelated to their raison d’être as mechanisms of service delivery to citizens. Soqotra has not escaped this outcome, as I illustrate through an individual exemplification of the prevailing behavioral norm among civil servants.

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• Interlude: Fieldnote Entry on Local Administration I was interviewing, or at least trying to, a government staff from the mainland who settled in Soqotra in 1979 first as a teacher and subsequently as Director of the Statistics Office. In that capacity, his responsibility encompassed data collection on all aspects of Soqotra including population. I was trying to understand the organization of the island into mud¯ıriyya (district), mant.eqa (region), and qariyya (village). I presumed that someone who works in such an office should have some familiarity with this issue. The day before, an appointment was made with him for 8:00 a.m., but I went to his office at 8:45 a.m. I met him in the streets, as if he had lost patience waiting for me in what I later understood to be his place of “non-work.” Why should he stay there anyway, he does not go there on a regular basis, if at all, except on the rare occasions when he is obligated to play the part of a government office worker, as he was about to do today for my benefit. But I was late in arriving. So he was on his way to the UN Biodiversity project office to collect payment for his real job as a sign maker. The project had contracted him to do the signs that dot the island’s landscape warning visitors that they are entering into protected areas. I sought three pieces of information: (a) How many regions is the island divided into? (b) What was the system used by the census in reporting on villages? and (c) how was the census organized in Soqotra? Regarding the first question, “I don’t know,” he says, “We received the list of villages from Sana‘a’. And then the census takers proceeded to collect the information from these villages according to the requirements of the census questionnaire.” As to the second question, there was no variation from his position of ignorance: “The list came as is and we filled it. However, Sana‘a’ has the information on the villages organized by regions. You should refer to them,” he suggested. It was merely a ploy of discharging responsibility unto others. “How was the census organized?” I persevered. He began, “There was a team of twenty-five people, some of them from Sana‘a’,” and shifted to a confession of non-involvement: “But actually I was not in that job during the census, I started in 1995 after the census.” In a final attempt to get something out of him, I suggested that since he has been living here for such a long time, he must have some idea about the names of the different regions and could he cite them for me. He felt obliged to say something. He cited a few and I wrote them

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down perfunctorily without much confidence in the accuracy of the information. Throughout the interview he betrayed an embarrassed demeanor, as he was being forced into playing a part he would rather avoid in order not to be reminded of his official duties that he does not actually, or only occasionally, perform. After he left, I innocently wondered, in a question to my research assistant, why do government employees we have met seemed not to know much about their job. He blurted out “¯ınfil¯ at ¯ıd¯ ar¯ı.” I repeated the term and exclaimed “what is that?” Previously, my assistant, since he was not my informant, never shared his opinion about the way things are done on the island—especially if they relate to government and politics. I recollected that I had the same experience of talking to other government staff. He gave me a resigned shrugged and said, “hakad¯ a ” (“it is like that”). This time he decided to fill in the background. ¯ Infil¯ at ¯ıd¯ ar¯ı (administrative disorder or chaos) is a public administration system that is characterized by the absence of three things: ¯ıjr¯ a’¯ at (procedures), dhabt. (control), and mur¯ aqaba (monitoring). He summed up the result of their local absence: “m¯ a f¯ı h.uk¯ uma” (“there is no government”). “There is nobody to be accountable to, to supervise, and to follow up what is being done. Nobody knows his or her job or what he or she is supposed to do,” he explained. Finally, he exclaimed “We learned it from them. They taught it to us, this ¯ınfil¯ at ¯ıd¯ ar¯ı.” “They” were the al-shim¯ aliy¯ın, the northerners from the mainland, and the source of everything that is wrong with the island, so goes a prevailing view among adult Soqotrans. He referred to the local council and observed that it is made up of mostly illiterate members in violation of the stipulations of the LAL, and who are more committed to monetizing their unremunerated positions than to ensuring that services are being provided to citizens. Here he was not sharing information as much as revealing his exasperation with this recently installed system of local administration. What my research assistant was pointing out was the failed implementation of the LAL. For in spite of its annexation of local authorities to the mainland state’s executive branch, the LAL is replete with the very things that ¯ınfil¯ at ¯ıd¯ ar¯ı lacks, namely Procedures, processes, structures, and systems related to control and monitoring that are neglected in practice. Indeed, this ¯ınfil¯ at ¯ıd¯ ar¯ı is a legacy of unification, which led to the primacy of the north’s administrative culture over that of the south, which was characterized as follows: The “northern anarchy” regime (al-fawd.¯ a al-shim¯ al¯ı) functioned as a state bureaucracy that is merely a patronage

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distribution mechanism devoid of any developmental compass, and whose operation is burdened with funding deficit, regulatory neglect, and inadequate staff recruitment due to haphazard use of meritocratic criteria. And a “southern order” (al-nidh¯ am al-jan¯ ub¯ı) based on functioning, but coercive, state institutions with centralized planning mechanisms embedded within an efficient public administration system in pursuit of development under the guidance of an ideology-driven and disciplinarian party organization as center of power (see Day 2012; Elie 2013). In sum, this ¯ınfil¯ at ¯ıd¯ ar¯ı exemplifies the pathologies in statecommunity relations engendered by the replication of the state’s governance culture of patronage at the local level. The resulting political alienation of the community is indicated by the frequent recourse to the dismissive epithet ¯ aysh h.uk¯ uma (“what government?”) that is used by Soqotrans to characterize the failures associated with government responsibility (e.g., inadequate supply of social services, frequent shortage of basic commodities such as sugar, flour, and cooking gas cylinders, and power outage). One illustration of the use of this epithet is the response of a Soqotran businessman to my innocent inquiry about the frequent electricity cuts, which was formulated in an exasperated tone and accompanied by contemptuous gestures: “What government? It eats everything. The court knows that, the prosecutor’s office knows that, and the police know that. And they take no action.” This is illustrative of one of the operating principles of amoral communalism: “office holders, feeling no identification with the purposes of [state institutions] will not work harder than is necessary to keep their places. [… And] no one will take the initiative in outlining a course of action and persuading others to embark upon it” (Banfield 1958: 89, 97). My interjection that the local government was staffed almost entirely by Soqotrans merely elicited a disdainful grimace, which seemed to imply that the entire administrative class of Soqotrans was seen as betrayers of their people’s trust. What mattered was not their local origin, but their disregard for the well-being of their fellow islanders and communal homeland. More generally, it indicated that Soqotrans, some of them at least, have adopted the position of critical spectators to a process of change that is perceived as being led by locals who are unwitting victims of the larger political culture of corruption, which they feel compelled to comply with and to replicate locally.

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Infrapolitical Practices: A Partial Inventory

Soqotrans’ reactions to the perceived political expediency of the state’s actions through the local operation of its transferred governance culture were expressed not through overt acts of resistance but subtle tactics of resentment. These tactics are deployed alternatively by Soqotrans in their different roles as public servants, civil servants, and ordinary citizens in their interaction with state’s institutions. They instantiate Scott’s notion of “infrapolitics,” which he describes as the tactical acts of protest that are “practiced outside the visible spectrum of what usually passes for political activity” (2012: xx). It is a marriage of the practices of everyday life and muted political activism as a form of “oppositional praxis” by situationally conscripted activists-citizens, which entails the local deployment of a series of subversive acts against the state. These acts, however, do not challenge the state’s political hegemony, but seek to redistribute its resources. Accordingly, these infrapolitical practices are dissimulated under quotidian practices that oppose a communal politics of opportunistic grassroots redistribution against the state’s politics of selective elite patronage. These acts are the citizens’ counter-stratagems to the state’s own, and their manifestation within the local institutional setting is categorized and briefly illustrated below: • Social Shirking entails the evasion of the performance of one’s occupationally-mandated responsibilities. It is the most widespread attitude, as it seems to be a pervasive feature of Soqotrans’ encounter with institutions, especially among civil servants. It is an attitudinal epidemic with the dominant symptoms of poor attendance and performance at work. For most civil servants, attendance ranges from the no-show to the irregular presence, or at the most to the threehour workday. However, this is the result of a combination of factors partly beyond their control: absence of work space, lack of a budget for the unit, and absence of training to remedy low technical capacity of staff. Many of the ministerial branch offices are a one-man operation without supporting staff. This is the legacy of the employment generation strategy through public sector post creation of the 1990s motivated by unification politics. Consequently, the most disadvantaged of citizen service seekers are students, as they bear the full brunt of the local government’s political expediency in establishing schools without adequate staffing and facilities’ maintenance. The

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end result is an institutional processing of Soqotran students by managerially-challenged and pecuniary-driven local administrators overseeing a cadre of local teachers inadequately prepared and demotivated by working conditions. To survive this context, students recourse to the infrapolitics of systematic cheating during examinations to express their resentment toward an institutional set up in which getting a certificate is divorced from proper teaching and learning. • Compensatory Appropriation seems to function as a folk ideology. The latter stipulates that whatever resource the state provides is to be regarded as compensation for the intrinsic neglect of the state’s mainland-based and elite-centric patronage regime, which systematically marginalizes all citizens with a threat-quotient deficit. This disposition engenders venal effects on the behavior of citizens such as the adoption of redistributive poaching practices toward state resources that I call “compensatory appropriation.” This is manifested in the endemic perception of a government job and the associated salary as compensatory entitlements that are unrelated to the professional capacity, or ethical obligation, to perform the required tasks. In effect, this attitude seems to mimic the appropriative practices of the mainland state’s patrimonial elites and their clients toward the nation’s wealth (see Elie 2018a). This practice, among others, carries the seeds of communal self-destruction, as it breeds tolerance for professionally-deficient locals occupying posts crucial to the social reproduction of the Soqotran community. Nevertheless, Soqotrans do not blame or shame, at least not publicly, the competence deficit or ethical lapses of their compatriots. Instead, it is the imported “northern anarchy” regime (al-fawd.¯ a al-shim¯ al¯ı) that is blamed, as it inexorably corrupts its bureaucrats as well as those it administers. However, the continued presence of such officeholders would seem to betray a more cynical acculturation strategy being pursued unknowingly perhaps by the local servants of the state, and in which the Soqotran public is an unwitting accomplice through a myopic opportunism. • Tactical Insubordination refers to the attempt to circumvent the administrative interference of outsiders very selectively and without appearing to challenge the political hegemony of the mainland over the island. The gestures through which this is manifested are generally innocuous vis-à-vis the state’s interests, but provide a margin of

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economic relief to citizens. For example, the collusive hoodwinking between port officials and Soqotrans importing cars from the Gulf countries, conveniently disregarding the national decree (for environmental protection) concerning the year prior to which used cars should not be imported into the national territory. This is to facilitate the purchase of cars by islanders with limited financial resources, and it is seen as a form of mutual aid among fellow islanders. Also, there is the absence of rigor in checking the manifest of cargo ships bringing food items (e.g., rice, sugar, and flour) to the island from the Gulf to differentiate between items donated and for sale, in order not to unduly penalized locals for the benefit of the state through higher tax assessment and thus facilitate the flow of goods on which the islanders are dependent, and the procurement of which by the state has been unreliable. • Avoidance is the act of last resort, after repeated failures to get satisfaction from petitioning government institutions. It is a form of tactical disengagement from state institutions arising from Soqotrans’ interaction especially with the ethically deficient judicial system, which has turned out to be a spider’s web. Recourse to the court (mah.kama) is a relatively new phenomenon that is linked to land disputes, especially in the hinterland. These disputes have become a widespread source of intra- and inter-clan conflicts over territorial access that were partly generated by population increase in rural areas, and the mutation of local values regarding land ownership: from communal resource to private property. More important is the breakdown of local leadership initiated by the mainlandintroduced shaykh system in which political connection determined the selection of shaykhs, instead of moral authority and conflict resolution skills. The result was the bypassing of traditional institutions and direct recourse to the court. Soqotrans, however, insist that the real problem is with the court and its leadership, which traditionally was a mainlander, presumably to ensure partiality. Instead, it has led to the perversion of the procedural norms of modern judicial administration through the monetization of justice, as decisions tend to favor those who can pay a higher bribe. This has rekindled the widespread use of the traditional institution of conflict resolution, sulh (see Chapter 3).

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The above illustrations of the politics of redistribution and the resentment-induced infrapolitical practices provoked by the state’s mass marginalization effects of its elite-centric patronage system and its corruption effects on the communal public ethos are symptomatic of the perverse political grammar of state-community relations in Soqotra. However, Soqotra is merely a microcosm of what takes place in local districts all over the mainland. Noteworthy is that the above practices are means of strategically accommodating the political caprices of the state, while simultaneously constituting the Soqotran polity’s own politics of survival within the institutional web of an elite-centric and polity-excluding culture of state governance.

8.4

Communal Civic Deficit: Dysfunctional Sociality

These infrapolitical practices constitute collective acts of resentment toward state institutions. The latter’s mode of operation engendered a mobilization effect among communal residents that took the form of a “negative solidarity,” against the state. This negative solidarity engendered a civic deficit toward the state and an absence of intra-communal solidarity, especially in the urban centers. This combination of sociopolitical attitudes is a by-product of the state-enabled corruption of the public ethos and the absence of an integrative social ethic to underpin a communal sociality: that is, the inclination toward engaging in associative activities. The absence of this inclination has engendered a dysfunctional sociality that is manifested, especially in the urban domain, in a communal anomie: an endemic social disposition, in which community members have adopted by default an attitude that betrays a generalized aloofness toward those outside their primary associations. This attitude was exacerbated by the presence of international organizations brokering a commercial approach to local development through tourism, which introduced a monetary quid pro quo as an obligatory relational ethos between Soqotrans and outsiders, and increasingly among themselves. Moreover, their unreliable interventions intensified the retreat into an insular selfreliance due to the loss of faith in the trustworthiness of non-related others generated by the unfulfilled expectations from external assistance, both national and international. One report prepared just prior to the onslaught of international surveyors of the island’s environmental assets

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noted: “Unfortunately there is a general feeling that promises for assistance have not been kept and this has had a noticeable effect on the attitude of the people” (GEF-UNDP 1997: 40). The cumulative effect of the above is the corrosion of the community’s pre-existing sociocultural capital as the formerly prevalent relations of obligatory reciprocity are being replaced by relations mediated by pecuniary motivations. This section examines the ramifications of the state’s and its international partners’ interventions on Soqotrans’ disposition toward associational activities within the public sphere. 8.4.1

Obstacles to Participation: Tutelary Public Sphere and Surrogate Civil Society

Even prior to unification, Soqotrans had accumulated a distrustful disposition toward governmental institutions as suppliers of public goods. This attitude worsened in the post-unification period in the mid-1990s with the transfer of the “northern anarchy” state culture of governance. The latter had corrosive effects on the Soqotran community by fomenting a communal civic deficit among the islanders as state citizens, which entailed the following associational dysfunctions: the narrowing of social boundaries within which civic mindedness is manifested; the reduction of the radius of interpersonal trust coupled with limited civic trust in public institutions; and the widespread reluctance to voluntarily form cooperative associations that are not based either on exclusionary social aspects (e.g., family, clan, village, or region) or on shared economic interests (e.g., fishing associations). It is not that Soqotrans lack the willingness or capacity for self-organization and civic participation, but the public space for them to do so is already invaded, and the formal organizational means (e.g., NGOs) have been instrumentalized by external sponsors. This undermined both their desire for civic engagement and their will for collective action. In effect, one of the institutional pillars of a modern polity, namely the public sphere, which is the interstitial space and virtual protective enclosure for civic institutions, only exists as a potentiality in Soqotra. This is because the local civil society organizations, which are the principal institutional actors in such a sphere, have yet to be autonomously and sustainably established on the island. Indeed, the formal definition of such organizations is predicated on their being voluntarily organized and legally recognized secondary associations, which mediate state-society relations through fostering public deliberation over issues of concern and

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that foment the formation of a shared consensus to be communicated to political authorities for action. The absence of authentically local NGOs, whose activities approximate the above definition, is due to the hegemony exercised by external actors over the constitution of a local public sphere and the organization of civil society in Soqotra. This resulted in the polity’s dissuasion from civic engagement and in its local organizational atrophy. Also, it led to the encompassment by default of the communal polity within a quadripartite sectoral configuration that is complexly imbricated: • The political sphere is still under the hegemony of the mainland state’s government in exile, as it is dominated by the ruling party the General People’s Congress (GPC), in collusion with the main opposition party al-Is.l¯ah.. However, this hegemony is being contested by emerging political factions (see last section). Nevertheless, Soqotrans’ political demeanor is still prey to the state’s paranoia of hegemony induced by potential political challenges to sustaining the communal polity’s loyalty to the central government. This paranoia is partly animated by the island’s geographical distance from, and the islanders’ indigenous cultural differences with, the mainland (see below). • The multilayered economic sphere is under the shared sovereignty of the state through its control of public sector jobs and the UN and its bilateral partners through their influence over an embryonic economic sector based on ecotourism projects that parceled out Soqotra’s landscapes into fee-charging protected areas and sponsored NGOs as enforcers of a UN designed and funded environmental protection regime. • The public sphere is under the joint tutelage of state and international agencies through the organizational cooptation of Soqotrans, which have pre-empted the emergence of the latent public sphere occupied by their informal deliberative venues that are sustaining their cultural heritage and nursing their political aspiration still tethered to anxieties of autonomy (see below). • The social support / philanthropic sphere plays a vital role in mitigating the material deprivation of locals. It is made up of a translocal network of local beneficiaries and émigré relatives in the diaspora in the Gulf countries. It mitigates both the community’s chronic dependency on the Yemeni state and the domesticating influence

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of the state’s international benefactors through the provision of the following types of assistance: financial remittances to locals with diasporic connections; transfer of goods for consumption or local sale; charity works that complement the state’s inadequate social safety net through the intervention of external religious organizations and individual philanthropists; and aid diplomacy from private citizens and governments from the Gulf—especially the UAE (see Vol. 2: Chapter 5). A brief overview of the civil society sector in Soqotra will illustrate how Soqotrans’ communal civic deficit was engendered through the dual corporate monopoly exercised by the state’s political incorporation and administrative subordination of the island, and by the United Nations agencies’ value assimilation and organizational cooptation of the islanders. The most recent, indeed only, survey of this sector was conducted in 2010 under the sponsorship of a project funded by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the “Soqotra Governance and Biodiversity Project” (Al-Hobieshi 2010). The purpose of the survey was to prospect for potential local organizational partners and to evaluate how they could be assimilated into the UN-sponsored environmental protection regime for the island. Only sixty organizations were catalogued in the report under the labels of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and categorized into associations, unions, foundations, and clubs encompassing seventeen sectors. The sectors covered by these organizations include the following: fisheries (17), ecotourism (6), sports (6), women (5), pastoralism (4), charity (5), environment (3), agriculture (3), apiculture (2), community-based self-help fund (2), development (1), disabled (1), youth (1), cultural heritage (1), labor (1), students’ welfare (1), and professional (1). At the time of the survey, most of these organizations were under some form of external tutelage either of the United Nations (which sponsored nearly one-third (19) of these organizations), the Yemeni government, or other external stakeholders. Given this external tutelage, the term NGOs may be a misnomer as their establishment does not accord with the pre-requisite that such organizations “be established by citizens” on their own free will and not on behalf of external interests. Indeed, many of these organizations resulted from government decrees (e.g., pastoral associations), legal mandate (e.g., fishing cooperatives turned into associations for taxing purposes), and

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international sponsorship in the case of the ecotourism and environmentrelated NGOs, as local citizens were actively recruited, organized into associations, and subsequently funded by the UN Biodiversity project. Predictably, the majority of the organizations surveyed in the report were inactive due to non-availability of external funding. Only those that were established as part of a social economy of subsistence to complement the assistance deficit of the state were, and still are, active (e.g., fishing associations). The activities of all these NGOs were divorced from public opinion formation aimed at influencing state policy. Consequently, the state’s incorporation imperative and the UN’s instrumentalizing logic in the formation of local organizations have consolidated this apolitical disposition into a tutelary public sphere and a surrogate civil society. In effect, the Yemeni state and the UN’s interventions constrained Soqotrans’ socio-cultural autonomy and stunted their political agency through their conscription into externally dependent and institutionally unsustainable organizations. This led to Soqotrans’ strategic de-politicization and the marginalization of their local deliberative venues for civic participation. In spite of the cooptation of Soqotrans into an externally dominated public sphere, there remains a peripheral space populated by a plethora of informal micro-social hubs as deliberative venues. Collectively, they constitute an organic civil society in-formation awaiting a window of opportunity to reclaim their communal public space and to assert their citizenship rights. These mostly urban venues embody the discursive spaces for sustaining a communal sociality and nurturing a civic sensibility that could reclaim the public ethos corrupted by the state. They include the following: the tea shops (without TVs), which are the obligatory stop-overs for the quintessential recreational pastime of tea-sipping among locals from different regions of the island that enable the spontaneous sharing of local news and views; TV cafés that offer a window to the larger world through watching global news and thus serve as vicarious incubators of a provincial cosmopolitan sensibility and became public fora for political debates during the Arab Spring; poetry competitions epitomize an indigenous form of deliberative public event; the wedding ceremony, which provided the inaugural stage for poetry recitation and has since sustained the performance of other traditional forms of cultural celebration (e.g., music, dancing, and the rituals associated with the ceremony); the muqhib, the daily afternoon gathering for tea drinking and socializing remains the islanders’ traditional “institution of conversation,” which the imported practice of q¯at chewing is threatening to replace (see

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Vol. 2: Chapter 3); and the mutual aid institution of gírif that epitomizes the self-help ethos and the spirit of communal solidarity. In the absence of state-sanctioned public spaces due to the state’s deliberate withholding of formal recognition of Soqotrans’ indigenous cultural heritage, these informal social hubs and their praxes constitute, in Chatterjee’s (1993) term, a “sovereign spiritual domain”: as the repository of the indigenous symbolic and practical resources of a communal culture (e.g., language, socio-cultural practices, and knowledge repertoire) that reproduce the communal value framework and thus sustain an embryonic ethno-national formation that is autonomous from the state’s political domain and resist its incorporative tentacles. In sum, Soqotrans’ communal civic deficit is the product of a negative symbiosis between externally established institutional structures, the external appropriation of the communal public sphere through the subcontracting of local civil society actors, and the negative effects on the communal polity’s civic disposition. The end result is that Soqotra’s communal polity is prey to a persistent malignant synergy between the state’s paranoia of hegemony and the Soqotrans’ anxiety of autonomy, which is discussed below. 8.4.2

State Paranoia of Hegemony: Authoritarian Reflex

The Yemeni state’s exercise of power was always driven by its leadership’s perception that nation and state building is a permanent workin-progress. This perception animates its paranoid quest for exclusive sovereignty over an ethnoculturally different and geographically remote community. This quest is pursued through the expedient vertical integration of the Soqotran community into the Yemeni nation-state. This engenders the partial dissipation of communal solidarity, or the state’s containment of its manifestation, as the mechanisms of governance are designed primarily to appease the regime’s chronic insecurity about national disintegration. This is conducive to the state’s “paranoias of sovereignty and control” and its permanent quest to induce, through cooptation or coercion, the polity’s acquiescence to its hegemonic sway over the public sphere (Appadurai 2010: 190). The Local Authority Law, discussed above, was to legalize the centralizing framework in which the proposed institutional structures and administrative processes served to reinforce the hierarchical integration and political subordination of the

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lower levels of government to the executive organs of the state, and with limited delegation of authority. Beyond the state’s imperative to maintain centralized political control over all regional and local authorities, there is also the state’s aversion to the nation’s regional and ethno-cultural diversity. Hence the need to assimilate it through the invocation of the code words “national unity” and “security and safety,” as is done in the Law’s article 115 clause 5: “To develop and consolidate positive social relations and bonds towards the realization and protection of national and social unity.” The state’s concern with national unity is abetted by Soqotra’s distinctive features from the mainland: (a) its distant location and proximity to the Horn of Africa; and (b) its ethnic, cultural, and linguistic particularities. Moreover, the state’s paranoia is exacerbated by its equation of geographic location (Arabian Peninsula) with ethno-linguistic homogeneity (Arab), and therefore, its conflation of the ethno-cultural uniqueness of Soqotrans with their potential aspiration for political independence and territorial secession. These features seem to reinforce the state’s authoritarian reflex to re-affirm its control over the population and to ensure their loyalty. This paranoia of hegemony has guided national integration since unification, which was pursued through North Yemen-led patronage politics in which individuals’ or groups’ perceived political threat potential was the only currency with which to access resources from the state. In Soqotra, as a communal polity lacking such a currency, the state’s patronage politics led to individualist self-seeking and to the dissipation of communal solidarity. Also, the state’s preference for a clientelistic polity fomented the deliberate absence of an enabling environment for associational activities (e.g., high registration fee and selective punitive enforcement of the NGO Law). Consequently, civic engagement was promoted and limited to the compulsory participation in the episodic rituals of elections. Moreover, there was a chronic neglect of human resources development and institutional capacity-building. The latter’s neglect was due to the fact that they engender autonomous political agency and managerial competency, which are the nemeses of the political docility preferred by the state. Accordingly, in Soqotra, the local development priorities of the state took the form of exhibitionistic construction projects: asphalted roads networks, airport, seaport, and local government buildings. These were more expedient political advertisement of the state presence and authority that simultaneously display its benevolence and presumably serve as local gratitude-inducing symbols.

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Communal Anxiety of Autonomy: Collective Acquiescence

These symptoms of the state’s “paranoia of hegemony” have reinforced Soqotrans’ “anxiety of autonomy”: the fear of asserting their citizenship rights to re-order the socio-geographic space of their community according to an indigenous social ethic and cultural politics. Indeed, this diffused anxiety is nurtured by an uncertainty about the political tolerance threshold of the state toward the local display of political and cultural assertiveness. Soqotrans harbor a deep feeling of political vulnerability due to their ambiguous sense of political allegiance and cultural affinity to the nation-state, and thus, they feel liable to the accusatory gaze of the state as potential renegades to its nation-building project. This has partly contributed to the absence of a tradition of collective action beyond the clan level that could have provided the foundation for an ethic of communal civic engagement, which would have remedied the communal solidarity and civic deficit, and thus enabled the emergence of organic civic structures in Soqotra’s public sphere. Instead, most active organizations have remained under the tutelage of either the state or the sponsorship of international organizations or religious charities, which are driven by external agendas. This organizational dependency has engendered a de-politicization effect and thus a relatively atrophied political agency. For the overwhelming majority of Soqotrans, participation in the public realm is out of a sense of perfunctory duty toward a mainland mandated public ritual (i.e., elections), and not necessarily out of personal political conviction. Consequently, Soqotrans have become pragmatic citizens in their electoral preferences after a disappointing experience in their earlier participation in electoral politics, as they seek to avoid the risk of alienating the central government’s occasional largess and incurring the punitive neglect of their island. This situation of endemic political anxiety and chronic external organizational dependency has engendered the following symptoms: lack of faith in the state institutions and international agencies induced by the perception of their political expediency, and unreliability of their assistance; resignation to the fatalities of a quotidian existence circumscribed to a lifeworld of elementary preoccupations due to the dearth of alternatives to subsistence livelihoods in the hinterland; a pre-occupation with modern self-making through consumerism in the urban context that is generating both an emergent class stratification and an intra-communal

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social segmentation due to regionally uneven access to material and financial support from the Gulf diaspora and the tourism economy; and limited awareness of social possibilities due to the inadequate institutionalization of formal education that is failing to enhance the capabilities of the new generation of Soqotrans. In addition to the above impediments, the rise of urban-based communal civic structures is handicapped by the absence of a formative process for an organic local cultural-intellectual leadership that is not co-opted by the clientelist politics of the regime-embedded political parties, which dominate Soqotra’s political scene (the GPC as the ruling party and the principal opposition party al-Is.l¯ah.). These parties, in effect, have inhibited the articulation of politically autonomous aspirations and thus have contributed to sustaining the communal civic deficit.

8.5

New Dawn: Evolving Transitions

The dysfunctional political grammar of state-community relations in Soqotra and the resulting civic deficit among members of the communal polity, that were described above, are the social costs associated with the state’s expedient establishment of modern incorporative institutions (e.g., a public administration system) and the adoption of a legal framework for state-society relations that reinforced the central government’s monopoly over political and financial decision-making. However, these social costs are always contingent on the evolving political imperatives of the state and never a permanent condition. The ramifications of the Arab Spring in Soqotra exemplified a pivotal historical conjuncture, which heralded the unraveling of the local political status quo and the dawning of a new political consciousness among members of the communal polity. The state abandoned its paranoia of hegemonic control and allowed a credible local devolution of political authority by making Soqotra into a Governorate. This inaugurated a series of transitions in state-community politics, as highlighted below, which relieved Soqotrans’ anxieties about asserting their political agency, thus allowing them to become active stakeholders in the political future of their island homeland: • First, the shift in Soqotrans’ political agency “from passive subordination of the community to its active political assertion” (Smith 1991: 64), as they disregarded the implicit taboo on political activism beyond elections’ season.

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• Second, the transformation of the infrapolitics of district denizens into the formal politics of national citizens, as the state-imposed barriers to entry into a locally constituted public sphere collapsed. • Third, the gradual transfer of individual loyalty from primary associations (e.g., family, village, and clan) dedicated to sustaining livelihoods, to civil society organizations that promote the aspirations of the larger community. • Fourth, the genesis of Soqotrans’ political awakening through the expansion of their aspirational horizon in terms of political possibilities as evidenced in a deepening commitment to a territorial patriotism to Soqotra as their exclusive homeland. This is buttressed by an evolving consciousness from their constituting an ethnocultural community into becoming and ethnopolitical polity as a prelude to establishing a distinctive ethno-national formation. • Fifth, the experience of organizing for collective political action during the Arab Spring rekindled a sense of communal solidarity, enhanced their disposition toward civic engagement, and enabled the accumulation of symbolic and practical resources for future political struggles to determine their modality of belonging to the Yemeni nation-state. A summative comment on the above achievements is that they were produced by self-organized groups without funding from international democracy-promoting agencies and their commando units of foreign consultants disseminating contextually and culturally unsuited “global best practices.” In effect, these practices tend to introduce inappropriate external drivers of change that generate perverse internal sociopolitical processes (see critique by Pritchett et al. 2010). Moreover, Soqotrans’ autonomous activism shows that democratic subjects are constituted through self-initiated political action in the public sphere and not through discursive practices in the private sphere as discussed in this chapter’s introductory section. Ultimately, democracy is invariably an organically grown institutional outcome and not an imported commodity that can be expeditiously grafted onto local soil.

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8.5.1

Vectors of Political Transition: Translocal Events

In spite of all of the above benefits from the Arab Spring, in addition to having achieved one of their major political demands, namely Governorate status for their homeland, the fleeting two-year period during which Soqotra enjoyed this status was not enough to launch the process of expunging the legacies of the mainland state’s culture of governance on the island. For example, the reversal of the following state practices of community subordination was never initiated: the fomentation of a venal communal polity, the corruption of the public ethos, the pre-emptive appropriation of Soqotrans’ self-organizing élan, the external domestication of local civil society organizations, and the state regimentation of the communal polity’s political agency. While the subsequent events discussed below brought about a halt to the development of the above-described new political dispensation, they simultaneously engendered a new dawn in Soqotra’s political history as well as a new set of relations between state governance and the community’s public ethos. The first event was the announcement in February 2014 of the new architecture of Yemen as a federal state that included Soqotra within the Hadhramawt region, which was universally rejected by Soqotrans. Soqotra’s inclusion in what is locally called the “Eastern Region” (ali’ql¯ım al-shark¯ı) composed of four governorates (Shabwa, Hadhramawt, al-Mahra, and Soqotra). This was tantamount to returning the island to its previous status as a mere district under the neglectful supervision of the Hadhramawt Governorate, which was the most loathed option out of the four discussed in Chapter 7. This decision was condemned as an “injustice and marginalization which was planned in the dark of night,” in the words of the statement by the General Council for the Sons of al-Mahra and Soqotra. This statement not only captured a communally shared sentiment but also re-animated the endemic resentment toward the mainland government. The second event was the Huthi’s takeover in September 2014 of the central government in Sana‘a’. This event postponed the operationalization of the newly reconfigured Yemeni state into the Federal Republic of Yemen. The Huthi coup d’état left Soqotra as a governorate without a state and lurched the island into a circuitous path to reconnect with some kind of national government on the mainland: As the Huthi regime began its re-establishment of a de facto Imamate, President Hadi was forced to resign and placed under house arrest from which he escaped to

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Aden in February 2015. He then rescinded his resignation and declared himself President of Yemen and established an alternative government in Aden. The latter was short-lived as the Huthis took over Aden in April and President Hadi fled to Saudi Arabia by way of Oman, thus leaving no governmental entity with which Soqotra could interact. The third event, which launched the era of the UAE’s protectorate first in the south of Yemen, was the ejection of the Huthis from Aden in July 2015 by an expeditionary force of UAE soldiers and UAE-trained Yemeni soldiers. This was supposed to lead to the return of the legitimate government of Yemen to Aden, which would re-establish political order and catalyze the rebuilding of Aden and subsequently the south. Alas, it did not turn out that way, as South Yemen lapsed into a political, security, social, and economic quagmire engendered by the neo-imperial politics and territorial balkanization strategy pursued by Yemen’s two regional benefactors: Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The fourth event, which led to the extension of the UAE’s protectorate regime from South Yemen to Soqotra, was the two tropical cyclones in November 2015, which found the island quasi-stateless. As the mainland government held its first meeting in Aden on 16 September 2015 and was barely in charge of the south’s territory and thus unable to come to the aid of Soqotrans. The timing of the UAE’s intervention at a moment when Soqotrans were abandoned by their government to the whims of nature engendered a massive debt of gratitude toward the UAE. It was this sentiment of having escaped a social catastrophe due to the benevolence of an external benefactor that was subsequently enlisted into the latter’s pursuit of strategic objectives. In Chapter 7, I described the immediate political, social, and development ramifications of the UAE’s presence in Soqotra. In the section below, I explore the emergent contours of a new political community on the island by examining the competitive relational dynamics between the main sociopolitical forces. 8.5.2

Political Community in Formation: Contested Institutional Reconfiguration

The UAE as a corporatist sociopolitical formation where power is exercised through the patronage of a network of clients and retainers, the reinstatement of the patrimonial rule of rural shaykhs as an extension of its national patrimonial network, was one of its strategic objectives in

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Soqotra. As noted in Chapter 7, in early 2016, the diplomatic bribing of patrimonial leaders was launched, and it resulted in the defection of the shaykh al-mash¯ayikh as a UAE-sponsored local leader. Noteworthy is that this strategy of engineering the socio-organizational metamorphosis of Soqotrans from a clan-based polity into a tribal polity was tried by the unity government back in the 1990s, but it was not successful due to the insufficiency of the cooptation resources deployed by the state (see Chapter 7). The difference under UAE’s rule is that lack of resources is not an issue, which could portend a more lasting reinstatement of the primacy of patrimonial authority through the tribal shaykh as the dominant communal authority figure and main institution of local governance. This would initiate the gradual substitution of the republican mode of governance and the marginalization of the Yemeni state. However, the initial reaction to this strategy was the intensification of local political feuding and power contestations over conflicting visions of Soqotra’s political status. This has led to the consolidation of four competing political actors with their own state flags. The first is the “General Council for the Sons of al-Mahra and Soqotra,” which was established as a civil society organization without any political party affiliation on 10 July 2012 following a large conference held in al-Ghaydah city in al-Mahra province. It has since morphed into a de facto political party that aspires to the establishment of a separate Governorate of al-Mahra and Soqotra, if not an independent state, with its own flag. Its chairman is ‘Abdallah bin ‘Isa bin ‘Afr¯ar, whose insistence on the autonomy of these two governorates made him a political opponent of the UAE and Saudi Arabia. After being granted residence in Saudi Arabia in 1989, he was forced to leave it in 2017 as the Saudi government refused to renew his passport.2 He moved to Oman in the same year, where he was given citizenship. He has continued his oppositional political activities on behalf of al-Mahra and Soqotra with Oman’s tacit support, and he enjoys greater legitimacy among the rural population than all other political factions. The second is the Southern Transitional Council (STC), which was established with UAE support and openly advocates for a separate southern state. It is the UAE’s local agent provocateur as it organized frequent political demonstrations against the local authority that represents the mainland government in exile. It has even established a “Freedom Square” (s¯ ah.at al-h.uriyya) in Hadiboh, which replaced the “Change Square” (s¯ ah.at al-taghyir) that was established by al-Is.l¯ah. during Soqotra’s Arab Spring. The third is the co-ruling party

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of the government in exile, the GPC, which attracts mostly symbolic support from the UAE based on the fact that the exiled President is a member of GPC. The fourth is al-Is.l¯ah. party, whose local members have been partially excluded from the UAE’s patronage as they continue to act as an opposition party to the UAE’s political goals in Soqotra and on the mainland where it controls the Ma’rib Governorate (for details on al- Is.l¯ah.’s entry in Soqotra see Vol 2: Chapter 4). Al-Is.l¯ah. and the GPC are the two parties that constitute the exiled government. As such, they are the only ones, among the four contenders for political power, which support a return to a unitary Yemen. It is the dénouement of the political struggle between these four groups along with their external sponsors that will partly determine the island’s ultimate political status. The other determining factor is the viability of the grafting process of a UAE envisioned Soqotran political community that may conflict with the relative freedom of speech and action that Soqotrans enjoyed previously under the mainland state due to its neglect of the islanders. Indeed, they were perceived as posing no political threat to the state. In contrast, the UAE as the island’s political overlord would not only put at risk the political achievements listed above, but also cast doubt on the fate of a number of communal aspects: the viability of civil society, the autonomy of political agency, the sustainability of indigenous ethnolinguistic identity, the existence of institutional democracy, and the practice of electoral politics. The risk factor is intrinsic to the nature of statesociety relations in the UAE, which are different from those between the Yemeni state and Soqotra’s polity. In essence, the UAE is a congeries of anachronistic patrimonial ethnocracies cloaked under the superficial veneer of an imported western modernity. Moreover, it is inhabited by a demographically fragile, developmentally asymmetric and thus unstable federal polity, which is geographically divided between a wealthy southern region (Dubai and Abu Dhabi) and a relatively impoverished northern region made up of the other five emirates (Davidson 2008: Chapter 7). This polity is organized into exclusionary representative institutions: Its electorate constitutes about 7000 citizens out of a total population of 1,070,000, who are selected by the Emirs of each of the seven statelets. Also, the Federal National Council—a Parliament-like body—only advises and monitors but does not legislate, and political parties are prohibited. In essence, the UAE can be described as a “monarchic corporatist” regime, in which the state is institutionalized as the private dominion of the hereditary rule of a tribal dynasty and its retinue of genealogically linked family

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lineages. Collectively, they constitute a “patrimonial network” made up of members of the rentier elite (Davidson 2008: Chapter 5). This patrimonial state is founded on a carbon rent generating economy that is literally owned by the ruling family with which it finances the cooptation of a politically neutered polity through a “cradle-to-grave” welfare system. As Emirati citizens “are granted free housing, education and health care” as part of a tacit quid pro quo with the state: “safety and prosperity in exchange for quiescence” (Worth 2020). This has created a “post-work” society in which the native workforce, indeed the entire national polity, is dependent on government ministrations. This national polity is administered through state subsidies and is dispossessed of any political agency. Moreover, political legitimacy is solely invested in the authenticity of rulers’ genealogical pedigree, and sovereignty is the exclusive privilege of the ruling family. The polity is granted provisional citizenship, which can be rescinded at any time, which makes the citizenry a collectivity of guests of the ruling family, as exemplified in the “Emirati Bidoon” issue (Zacharias 2018a). Indeed, as one scholar noted, “the country has one of the least participatory political systems in the world” (Ulrichsen 2012). Ultimately, it is a “hypermodern surveillance state” underpinned by a governance regime of “socially liberal autocracy” that is evocative of the Singapore model in the desert of West Asia. As one Western observer put it: “the U.A.E. can easily look like a hyper-capitalist slave colony whose leader wants to crush all dissent” (Worth 2020). To be fair, the Yemeni state under the ‘Ali ‘Abdallah Saleh regime until 2012 shared some, but not all, of the above features (see Elie 2018a). However, it adopted the rituals of democratic governance, which allowed a circumscribed democratic space to the polity. This democratic space is non-existent under all of the other regimes on the Arabian Peninsula. More crucially, if Soqotra were to be permanently incorporated into this governance system, the civil status of Soqotran residents on the island would remain ambiguous at best. This is because of the ethnocratic nature of the requirements for Emirati citizenship. Indeed, their status would approximate that of the “Emirati Bidoon.” The latter are UAE residents for generations whose grandparents migrated to the Emirates from elsewhere and thus do not meet citizenship requirements. They are given passports from the three-island state of the Comoros, subsist on aid from charitable foundations, and face a number of restrictions regarding property ownership among other factors (see Zacharias 2018b). Similarly, Soqotrans will most likely be required to keep their Yemeni

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passports, might have access to some specific types of jobs in the UAE, and their island-homeland will be maintained through paternalist ministrations from the two charitable organizations (KBZ Foundation and the ERC) as is the case presently. Finally, the future configuration of Soqotra as a communal polity is contingent on the evolution of South Yemen’s political situation. What is emerging in Yemen is evocative of the aftermath of the 2011 NATOassisted regime change in Libya, which left a state of permanent chaos instigated by external sponsors of local militias positioned to exploit the existing fault lines in the society and thus to sustain its dissolution. The external instigators and ultimate beneficiaries of the chaos in Yemen have accumulated facts-on-the-ground as part of a regional geopolitical power tournament among a troika of regional states (Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Iran) indulging their hubris in a competition over the vain status of regional hegemon. The ultimate goal of this chaos-disseminating strategy is to dissuade the region’s youths from engaging in Arab Spring-like regime change and to promote the institutionalization of authoritarian patrimonial states throughout the WANA region. The effects of this strategy can be observed in South Yemen where the country’s previous geographic, cultural, and political divisions are being reinstated. As Saudi Arabia is carving out a political dominion in the al-Mahra governorate (see Al-Sewari 2019), while the UAE is consolidating its political hegemony over Aden and Soqotra, and Iran has recruited the Huthis in North Yemen into its proxy war with Saudi Arabia. Given the balkanizing ramifications of these external actors’ interventions, it is impossible to envision the re-establishment of a unitary state in Yemen’s future or the formation of an autonomous Soqotra.

Notes 1. For example, Anderson’s (1991) epigones have privileged a post-modernist reading of his book that spurns structural explanations in which nation formation is a historically contingent and institutionally mediated outcome. Instead, institutions are neglected and discourse is fetishized as the privileged “object of analysis.” Indeed, as Smith noted, they resort to a mode of “textualist theorizing” which favors cultural descriptions that reify “the idea of the nation as a discourse to be interrogated and deconstructed” (1998: 142). 2. As the Sultan is likely to remain a key figure in Soqotra’s political future, I insert his biographical self-description:

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I am Abdullah bin Isa bin ‘Ali bin ‘Afrar, born in 1963, married, and I have seven children, I received my secondary education in the city of Sha‘ab Aden. And after completing my studies I joined the compulsory military service in Soqotra from 1981–1983. After that I was appointed Director General of Financial Administration in Soqotra during the rule of President ‘Ali Nasser Muhammad [1980– 1986]. In 1989, I received an invitation as the Sultan of al-Mahra and Soqotra from the Saudi Royal Court to visit Saudi Arabia during the reign of King Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. When I entered the Kingdom, I was granted a passport, privileges, accommodation and living expenses for me and my family. I stayed there until 2017 after I found that it was impossible to renew my passport, so I decided to leave (Al-Dumaini 2019).

Epilogue: Soqotrans as an Indigenous Polity

This chapter provides a synopsis of Soqotrans’ trajectory of emergence as an indigenous polity from the nineteenth-century to the twenty-first century through an emphasis on their serial embodiment of different state-ascribed political agencies under dissimilar political regimes and their polity formation strategies. Accordingly, the chapter highlights Soqotrans’ circuitous path to the self-recognition of their indigeneity without the mediation of either the UN-sanctioned global discourse on, or the assistance of international NGOs for, indigenous peoples’ rights. It situates the Soqotrans’ quest for recognition of their indigeneity within a regional context characterized by an endemic aversion to cultural pluralism shared by all Arab states. Then, it describes the characteristics of a specifically Soqotran indigeneity in the form of an ethnoregional communalism. Finally, it explores briefly the divergent pathways that could enable or disable Soqotrans’ quest for the internal realization and external recognition of their aspiration as a politically autonomous indigenous polity.

Travails of Transition: Paradox of Incorporation Throughout this book, I have explained how Soqotra’s recursive relationship with various state-led political regimes and other international actors (UN, GEF, donors, and regional powers afflicted with delusions

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45638-2

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of grandeur on an anachronistic empire building crusade) and their divergent administrative systems and economic strategies have driven Soqotra’s modern historical trajectory. This entanglement generated a process of transition that remains politically fluctuating, culturally unsettling, and developmentally inconclusive. While this transition process has introduced external vectors of change, it has generated internal forces of cultural sustainability (e.g., language preservation, identity distinction, and aspiration to political autonomy). Contrary to the expectation that Soqotrans’ long history of external political subordination would have led to their complete sociopolitical assimilation, the opposite seems to have happened. This suggests, as Lee observed, that “Indigenous communities exist along a continuum of conscientization” (2006: 461). Indeed, Soqotrans’ distinct sovereign identity did not disappear but emerged through successive phases of consolidation, hence the notion of paradox of incorporation. This political incorporation process was characterized by the rapid succession of political regimes with distinct polity formation strategies, which promoted divergent political agencies and social identities within the communal polity. The cumulative effect was the gradual weaning of Soqotrans from their atomistic communal existence and their serial embodiment of different political and economic agencies as a result of their conscription as external actors’ political, economic, and environmental agents. The historical reconstruction of Soqotrans’ encounter with external political forces from the nineteenth-century to the twenty-first century that was presented in Chapter 7 turns out to be a narrative about the paradoxical emergence, instead of a chronicle of the fated disappearance, of an ethnoculturally indigenous community. Just prior to the British sponsored transfer of the seat of the Sultanate from al-Mahra to Soqotra, Soqotrans constituted a non-integrated and pre-national social formation sundered into isolated clan hamlets separated by topographical barriers that nurtured centrifugal identities. Indeed, their rudimentary social and political organization prevented their constitution into a people capable of exercising sovereignty over the entire island. Nevertheless, their political incorporation into the centripetal vectors of states did not lead to their irreversible political subordination and permanent cultural assimilation. Instead, they generated the development of a gradual process of self-recognition as constituting a distinct people who are entitled to political autonomy and cultural self-determination within, if not without, the existing Yemeni state. The paradox of Soqotra’s incorporation process is

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that it launched the career of Soqotrans as a nation-in-formation. This process gradually transformed the initial meaning of the term Saqat.r… , from that of a toponym, the name of a place, to that of an ethnonym, the name of a people (see Vol. 2: Chapter 2). Beyond the crossing of this semantic threshold, this process catalyzed the ongoing transition from a chronic condition of political heteronomy to one of emerging political autonomy, or at least an endemic aspiration toward it. As an ethnoculturally distinct sub-national community, Soqotrans have always harbored an intrinsic sense of political vulnerability due to the following factors: (a) their divergent linguistic heritage, which complicated their perception by mainlanders as originally Arab; (b) their interstitial ethnocultural identity (Soqotri-Yemeni), which undermined their authenticity as Yemenis; and (c) the geographic chasm between the island and mainland that made their homeland into the territorial orphan and the cultural “other” of the Yemeni nation-state. These particularities have induced an endemic communal sentiment of a belonging deficit to the mainland nation-state. This led them to adopt a political demeanor of “pragmatic submission” in order to deflect the state’s suspicion about their political loyalty. This entailed the deployment of a series of tactics of opportunistic accommodation: the feigned submission to the state’s exercise of administrative control; a contrived acquiescence to its political authority; and a manufactured display of public consent to its arbitrary power. Paradoxically, both the chronic sentiment of political vulnerability and belonging deficit and their associated compensatory practices contributed to sustaining their commitment to a state-averse identity that eventually converged into their self-recognition as an indigenous polity. This epilogue provides a retrospective synopsis of the process of Soqotrans’ dawning consciousness of incarnating a collective identity as an indigenous polity. This self-recognition resulted from a historycontingent and state policy-mediated process, which incorporated them as state subjects and endowed them with particular types of political agency. This process imparted an evolving sense of national belonging that eventually led back to their communal homeland as constituting an emerging ethnonational community. Accordingly, in what follows, first, I briefly retrace the phases of political mobilization that ultimately consolidated into the quest for a “secessionless sovereignty” over their homeland within the jurisdiction of the existing Yemeni state; second, I explain this quest for political autonomy and cultural self-determination through a comparative analysis of the prevailing UN-based discourse on indigenous

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peoples and propose a specifically Soqotran “template of indigeneity”; and third, I outline the future prospects of Soqotra as an indigenous community.

Changing Political Orders: Evolving Communal Agency Soqotra’s trajectory of emergence as a political community offers a contrary narrative to the prevailing one, according to which “a communal polity is the inexorable progeny of the national state” (Anderson 1991; Hobsbawm 1992; Smith 1991). Soqotra is a jarring exemplification of the history-contingent and context-specific applicability of this assumption. As the state’s incorporation of the communal territory led to the “vernacular mobilization” of the communal polity through the valorization of the symbolic resources of its indigenous culture (Smith 1991: ix). This dialectic produced what I call the paradox of state-mediated identity formation in which the state “mobilizes the very primordial sentiments that subvert its project of promoting the undivided loyalty of its citizens” (Rosaldo 2003: 4–5). This reactive dynamic is engendered by a dual process of the state’s political incorporation and the community’s localization of its identity. In effect, the state’s political incorporation and citizen selection process are inherently exclusionary as it entails the following: Among the primary goals of the modern … state are assimilation, homogenization, and conformity within a fairly narrow ethnic and political range, as well as the creation of a societal agreement about the kinds of people there are and the kinds there ought to be. (Nagengast 1994: 109)

As discussed in Chapter 7, Yemen’s constitution established that national identity is based on a singular ethnicity (Arab) and a monolingual allegiance (Arabic). These are the prerequisites to being an ethno-culturally legitimate member of the nation. In reaction, Soqotrans have engaged in a kind of “compliant subversion” of the state’s prescribed identity through the feigned internalization of the state’s notion of national identity and the pantomimic performance of the political agencies they were ascribed (e.g., tribes and client electorate). This “compliant subversion” of their assigned roles engendered a reactive process of localizing their communal identity, which developed as follows:

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A group’s self-identification as […] indigenous is not natural or inevitable, but neither is it simply invented, adopted or imposed. It is rather a positioning which draws upon historically sedimented practices, landscapes and repertoires of meaning, and emerges through particular patterns of engagement and struggle. The conjunctures at which (some) people come to identify themselves as indigenous, realigning the ways they connect to the nation, the government and their own, unique… place, are the contingent products of agency and the cultural and political work of articulation. (Li 2000: 151)

It is this strategy of “positioning” or of “localizing” their selfidentification through the practice of “compliant subversion” that sustained their commitment to an indigenous identity. This identity, however, had a long gestation period of “articulation” as it emerged from internally and externally bounded centrifugal identities into a centripetal identity. It was not only riven by internal boundary demarcations (e.g., topography-based livelihood differentiation or geography-based divergent cultural dispositions discussed in Chapter 3), but also it was subordinated to a series of externally imposed state-ascribed identities (Chapter 4). In this section, I retrace the six historical conjunctures (discussed in Chapter 7) that were demarcated by the unrelenting alternation of stateled political mobilization strategies and the kinds of communal polity and political agency that they constituted. This experience was the incubator of Soqotrans’ own political agency animated by the quest for relative political autonomy and cultural self-determination that propelled the Soqotran community’s emergence from an atomized centrifugal social collectivity to a consolidating centripetal communal polity. Settler Sultanate: Communal Polity in Formation The Sultanate set the conditions through which Soqotrans began to coalesce into a communal polity. Soqotra was then a pre-state clanbased polity in which the relationship between ruler and ruled is best expressed in the metaphor of an absent shepherd and a dispersed flock. As the Sultan had largely delegated his governing functions to a retinue of settlers as the administrative and economic intermediaries, and to a contingent of indigenousmuqaddams who had sole responsibility for their clans. It was an atomized polity lacking a sense of being part of any larger entity beyond the individual clans dwelling in clusters of villages

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sparsely populated and widely dispersed throughout Soqotra’s wilderness. Their political isolation was mitigated by intermittently held sub-regional inter-clan meetings with the Sultan (Etíhi di-sát.ahan) to administer justice and settle problems beyond the capacity of the muqaddam. In effect, the only factor of cohesion in the Soqotran polity at that time was a livelihood-induced membership in a loose collectivity linked through a mutual aid web of domestic security that was made imperative by their relative abandonment to an exclusive reliance on the whims of nature as their only means of survival. The latter rendered even more difficult by the twice-yearly collection of taxes by the Sultan. Under the Sultanate, Soqotra was primarily a herding economy with pastoralism as the Sultanate’s primary source of revenue through taxation of its by-products in a barter-dominated economy. The surplus collected from taxation sustained the socio-political elite and subsidized the minimal pre-state governmental apparatus. Indeed, from the perspective of the Sultans and their administrative entourage, Soqotra was a tax farm and Soqotrans were merely tax extraction units, especially the pastoralists in the west and center of the island. The other socio-economic groups (agropastoralists and fishermen) sustained themselves through the exploitation and exchange of a variety of local products as part of the system of mutual aid that linked the coastal and hinterland population. In spite of the Sultanate’s political disenfranchisement of the indigenous population through the settlers’ arrogation of power, it established the embryonic foundations of a communal formation through the integration of hamlets-dwelling clans as tribute-paying subjects. The twice-yearly tax collection campaigns and the irregular meetings with the Sultan were the centralizing mechanisms that provided a collective dimension to their mostly autarkic livelihood practices and atomistic social existence. Revolutionary Regime: Citizen Apprentices In the aftermath of the 1967 revolution against British colonialism, the new South Yemeni government endeavored to infuse a sense of belonging to a greater whole in an atomized population of mostly cave-dwelling pastoralist in the mountainous interior, subsistence agropastoralists in the interior plains and valleys, and artisanal fishermen in coastal villages. This was attempted through their integration into a plethora of civil society organizations, which undertook their ideological regimentation as members of mass organizations. Their aim was to efface the social legacies

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of the previous regime, such as clan affiliation and regional insularities, the socio-ethnic boundaries, and social status distinctions between families of the Sultan’s tribe and clients and the rest of the population. This was Soqotrans’ inaugural socialization as citizens of a modernizing nationstate, which introduced institutions that weaved them into a collectivity, educated them into an emancipated social agency from their previous serflike condition, and constrained them to adopt a different self-concept. This was accompanied by the provision of the population’s basic needs, which made available new types of goods that improved local material culture and palliated the insufficiencies of the environment by relieving the islanders’ chronic seasonal hunger. Pastoralism was not encouraged, as it symbolized the feudal system of the Sultanate. Instead, the pastoral domain was partially drained of its surplus population in order to be socialized as a class of urban administrative cadres or as fishermen or cooperative peasant farmers, since these socio-occupational categories were the needed agents of an emergent socialism-inspired social order. More important perhaps was the generalized introduction of the use of cash as medium of exchange, and the payment of salaries, which initiated the gradual, but irreversible, retreat of the barter economy. The end result, however, was a kind of subsidized politico-economic agency, as everyone was beholden to the state, which after all was the main, if not sole, provider. Ultimately, however, their integration as “comrades” into a socialist fraternity was marred by the state’s fear of their potential defection to an imagined capitalist camp, which engendered a local politics of “freedom under surveillance.” This produced a carceral communal atmosphere, which was enforced by the island’s Central Committee for Popular Defense. This left an endemic sentiment of disaffection with the state’s emancipatory project. National Unity: Electorate of Tribesmen The unification of North and South Yemen in 1990 heralded an era that Soqotrans called “the opening.” This designation was meant chiefly to characterize the lifting of the veil of political surveillance and the freedom to practice Islam or to engage in trade or travel, which were previously tightly regulated, when not entirely prohibited. Unification, however, inaugurated multi-party electoral politics, which necessitated the building of political capital among the newly integrated southern population, as a means of gaining their allegiance. This necessity led to the deployment

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of a patronage political economy as an essential tool in the consolidation of national unity given the northern elite’s lack of a political ideology with which to mobilize the unified national polity. The preference for patronage reflected the north’s peculiar culture of governance that is rooted in its tribe-centric administrative practices that promote a polity organized into tribally segmented political clients. In a national political community structured in this way, access to state resources was not a matter of governmental obligation, and even less so an issue of citizen’s entitlement, but was contingent upon a group’s bargaining power. The end result was the institutionalization of relations between the state as patronage provider and communities or social groups as favor seekers, in which their economic fate was contingent on their perceived political threat quotient to the state. The latter would determine the amount of patronage, if any, they could generate from the state in return for their political loyalty. In Soqotra, this led to the introduction of the nidh¯ am mash¯ ayikh (shaykh system), which was, in effect, a variant of indirect rule on the part of the executive branch of the government in Sana‘a’. As the formal village committees of the previous regime became informal village councils headed by central government-approved shaykhs. These constituted the only sub-district representatives upon whom the island’s administrative center relied, but without discretionary authority over its management. The shaykh system established competing lobbying groups to vie for resources from the state, which turned out to be relatively meager and haphazardly distributed. The attempt at foisting on Soqotrans a tribally segmented polity institutionalized a quasi-clientelist politics between the regions through their respective shaykhs and the Department of Tribal Affairs. This department primarily functioned as a “salary” distribution office to local shaykhs throughout the national territory. The introduction of the shaykh system, however, generated a number of dysfunctions: (a) the creation of tribal boundaries that circumscribed the formerly “borderless” ethic of mutual help among the dispersed population of the island; (b) the introduction of a system of parallel rule through the establishment of an urban-based local administration separated from a rural-based shaykh system; and (c) the spread of an endemic skepticism toward state institutions given their failed delivery of development promises. Ultimately, the unification regime bequeathed a communal polity whose members straddled divergent political identities: urban-based citizens of a republic and rural-based tribesmen of sub-regional shaykh fiefdoms.

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Post-unification: Polity of Clients The dawn of the twenty-first century brought about a new political conjuncture in Yemen. The presidential elections of 1999 marginalized the power of the main opposition parties (al-Is.l¯ah. and Yemen Socialist Party), as the ruling party, the General People’s Congress (GPC), won the Presidency and gained an absolute majority in parliament. This electoral victory provided a window of opportunity for the ruling party to consolidate its political hegemony over the institutions of state-community governance at all levels: national, regional, and local. This was the purpose of the formulation and ratification of the Local Authority Law in 2000, which led to the establishment in 2001 of the Local Council system throughout all of the districts of the country. This law signified the Yemeni government’s adoption of the internationally sponsored discourse on democratization and good governance, which finally trickled down to Soqotra. This law was part of a comprehensive package of institutional modernization and democratization of local governance, which included the institutionalization of electoral politics as the privileged means of selection to public office, the delegation of administrative authority to local councils constituted through elections, and the enhancement of their capacity to manage development projects and deliver social services. However, as discussed in Chapter 8, contrary to its declared objective of decentralizing power to Local Councils throughout the republic, it engendered their total subordination to the central government and the conscription of the electorate into a voters’ bank. In effect, this law introduced the state politics of mass clientelism, which assimilated the national polity into the venal culture of state governance. This led to the public sector’s endemic ethical deficit; civil society’s adoption of an ethos of financial opportunism; and citizens’ adoption of a transactional disposition toward the state. Coincidentally, in the same year that the Local Authority Law heralded the modernization of the island’s political management, a Presidential Decree promulgated the “Soqotra Biodiversity Zoning Plan” as the legal blueprint for the modernization and internationalization of its environmental management. This launched the formal preparation of Soqotra as an ecotouristic destination, which led to the emergence of a service economy dedicated to tourism, and the conscription of pastoralists as conservationists of the island’s biodiversity on behalf of the international community. Consequently, Soqotrans became a communal polity of clients: as the occasional

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political clients of the state and as the selective environmental clients of the UN agencies. This mass clientelization of Soqotrans disenfranchised them of their political rights to self-govern their community and of their autonomous stewardship of their island’s environment. This exacerbated their already simmering resentment, and animated their resistance, toward their external supervision by the state and its international proxies. Arab Spring: Genesis of Peoplehood From the Arab Spring’s very beginning in March 2011 in Soqotra, it was first and foremost a movement for local autonomy and political sovereignty as a separate region within a federal Yemen. The legacy of disenfranchisement from the previous political regimes turned this aspiration into an ultimatum to the Yemeni government as the only acceptable result from the transition process that was launched by the Gulf Cooperation Council and supported by a UN Security Council Resolution in 2011. This aspiration was expressed in a manner that captured the shared sentiment among all Soqotrans, by one of the many civil society organizations (CSOs) that sprouted during the Arab Spring: The National Youth Council of Soqotra Archipelago [NYCSA] considers the Archipelago a sovereign border that should be made into an independent region under a strong federal state that meets the aspirations of the people of Yemen in general and of the Archipelago in particular. (NYCSA 2011)

On mainland Yemen, the Arab Spring ultimately led to civil war, while in Soqotra it fulfilled Soqotrans’ primary demand for governorate status of their homeland. In effect, Soqotra was the main beneficiary of the Arab Spring in Yemen, as President Hadi made a personal visit to Soqotra in October 2013—prior to the conclusion of the National Dialogue Conference in January 2014—to inform Soqotrans that their Archipelago will be made into a governorate. Although unintended by the Yemeni state, the status of governorate for Soqotra not only symbolized the inaugural step in Soqotrans’ longterm quest for recognition as a distinctive ethnocultural community, but also galvanized their aspiration toward becoming an ethnopolitical polity as a prelude to establishing a distinctive ethnonational formation within

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or without the Yemeni state. This aspiration was consecrated in a “narrative of refusal” of political subordination and cultural assimilation that was articulated into a set of twelve demands by the CSO quoted above. The four demands quoted below resonate with those of an indigenous people’s quest for self-determination: (a) “A complete separation of the Soqotra Archipelago so that it becomes an independent, full-fledged region within the framework of a federal state”; (b) “The region’s authorities shall abide by international law, the Charter of the United Nations and the Charter of Human Rights”; (c) “The region shall have the right to exercise sovereignty over its geographical domain on land, sea and air as well as control of all its ports”; and (d) “The region shall develop its educational policy in accordance with its Islamic identity and its cultural and environmental specificities” (NYCSA 2011). It is this set of objectives that animated Soqotrans’ quest for the autonomy of their Archipelago that was aborted by the intervention of the UAE in 2015. UAE Protectorate: Patrimonialism’s Conscripts 2015 was an inauspicious year for Soqotra as the occurrence of natural disasters (hurricanes) and political events (civil and inter-state war on the mainland) led to its incorporation as a humanitarian protectorate of a regional power, the UAE, on behalf of a disabled Yemeni state that lacked a functioning government and was mired in an ongoing civil war. This conjuncture has effectively nullified the gains of the Arab Spring in Soqotra as it threatened the permanent termination of Soqotra’s transition to a functioning governorate under communal self-rule. As the subsequent consolidation of the UAEs authority over the island introduced a patrimonial governance strategy, which “feudalized” the relational norms in state-community relations into those between a patron state and a client polity. Such relationality was enshrined in the restored primacy of the shaykh system over modern republican institutions of governance (e.g., the election of local council members as part of the Local Authority system) that were introduced via the Local Authority Law enacted in 2000. The conscription of shaykhs as clients of the newly empowered shaykh system under UAE’s patrimonial regime established a countervailing governance to that of the Yemeni state. The ultimate aim was to mobilize a wide segment of the local population in support of the protectorate regime as well as any UAE-sponsored political arrangement in the future.

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Noteworthy is that the nature of the patronage and the influence of shaykhs under the previous mainland regime were differentiated by the fact that the Yemeni state is a republic and the UAE is a monarchy: the first adopted the rituals of democratic governance, albeit superficially, which allowed a circumscribed democratic space to the polity through electoral politics; while under the second type of regime, this democratic space is non-existent as representative institutions are largely ornamental. Indeed, governance legitimacy is not invested in the state’s accountability to the national polity but in the authenticity of the rulers’ genealogical pedigree, and sovereignty is not the prerogative of the citizenry but is the exclusive privilege of the ruling family. Accordingly, the restoration of the shaykh system constitutes a surreptitious mode of regime change aimed at re-institutionalizing the primacy of patrimonial institutions under the exclusive patronage of the UAE. The emerging scenario portends the gradual substitution of the republican mode of governance with a patrimonial regime and the permanent marginalization of the Yemeni state’s role in Soqotra. Ultimately, Soqotrans could be dispossessed of their autonomous political agency once allowed by the electoral politics of the mainland republic and remade into dependent tribal subjects subordinated to the rule of shaykhs who are themselves patronized clients of a de facto Sultanate, if not a transplanted Emirate, as a proxy regime of a foreign absolute monarchy. ∗ ∗ ∗ The succession of types of polity that Soqotrans were conscripted into and the kinds of political agency that were imposed on them, or have fashioned for themselves, can be summarized as follows: (1) as members of a coalescing community of tax-paying clans under the minimally integrating political oversight of the Sultanate; then (2) as revolutionary comrades and budding citizens under the socio-political regimentation of a modernizing socialist state; (3) to be subsequently constituted into competing tribal interest groups for the selective and haphazard distribution of patronage under the unity government’s shaykh system; (4) as a clientelistic polity endowed with dual agency under the postunification regime to accommodate the shared sovereignty exercised over their island between a UN-led conservationist covenant that appropriated their domain of livelihoods as a global commons and sought to recruit them as alienated noble ecological custodians of their own land

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on behalf of the global regime of environmental conservation, and as the voters’ bank under the mass clientelism strategy of a cabalistic state preoccupied with staying in power through a largely procedural electoral democracy; (5) as an autonomous communal polity within a newly recognized self-governing region following the Arab Spring demonstrations against the political status quo; and (6) as demoted citizens of a self-governing region within a republican state into coopted patrimonial subjects of the UAE’s protectorate regime that has reinstated the shaykh system under the supervision of a regional monarchical power that seems committed to maintaining Soqotra as its dominion. The cooptation of the Soqotran polity into the protectorate administration of a foreign state as the neutered political subjects of its patrimonial regime presents the greatest threat to Soqotrans’ quest for political and cultural self-determination as an indigenous community. The nature of this quest is discussed in the next section.

Self-Recognition of Indigeneity: Ethnoregional Communalism The above summary inventory of the political agencies incarnated by Soqotrans has culminated in a state of self-identification as a people, which is the fundamental criterion of indigeneity. This gradual process of self-recognition through the surreptitious practice of a “compliant subversion” of the externally imposed national identities and political agencies led to the local political mobilization campaigns during the Arab Spring. The latter catalyzed that embryonic sense of indigenous peoplehood that began its trajectory of emergence from the Sultanate period onward and gradually consolidated under the subsequent political regimes. In effect, the Arab Spring heralded “the arrival on the scene of citizens capable of formulating alternative projects for society” (Amin 2016: 16) and thus provided a window of opportunity for Soqotrans to articulate their communal polity’s ultimate aspirational horizon. This aspirational horizon is best described in the term ethnoregional communalism, which articulates a demand for greater political autonomy from the central government and cultural self-determination from its assimilationist policies. The term refers to the symbiosis between a distinct ethnocultural group inhabiting a naturally bounded territory that constitutes a homeland as the exclusive domain of a Saqat.rí community. However, ethnoregional communalism articulates an indigenous identity

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that is territorially-endowed and not one that is exclusively ethnicitybased for reasons that will be explained below. Moreover, this communal identity is tacitly animated by a long-term aspiration to some form of independent co-existence with the mainland state, if not the eventual formation of their own nation-state. In spite of the multiple exceptions to the applicability of the term “indigenous people” to Soqotrans (see below), they nevertheless epitomize a natural case of an indigenous people according to the generally accepted criteria (see below). The recognition of their indigeneity, however, was delayed by the following three factors: first, by the Yemeni state politics of “cultural protectionism” against any challenge to the primacy of Arab ethnicity and Arabic language (discussed in Vol. 2: Chapter 2) that enforced the symbolic erasure of its ethnolinguistically different sub-national communities. Second, by the epistemic community of environmental scholars working in Soqotra who, out of professional self-interest, prioritized Soqotra’s endemic biodiversity given its noncontroversial nature to the Yemeni state (see Vol. 2: Chapter 6), while neglecting to highlight the symbiosis between the sustainability of biodiversity and the repertoire of indigenous traditional knowledge about the environment contained in Soqotrans’ language and livelihood practices. Indeed, the recognition of this symbiosis is mandated by article 8j of the 1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity: To “respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and promote their wider application with the approval and involvement of the holders of such knowledge.” And third, by Soqotrans’ protracted process of selfrecognition as an indigenous people and the recency of their activism to demand the state’s recognition. In making the case of Soqotrans as an indigenous people, I am not engaging in an unsolicited surrogate activism on their behalf or in academic advocacy driven by that patronizing sentiment of “giving voice” to natives. Instead, my aim is merely to remedy the neglected task of making explicit a social reality that was tacitly but widely felt among Soqotrans and has been obvious to foreign observers of Soqotra who chose complicity with the Yemeni state’s non-recognition of their indigeneity. In what follows, first I situate my discussion of Soqotrans’ experience with the Yemeni state within the regional context in which prevails an aversion among Arab majority states to recognize their ethnocultural diversity.

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Second, I describe the characteristics of a specifically Soqotran template of indigeneity by (a) identifying the grievances that catalyzed their claim to indigeneity; (b) highlighting the particularities of their articulation of an indigenous identity; and (c) outlining the nature of their aspiration as an indigenous communal polity. Regional Context: Aversion to Pluralism Indigenous peoples is a de facto taboo subject in Arab majority states, as any acknowledgment of the existence of ethno-linguistic minorities within their national polities would undermine the convenient myth of their homogeneity. As Kymlicka and Pföstl (2014: 7) noted “the Arab world was effectively absent from the global policy networks working on minority and indigenous rights.” This absence is not only of the region’s states, but also among scholars. As Shami and Naguib observed, “In anthropology today, despite important advances in the study of many topics and issues and understandings of the region, the issues of ethnic identity and difference are remarkable for their absence” (2013: 29). This political and scholarly neglect perhaps explains the paucity of officially identified indigenous peoples in such states. For example, the International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), which, according to its website, “is a global human rights organization dedicated to promoting, protecting and defending indigenous peoples’ rights” since its founding in 1968 and the publication of its annual report The Indigenous World from 1986 onward, has identified only two indigenous groups under the regional rubric of Middle East and North Africa: the Amazigh (formerly known as Berbers) of North Africa (Aïtel 2014) and the Negev Bedouins in Israel whose indigeneity is contested (Frantzman et al. 2012). Among the better-known indigenous groups not mentioned in the IWGIA annual reports are the Nubians of Egypt whose long history of relocation reached its nadir in 1960 with their large-scale resettlement out of their homeland for the building of the Aswan Dam (Janmyr 2017); the Palestinians whose claim to prior occupancy of their territory is contested by the state of Israel (Rifkin 2017); the indigenous stateless tribes of Kuwait known as “bid¯ un jinsiyya” (“without nationality”) whose plight seems similar to the Negev Bedouins (Human Rights Watch 2011). The IWGIA’s criteria of inclusion of indigenous peoples in the Middle East and North Africa region are not explicitly identified in their reports. The absence of these groups suggests that they rely on an ad hoc

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combination of factors: selective advocacy, political convenience, avoidance of the region’s high stakes ethno-politics, or their relational network with the selected groups. Indeed, the aversion of states in the region to recognize their inherited demographic diversity in the form of ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences (Robson 2016; Bengio and Ben-Dor 1999), in addition to their narrow criteria of eligibility for citizenship (Parolin 2009), seems to banish the mere evocation of indigenous people’s existence in their midst. In effect, Arab majority countries are de facto ethnocracies given their ideological insistence that they are constituted by mono-ethnocultural polities. This is despite the fact that all Arab states voted in favor of the United Nations conventions related to such groups: the 1992 Declaration on Minority Rights, the 2001 UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity, and the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). This endemic aversion to ethnocultural pluralism among regional states begs for an explanation. Kymlicka and Pföstl (2014) identified three region-wide explanatory hypotheses: (1) the legacy of the millet system, which categorized the rights of minorities according to religion and ascribed them the status of “protected groups” with circumscribed, if not abrogated, citizenship rights; (2) the legacy of colonial rule, which led to the selection of minorities as preferred collaborators of the colonizers against the majority (e.g., Berbers vs. Arabs), and the lasting legacy of suspicion toward minorities as agents of foreign powers; and (3) the exigencies of postcolonial state-building, which constrained Arab majority states to prioritize ethnocultural homogeneity over diversity that compelled the state’s non-recognition, if not erasure, of sub-national ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences. Initially, Arab nationalism as the dominant postcolonial nation-state building ideology provided the rationale for denying ethnonational diversity, but the subsequent failure of its secular development strategy undermined its legitimacy among the majority population. Indeed, the last hypothesis, namely the exigencies of nation-building and the subsequent failure of the state to institutionalize its legitimacy, is the most plausible explanation of the region’s aversion to pluralism. As Kymlicka and Pföstl explained, “the failure to respect minorities is in large part due to the state’s fragile legitimacy amongst the majority” (2014: 16). Accordingly, having failed to perform successfully its function as an “effective representative of the interests and identities of the ordinary mass of its citizens,” the state could not act as the protector of its minorities’ rights (Kymlicka

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and Pföstl 2014: 17). However, this is a political dilemma of republican regimes that rely on electoral procedures as the basis of their legitimacy. In the case of monarchical regimes that do not rely on an electorate of citizens, and where citizenship is devoid of political agency and is largely a symbolic marker of entitlement to state patronage, the status of minorities approximates that of the millet system and thus their relegation as minimally protected groups. The case of Yemen offers a contrastive trajectory of emergence to that of the region’s other social formations. Notwithstanding the initial usefulness of nationalism as a polity mobilization rationale prior to unification in 1990, it subsequently failed to offer an alternative narrative that was nationally unifying and thus never supplanted the prevailing primordial rationales (e.g., tribalism, regionalism, and confessionalism). This led to the rise of sub-national allegiances in the form of an infra-nationalism that was articulated in a dissenting regionalism (man¯ a.tiqiyya). The latter fractured the national polity into regional and/or communal formations through a process of reactive localization of political loyalties, as these sub-national formations asserted their wish to be autonomous from the illegitimate central state. The legacy was a permanent structural disarticulation between the nation and the state that fomented endemic antinomies of governance: state vs. nation, institutions vs. society, center vs. regions. This engendered a default vernacular federalism characterized by the collective sharing of a national territory, while political identification is circumscribed to the regional and communal levels. This prevented the state from forging symbiotic relations between it and the individual, the community, the society, and the nation. Consequently, the Yemeni state never achieved hegemonic status over the national territory. This condemned state leaders to a permanent legitimation crisis, which forced them to resort to opportunistic regime maintenance strategies. Ultimately, this led to a national polity constituted by divergent identities, conflicting loyalties, and competing sovereignties. Since unification, the Yemeni national identity has remained an unevenly shared symbolic property among the nation’s regionally sundered polity (see details in Elie 2018a). This is the background that fashioned the nature of Soqotrans’ claim to indigenous rule over their island homeland. The vernacular federalism referred to above was animated by a keenly identitarian fervor among Soqotrans that was articulated in an ethnoregionalism. The entailments

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of this ethnoregionalism as the expression of Soqotran indigeneity are discussed in the next section. Soqotran Indigeneity: The Vernacular Template The United Nations began its deliberations over the constitutive characteristics of an indigenous people with the launching of the José Martinez Cobo study in 1972. The study was finally completed in 1986 in five volumes entitled The Study of the Problem of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations, and it offered the following working definition of an indigenous community: Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having [a] a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, [b] consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing on those territories, or parts of them. They form at present [c] non-dominant sectors of society and are [d] determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal system. (Cobo 1986, vol. 5: para. 379)

Noteworthy is that in spite of the fact that the UN never adopted an official definition of what constitutes an indigenous people, Cobo’s working definition has established what are generally considered and widely accepted as the four foundational pillars to justifying claims of being an indigenous people: (a) prior occupancy of territory as attested by historically continuous residence, (b) cultural distinctiveness from the dominant national majority, (c) non-dominance over others as evidenced in a long experience of political subordination and socioeconomic marginalization, and (d) self-identification, which endows claimants to indigenous status with the exclusive right to identify themselves as such without authorization from external corroborators of identity (e.g., governments). All of these four criteria apply to Soqotrans as a sub-national polity of the Yemeni nation-state. However, Soqotrans’ path of emergence as an indigenous collectivity diverges from the prevailing template, which is based on Western-induced crisis criteria: e.g., political powerlessness, economic marginality, and sociocultural distress (Coates 2004: 12–13; Nizen 2003: 5). The reliance on such criteria is confirmed by a UN

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report: “The concept of indigenous peoples emerged from the colonial experience, whereby the aboriginal peoples of a given land were marginalized after being invaded by colonial powers, whose peoples [i.e., descendants] are now dominant over the earlier occupants” (DESA 2009: 6). Accordingly, both the path of being made into an indigenous people and the process of affirming one’s indigeneity are framed within a “global linear thinking” mode about the prerequisites of, and path to, inclusion into the global “indigenous slot.” The trajectory of this linear path to indigenous status is initiated through unsolicited encounter with Western invaders, followed by territorial dispossession through colonization, which engendered an existential resistance dissimulated through their proselytization into the conquerors’ religion as a means of survival (Pratt 2007: 401–402; Clifford 2013: 15). This is followed by a singular trajectory of affirming one’s indigeneity by articulating grievances and demands through UN-sanctioned Indigenous Peoples’ discourse and by making common cause with international NGOs that promote indigenous rights. This path to the recognition of indigeneity is redolent of colonial policies for the political management of ethnoculturally differentiated sub-national polities, as exemplified in the French colonial management of Algeria’s population through a despotically established and enforced multi-ethnoculturalism. Paradoxically, it is this colonial ethnicracial-cultural management strategy that evolved into its liberal version of multiculturalism in former imperial states, northern settler states, and southern post-colonial societies with all their dysfunctional ramifications. Moreover, the United Nations’ role in this recognition-bestowing regime is a recuperation of its predecessor the League of Nations’ mandate system, which assumed guardianship rights over populations with transitional sovereignty over their territory and placed under the temporary protectorate of colonial states (see Robson 2016). Soqotrans did not follow this internationally-mediated path in their quest to be recognized as indigenous. As Soqotrans’ claim to indigeneity remains a domestic dispute with the Yemeni state and has not escalated into a UN-sanctioned quest for recognition and rights. As a result, they have avoided the pitfall of self-ethno-commodification as an opportunistic accommodation to the international discourse of indigenous people. Instead, they have pursued an organic process unmediated by appeal to international indigenous peoples’ organizations. The sections below identify (a) the nature of the local grievances that catalyzed the quest for political and cultural self-determination, (b) the particularities

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of the Soqotran discourse on, and practices of, indigeneity, and (c) the contours of an imagined indigenous communal polity. Grievances: An Inventory The catalyst was the Sultanate’s settler colonialism whose presence was restricted to the northern coast where they exercised control through a tribute extracting administrative apparatus. In contrast to the Western settler colonialist regime, there were no land dispossession and no forced population resettlement. Moreover, there was no cultural assimilation, as the Mahri settlers were ultimately assimilated into Soqotri language and culture. However, the Sultanate’s legacy was the system of external administrative supervision of Soqotrans’ territory and resources and the arrogation of sovereignty over their homeland. These became the endemic features of all subsequent regimes. As a result, the Yemeni state became the primary object of Soqotrans’ political disaffection and contestation, which was subsequently transferred to the state’s international proxies when it sub-contracted UN agencies to manage Soqotrans’ use of their environment through projects that sought to annex the island and domesticate its residents into a prematurely preventive and excessively disciplinary conservation regime. The shared sovereignty exercised by the Yemeni state’s circumscription of Soqotrans’ right to self-govern and by the UN’s dispossession of their autonomous environmental stewardship has produced the following litany of grievances: the endemic perception of being unequal citizens of the nation-state; the shared sentiment of being seen as “different” by the national society; the belonging deficit generated by the state’s deliberate refusal to recognize their ethnolinguistic heritage; the collective resentment toward their socioeconomic marginalization by the state based on a clientelist covenant of token exchanges of state resources for their political loyalty; the insecurity generated by an environmental conservation policy that limits their economic development and promotes their relocation from their traditional domains of livelihood; and the existential threat posed by the state’s default erasure of their cultural heritage through its policy indifference. These grievances have catalyzed an affirmation of cultural distinctiveness as a resource in their pursuit of political and cultural selfdetermination. This engendered the quest to enshrine an exclusive relationship with, if not sole sovereignty over, their territorial and environmental endowments without the assimilationist ministrations of

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the national government or the dispossessing interventions of international agencies concerned with environmental conservation on the island through invocation of primitivistic imagery of Soqotrans as indigenous conservationists. Paradoxically, in Soqotra, indigenous interests are in conflict with environmentalists’ priorities. Particularities: A Tally As noted above, Soqotrans’ affirmation of their indigeneity remains a domestic struggle without reference to the UN elaborated legal framework for indigenous peoples. However, reference to the United Nations and its charter on human rights are conveniently invoked. Thus far, the Yemeni state’s neglect of their cultural particularities is not denounced through the invocation of the global normative expectations of states’ behavior emanating from UN declarations on cultural diversity and indigenous peoples. Soqotra has only one civil society organization— the Soqotra Association for Heritage and History—that is tangentially engaged in promoting cultural indigeneity, primarily through organizing Soqotri poetry competition. Its members, however, are not employing such a discourse—at least not yet. Moreover, the term indigenous peoples (al suk¯ an al-as.liyy¯ın in Arabic) is not used. The avoidance of the term is partly due to ignorance of the international debate and perhaps more importantly due to the concern about differentiating themselves from an Arab and Islamic heritage. Indeed, the term indigenous people is not only an inconvenient category for the Yemeni state given its challenge to its affirmation of the nation’s homogeneity, but also an undesirable designation for Soqotrans. To invoke the term al suk¯ an al-as.liyy¯ın in claiming their indigeneity would be tantamount to associating themselves with being of non-Arab ethnicity and being culturally stuck in the preIslamic period of al-j¯ ahiliyya. This is a red line for Soqotrans. Saqat.r… is the substitute term that carries all of the local attributes of indigeneity (see below). Relatedly, Soqotrans do not consider themselves an ethnic minority (’¯ aqalliyya ‘arqiyya), which carries derogatory connotations due to its association with the servile class of al-akhdam on mainland Yemen. Furthermore, Soqotrans present an alternative category to the three types of ethnic differentiation within Arab majority states that were initially formulated by Hourani (1947: 1) and have been used ever since: (a) Arab but not Muslim; (b) Muslim but not Arab; (c) neither Muslim nor

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Arab (Ben-Dor and Bengio 1999). In contrast, Soqotrans have strategically adopted a flexible conception of their ethnic identity as they claim to be simultaneously Arab, Muslim, and indigenous (see below). Noteworthy are a number of other distinctive features of Soqotrans’ affirmation of their indigeneity that are exceptions to the mainstream template. For example, they were always spatially and temporally prior to their settler overlords; therefore, the hinterland’s land tenure system, which was based on traditional occupancy by clan collectives, was never interfered with, therefore, land claim issues against state dispossession do not apply to Soqotra. However, the UN invasive reconfiguration of their livelihoods’ territorial domain has undermined the natural symbiosis between protection of biodiversity and preservation of cultural indigeneity. Soqotrans’ colonial encounter with Western imperialism (Portuguese and the British) was limited in duration and immaterial in impact to such an extent that there is no Western colonial legacy to be erased. Soqotrans do not suffer social exclusion or ethnic discrimination from mainlanders as they are the majority on their island-homeland. However, they seem to practice it toward the internal ethnocultural minority, al-muwallad¯ın, who are still burdened by social marginality and status ambiguity in Soqotra’s communal polity (see Chapter 4). The preservation of a “subsistence way of life” is not one of the claims to indigenous status by Soqotrans. Soqotrans, however, remain attached to pastoralism as a cultural practice more than an economic one, as it is considered a key anchor to sustaining the clan’s relationship to the collectively owned land. Soqotrans do not engage in the self-stereotyping performance of their cultural heritage through folklorized shows for external audiences as manifestation of their indigenous identity. To the extent that they “perform” their cultural heritage, it is for their own entertainment as in the case of the wedding ceremony and their edification as in the case of poetry competition. The typology of Arab states’ policies toward the existence of an indigenous people within their jurisdiction can be characterized as follows: (a) vigorous opposition or active denial through social ostracism or political repression, (b) nominal recognition through selective folklorization, (c) cooptation through political concession or economic patronage, and (d) non-recognition through policy disregard (Eyadat 2014). The Yemeni state in Soqotra did not engage in forced assimilation, with the exception of the coercive modernizing practices of the socialist administration, and did not actively repress Soqotrans indigenous cultural practices (e.g., use

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of Soqotri language) but merely ignored their existence. Second, the state has never resorted to the condescending policy of selective recognition of Soqotran culture through the folklorization of its indigenous cultural assets for public consumption by external audiences. Third, the state’s recourse to cooptative practices was unrelated to their cultural particularities, except for the selection of Soqotra’s iconic Dragon’s Blood tree as a national emblem. Finally, the key issue for Soqotrans is the state’ systematic policy disregard as manifested through its culturally exclusionary policies of nation-state building that sanction the non-recognition of their cultural heritage. Aspirational Horizon: The Contours Soqotrans’ aspirational horizon for their quest to have their “Saqat.r… peoplehood” recognized is best expressed as follows: A “‘decentered diverse democratic federalism’ allowing for real native autonomy and self-government yet without any rigid separatist agenda” (de la Cadena and Starr 2009: 16). This Saqat.r… peoplehood seems to be motivated by a positive regionalism (i’ql¯ımiyya) and not the negative regionalism (man¯ a.tiqiyya) that the Arab Spring unleashed on the mainland (see above). Indeed, their quest for regional autonomy is based on the natural geographic boundedness of their territory, its globally recognized environmental endowment, and their linguistic heritage. These characteristics, in their view, are sufficient justifications for their claim to a “secessionless sovereignty” over their homeland. The nature of the communal identity that this quest for political sovereignty sought to achieve is best captured in a manifesto-like website posting that proclaimed: We are not Mahri, although some of us come from al-Mahra but they have become Soqotrans. We are not Hadhrami and we are also not northern or southern because we are simply Soqotrans [li’ innan¯ a bi ikhtis.¯ ar saqat.riyy¯ın]. Therefore, we do not stand with or against anyone, but we look only for our stolen rights which we rightly deserve. (Badahin 2012)

This claim to be “simply Soqotrans,” or what I call their “Saqat.r… peoplehood,” as their indigenous identity represents the sentiment of a majority of Soqotrans. This affirmation, in effect, rejects the claim made by the son of the last Sultan of Soqotra in his attempt to show the deep affiliation between Soqotrans and Mahris: “Soqotra is Mahri par excellence. A Mahri

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political entity was governing this island since ancient times along with AlMahra itself, and Soqotra identity is Mahri, and its tribes are Mahri, as well as its inhabitants” (interview with al-Dumaini 2019). The Sultan’s claim betrayed political hubris and cultural insensitivity and affirmed a settler’s perspective in claiming sovereignty over Soqotrans’ homeland. Beyond its irreducibility to a Mahri identity, the affirmation of being “simply Soqotrans” contains a paradox, as it entails a series of incongruous affirmations. When put together these affirmations amount to the following collective testimony of the bases of their indigeneity: “Islam is our religion, Soqotri is our mother-tongue, Arabic is our step-mother tongue, our ethnicity is a hybrid of the descendants of ancient southern Arabs who migrated to Soqotra millennia ago and who became ethno-culturally Saqat.r… , Soqotra is our national homeland, and Yemen is our federal state.” Worthy of note is that this notion of a derivative, and not a distinct, ethnicity resonates with the argument made by Soqotrans public intellectuals (e.g., Al-Anbali in Vol. 2: Chapter 2) that the Soqotri language is a dialect of Arabic. This implicit claim of being endowed with a hybrid ethnicity is driven by Soqotrans’ existential desire to be perceived as having a legitimate pedigree to belong to the pan-Arab nation and Islamic polity in spite of their divergent demographic and linguistic legacy. In affirming this ethnically flexible identitarian amalgamation, Soqotrans are in effect asserting their right to self-identification as conferred by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Article 33 stipulates: “Indigenous peoples have the right to determine their own identity or membership in accordance with their customs and traditions. This does not impair the right of indigenous individuals to obtain citizenship of the States in which they live.” The emancipatory quest for the recognition of their “Saqat.r… peoplehood” aims to achieve the following goals: (a) the effective decentralization and indigenization of communal governance that reflects their majority status in their homeland; (b) the acquisition of full citizenship rights without the implicit prerequisite of forfeiting their cultural identity; (c) the official recognition of their cultural heritage, especially their indigenous language, as a valued patrimony of the Yemeni nation-state and its inclusion as a subject matter within the local educational curriculum; and (d) the uncontested stewardship of, and resource sovereignty over, the physical space of the entire island as their communal hearth. Collectively, these goals entail the non-negotiability of their rights to property (territories, landscapes, natural resources), the

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non-interference with their social rights over their traditional practices (residential preferences, land use protocols, cultural performances, livelihood traditions), the formulation of enabling policies and institutions to practice their indigenous traditional knowledge (linguistic and environmental), and the unimpeded exercise of their rights to genuine sustainable development. Noteworthy is that all of these aspirations are threatened by the arbitrary strictures of the UN-implemented environmental adjustment regime and by the political subordination of Soqotrans to the geopolitical whims of regional states.

Future Prospects: Competing Pathways The case of Soqotra illustrates that the indigeneity of a sub-national community is not only a primordial inheritance from the past, but also a by-product of the inclusionary or exclusionary effects of the state’s polity mobilization strategies and the vernacular mobilization against the state’s attempt at erasing, or not recognizing, that community’s intrinsic ethnocultural particularities. The vernacular mobilization that was catalyzed by the Arab Spring has, in turn, galvanized an endemic feeling of Soqotran indigeneity that is symbolized in a communal territorial identity that envisioned their homeland as an inalienable existential matrix that should no longer be subordinated to the “sovereign entitlement” of external others. Moreover, this indigenous identity had the unintended consequence of initiating a process of gradual political-cultural estrangement from the Yemeni state by engendering the emergence of an embryonic ethnonational consciousness with a post-national aspirational political sensibility. This sensibility is characterized by Soqotrans’ rejection of the constitutionally-mandated assimilation imperative of the Yemeni state (i.e., supremacy of Arab ethnicity and Arabic language) and their adoption of a self-determined accommodation to it. Soqotrans, however, have only breached the psychological barrier to their self-recognition as an indigenous community. They have not achieved formal recognition from the Yemeni state or from the global community of indigenous rights defenders. Moreover, from the perspective of the Yemeni state, they remain a sub-national communal polity of ordinary citizens with the added burden of being perceived as an ethnolinguistic minority. Nevertheless, the Arab Spring not only occasioned the transformation of their community’s administrative status from district to governorate, but also opened up potential alternatives to state-community relations.

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Without predictive pretension, I offer a brief outline of the three possible pathways along which Soqotrans as an indigenous community might evolve: • First, the path Soqotrans were pursuing in the aftermath of the Arab Spring would have led to the constitution of an indigenous ethnoregional polity as part of a federal Yemen. Their indigeneity would have been recognized, if only implicitly, by the state as de facto, but not de jure, members of an indigenous community (al-mujtama’ al-as.l¯ı) occupying an ocean-bounded and territorially-demarcated region. This would have allowed the practice of regional autonomy and cultural self-determination. • Second, the ultimate, if utopian, aspiration of many Soqotrans is that of an independent state (dawlah mustaqillah), which in indigenous term would be an ethnonational community (al-mujtama’ al-wat.an¯ı) outside of the Yemeni state’s borders. The status of governorate was seen as a preparatory phase to this eventuality in the long-term. This aspiration to political sovereignty is animated by the conviction that the surrounding ocean contains oil deposits and with ecotourism could provide the bases for the economic sovereignty of an independent state. • Third, the above pathways were temporarily put on hold, if not permanently aborted, by the UAE’s intervention, which represents the de facto incorporation of Soqotra into a patrimonial protectorate regime. Out of the four policies employed by Arab states toward their internal minorities that were listed above, two are already being implemented by the UAE: (a) the nominal recognition of indigeneity through cultural cooptation by means of economic patronage and (b) the selective folklorization of local cultural practices. In effect, the UAE is the self-appointed patron of Soqotrans’ indigenous culture through its sponsorship of an annual Soqotri poetry competition and the promotion of local arts and crafts. As the UN-sponsored environmental conservation and ecotourism experiment is marginalized as Soqotra’s primary economic strategy under the protectorate regime, it is being replaced, in part, by an ethnocultural commodification experiment that could transform the Soqotran community into a living museum for the folkloric performance of its indigeneity as a UAE managed cultural tourism destination.

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Soqotra’s future is caught up in Yemen’s political crisis that was exacerbated by its regional neighbors and its resolution defies prognostication. In the meanwhile, Soqotrans remain under the supervisory regime of “freedom under surveillance” by external powers. Indeed, the scope of the UAE’s encompassment of Soqotra surpasses all past attempts by the Yemeni state, which is heralding its total replacement on the island. For example, its capture of local institutions through well-funded politics of patrimonial patronage; its extensive population cooptation strategy through humanitarian aid and development projects; and its symbolic cultural assimilation gestures through the strategic promotion of local heritage, customs, and traditions (see Vol. 2: Chapter 5). However, the actual trajectory and ultimate outcome of Soqotrans’ emergent communal identity, polity configuration, mainland-island political association, and homeland-diaspora relations as well as the Soqotra Archipelago’s status within the region’s geopolitics must await the travails, and ultimately the verdict, of history.

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Index

A agency, xxxvii, xlii, xlviii, liii, lvii, 32, 55, 59, 67, 78, 203, 248 agro-ecological zones, 43, 188, 197, 217, 241 agropastoralism, 205, 255 al-Anbali, Ahmed, xlix–li, 129, 240 amoral communalism, 307, 310, 311, 326 annexation syndrome, 279 anthropology of the political, 61, 64 anthropos , lix antinomies of governance, 317, 323, 363 aporias of relationality, xxxix Arab Spring, 48, 53, 146, 154, 229, 230, 277–281, 283, 288, 289, 307, 312, 334, 338–340, 342, 345, 356, 357, 359, 369, 371, 372 Arcadia, xxxii, 44 Arcadian epistemology, xxxi arrogant particular universalism, 59, 62

ascetic ethos, 217–220 assimilation, liv, 12, 56, 123, 228, 275, 333, 348, 350, 357, 366, 368, 371, 373 atomistic community, 75, 183 auto-ethnography, xlvii Axial Era, 1 Axis of Autocracy, 289 B bad¯ u , 126, 136–138, 149, 155, 193, 204, 236, 250 Bedouins, 34, 110, 137, 138, 168, 199, 203, 204, 236, 248, 250, 361 biodiversity, xxvi, 14, 41, 45, 52, 56, 73, 74, 116, 155, 163, 164, 181, 186, 187, 191–193, 202, 219, 229, 277, 324, 355, 360, 368 bourgeois professional, xxxvii butter-oil, 50, 74, 89, 90, 92–95, 118, 133, 136, 149, 169, 171, 172, 178, 200, 202, 210, 211, 214, 222, 238, 241–243, 254

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45638-2

401

402

INDEX

C census, 42, 43, 180–183, 193–196, 198, 250, 324 centrifugal paradox, 143, 156 citizenship, 63, 122, 141, 142, 144, 147, 148, 151, 156, 229, 250, 272, 278, 283, 311, 314, 319, 334, 337, 342, 344, 362, 363, 370 civic deficit, 330, 331, 333, 335, 337, 338 clan autarky, 79, 98, 99 clans, 34, 43, 85, 91, 93, 97–100, 102, 105, 117, 127, 141, 147, 163, 165, 182–185, 186, 202, 218, 235, 238, 239, 249, 252, 261, 262, 292, 294, 295, 304, 351, 352, 358 clientelism, 269, 355, 359 communal anomie, 330 communalism, 48, 148, 311, 347, 359 Communal Safety Net, 118 community of fate, 54 Comprador Epistemology, liii conjunctural narrative, 39, 69–71, 229 Conservation Zoning Plan for Socotra Islands, 52, 277 constructive iconoclasm, xliii cultural geography, xxxiv, 78 cultural modernization, 63, 248 culture of governance, 55, 307, 308, 310, 311, 315, 317, 318, 323, 331, 340, 354 D data colonialism, xxviii, xxix, xxxix, xliv, lv, 7, 8, 15, 21, 24, 27, 28 data reciprocity ethos, 24, 28 decolonization, lix, 3, 246 demographic distribution, 75, 98, 106 diplomatic bribing, 291–293, 342

discursive ethic, xxv, li, 26 E eco-fundamentalist, xxxi, 221 ecological community, 116 ecological primordialism, 73, 76–78 economic migrants, 48, 50, 51, 133, 234, 236, 242 ecotopia, 48 ecotourism, 52, 57, 73, 84, 86, 164, 165, 193, 222, 276, 277, 332–334, 372 ego-graphy, xxxviii, xli emigration, 49, 51, 198, 290 Emirates Red Crescent, 288, 301 empire, x, xxxix, xlv, liv, lvii, lviii, lx, 2, 4, 6, 12, 23, 25, 27, 161, 244, 288, 300, 348 entropology, liii environmental annexation, 56 environmental migrants, 97, 183 epistemic community, 57, 360 epistemocide, 13 epistemological aporia, xxix epistemological individualism, xxxvii epistemological malpractice, xliv epistemological paradox, lviii, 59, 60 epistemology of ignorance, xli ethical covenant, 1, 5, 22 ethic of reciprocity, xxv, xlix, li, 24 ethnocentric reflex, xxxvi ethno-commodification, lv, 365 ethnographic ventriloquism, xliv, lxi, 15 ethnoregional communalism, 359 exoticism, xl, liv, 7, 41, 116 exoticization, xxvii, 39 F family organization, 113 fictive native, xxxv, xliv, 34

INDEX

fieldwork, xxv, xxviii, xxix, xxxi, xxxii, xxxvii, xliv, xlvii–l, 1, 5, 8, 11, 13, 16, 19, 22–26, 29–33, 45, 59, 66, 67, 110, 114, 175, 230 fieldwork paradox, 21 G Galileo’s dilemma, xxxiii General Council for the Sons of al-Mahra and Soqotra, 282, 284, 293, 340, 342 General People’s Congress. See GPC geography of residence, 47, 163, 182 GIZ, 86 global awakening, 5 globalization, 9, 10, 60, 61 Global North, lii, lv, 4, 19, 44, 60 Global South, lii, liii, lv, lvii, 4, 20, 44, 60, 62, 64, 166, 168 going native, 30 governance culture, xlviii, 308, 310, 312, 314, 321, 326, 327 GPC, 262, 269, 282, 285, 332, 338, 343, 355 graze phobia, 163, 186, 187, 191, 221 green missionaries, 43 H Hadiboh, xlix, 34, 43, 51, 75, 84, 108, 109, 119, 124–126, 128, 130, 132–134, 136, 139, 140, 153, 158, 175, 177–179, 181, 183–185, 186, 195, 196, 206, 208, 209, 214–217, 219, 232, 233, 237, 239, 242, 244, 246, 249–251, 261, 264, 266, 267, 271–273, 281–283, 293, 296, 298, 342 herd composition, 85, 184, 195 heteronomy, 41, 54, 228, 349

403

historical anthropology, xlvii, 31, 58, 66, 70 History of Soqotra Island, xlix human-environment relations, 57, 74, 78, 79, 116 humanitarian protectorate regime, 41, 287 humanitas , lviii human sciences, xxix, xxxiii, 10, 20 I identity formation, 106, 123, 142, 153, 157, 350 identity geopolitics, 4 indentured service class, liii, 19 indigeneity, lxv, 100, 148, 282, 347, 350, 359–361, 364, 365, 367, 368, 370–372 indigenous, xxvi, xxvii, xxxiv, xli, xlviii, lxv, 4, 8, 14, 16, 20, 39, 42–44, 46, 49, 50, 54, 57, 69, 74, 76, 79, 86, 88, 100, 101, 117, 121, 125–127, 131, 138, 143, 149, 150, 152, 155, 159, 186, 190–192, 204, 221, 228, 229, 233, 234, 244, 279, 281, 282, 286, 294, 332, 334, 337, 343, 347–352, 357, 359–365, 367–372 indigenous ontologies, 16 indigenous sovereignty, 57, 279, 282, 294 indigenous traditional knowledge, 74, 80, 86, 221, 360, 371 infra-nationalism, 363 infrapolitics, 319, 327, 328, 339 instrumentalization, l, lv, 21, 59, 62, 78, 231, 263, 282, 289, 292 interpretive misdemeanors, ix, l, 26, 313 interpretivism, xxx, xxxvi, xli, lix, 13, 15

404

INDEX

Is.l¯ah., 260, 262, 282, 284, 285, 298, 332, 338, 342, 355 IUCN, 297

J j¯ ahiliyya, xlviii, 367

K KBZ Foundation, 289, 290, 295, 345 knowledge production, xxv, xxviii, xxix, xxx, xxxviii, xl, xli, xliii, lviii, 5, 8, 16, 20, 30, 31, 59, 61

L land occupation strategy, 96, 98 landscapes, 14, 76, 86, 87, 277, 332, 351, 370 liberal imperialism, xxx, 3, 18, 25, 27 liberal internationalism, xxx liberal totalitarianism, 20 Linguistic populism, lx livelihoods, 78, 84, 92, 97, 112, 115, 116, 124, 132, 141, 173, 180, 192, 206, 221, 339, 358, 368 livestock population, 193, 196, 210 Local Authority Law, 142, 258, 266, 274, 275, 294, 320, 321, 335, 355, 357 Local Council, 267, 269, 273, 275, 321, 355

M meeting with the Sultan (Etíhi di-sát.ahan), 103 merchants of astonishment, 15 mesographer’s oath, 28 mesography, xxvi, xxvii, xxxv, xxxix, xliv, xlv, lxii, 1, 5, 7, 17, 20, 22, 27, 28, 31, 33, 35

mesographic, xxvii, xlix, 1, 22, 27, 39, 78 migration, 49–51, 91, 95, 97, 118, 148, 151, 168, 173, 176–178, 180, 183, 188, 237, 250 migratory movements, 49, 56 misanthropy, xxxv, 15, 191 misanthropic, xliii, liii, lix, 12, 164, 192 multi-sited ethnography, 33 muqhib, 34, 334 mutual aid, 74, 75, 79, 91, 102, 108, 112–115, 118, 124, 132, 175, 177, 207, 250, 261, 329, 335, 352 muwallad¯ın, xxxii, 102, 150–153, 155, 247, 265, 368 N narcissism, xxxviii, xl national container paradigms, xxxvi, xxxviii, 19, 33 neoliberalism, xxx, xxxvi, lii, lv, lvii, lix, 3, 8–10, 17, 19, 20, 25, 60, 311 neo-tribalism, 68 nidh¯ am mash¯ ayikh (shaykh system), 142, 202, 257, 354 noble ecological custodians, 43, 358 nomadism, 85, 167, 174 novelist manqué syndrome, lxi O Occidental cosmopolitanism, xxix, xliii, liii, lv, lvi, lviii, 20, 26, 59 one world anthropology, xxx, 3, 10, 62 ontological anthropology, 14, 15 ontological pluralism, 11 ontological turn, 14 Orientalism, 5

INDEX

Oriental masquerade, xliv, 33, 34 P paradox of incorporation, 348 parallel economy, 116, 203, 206 pastoral fauna, 186, 187, 190 pastoral herds, 83, 163, 187, 191, 193, 197, 200, 210 patching up ethos, 220, 223 patrimonial, lvii, 92, 93, 124, 127, 132, 135, 141, 273, 287, 288, 292–295, 316, 328, 341, 343, 345, 357–359, 372, 373 philanthropology, xlii, 31 physiographic areas, 82, 83, 170, 182 pluralism, xxix, 347, 362 pluriversality, lii, 30 pluriverse, xxx, xxxi, 3, 7, 62 political agency, xlviii, 141, 278, 283, 287, 297, 307, 308, 310, 312, 334, 336–338, 340, 343, 344, 349, 351, 358, 363 political anomie, 147 political economy, xli, xlviii, 18, 60, 61, 92–95, 197, 199–204, 220, 221, 223, 354 political geography, 56, 65, 197, 228, 229, 249, 271, 285, 305 political incorporation, 42, 45, 49, 52, 54, 55, 58, 64–68, 71, 122, 123, 125, 144, 146, 153, 171, 227, 229, 279, 333, 348, 350 politics of redistribution, 307, 311, 318, 319, 330 polity formation, xlviii, 39, 65, 66, 69, 91, 121–123, 141, 142, 156, 202, 229, 235, 247, 258, 259, 287, 312, 313, 318, 347, 348 polycentric world order, xxxix, 2, 17 postcolonialism, liv, lv, 23 post-ethnography, 1 post-truth, xlv, 13

405

post-universalist, lvii, 4, 61 poverty, 219 predatory hermeneutics, 13, 15 property-rights regime, 94 Proxy Colonialism, 230, 231 public anthropology, 11 public ethos, 55, 307, 308, 310, 311, 330, 334, 340 public sphere, liv, lvii, 4, 67, 141, 161, 281, 307, 310, 312, 314, 331, 332, 334, 335, 337, 339 Q Qalansiyah, 34, 43, 84, 111, 125, 133–135, 140, 153, 158, 181, 183, 185, 195, 196, 216, 232, 238, 242, 249, 251, 256, 266, 267, 271, 273, 283 q¯ at chewing, 48, 51, 146, 313, 334 R reciprocity, vii, xxxix, xlix, l, 7, 15, 79, 108, 109, 114, 115, 118, 331 recursive relationship, 39, 64, 68, 69, 123, 228, 314, 347 regionalism, 146, 278, 305, 363, 369 relativism, xxix, lxii, 7, 26 republican tribalism, 258 retrotopia, 2, 4, 10 S sacrificial sentinel, xxxiv, 16 Saqat.r… , 148, 149, 155, 349, 367, 369, 370 seasonal calendar, 175, 242 segmentary theory, 68, 161 self-other dialectic, xxxviii, 32 self-recognition, xlviii, 347–349, 359, 360, 371 semiotic colonization, lix, 15, 20 sites hopping, 33, 34

406

INDEX

socialization, 21, 46, 52, 141, 146, 174, 247, 291, 308, 316, 353 social kinship, 74, 112, 113, 118 social structure, 12, 50, 66, 92, 95, 99, 121, 123, 161, 248, 258, 259, 294, 308 Socotra Archipelago Master Plan, 45 Somalia, xliii, 90, 117, 212, 222, 243 Soqotran indigeneity, 347, 371 Southern Transitional Council (STC), 286, 298, 342 state-community relations, xlvii, xlviii, 53, 55, 71, 267, 270, 274, 279, 308, 317, 320, 326, 330, 338, 357, 371 state policy, 54, 180, 268, 334, 349 state-society relations, xlvii, 39, 58, 62, 63, 65, 70, 276, 313, 331, 338, 343 status hierarchy, 50, 51, 65, 94, 125, 126, 129, 141, 153, 160, 161, 235, 241, 246, 248, 252 subsidiarity principle, 268–270, 274, 275 subsistence, lxiv, 46, 48, 75–78, 83–86, 91–93, 107, 116, 124, 163, 165, 168–171, 175, 179, 182, 186, 189, 192, 197, 199–203, 205, 206, 208–211, 213, 215, 217–220, 222, 243, 248, 249, 256, 257, 334, 352, 368 subsistence livelihoods, 43, 83, 115, 166, 169, 170, 209, 249, 337 sulh, 34, 103, 104, 106, 263, 329 surveillance, 20, 252, 344, 353, 373 symbolic cannibalism, xli, xlv, lxii, 13, 60 T taxation, 50, 92, 93, 201, 233–235, 241, 242, 352

territorial annexation, 234, 287, 303 theft of anthropology, xliv theory formation, xxvii, 18, 23, 29, 61 Theory from the South, lii topography, 47, 75, 76, 80, 82, 84, 167, 172, 185, 249, 351 topophilia, 100, 106 transhumance, 83, 87, 88, 96, 172, 173, 177, 179, 182 transhumant pastoralism, 56, 57, 84, 85, 91, 92 transitional social formation, xlvii, 71, 227 transitional transformation, 27, 49, 58, 71 travelling theory, xxviii, xlii, xliv, xlv, xlvii, liv, lix, 4, 8, 13, 18, 21, 22, 25, 27, 34, 61, 313 tribalism, xlvii, 66, 68, 70, 99, 146, 258–261, 363 tribal polity, 92, 262, 342 tribe, 50, 66–68, 90, 94, 99–102, 127, 128, 131, 132, 134, 139, 142, 154, 161, 259, 278, 353, 354 tributary patrimonialism, 234 tribute extraction, 93, 94, 96 truth, xxx, xxxii, xxxvi, xlii, xliii, xlv, lxi, 27, 66

U UAE, 41, 48, 50, 53, 57, 102, 208, 229, 230, 286–303, 305, 307, 312, 333, 341–345, 357–359, 372, 373 UNDP, vii, xliii, 259, 277, 323, 331, 333 UNESCO, 42, 155, 192, 297, 362 United Arab Emirates. See UAE

INDEX

V vernacular federalism, 363 vignettes, xxxviii, xlvii, 230 W West Asia and North Africa (WANA), ix, xlvi West-Rest antinomy, xxv West-stream anthropology, xxix, xxx, xxxiv–xxxvii, xxxix–xli, xliii, xlvii,

407

xlix–li, lv, lxii, 7–9, 12–14, 24, 25, 27, 62 world anthropologies, liv, lv World Bank, 254, 263, 269, 272, 275

Y Yemen Arab Republic, 104, 259, 260 Yemeni Socialist Party, 262