A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume II

Cultural and Environmental Annexation of an Indigenous Community

Serge D. Elie

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030456467
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

This two-volume book offers a panoramic explanatory narrative of Soqotra Island's rediscovery based on the global significance of its endemic biodiversity. The first volume, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra: A Mesography of an Indigenous Polity in Yemen initiated the analytical inventory of the four key vectors of Soqotra's transition process through a discussion of the first two: economic disarticulation and political incorporation. This volume, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra: Cultural & Environmental Annexation of an Indigenous Community completes the analytical inventory by exploring the other two pivotal vectors of transition: cultural modernizationand environmental annexation. These two vectors encompass the critical sociocultural spheres and environmental domains in which Soqotra's transformation process is unfolding. The origin of these vectors is situated within Soqotra's long history of exogenous mediations by external actors and their symbolic appropriation of the island into an imaginative geography. The legacy is a "symbolic curse, " which has made Soqotra into an ideal playground for fantasist cultural or environmental experiments. Accordingly, this volume undertakes, first, a systematic inventory of the communal effects engendered within the domains of cultural modernization: dissonant linguistic attitudes, alienating consumption practices, divergent religious affiliations, and differentiating economic aspirations. Second, it anatomizes the process of environmental annexation through the reconstruction of the formulation and implementation process of a biodiversity conservation and sustainable development experiment in which the island and its residents are appropriated into an anachronistic paradigm – a pastoral ecotopia – as a blueprint of their future.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. D. ElieA Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume IIhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45646-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Mediated Urbanization: Hadiboh as an Emergent Translocality

Serge D. Elie¹

(1)

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Serge D. Elie

End Abstract

This chapter situates Soqotra’s communal modernization and national integration process within the island’s main urban formation: Hadiboh town. It is the primary context for the incubation and dissemination of the modernizing process, which is described in the four chapters of part 1. This chapter elucidates this process through its main local manifestations: It highlights the nature of this urban formation as a de-provincializing incubator due to mixed population contacts and the mediation of cultural technologies that are engendering existential dilemmas about the community’s political affiliation with, and cultural belonging to, the mainland nation-state. It surveys the impacts of the increasing mediation of these cultural technologies: first, of television watching that is enabling residents’ vicarious participation in multiple social milieus and the construction of a new social imagination; and second of the increasingly essential role of the Internet and the smart phone and its panoply of apps that are entrenching Soqotrans’ participation in a homeland-diaspora-world communication nexus. Finally, it suggests that this modernizing process is leading to the permanent crossing of an internal threshold between the rural and the urban domains that entail a deepening of intra-communal sociocultural differentiations.

1.1 Interstitial Urbanscape: De-Provincializing Incubator

Soqotra’s communal modernization is a dilemma-generating process through its entanglement with an “inconsistent field of warring possibilities, possibilities neither simultaneously reachable nor systematically connected, neither well defined nor unequivocally attractive” (Geertz 1995: 138). Indeed, it compels Soqotrans to negotiate simultaneously their political and cultural belonging to community, nation, and state. Soqotrans’ dilemmas of belonging were engendered by their island’s interstitial geographic location and mixed ethnocultural heritage. The resulting hyphenated form of belonging entails juggling a triad of allegiances: (a) sustaining their communal ethnolinguistic particularity without being perceived by the mainland political authorities as compromising their required political commitments to the Yemeni nation-state; (b) negotiating the trans-local political and economic relationship between mainland, island, and diaspora; and (c) hyphenating the triad of ethnocultural identities: Arab, Yemeni, and Soqotran. This interstitial location is generating a situation in which identity is no longer an inheritance but a political quest for an optimally syncretic way of being a citizen of the Yemeni state, while asserting an Arab ethnicity and maintaining the autonomy of a Soqotran identity. This modernization process initiated a transition that has taken Soqotrans through a series of social mutations: From a community atomized into clans constrained by limited socio-economic choices, to one incorporated into a national society as citizen of uncertain socio-cultural fate; from a communal ethic of social solidarity through mutual aid, to an individualizing ethos mediated by pecuniary relations; and from being only marginally a community of descent in terms of genealogical affiliation to one of ascent based on emerging socio-economic differentiation.

Soqotrans are caught up in a politically and culturally fraught transitional conjuncture, as they straddle the tradition/modernity divide, and the mainland/island geo-political bi-furcation. This double straddling has engendered a kind of existential dilemma: (a) the shared memory that the past was one of socioeconomic deprivation not worth being nostalgic about but that bequeathed a distinctive cultural legacy worthy of preservation; and (b) the realization that the future is inexorably contingent on power-asymmetric and agonistic political and cultural relations and negotiations with external forces and their local agents. This national integration process was initiated by political contact with the mainland Yemeni state (Vol. 1: Chapters 7 and 8), while communal modernization was initially brokered by cultural contact with mainlanders. This is generating an existential challenge for Soqotrans as an ethnoculturally indigenous sub-national group. As this modernization process entails (a) the partial subsumption of Soqotrans into a national culture that is driven by the interactions between various representatives of the dominant national culture from mainland Yemen, and (b) their simultaneous participation into a pan-regional ecumene that is mediated by cultural technologies, diasporic relations, and trans-local influences. The key vectors of communal transformation were the inaugural political and cultural contacts between Soqotrans and the mainland state and its citizens as members of a pan-Arab community; however, international actors are increasingly having a determining influence on this process.

The primarily, but not exclusively, urban ramifications of the cultural modernization and national integration process are evocative of the mechanism of cultural diffusion. The use of the term “diffusion” is devoid of any connection to the nineteenth-century theory that was used as an explanatory alternative to evolutionism (Barnard 2000: 47–60); or its twentieth-century re-incarnation as globalization theory and its neoliberal political-economic rationale, according to which the local is always under the imminent threat of being, if not already, colonized by transnational cultural influences. Instead, it is invoked here merely as a metaphoric idiom, and not as a theoretical construct, because the process it describes aptly characterizes a key vector of Soqotra’s communal modernization trajectory: That is, cultural changes on the island were brokered through the internal migration of Soqotrans from rural to urban zones and through the in-migration of mainlanders to the island whose cultural practices were emulated by locals. Indeed, these migrating individuals from various parts of Yemen in search of economic opportunities in Soqotra are the main change agents in the island’s cultural transformation. Consequently, the encounter between the mainland carriers of the national culture and the local agents of the communal culture has engendered a series of adjustment effects among Soqotrans through the adoption of local strategies of accommodation. This human contact is complemented by the state’s ad hoc assimilationist strategy that is producing its own form of accommodation, especially in the case of language. This chapter highlights the role of Hadiboh, which is the primary theater for the dissemination of this communal modernization process.

1.2 Mosaic Urban Formation: Syncretic Space

Soqotra Island has two main towns (Hadiboh and Qalansiyah), which contain about two-fifths of the total population, and it is a population proportion that will steadily increase over time. However, it is Hadiboh that provides the relevant urban context for the process of cultural diffusion. Hadiboh’s coastal location, greater concentration of urban amenities, heterogeneous population contacts, and as the island’s economic capital and site of its international airport make it the main gateway for external influences. Also, Hadiboh’s honeycomb of little shops located in a labyrinth of unpaved streets is collectively designated as al-sūq, which constitutes the only market place for the entire island. This sūq is brokering Soqotrans’ participation in modernity’s culture of consumption and thus engendering a gradual transition from a subsistence to an exchange economy. From a visual standpoint, Hadiboh seems an unlikely setting as an incubator of a de-provincializing process. It is an urbanizing space that is attempting to emerge from the decrepit facade of its old center of gravity next to the coast, which is the location of the former administrative center of the Sultanate where the dilapidated official buildings still stand. As this urban formation expands southward toward the encircling mountain range, it exemplifies a hybrid formation straddling the vestiges of a vanishing village still entwined with the construction debris of a ramshackle provincial town, and in the midst of which a “modern” city is undergoing an agonizing Phoenix-like birth. Hadiboh is still under construction with haphazardly designed and opportunistically located multiple building sites for various owners (e.g., the shops of mainlanders, the apartment compounds of Soqotran émigrés in the Gulf, and the modern houses of an emergent class of al-maīsūrīn (the “wealthy ones”) in various phases of completion (see Fig. 1.1). The novelty of this urbanizing process to Soqotra’s administrative officials is betrayed by the absence of zoning regulations, architectural standards, aesthetic considerations, and of urban hygiene.

Fig. 1.1

Partial view of Hadiboh town

Nevertheless, historically Hadiboh was, and still is, the main theater for a variety of social and political experiments, which constituted the cardinal markers in Soqotra’s historical evolution from the nineteenth century onward, which is the period under consideration in this book. Throughout most of this historical trajectory, it was the political and economic center of the island. During the Sultanate, Hadiboh was organized into a series of distinct neighborhoods, which reflected the status stratification system (see Vol. 1: Chapter 4). As each neighborhood was structured around the residences of the members of the status hierarchy and the Sultan’s assigned representatives (muqaddam), each one was mostly a kin-based compound, and attached to each was a retinue of African servants. Under the socialist administration, Hadiboh was formally established as a municipality in the early 1980s and was divided into three government-designated neighborhoods called ḥāra (in Arabic), which doubled as electoral wards (see Annex 1.1). Interestingly, these neighborhoods were named after the dates of major historical events in both North and South Yemen. The socialist imposition of this nominal grid on this embryonic urban agglomeration sought to reorganize a medieval village into an emerging town. This symbolized Hadiboh’s and the entire island’s incorporation into the political history of both Yemeni states through the invocation of the major markers of their nation-building itineraries. Simultaneously, it heralded the inclusion of Soqotra into national history that served as the myth of origin of the newly incorporated community, as part of a common culture and shared history and destiny. Noteworthy, is that this naming of public spaces, as a means of political incorporation and cultural assimilation, is being re-enacted by the UAE’s protectorate regime as buildings in Hadiboh are being named after its leaders (see Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.2

Shaykh Khalifa Bin Zayed Hospital in Hadiboh

Hadiboh was always inhabited by a population of mixed provenance ever since the British consecrated it as Soqotra’s capital town on 30 October 1886. Then, the majority of its residents were slaves (imbu‘ileh) followed by the Sultans’ relatives and their motley entourage coming from the South Arabian mainland and from the Arabian Gulf. The internal migration process that was initiated by the policies of the socialist administration continued under the subsequent political regimes. This led to Hadiboh’s gradual accretion into a multiplicity of zones, organized around, and informally named after, the regions or villages from which the residents originated (see Elie 2004a). Today, the descendants of the pioneering cohort of pastoralists from the hinterland, who were encouraged into a sedentary urban life in Hadiboh in the aftermath of the 1967 Revolution, constitute the first urban-born generation of Soqotra’s modern period. This cohort is being replenished by a steady stream of youths migrating from the hinterland in order to complete their secondary education, and who are most susceptible to imported cultural ways as a means of shedding their rustic baggage and affirming a new urban identity.

This urbanization process and its internal demographic, residential, and cultural reconfiguration of the island began in earnest in the aftermath of the 1994 civil war on mainland Yemen. The victory of the north over the south marked the actual achievement of Yemen’s unification, as the continuing political dominance of the Socialist Party over South Yemen was eradicated (see Vol. 1: Chapter 7). In Soqotra, the effects of unification started in 1996 and intensified throughout the first decade of the 2000s. This not only accelerated internal rural-urban migration due to the increasing availability of socioeconomic opportunities on the northern coast, but also opened up Soqotra’s territory to external migrants from the mainland, the diaspora and of international provenance. This engendered the constant two-way flows of mainland migrants who continued the tradition of being the island’s shopkeepers and occupied the new trades required by the modernizing economy. Some of these mainland migrants became long-term residents and propagated their mainland cultural practices (especially qāt chewing). Their presence was complemented by that of expatriates performing a variety of functions: the staff of the Australian-run English and computer school that was established in 1999 and lasted until 2014 and was replaced by local ones. The cyclical residence of expatriate staff of UN and NGOs projects that began in 1997 and subsided only in the mid-2010s. They were seasonally augmented by ever-increasing numbers of tourists from the early-2000s until 2014 (see Chapter 5). Also, for a number of years, there was a contingent of teachers from Syria, Iraq, and one English-teaching Indian working at the local two-year College of Education along with some mainlanders. The latter were the majority among the teachers at the local high school until the early 2000s. Equally significant is the seasonal return of Soqotran émigrés from the Arabian Gulf diaspora, who are renewing social ties, consolidating cultural bonds, and enhancing economic linkages through investments, especially in real estate. Also, there were the frequent visits to the island from government officials and ordinary citizens from Arabian Gulf countries. The governments of these countries launched philanthropic activities that were not entirely devoid of political considerations as was eventually confirmed by the UAE’s protectorate regime (see Chapter 5).

The heterogeneous interactions between a population of mixed provenance are heralding an emergent urban formation as a “syncretic location” that is configured into a sociocultural mosaic of inter-ethnic tension between islanders and mainlanders, and of centrifugal allegiances to regional clan affiliations among Soqotran urban residents. This social maelstrom is engendering Hadiboh’s mutation into a “translocality,” which is an “emergent category of human organization” in the form of an urban formation that is fostering modern aspirations, which are weakening its residents’ cultural ties to the hinterland (Appadurai 2003: 338). Furthermore, the local adoption of imported modes of consumption and the increasing availability and widespread use of cultural mediation technologies (TV, Internet, and smart phones) make Hadiboh an incubator for an interstitial sociocultural space that is propitious to the de-provincialization of local urban residents with ripple effects throughout the rest of the island. The characteristics of this emergent urban-based social imagination are aptly illustrated in the following description:

[W]ays of living and thinking, styles of life which are deracinated from communities and cultures of origin, from conventional living, from family and hom...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Mediated Urbanization: Hadiboh as an Emergent Translocality
• Part I. Cultural Modernization: National Integration Processes
• Part II. Environmental Annexation: Global Governance of Local Conservation
• Back Matter