This article presents the first study of pastoralism on Soqotra Island, which is the main island of the Republic of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Its inhabitants constitute a once predominantly pastoralist community with a unique language and of mixed ethnicity who are now being enlisted in a state-sponsored and internationally-assisted conservation-with-development experiment. The article seeks to remedy Soqotrans' disenfranchisement from the academic literature on pastoralism around the world. Accordingly, it gives an overview of the nature of pastoralism on the island. This is done through the following analytical tasks: First, it provides a brief geo-cultural contextualization of the island. Second, it describes the underpinnings of a mixed subsistence pastoral regime in terms of livelihood practices, spatial mobility and residential modality. Third, it offers a provisional inventory of the pastoral flocks and herds. Fourth, and finally, the article summarizes the pastoralists' sociocultural changes resulting from Soqotra's entanglement with an externally initiated process of communal transition.
This article describes the current functioning of the pastoral economy of Soqotra Island, a sub-national entity of the Republic of Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula, located in the Indian Ocean at the entrance of the Red Sea. Soqotra's contemporary pastoral economy is the legacy of a transition process engendered by a state-initiated disarticulation from the subsistence economy of the hinterland with the political economy of the state. This process transformed the practice of pastoralism in Soqotra from a core economy to an auxiliary livelihood. The introductory section offers an historical synopsis of this disarticulation process through a description of the political economy of four mainland-imposed regimes on the island. The second section undertakes a brief explication of the mistaken identification of Soqotran pastoralists as bedouins. Subsequently, the article 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 briefly explores the sustainability of pastoralism in Soqotra by considering future scenarios about its prospects on the island.
This article undertakes a critical retrospective of the symbolic appropriation process through which Soqotra was constituted as an imaginative geography, embodying the strategic desiderata of states as well as the ideational fantasies of men over millennia. The island's location on the threshold of continents (Africa and Arabia), and on a cardinal node on the sea-lanes linking the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond, subjected its internal dynamics to the maelstrom of events in the larger world. Moreover, its physical isolation 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. The article examines the strategic interests pursued, and the appropriating discourses deployed, by the European powers vying for political and economic hegemony at the different historical periods surveyed here: Antiquity, Portuguese, British, Soviet and the recent adoption of a United Nations-brokered environmental regime for Soqotra. Finally, it draws out the ramifications of this strategic entanglement and symbolic appropriation process on Soqotra's estimated 50,000 inhabitants at the present historical conjuncture.
The urgent need to redirect the debate on gender in the Middle East has led one commentator to suggest that "facile assumptions about the monolithic role 'Islam' or Arab culture plays in the seclusion, disempowerment, and oppression of women no longer pass as the accepted academic discourse on the topic." 1 This valiant declaration, which sought to establish the proprieties of discourse on gender in the Arab world, may have succeeded in banishing facile assumptions in favor of a more complex sense of the relationality between Islam and the construction of gender in the Arab world. Nevertheless, historical legacies, the persistence of certain idioms and their deployment as part of the discursive currency about the Middle Eastern region, cannot be wished away by wellmeaning declarations.One such idiom is what I call "the harem syndrome," a com plex ensemble of ideas and of nearly indelible images that have constituted a kind of doxology informing the discourse on gender in the Middle East as a whole. This ensemble of ideas includes the cult of domesticity of women that certain verses of the Quran seem to have sanctioned. During the era of the Islamic empire, such practices, which entailed the near incarceration of women into the elaborate gynaecea-that is, the harem-of the great houses, were commonplace. Today the cult is associated with women's relative exclusion from the public sphere and seclusion in the more mod est abodes of present-day Muslim societies. This is coupled with the perception of women as the custodians of Islamic tradition, values,
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