A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume II: Cultural and Environmental Annexation of an Indigenous Community [1st ed.] 9783030456450, 9783030456467

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xliv
Mediated Urbanization: Hadiboh as an Emergent Translocality (Serge D. Elie)....Pages 1-23
Front Matter ....Pages 25-25
Linguistic Dilemmas: Communal Vernacular in Transition (Serge D. Elie)....Pages 27-70
Consumption as Alienation: Diffusion of the National Pastime (Serge D. Elie)....Pages 71-105
Religious Re-Conversion: Mediations of Local Islamic Practices (Serge D. Elie)....Pages 107-145
Economic Reconfiguration: Emergent Social Differentiation (Serge D. Elie)....Pages 147-196
Front Matter ....Pages 197-197
Trojan Environmentalism: Ecological Gentrification of an Island Community (Serge D. Elie)....Pages 199-253
“Saving Soqotra”: Biography of a Conservation and Development Experiment (Serge D. Elie)....Pages 255-319
Back Matter ....Pages 321-368

Citation preview

A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume II Cultural and Environmental Annexation of an Indigenous Community Serge D. Elie

A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume II

Serge D. Elie

A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume II Cultural and Environmental Annexation of an Indigenous Community

Serge D. Elie Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

ISBN 978-3-030-45645-0 ISBN 978-3-030-45646-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45646-7 © 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 the People of Soqotra in their quest for cultural self-determination

Contents

Prologue: Soqotra as a Crucible of Exogenous Mediations 1

Mediated Urbanization: Hadiboh as an Emergent Translocality 1.1 Interstitial Urbanscape: De-Provincializing Incubator 1.2 Mosaic Urban Formation: Syncretic Space 1.3 Vicarious Participation: Cultural Pan-Arabism 1.3.1 TV Cafés: Entertainment Gateway and Civic Forum 1.3.1.1 Cultural Enfranchisement: Modern Arab Consumerism 1.3.1.2 Political Pedagogy: Supra-National Membership 1.3.2 Digital Mediation: Homeland-Diaspora Interconnection 1.4 Spatial-Cultural Displacement: From Bad¯awa to H . ad.¯ara Annex 1.1: Map of Greater Hadiboh

xxi

1 2 4 8 10 14 15 16 20 23

vii

viii

CONTENTS

Part I Cultural Modernization: National Integration Processes 2

3

Linguistic Dilemmas: Communal Vernacular in Transition 2.1 State Cultural Protectionism: Linguistic Heritage Ignored 2.2 The Soqotri Language: Primer and Lament 2.2.1 Research Expeditions: Chronology and Legacy 2.2.2 Linguistic Conundrums: Intramural Debates 2.2.2.1 Debatable Etymologies 2.2.2.2 Competing Genealogies 2.2.2.3 Orthographic Dilemmas 2.2.3 Challenges Ahead: Beckoning Opportunities 2.3 Socio-Linguistic Predicament: Dissonant Attitudes 2.3.1 Aspiring to Mobility: Self-Modernization 2.3.2 Affirming National Belongingness: State Allegiance 2.3.3 Asserting a Muslim Identity: Beyond al-J¯ahiliyya 2.3.4 Preserving a “Semiotic Homeland”: Biocultural Communalism 2.3.5 “Soqotri Is a Dialect of Arabic”: Self-Arabization 2.4 Beyond the Arabic Koiné: Recognition of Multilingualism 2.5 Ethnolinguistic Vitality: Provisional Assessment Consumption as Alienation: Diffusion of the National Pastime 3.1 Diaspora Formation: Q¯ at as Vector of Cultural Assimilation 3.1.1 Communal Commodity Conquest: Accidental Proxies 3.1.2 Q¯ at and Community: Culturalist Interpretations vs. Historicist Explanations 3.2 Consumption Rituals: Segregated Venues and Divergent Motivations

27 28 32 34 37 38 40 41 42 44 45 48 50 52 54 58 62

71 72 74 76 78

CONTENTS

3.2.1

3.3

3.4

3.5

4

Supply and Demand: Expanding Circuit of Consumers 3.2.2 Consumption Ethos: Maqyal vs. Makhazzin Value Entrapment: Political and Cultural Ramifications 3.3.1 Travelling Theories of Q¯ at Consumption: Interpretive Anachronisms 3.3.2 Shifts in Symbolic Significations: From Identity Legitimacy to Cultural Anomie 3.3.2.1 Political Assimilation: Local Elite Formation 3.3.2.2 Mass Enculturation: Cultural Renegades 3.3.2.3 Resistance Mobilization: Traditional Sociability Defenders Policy Dilemmas: Confronting the “Accursed Tree” 3.4.1 Elusive Legislative Solution: Prohibition vs. Dissuasion 3.4.2 Youths Against Q¯ at: An Existential Challenge Future Stakes: Policy and Community 3.5.1 Social Problem Deniers: Drug Consumption not Cultural Practice 3.5.2 The “Djibouti of the Indian Ocean”: Endemic Chewing

ix

Religious Re-Conversion: Mediations of Local Islamic Practices 4.1 Reclaiming a Religious Heritage: Pietization of the Communal Sphere 4.2 Becoming Muslims Again: Three Historical Conjunctures 4.2.1 Communal al-J¯ahiliyya: Syncretism Prevalent 4.2.2 Liberation Credo: Islam Radicalized 4.2.3 Era of Atonement: Collective Expiation Exercise 4.3 Agents of Re-Conversion: Three Proselytizing Paths 4.3.1 Al-Tabl¯ıgh: Pietistic Quest 4.3.2 Al-Is.l¯ah.: Islam Politicized 4.3.3 Salaf¯ı: Social Asceticism Ethos 4.4 Communal Ramifications: Ethical Quandaries

78 80 84 84 87 88 89 90 92 93 95 98 100 102

107 108 113 115 120 123 126 127 129 134 138

x

CONTENTS

4.4.1

5

Economic Reconfiguration: Emergent Social Differentiation 5.1 Elusive Communal Economic Sovereignty: Dependency Dilemmas 5.1.1 A Transitional Economy: Economic Anthropology’s Inadequate Lexicon 5.2 Nascent Modern Economy: Structural Anatomy and Social Inventory 5.2.1 Municipal Economy: Governmental Sector 5.2.1.1 Social-Physical Infrastructure: Spreading “Civilization” 5.2.2 Social Economy: Community-Based Sector 5.2.2.1 Eco-Farms: Commercializing Natural Resources 5.2.2.2 Fishing Cooperatives: Translocal Endeavor 5.2.3 Service Economy: Private Sector 5.2.3.1 Retail Trade: Shopkeepers’ Emporium 5.2.3.2 Ecotourism: Monetizing the Landscape 5.3 Diasporic Economy: Philanthropy as Political Cooptation 5.3.1 Émigré Remittances: From Safety Net to Investment Capital 5.3.2 Aid Diplomacy: State Substitution 5.4 Coda: Transformational Effects

Part II

6

Divergent Ethical Commitments: Rural vs. Urban

140

147 148 149 153 154 155 159 160 163 166 167 178 183 184 187 190

Environmental Annexation: Global Governance of Local Conservation

Trojan Environmentalism: Ecological Gentrification of an Island Community 6.1 Global Conservation Regime: Hegemonic Travelling Policy

199 200

CONTENTS

6.1.1

6.2

6.3

6.4

6.5

Sustainable Development Financialized: Green Economy Paradigm 6.1.2 Local Ramifications: Conservation as Transnational Gentrification Making Yemen’s First Protected Area: Soqotra’s Environmental Enclosure 6.2.1 Conflicting Motivations: Chronic State Ambivalence 6.2.2 Fateful Decisions: Malignant Managerial Synergies 6.2.3 Divergent Expectations: Incompatible Stakeholders Premature Environmental Adjustment Regime: Establishing a Conservation Outpost 6.3.1 Invented Ecological Agents: Pastoralists as Indigenous Conservationists 6.3.1.1 Recruiting Sub-Contractors: Practitioners of Sustainable Livelihoods 6.3.1.2 Alarmist Diagnostics: Crisis Mongers 6.3.2 Imported Knowledge Templates: Epistemic Generification 6.3.2.1 Policy Narrative: Rationalizing Annexation 6.3.2.2 The CBD: From Local to Global Commons 6.3.2.3 “Public Consultation”: Conscripted Audience 6.3.3 Friends of Soqotra: An Epistemic Community Virtual Cartographic Exclosures: Misanthropic Map-Making 6.4.1 Segmented Landscape: Conservation vs. Livelihoods 6.4.2 Collateral Damages: Conservation as a Human Threat Human-Environment Relations: Brief Historical Chronology 6.5.1 Nature as Benevolent: Providential Dependence 6.5.2 Nature as Obstacle: Taming the Wilderness

xi

202 207 210 210 212 214 216 218

219 220 224 224 227 229 232 236 237 242 244 245 247

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CONTENTS

6.5.3

6.6

7

Nature as Public Sector Outpost: Administrative Conquest 6.5.4 Nature as Sanctuary: Spatial Annexation A Modest Proposal: Recalibrating a Preemptive Conservation Strategy

“Saving Soqotra”: Biography of a Conservation and Development Experiment 7.1 Conservation, Management, and Development: Panoptic Nexus 7.2 Ecotopia Envisioned: Sacrosanct Landscape and Primeval People 7.2.1 Ecotopia Debated: Pollyanna vs. Cassandra Narratives 7.2.1.1 Pollyanna: Ecotopia Is Possible if… 7.2.1.2 Cassandra: Apocalypse Is Inevitable Despite… 7.3 Development Modeling: Ten-Year Master Plan 7.3.1 Formulating the Master Plan: Institutionalizing Non-Development 7.3.2 Economic Growth Scenarios: Low, Medium, and High 7.3.3 Development Abandoned: Shelving the MP 7.4 Sustainable Underdevelopment: Preserving Wilderness 7.4.1 Micro-Development: Philanthropic Gestures 7.5 Implementing Conservation: Shifting Objectives and Eluding Results 7.5.1 Institutional Dysfunctions: The CBD and the GEF 7.5.2 Virtual Environmental Management: Recreating Arcadia 7.5.2.1 Phase 1. Eco-Management Overreach: Inaugurating a Conservation Experiment 7.5.2.2 Phase 2. Protected Area Fetishism: “False Advertising” 7.5.2.3 Phase 3. Marketing Nature: “Engines of Growth”

248 249 250

255 256 259 262 264 265 266 267 270 272 274 276 280 281 286

288 293 298

CONTENTS

7.5.2.4

7.6

Phase 4. Mainstreaming Biodiversity: Quest for a Managerial Panopticon 7.5.2.5 Phase 5. Green Economy Lab: Institutionalizing a Research Colony Exit Strategy: Conservation with Development

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303 308 316

Epilogue: A Community in Permanent Transition

321

Bibliography

339

Index

363

List of Figures

Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 3.1 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1

Partial view of Hadiboh town Shaykh Khalifa Bin Zayed Hospital in Hadiboh A Muqhib—Participants waiting for tea Internet Café-Travel agency Factors influencing language vitality and endangerment First mass demonstration against Q¯at Modern economic domains Asphalted roads network Tourists in Soqotra 1997–2015 Departing tourists Soqotra Airport Istanbul City Zoning Plan Map

5 6 13 18 65 96 155 157 181 182 189 239

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List of Tables

Table 2.1 Table 5.1 Table 7.1

Evaluation of Soqotrans’ ethnolinguistic vitality Hadiboh’s marketplace Main conservation projects in Soqotra

67 170 287

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Acronyms

CBD CBOs CSOs CTA EPA EPC FoS GEBs GEF GIZ ICDPs IMF IUCN LEBs MEAs MP MSALs NGOs PAs PLE RBGE SCDP SCF SGP STF UN

UN Convention on Biological Diversity Community-Based Organizations Civil Society Organizations Chief Technical Adviser Environmental Protection Authority Environmental Protection Council Friends of Soqotra Global Environmental Benefits Global Environment Fund German Corporation for International Cooperation Integrated Conservation and Development Programmes International Monetary Fund International Union for Conservation of Nature Local Environmental Benefits Multilateral Environmental Agreements Soqotra Archipelago Master Plan Modern South Arabian Languages Non-Governmental Organizations Protected Areas Post Liberal Environmentalism Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh Soqotra Conservation and Development Programme Soqotra Conservation Fund Small Grants Programme Socotra Trust Fund United Nations xix

xx

ACRONYMS

UNDP UNEP UNESCO WB WHS WWF YR ZP

United Nations Development Programme United Nations Environment Programme United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization World Bank World Heritage Site World Wide Fund Yemeni Rial Conservation Zoning Plan for Soqotra Islands

Prologue: Soqotra as a Crucible of Exogenous Mediations

This prologue performs a strategic synopsis of the issues discussed in the first volume and the ones addressed in this volume. First, it undertakes a brief comparative overview of the respective contributions of the first and second volumes by highlighting the different analytical foci on two different set of catalysts of transition: economic disarticulation and political incorporation were discussed in volume one, and cultural modernization and environmental annexation will be addressed in the present volume. Second, it summarizes the genealogy of Soqotra’s millenniaold symbolic appropriation by external actors and identifies some of the contemporary legacies. Third, it highlights the nature of the contemporary mode of symbolic appropriation that is referred to as exogenous mediation, which serves as Trojan forces of transformation on behalf of the national subordination and global encapsulation of the Soqotran community. And fourth, given that the broad research context, the methodological approach and the theoretical frame for the total study of Soqotra as an indigenous community were elucidated in the first volume, this prologue specifies the articulation of the mesographic approach to the theoretical and methodological particularities associated with explaining the ramifications of the cultural and environmental annexation of the Soqotran community.

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Synopsis: Comparative Contributions The first volume—which is sub-titled “A Mesography of an Indigenous Polity in Yemen”—launched the total study of the Soqotran community through a systematic inventory of the constitutive aspects of an islandbased indigenous communal polity initially embedded within symbiotic relations with its ecosystem and organized around a pastoral economy. It identified the state’s political incorporation process as the determinant of ever-changing state-community relations, which in turn generated the pivotal drivers that transformed the nature of Soqotra’s polity from a proxy colonial settler community into a sub-national polity under a succession of modernizing political regimes of the mainland-based Yemeni state and other influential international and regional actors. Prior to undertaking these inventorial tasks, the first volume situated its study of Soqotra within the evolving global context that structured knowledge production practices within the social sciences and its specific ramifications on the practice of anthropology. Accordingly, the volume, in its Prologue, invited the global audience of established and aspiring social scientists, to whom it is addressed, to consider a different modality of doing anthropology that no longer relies on ethnography as its foundational research method, which has lapsed into a transactional academic ritual. Subsequently, it introduced mesography as the new methodological underpinning of a post-exotic anthropology as a field-based science of human emancipation. Then, it described the determining factors and actors that are shaping the existential context of Soqotrans, and tackled a persistent problem within anthropological studies in general, and in political anthropology in particular, namely the reliance on travelling theories and its distortive impacts on understanding context-specific state-community relations. The six core chapters of the first volume (Chapters 3–8) initiated the inventory of the constitutive aspects, the pivotal vectors and historical conjunctures of Soqotra’s transitional transformation engendered by the processes of economic disarticulation and political incorporation and their multiple effects on the Soqotran community. The first volume concluded with an evaluation of Soqotra’s political incorporation process through a retrospective analysis of the different state polity formation strategies and the different types of political agencies they imparted to the Soqotran polity and how this process catalyzed the trajectory of emergence of Soqotrans’ self-recognition as an indigenous communal polity that is still burdened

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with the chronic condition of political heteronomy within the Yemeni state. This volume will explore the other two pivotal vectors of transition: cultural modernization and environmental annexation. It inventories and anatomizes the critical sociocultural spheres and environmental domains in which Soqotra’s transformation process is unfolding. At different historical conjunctures during the past centuries, Soqotra was the destination for a plethora of externally determined choices that I label exogenous mediations, or Trojan forces, which cumulatively circumscribed Soqotrans’ communal aspirational horizon. These mediations were introduced through conjunctural changes in the state’s political regimes and their policy choices. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, new Trojan forces were introduced with greater intensity and with a more encompassing scope in the aftermath of Soqotra’s rediscovery in the mid-1990s. The communal ramifications of these contemporary Trojan forces that are represented in the two catalytic processes driving Soqotra’s transformation noted above will be discussed throughout this book in the following order: Chapter 1 highlights the increasing importance of the urban milieu as a crucible of modernizing influences and dilemmas-inducing choices. Chapters 2–5 identify the nature of the influences of cultural modernization in four local domains and analyzes their consequences: conflicting loyalty to mother tongue versus imported lingua franca; adoption of new consumption practices and their multiple alienating effects; competing religious affiliations and their communal ramifications; and an evolving multi-sectoral modern economy and its polarizing effects on Soqotrans’ allegiance to the Yemeni republican nation-state or to a foreign monarchical ethno-state. To illustrate the vector of environmental annexation, Chapters 6 and 7 undertake a comprehensive evaluation of the suite of projects that constitute the Global Environment Facility-sponsored biodiversity conservation experiment in Soqotra through a detailed analysis of both their formulation and implementation processes. Finally, the Epilogue summarizes the vectors of Soqotra’s cultural and environmental transformation, and recapitulates the prevailing obstacles to, as well as outlines a strategy for, the transition toward the practice of a post-exotic anthropology.

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Genealogy of the Present: Retrospective on Symbolic Appropriations Soqotra, in spite of its legendary reputation from the Middle Ages onward as a cornucopia of aromatic resins was spared a “resource curse” and the economic depredations that prevailed in the aftermath of the colonization crusade launched in the fifteenth century (Bent and Bent 1900; Beckingham 1983). In contrast, Soqotra has had the mixed blessing of a “symbolic curse”, which made it into a coveted object for symbolic appropriation through its strategic entanglements with external actors from all corners of the world. These entanglements have bequeathed a pathdependent legacy on the contemporary fate of the island and its residents. Indeed, from the late centuries BCE, Soqotra has exercised a kind of symbolic domination over the imagination of travelers, merchants, and conquerors of all sorts, and has sustained it ever since. Grove explains the nature of the attraction: “The commercial and utilitarian purposes of European expansion produced a situation in which the tropical environment was increasingly utilized as the symbolic location for the idealized landscapes and aspirations of the western imagination” (Grove 1995: 3). Soqotra served as a vehicle for their projective fantasies: For the travelershistorians in pursuit of the exotic to enrich their fantastic tales; for the merchants driven by their pecuniary imagination in search of tradable commodities; for the would-be conquerors seeking territorial expansion and possession; for the men of science (mainly naturalists doubling as ethnologists) groping for explanations as to the origin of man and the original location of the Garden of Eden; and last but not least for the men of a religious calling, imbued with a proselytizing urge, gathering converts for the kingdom beyond. All seem to have made their obligatory pilgrimage to Soqotra in search of their particular fulfillment. This section summarizes the symbolic appropriation process and its corollary exogenous mediations through which Soqotra was constituted as an imaginative geography, embodying ideational fantasies of these explorers of the exotic over millennia. Accordingly, it illustrates the endemic narrative of ecotopia that has come to be associated with Soqotra by examining the appropriating discourses deployed by the European powers and their organizational or individual surrogates, during five historical periods: Starting with Alexander the Great’s project of Hellenizing the Orient during the fourth century BCE, then through the Portuguese mercantile exploits during the Age of Discovery (or more

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correctly the “Age of Invasion”) in the fifteenth century, by way of the British empire-building at the dawn of modernity in the eighteenth century, followed by the Soviet in the Cold War in the 1970s and finally the United Nations in the present era obsessed with synergizing economic development with environmental conservation as the panacea to the global crisis of climate change. (see details in Elie 2006) The period of Antiquity—from the fourth century BCE—inaugurated a utopian-aesthetic discursive tradition in which South Arabia and Soqotra were seen as “Terrestrial Paradise” given their cornucopias of aromatic flora and fabulous fauna, and subsequently during the Christian era Soqotra was imagined as the location of the Garden of Eden. In particular, in its previous incarnation of Greek names (Panchaia and Dioscorides) Soqotra was thought to represent one of the most ancient models of the utopian human habitat. When Alexander the Great (336– 323 BCE) initiated his project of Hellenizing the world by starting in the Orient through the conquest of Persia in 334 BCE, he opened the floodgates of a mass emigration movement; where “thousands of Greeks swarmed out of their homeland … in hope of finding fortunes in foreign parts” (McNeill 1979: 151). In a probably apocryphal story related by the Arab historian al-Masudi writing in the tenth century CE, it was Aristotle, the tutor of Alexander, who appeared to have titillated the latter’s interest in the Orient in general and in Soqotra in particular by referring to the availability and economic potentiality of aloes, which were used widely for medicinal purposes (Ubaydli 1989). Indeed, Soqotra was reputed as a plantation economy dedicated to the production of aloes and resin-bearing trees. It is reported that the Greek colonists, in their new vocation as aloes farmers, were handpicked by Aristotle and came from his native town (McCrindle 1897). Noteworthy, it was the presumed presence of Greeks in Soqotra that inaugurated archaeological research for the remains of “white colonies” that were imagined to have been established by Alexander’s colonists (Doe 1992). The legacy effect of the presumed presence of Greeks in Soqotra can be illustrated through two anecdotal examples. The first three issues of the newsletter of the NGO Friends of Soqotra, launched in 2003, were initially called the island’s Greek name: “Dioscorida.” The latter was subsequently replaced with “Tayf,” which is the Soqotri word for aloes, the plant that inspired the Greeks’ colonization of the island. In addition, aloes’ reputation as a coveted commodity for centuries inspired attempt at reclaiming its past commercial success

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through its experimental production on the island with funding from the German development agency GIZ (see Chapters 5 and 7). The Portuguese colonial interlude in Soqotra—1507–1511—was devoid of scientific pretenses, as it was motivated exclusively by territorial control in the proximity of important sea lanes relevant to their quest for supremacy over the Indian Ocean trade, which was dominated by Muslim merchants. The Portuguese regarded these merchants as their “hereditary foes.” This quest was animated by a missionary zeal to spread Christian civilization, and thus sought to re-convert Soqotrans into Christians. As their colonization of Soqotra was based on the mistaken identification of the islanders, who were presumed to be “Christians who had lived there since the time of Saint Thomas” in 50 CE, and who could be enlisted as allies in their attempt “to close the Gulf of Aden to Muslim Commerce” (Beckingham 1983: 173). Soqotrans’ passive resistance, coupled with a chronic insufficiency of supplies, undermined the will of the Portuguese to pursue their ill-fated search for communion with fellow Christians. Noteworthy, this situation of mistaken identity as Christians saved Soqotrans from ethnocide, given the mission assigned to Portuguese colonizers: “to make stern war against and destroy all the kings and lords who [were] unwilling to be friends and tributaries” (Birch 1875: 39). This led to the systematic carnage of communities throughout the areas visited by the Portuguese from which Soqotra was spared. The British encounter with Soqotra in the early 1830s and its political annexation in 1876 until 1967 inaugurated the era of scientific research on the island by default. As their initial attempt at deploying science as a means to the economic valorization of natural resources failed, due to Soqotra’s lack of economically viable resources relevant to the industrial age. Paradoxically, it was the scientists of the British colonial era who conferred upon Soqotra a redeeming purpose as a scientific research station. Indeed, the 1835 report on the prospecting mission to Soqotra undertaken by James Wellsted on behalf of the British East India Company served as the referential framework for all subsequent scientific endeavors on the island. Initially, the dominant focus was on botanical research (Balfour 1888), which was a pre-commercial form of bioprospecting that did not lead to the usual synergy generated elsewhere between science and commerce. Instead, it established a scientific archive for Soqotra that served as the obligatory frame of reference for natural scientists ever since. The end result was Soqotra’s encompassment within the emergent and universalizing discourse of environmentalism, which

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galvanized scientific interest in the fauna and flora of the tropics. This led to Soqotra’s redemption from being a neglected colonial ward, and made it into an experimental domain for scientific research. The legacy of this period was the consecration of environmentalism as the primary discourse for the renewed interest in the island in the twenty-first century. The Soviet encounter with Soqotra from the 1970s until 1990 was a secondary effect of the Soviet state’ support for the Marxist regime of the South Yemeni state on the mainland. The Soviet interest in Soqotra was scientific and not military in spite of misleading reports about their having established a military base on the island. However, their interest shifted the research focus from the natural sciences to the sociocultural dimensions of Soqotra through the deployment of the four sub-fields of anthropology from the prevailing Soviet perspective at the time: biological, cultural, linguistic, and archaeological. The Soviet’s anthropological appropriation of Soqotra illustrates the phenomenon of region-bound travelling theories that was discussed in the first volume. The key concept in Soviet anthropology was “ethnogenesis,” which is concerned with the origin of ethnic groups, and their formative processes as well as their temporal and spatial distribution. Ethnic groups are referred as “ethnos,” which connotes more than ethnicity. As the term ethnos refers to a biosocial community endowed with the following characteristics: (i) common origin in terms of a genetic pool; (ii) occupies a remote territory or a geographically delimited space; (iii) exhibits actual economic interaction or is united by relations of production; (iv) practices endogamy, which is a defining element in an ethnos as it acts as stabilizer and “genetic barrier” and thus enables the development of traits specific to a given community; and (v) all the above are articulated around culture and everyday life (see Gellner 1980; Bromley and Kozlov 1989). The result of the encounter of Soviet anthropology and Soqotra is epitomized in the first ethnography of the islanders by Vitaly Naumkin (1993): Island of the Phoenix: An Ethnographic Study of the People of Socotra (see critique in Elie 2006: 151–156). The nature-prospecting incursions into the tropics during the period ranging from Antiquity, by way of the Medieval era, followed by the West’s colonization of the Rest from the fifteenth century onward, and the subsequent birth of modernity in the eighteenth century, resulted in the prevalence of an Edenic discourse reserved for places like Soqotra Island. As that discourse idealized the island as a totemic form that was embodied in an epistemology for the West’s physical interaction with, and symbolic

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appropriation of, the natural world especially in newly conquered territories in the tropics (see Grove 1995). This totemization of the island seemed to have crystallized into an “Arcadian epistemology,” according to which Soqotra was perceived as an exotic abode forever frozen in a paradisial state to be preserved as such. In effect, as an island, Soqotra became the pillar of an Orientalist imaginary that was used in the objectification of nature and otherness. This is epitomized in the more recent exogenous mediation through symbolic appropriation undertaken by the United Nations from the mid-1990s onward in pursuit of the implementation of a biodiversity conservation experiment, which is the subject of Chapters 6 and 7. The UN experiment is configured by a combination of the above discourses from the paradisial fantasies of Antiquity and the subsequent quixotic quest for the lost Eden, and the default environmentalism of the British period. These discourses were instrumentalized by the UN into a precautionary tale against development. The renewed interest in Soqotra at the dawn of the twenty-first century that is spearheaded by the UN is dedicated to rekindling the island’s power to mesmerize the new breed of heroes of the post-modern age, namely the biodiversity conservationists in their relentless pursuit of ecological capital preservation, and the ecotourists in their search for re-enchantment through visual consumption of nature. The defining characteristic of all these symbolic appropriations—then and now—is that of a power-based monologue about nature and otherness in Soqotra rather than in dialogue with its inhabitants. Indeed, such a dialogue was precluded by the reflexive recourse to instrumentalizing discursive practices that relied on exogenous idioms to understand local reality. The legacy of these external actors’ mediations as embodied in the UN-led conservation experiment is complemented by the political consolidation and cultural modernization of Soqotra Island under the aegis of the Yemeni state. The state’s role in Soqotra’s cultural modernization was characterized by the absence of a policy framework for the political and cultural integration of Soqotrans as an indigenous community within the national polity. Hence, it has consistently, and perhaps intentionally, not recognized their ethno-linguistic heritage. Indeed, the state seemed to expect Soqotrans to conform to the pluralism-averse foundational pillars of polity formation in the Arab region and their exclusionay ethnic and linguistic prerequisites: (a) to affirm their Arab identity through their allegiance to the secular idea of the pan-Arab nation (al-umma al-‘arabiyya); and (b) to prioritize the use of Arabic the language of the Qur’an as

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a virtuous marker of their membership in the global religious community of Islam (al-umma al-islamiyya). In the case of Soqotra’s environmental annexation, the Yemeni state played the role of an opportunistic broker of external interests through the adoption of an economic strategy that showcases Soqotra on the international stage as an environmentally unique sub-national entity. The chapters in this book will explore the cultural and environmental mediations and the communal ramifications of a range of contemporary Trojan forces as externally introduced vectors of transformation encompassing the communal, national, regional diaspora and the global.

Contemporary Trojan Forces: Cultural and Environmental Mediations At the dawn of the twenty-first century, a new set of Trojan forces were introduced as exogenous mediations in the aftermath of Soqotra’s rediscovery during the period of the global conservation enclosure movement catalyzed by the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. These new Trojan forces of national and international origins are manifested in two catalytic processes—cultural modernization and environmental annexation—that are driving Soqotra’s transformation. These two processes have spawn a series of exogenous mediations that have intensified and expanded Soqotra’s subordination to external actors through a broad range of domains: societal visions, development models, management templates, environmental values, conservation priorities, collective agencies, cultural practices, leisure activities, economic aspirations, political regimes, polity configurations, civil society organizations, language preferences, institutional apparatuses, communal governance modalities, livelihood choices, among others. As in the first volume, the chapters in this book will inventory the nature of the “recursive relationship” between the national and international agents who have introduced the vectors of transitional transformation, and their multiple effects on, and the varied repertoire of responses from, Soqotran community members. Accordingly, the chapters will address the fieldwork-generated themes that emerged from this recursive relationship and its ramifications in terms of the Trojan forces engendered by cultural modernization and environmental annexation. These forces encompass the following domains: (a) the intensification of the

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urbanization process in one town as the incubator of the cultural modernization process that is increasingly digitally mediated; (b) the emergence of a politically fraught and complex linguistic ecology on the island in which Soqotri, the mother tongue, is competing for the allegiance of its native speakers with Arabic (promoted by the state) and English (sponsored by international agencies); (c) the adoption of a consumption practice of a narcotic plant as a leisure activity that became the singular object of commodity fetishism on a national scale, which has ensnared a majority of the national polity into a sociocultural panopticon with largely negative societal consequences; (d) the state politics-mediated pietization of the communal public sphere that is producing, among other effects, an ethical dilemma in terms of Soqotrans’ commitment to the “ethic of selfpreparation” for the afterlife or to an “ethic of self-improvement” for the present life; and (e) the modernization of the economy through its sectoral diversification and proliferation of economic actors that is engendering a clash of livelihood choices between two competing sectors: a trade and consumption-oriented sector vs. a biodiversity conservation and eco-development sector. These themes are “translated” into the research topics that are addressed in the pertinent chapters as follows: The gradual emergence of a provincial town into a modernizing hub for a mosaic population (Chapter 1); dilemmas of loyalty among Soqotrans toward their ethnolinguistic heritage as a contingent effect of the state politics of “cultural protectionism” that privileges the Arabic language and Arab ethnicity (Chapter 2); new modes of leisure as consumption practices (especially q¯at chewing) from the cultural mimicry of mainland migrants that generate endemic local cultural alienation (Chapter 3); shifting communal religious practices and identities partly produced by state mediation and by mainland proselytizing groups (Chapter 4); embryonic social differentiation engendered by a new urban consumer economy brokered by mainland migrants, and complemented by the availability of the Gulf diaspora’s remittances, and limited access to the new tourism sector (Chapter 5); and biodiversity conservation as a default economic strategy opportunistically adopted by the Yemeni state that allowed international environmental protection agencies to locally reproduce an imported eco-centric development blueprint (Chapters 6 and 7). In effect, these Trojan forces unsettled the nature of relations between individual members and the communal collectivity, and between the latter and the Yemeni state among other external actors. The emerging

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consequences include the following: changing the bases of social solidarity, fragilizing the commitment to traditional cultural practices, diversifying economic vocation and social aspirations, corroding the sentiment of communal belongingness, privileging diasporic attachment, and undermining political fealty to the Yemeni nation-state.

Methodological Reprise: Theoretical Framing and Self-Disclosure This volume continues with the exemplification of the application of the mesographic approach to the total study of a community. Chapter 1 of the first volume provided a detailed overview of what the practice of mesography entailed. In this section, I will briefly (a) define mesography and its key methodological procedures; (b) restate my qualms with the prevailing tendency to invoke travelling theories, especially neoliberalism, as interpretive framework; and (c) explain the professional background that informed my research sensibility. Mesography: A Recapitulation Mesography is the methodological articulation of a post-exotic anthropology, which provides a model for the anthropological study of social formations anywhere based on the following research, analytical, and expository procedures: (i) a historical biography through a multi-temporal chronological mapping of a social formation’s change trajectory; (ii) a structural anatomy through a multi-scalar analytical excavation of a social formation’s key constitutive aspects (e.g., political, cultural, economic, and environmental); (iii) a lexical genealogy of a community’s social taxonomy that categorizes its major sociocultural practices and imparts the local meanings that inform communal life; (iv) a strategic inventory of the network of actors and factors that generate the vectors of communal change; and (v) a processual analysis that articulates the above within a relational matrix encompassing variously situated actors, trans/local institutions and catalyzing events in a miscellany of sites inside and outside the social formation being investigated. Furthermore, the information collected from these research procedures are presented through an expository strategy that evokes the metaphor of peeling away the multiple layers of an onion. This analytical peeling process is done through a thoroughly contextualized and meticulously explanatory narrative, which eschews

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ethnography’s travelling theory-informed inventive interpretation of local communities. Moreover, this expository strategy entails the systematic dissection of the multilayered imbrication of communal social reality within the multi-scales structuring processes of Soqotra’s complex transitional transformation that is co-produced by a motley of local, national and international actors. These procedures are complemented by a mesography-informed fieldwork that requires its practitioners’ adoption of a research imagination animated by a commitment to empirical social learning through a heuristic quest for the drivers of change in the social formation under study. This quest takes its cues from the prior historical process, and current realities as shaped by the mediating and structuring effects of the gauntlet of national and international institutions and their policy regimes. Accordingly, it foregrounds the institution-mediated agency of research subjects and the power-structured historicity of the communal context. Moreover, a mesographic approach to anthropological research is conceived as a non-positivist social science in which there is no hypothesis testing (which usually leads to the search for its confirmation and precludes an open-ended research process), no correlation of variables in search for underlying constants to social reality, no predictive pretension regarding the outcomes of social processes. Also, it abandons the de-temporalizing analytical convention of the “ethnographic present” in order to straddle the past, present, and future. Mesography uses a transversal perspective that connects multiple historical periods and analytical foci to produce a history-embedded and institution-mediated explanatory narrative about the formation of a social collectivity into a communal polity. And it situates the research domain within its historical context, anatomizes the macro-structural processes engendered by the state and international agencies, in order to elucidate their effects on meso societal structures such as local institutions, and on the micro-lifeworlds of community members such as their agency, practices, and aspirations. Most importantly, mesography rejects West-stream ethnography’s chronic reliance on data colonialism, in which fieldwork domains serve exclusively as reservoirs of data extraction and the knowledge produced from this data is not shared with those from whom it was extracted. In contrast, mesography embraces a data reciprocity ethos that insists on using field data to produce knowledge as resources for the mutual emancipatory aspirations of both researchers and research subjects.

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The analytical priority in the application of the above procedures is not to reduce communities of research subjects into premature objects of comparison, which is a fetish of West-stream anthropology mired in contradictions (see Candea 2018). This fetish is not only a conduit for extending the applicability of travelling theories as the handmaiden of a putative universalism driven by an Occidental cosmopolitanism, but also an archaic principle of scientism according to which comparison is an essential means of scholarship to demonstrate the significance of local research findings. The fact is that West-stream anthropology has yet to establish its practice on a non-ethnocentric comparative standpoint to articulate the relationality between “the diversity of human populations [and their divergent sociocultural formations] and the unity of the human race” (Todorov 1993: xi). Therefore, it is still in the throes of the tedious conundrum of universalism vs. relativism, which has preoccupied Western philosophy since the seventeenth-century Enlightenment as a direct consequence of the rise of slavery and colonialism in the aftermath of the fifteenth-century “Age of Invasion,” and remains an epistemological dilemma in the Eurocentric practice of the human sciences. (see Todorov 1993; Kapferer and Theodossopoulos 2016) A post-exotic anthropology spurns this intellectual heritage along with its heirs’ delusion about sustaining the discipline’s relevance only through grafting theories and concepts from Western intellectual traditions. In contrast, the analytic priority of a mesographic approach is to value peoples and their communities as subjects of understanding and to convey that understanding without the mediation of travelling theories and their alienating epistemological preoccupations. The point is that the key to understand a community of research subjects is contained within it through: (a) developing an awareness of its historical background; (b) pursuing systematic observations of its contemporary life; (c) engaging in meticulously comprehensive description of the vectors of change and their effects, which are the bases of theory formation; and (d) producing an integrated explanation in a synoptic account of the community’s trajectory of emergence, its current predicaments, and evolving mediations of its process of change. Moreover, mesograhy abandons ethnography’s pursuit of over-theorized “thin descriptions” that confine their utility to spectatorial cultural critique for an exclusively academic audience. Instead, mesography pursues an emancipatory understanding through the production of actionable knowledge as input to public policy-making. Ultimately, mesography is a praxis of inquiry that is only tangentially dependent on

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biography, necessarily reliant on history, and intellectually accountable to an inclusive community of local audiences and external researchers and readers. Theoretical Framing: Post-Neoliberalism Turn The two mechanisms of social transformation discussed in this book— cultural modernization and environmental annexation—are the most susceptible to appropriation by social scientists under the rubric of neoliberalism. This is due to the prevailing false presumption that the political economy of neoliberalism and its enabling cultural regime of Occidental cosmopolitanism (discussed in the first volume) are the preeminent driving forces of societies around the globe. As such they are presumed to exercise a determining influence on the fate of individual lives, the transformation of communities and the emerging trends in national social formations everywhere. This false presumption is due to the non-recognition of globalization’s paradoxical double movement: On the one hand, there is convergence at the macro-level as manifested in the surficial homogeneity of urban landscapes across the world’s civilizational clusters with skyscrapers, shopping malls, and stock markets, and on the other, there is divergence at the micro/meso levels within these civilizational clusters, where one finds a plethora of communal lifeworlds embedded within a profusion of incommensurable sociocultural practices and political systems bequeathed by their particular historical trajectory and sustained by economic success and the corollary confidence of their inhabitants to reclaim prior civilizational inheritances along with their distinctive value repertoires. This paradox is epitomized in the fact that globalization aspired to being a world homogenizing process but produced a heterogenizing outcome in the form of a plethora of heteromorphic social formations around the world. My use of the term “exogenous mediation” recognizes this paradox and thus does not share the above presumption. Accordingly, I investigate the role of external actors without assuming a priori their determining influence over local reality. In fact, Soqotra’s cultural modernization is bounded within a communal-national-regional pan-Arab cultural nexus with negligible impact from the forces of neoliberalism and Occidental cosmopolitanism. In the case of its environmental annexation, Soqotra lacks the environmental assets that would attract the interests of major corporate players and their “neo-liberalizing” practices. Indeed, none has

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yet to engage in bioprospecting on the island. Even the World Bank has shown little interest in initiating an “investment” project. Soqotra’s encounter with market-mediated biodiversity conservation was inaugurated by the GEF, which brought alone its implementing agencies (the UNDP and UNEP) and their stable of consultants and supporting bilateral donors (e.g., Italy, The Netherlands, among others). From 1996 onwards, the UN agencies have remained the main drivers of Soqotra’s conservation experiment. Subsequently, these agencies were complemented by a multitude of European scientific institutes and university departments, the contemporary heirs of Wellsted 1835 mission to Soqotra, which have funded various research activities. Collectively, they represented the minor proxies of the absentee neoliberal corporate sector, as they have professed an interest in using Soqotra as an experimental laboratory for saving nature through the market. In 2001, members of these research institutes, university associated researchers and former consultants of UN projects, have assembled into an international NGO called Friends of Soqotra (FoS), which has gradually evolved into an epistemic community that produces knowledge supportive of the GEF-UN enclosure of Soqotra (see Chapter 6). The absence of the neoliberal corporate sector in Soqotra was filled by the GEF, which inaugurated Soqotra’s environmental conservation experiment. The GEF is the neoliberal corporate sector’s philanthropic proxy as it is a grant-giving agency and not a loan-dispensing one. The emergence of the GEF as the lead institution in global environmental governance through its funding activities of the implementation of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) signaled a new conjuncture in the operational modality of neoliberalism. McAfee’s foresight in characterizing the adoption of the CBD as heralding the emergence of “a new ‘global’ discourse, a postneoliberal environmental-economic paradigm”— a “green developmentalism”—offering “a panplanetary metric for valuing and prioritizing natural resources” is now fully operational in the UN’s “green economy” policy paradigm (1999: 133–134). This paradigm promotes a synergy between competing discourses through the recalibration of capital-ecology relations that anticipates the global circulation of new travelling environmental policy projects with uncertain consequences for recipient countries and their populations. This consolidating “green economy” paradigm, which is sponsored by the UN (UNEP 2011) along with multilateral agencies (World Bank 2012) and western donors’ bilateral government agencies, reflects the

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discursive annexation of the formerly oppositional discourse of environmentalism within the matrix of neoliberalism. Consequently, the term “neoliberalism” has become an oxymoron as there is nothing “liberal” about its operational modality, which generates illiberal effects that were once associated with imperialism. Hence my recourse to the concept of “post-liberal environmentalism” (PLE), which captures the de facto abandonment of the fiction of the market as the guarantor of economic liberty and freedom of choice as these are denied to civil and state actors in the domain of environmental policy. Indeed, PLE illustrates this denial, as it entails the establishment of an epistemic hegemony over global environmental policy-making, the constitution of an institutional monopoly over the dissemination and implementation of environmental policy on a global scale, and the formation of a political-economic oligarchy among a cartel of state and corporate actors as agenda-setters and funders of this institutional monopoly and hegemonic policy regime. Moreover, PLE’s economic oligarchy-enforcing institutional setup has appropriated the traditional vices of liberal economics as the indispensable tenets of its market zealotry: the permanent growth imperative, an asymmetric transactional ethos, and the extractive logic of profitability in the formulation and implementation of conservation policies (see Bernstein 2002). In light of the above, to invoke neoliberalism as a theoretical explanation of the connections between environmental policy and the prevailing extractive global political economy, is to fail to recognize that economic (neo-) liberalism and mainstream environmentalism are no longer separate discourses. Indeed, the current conjuncture is characterized by the consolidation of a global environmental governance and its epistemic regime into a cartel of UN agencies, major environmental NGOs, regional banks, southern recipient and northern donor states and their sponsored research institutes within a financial-scientific-political network to promote the green economy as a hegemonic political economy of global environmental conservation and economic development (see Chapter 6). Paradoxically, the UN and its constellation of (51) agencies are the cheerleading protagonists of this global political ecology of development inaugurated by the Rio+20 Conference in June 2012 (see UNEMG 2011, 2017). Indeed, the UN system has willingly conscripted itself into the service of global corporate interests through the euphemistic “multi-stakeholders partnerships” as exemplified in the “UN Global Compact” that confers the UN stamp of approval on the dubious “sustainability practices” of global corporations (see Friends of the Earth International 2012).

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The absence of neoliberalism’s corporate protagonists in Soqotra’s environmental annexation informs my refusal to invoke the conceptual morass of neoliberalism with its “ungainly diversity of meanings” (Dunn 2016), which is generating calls for a “post-neoliberalism turn” (Venugopal 2015). Thus I avoid participating in the pedantic theoretical and definitional debates about its environmental ramifications as implied in the trendy neologism of fading taxonomic relevance: “neo-liberalization of nature.” As Brockington and Duffy noted, neoliberalism “is a fundamentally uneven project… It is applied with differential rigour across space, and often in direct conflict with its ideological precepts” (2011a, b: 12). Consequently, not every place ended up as neoliberalism’s neocolony, and thus not every restructuring of nature-society relations was produced by capitalism’s neoliberal phase. Indeed, as I show in Chapter 6, there were a number of shifts in community-nature relations in Soqotra produced in previous historical conjunctures of the Yemeni state’s political economy. Therefore, I avoid the prevailing norm of theory formation, which entails the inference of social reality from travelling theorymediated analysis of field data. This conventional theory framing is contextualized through the occasionally useful but ultimately perfunctory practice of “literature review”: The mere listing of a series of key terms or phrases, each followed by a string of reference in parenthesis that is supposed to showcase the author’s scholarly breadth and comparative scope. In contrast to these sophomoric practices, I situate myself within the interstitial space between travelling theoretical texts and a particular social context, letting the latter determine the relevance, if any, of the former. Accordingly, I perform a structural anatomy of the constitution of a locally emergent social reality through a transversal mode of descriptive analysis that ranges from global vectors, by way of international actors, national mediators, communal collaborators and the multiple effects on the Soqotran community as a collectivity. This enables me to elucidate the empirical specificities of environmental conservation within a particular local context without premature recourse to the prevailing travelling theories. Lastly, given the consequential nature of the two processes discussed in this book—cultural and environmental annexation—on the Soqotran community’s fate, my theoretical framing practice is pursued through detailed explanatory descriptions of the vectors of change, an inventory of the multiple local effects and a survey of the communal responses engendered by these two processes. Accordingly, my recourse

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to theory spurns its prevailing use as a tool to exhibit the anthropologist’s interpretive virtuosity through the instrumentalization of research subjects’ predicaments as mere data to be experimented with. Self-Disclosure: Experience-Induced Research Sensibility After a decade-long cathexis with development at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), I was seeking intellectual distance, indeed rupture with, as well as physical disengagement from, its corporate milieu. I spent my time at the UNDP as a critical consumer, substitute producer and wary disseminator of consultant reports purporting to provide advice to governments on development strategy. Also, I acted as the executor of my employer’s corporate policy articulated more to attract donor funding than to address developing countries’ symptoms, not the causes, of their underdevelopment. I was part of an organizational universe whose very existence was contingent on sustaining its responsiveness to the changing whims of Western states’ aid agencies that were subservient to their corporate sectors’ global economic interests. This explains the semantic versatility of development policy pronouncements and their instrumentalization within a framework of donor-expert hegemony. Consequently, I decided to migrate from development to anthropology, which are the two discursive heterologies—that is a field of study or domain of practice that is saddled with semantic deception and mission failure as it does not actually perform its assigned functions or fulfill its mandated objectives—that are specifically designed to study and/or to improve the lives of subalterns in the Global South. These two discourses have exercised an epistemological duopoly over the production of knowledge about the Global South. This change of vocation was partly to renew my shaken faith in the ultimate feasibility of the travelling regime of development as an altruistic endeavor. This quest led to my repositioning from being an active participant within a global development agency to assuming an externally situated observer mode in situ to investigate its modality of operation. Accordingly, as I performed the initiatory rite of fieldwork, my primary motivation was not an opportunistic encounter with “natives” in order to fulfill a degree requirement in anthropology, but more about trying another form of engagement with the conscripts of development and anthropology from a standpoint that was unmediated by the UN’s diplomatic protocols or by the discipline’s theology of otherness.

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My engagement with Soqotra preceded my fieldwork by half a decade. As it began soon after I arrived at Yemen’s UNDP office in Sana‘a’ in May 1996 to assume my responsibilities as Sr. Assistant Resident Representative for the next four years. In November, I led a team on a field visit to Soqotra that included two architects who came to measure the land allotted by the Yemeni government for the establishment of the office that would house the GEF project. Until I left UNDP in December 2000, I was involved in, or was aware of, all activities related to Soqotra. Subsequently, Soqotra was the site of my dissertation fieldwork from February 2002 onwards. During the duration of my initial fieldwork, the island was teeming with expatriate consultants of European and Arab provenance (see Chapter 1). Their presence in relatively large numbers lasted until 2008, which marks the end of the third phase of the GEF-UN conservation experiment when related activities were scaled down in the aftermath of Soqotra’s designation as a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site (see Chapter 7). They were associated with a plethora of “development” and “conservation” projects that were funded by UN agencies and foreign NGOs dedicated to assisting “the people of Soqotra.” Predictably, as heterological discourses, the beneficiaries of the global travelling policy regime of development and conservation followed a hierarchy: First came the international staff of UN agencies’ or NGOs’ projects, followed by ministerial bureaucrats, then project staff hired from local communities, and finally the local population as incidental, not as the principal, beneficiaries. Therefore, only a few local individuals benefitted from such projects, and never “the people of Soqotra” as a collectivity—as I show in Chapters 6 and 7. I had a strategic vantage point from which to survey the activities related to the GEF-UN conservation-development experiment, as I was allocated a desk in the project office for nearly two years while researching and writing up my notes. However, my presence was not unanimously welcomed, as the Sana‘a’-based GEF project director was concerned about the ramifications of my research. Moreover, given my status as a former UN staff, I was perceived as being “too critical” and he instructed the project staff not to collaborate with me. Fortunately, the directive was not heeded, at least not entirely, as there remained a pervasive suspicion about my motives: Was I surreptitiously evaluating the project, which could undermine reputation and jeopardize jobs? Nevertheless, sitting in the project’s office was a strategic location, as I got to know, and regularly interacted with, all of the GEF-UN project staff and met most of

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the consultants and went along on multiple visits to project activities around the island. Also, I visited frequently other NGOs’ offices and their projects. Furthermore, I met and conversed regularly with all relevant local government officers. In addition, I read all of the projects-related documents, consulted the relevant policy literature of UN agencies. These activities were complemented by my extensive travel throughout the island by car and on foot to conduct my own improvised demographic and residential survey and to catalogue the regional divergences of rural life. After completing my initial fieldwork, I returned for many field visits of various duration (from three weeks to three months) until 2014. Since then I have kept in touch with my local interlocutors electronically. In sum, I observed the evolution of all of the different phases of UN conservation projects’ activities over a period of two decades. A caveat is apropos here: My decade-long experience as a development worker at the UNDP in four countries left me with a deep skepticism toward the promises of UN agency-led initiatives. Indeed, my experience with the UN-brokered implementation of “development” was not encouraging. As the pursuit of development in the Global South is chronically hampered by the following norms: (1) local development objectives are driven by UN agencies’ corporate policies that cater to donors’ interests in order to ensure funding for their institutional sustainability as disseminators of the illiberal order-sustaining hegemonic policy regimes; (2) UN-sponsored development entails the promotion of social, economic, and political regime change through the transfer and local parody of an imported societal model, which is the root cause of its chronic failure; (3) project formulation and implementation relies excessively on short-term expatriate consultants animated by a selfserving and opportunistic disposition, if not a mercenary ethos, that is partly induced by development’s “gig economy” recruitment model; (4) decision-making about projects are routinely top-down between government ministers and UN agency staff in the capital city; and (5) project formulation missions are of short duration (an average of 7–10 days in the field), which leads to the duplicitous practice of superficial localization of agency templates for sector specific projects. I can sum up what I have learned from my ten years’ experience as a UNDP development professional as follows: The UN and World Bank sponsored supervisory regime of “international development” merely promotes a dependency-inducing politics of incremental meliorism for the Global South. As such, it generates the endemic syndrome of “sustainable

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underdevelopment” wherever it is imposed. This is partly because it is managed by these international agencies’ commando units of consultants and their associated NGOs. Their parachutist interventions to promote development seek merely “to enhance demand for their services, locate reliable subcontractors, improve their product line, and demonstrate both a modicum of success and the need for another contract” (Carapico 2002: 385). This venal practice leads to the expedient introduction of inappropriate external drivers of change that generate perverse internal processes. This is exemplified in the “isomorphic mimicry” syndrome, which entails the external transfer and local adoption of organizational forms, procedural norms, “development” and “conservation” models that represent “global best practices,” but are contextually and culturally unsuited (see Pritchett et al. 2010). These “global best practices” promote a regime of belief in the universality of a mono-culturally defined value configuration about the ideal social order and its redemptive governance modality that are conceived as the “transcendental cultural logics” of our age. These “cultural logics” are too often appended to liberal imperialism’s agenda and serve as the morally prescriptive and culturally ascriptive thematic entry points into social formations of the Global South. To illustrate their perverse impacts in Yemen, I briefly allude to two examples: First, the IMF and World Bank’s economic liberalization measures introduced in 1995 led to crony capitalism based on a corrupt economic sovereignty protection strategy by an elite cabal and not to a liberal market economy (Lackner 2017; Blumi 2018). Second, civil society organizations were co-opted by the UN agencies and Western governments’ aid agencies into mere sub-contractors for their political liberalization schemes and development projects. This led to their local perception as foreign-funded agents that undermined their political legitimacy in the public sphere, and prevented their institutional consolidation into genuine civil society actors (Elie 2018). In truth, the adoption of these “best practices” serves primarily to justify the continued support of donors who are ultimately indifferent as to whether or not they are integrated within the institutions of the recipient country. Similarly, in the case of Soqotra, an externally imposed set of “best practices” engendered the chronic condition of “sustainable underdevelopment” through a locally maladapted and essentially premature “environmental adjustment regime” that I discuss in Chapter 7. In spite of the consistent failure of the hegemonic travelling policy regimes associated with these global best practices, they are still being

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promoted in the Global South. This is because of an entrenched structural contradiction at the core of the UN system. As its current organizational setup and mode of operation have remained subservient to an increasingly fragile, but still prevalent, Euro-American hegemony-sustaining global geopolitics. This subservience has preserved the UN as the institutional progeny of the trusteeship system of the colonial era, which employed an “oversight regime that would guarantee the ‘wellbeing and development’ of colonised peoples while keeping them in imperial hands” (Pedersen 2016: 23). Consequently, most, if not all, UN-sponsored international regimes and their network of supranational bureaucracies encompassing North-South relations (e.g., development aid, democracy promotion, environmental protection, international trade, etc.) have reproduced, perhaps unwittingly, the intention of “keeping them in imperial hands.” These regimes have been instrumentalized by the reigning, but declining, global hegemon (USA), former colonial powers (European states) and by transnational corporations and their institutional proxies (e.g., UN agencies, Western governments’ aid agencies and international NGOs) to deceptively claim the mantle of global philanthropy dedicated to saving the planet and eliminating poverty with predictably and consistently disappointing results. Beyond these institutional impediments, the chronic failure of the development regime is further exacerbated by its entanglement within two intrinsically contradictory motives: First, it is a morally expiatory reparation scheme for centuries of colonial kleptocracy based on human enslavement and environmental resource extraction in the Global South. Second, and ultimately, it is a political containment strategy, which sustains economic dependency, encourages value assimilation and promotes an impossible societal cloning of recipient countries through donor countries’ self-serving foreign aid conditionalities. In sum, “development” in its institutional, conceptual and practical manifestations has never emancipated itself from its Cold War purpose as the enabling ideological tool for competing global hegemons (Lorenzini 2019). Alas, Soqotra’s experience with the GEF-inspired conservation regime seems to be replicating the failure-laden path of the UN-brokered “sustainable underdevelopment” regime. Beyond my experience-induced premonition about this conservation experiment eventual lack of success, the policy documents of the participating UN agencies betrayed why failure was inevitable, and the evaluation reports of the conservation projects confirmed it, as I show in this book. However, I do not engage in a gratuitous and spectatorial critique of this experiment’s failure, as

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anthropologists tend to relish. Instead, I empirically show how and painstakingly explain why it failed, and suggest exit strategies from the failure-laden path chosen by the formulators and implementers of this conservation-development experiment.

Book Contents: Outline of Chapters The chapters in this book situate Soqotra’s transitional transformation process within a continuum of exogenous mediations that encompass simultaneously the communal, national, regional, and global vectors. These vectors are aggregated under two mechanisms: The first effectuates Soqotra’s national integration through a state-mediated cultural modernizationprocess, and the second promotes its global encapsulation through the GEF-UN sponsored environmental annexation. Accordingly, the chapters are organized under two parts that explore the communal ramifications of these two processes. First, however, Chapter 1 situates these national and global vectors of communal transition within the deepening urbanization process and the resulting mediation of local lifestyles through the spread of a modern media landscape as enabling factors. Part I and its four chapters address Soqotrans’ predicaments in accommodating the exigencies of an urban-based process of national integrationand cultural modernization. Chapter 2 surveys Soqotrans’ dilemmas of loyalty to their mother tongue due to the state’s deliberate nonrecognition of their ethno-linguistic heritage. Chapter 3 examines the multiple ramifications of the local diffusion of the mainland hegemonic national cultural pastime, q¯at consumption. Chapter 4 recounts the statemediated trajectory of religious practices and the changes in the islanders’ Muslim identity. Chapter 5 describes the emergent urban-led modern economy and the types of economic activities engendered by the participation of mainland economic actors, the increasing economic importance of the Arabian Gulf diaspora and the potential effects of the UAE’s presence on the island. Part II contains two chapters that explore Soqotra’s incorporation into a global biodiversity conservation regime under the theme of environmental annexation of the island’s ecological endowments. These two chapters provide the first comprehensive assessment of a twenty-year span of the implementation of the GEF-UN sponsored biodiversity conservation experiment in Soqotra. Chapter 6 offers a narrative reconstruction of the multiple dimensions of the formulation process of a conservation

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experiment that inaugurated Soqotra’s incorporation into an externally managed environmental adjustment regime. Chapter 7 performs a biography of the actual implementation process of this environmental adjustment regime through a systematic and critical review of the five main conservation projects. The book concludes by highlighting Soqotra’s entanglement in a permanent transition process toward an uncertain destination as it is subordinated to the symbolic appropriation and political annexation of external actors. Also, it returns to the overarching theme of this total community study of Soqotra, namely the challenges facing the practice of anthropology in the post-exotic conjuncture by recapping the diagnosis of the related problems and offering a prognosis of their potential solutions.

CHAPTER 1

Mediated Urbanization: Hadiboh as an Emergent Translocality

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.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume II, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45646-7_1

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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 nationstate; (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

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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.

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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-s¯ uq, which constitutes the only market place for the entire island. This s¯uq 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-ma¯ıs¯ ur¯ın (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. 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

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Fig. 1.1 Partial view of Hadiboh town

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 h.¯ ara (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 nationbuilding itineraries. Simultaneously, it heralded the inclusion of Soqotra

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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). 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

Fig. 1.2 Shaykh Khalifa Bin Zayed Hospital in Hadiboh

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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 q¯at 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

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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 deprovincialization 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 home-centredness, and have developed into a culturally promiscuous life, drawing on diverse ideas, traditions and innovations. (Zubaida 1999: 15)

This is leading to Soqotrans’ cultural incorporation into an urbancentered sociocultural reproduction process separated from the formerly dominant and rural-anchored pastoralist lifestyle. The result is the sundering of the Soqotran community into two different types of locality with divergent commitment to cultural heritage: The first is an “enclave locality” at the level of cluster of villages in the hinterland, which continues to be the repository of strong community identification with traditional cultural endowments (i.e., language and livelihood practices), facilitated by their relative access deficit to modern amenities. The second is a “transient locality” in the urbanizing spaces on the northern coast, which are characterized by eroding commitment to communal cultural traditions, and where communally shared values no longer regulate social interactions.

1.3

Vicarious Participation: Cultural Pan-Arabism

This de-provincializing process is increasingly manifested in a digitally mediated sociocultural imagination that articulates multiple levels of vicarious dwelling and situationally contingent participation within social

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frameworks straddling the local, communal, national, diasporic, and the pan-regional. This social imagination is being generated by the emulative effects of satellite television, the cultural mediation of the Internet, by travel to and from the mainland and Arabian Gulf, study tours in the West and elsewhere, cultural contacts with tourists, economic empowerment from tourism and from the Gulf diaspora’s remittances. The vectors of change animating the emergence of this “transient locality” cannot be credited to the effects of neoliberalism, which is reflexively and prematurely invoked as the explanatory mantra for all types of social changes in today’s world. In reality, Soqotrans are not inmates of the imagined global panopticon of neoliberalism’s Westernizing cultural imperialism. In fact, the main source of influence on Soqotrans’ emergence as vicarious participants in modernity was primarily through a cultural pan-Arabism. The latter is a region-wide Arabo-Islamic civilizational ecumene, which is symbolized by the pan-regional Arab Nation (al-umma al-‘arabiyya) and the supra-national Muslim Community (al-umma al-isl¯ amiyya). This civilizational ecumene encompasses a shared supranational history along contiguous territories and common societal matrices, corporate political ideologies, religious cosmology articulated within an Arabic Koiné, and a genealogy-embedded ethnocultural ontology. Collectively, these aspects constitute a regional universe of a shared ensemble of sartorial accessories, social demeanors, linguistic conventions among other cultural practices that have sedimented into an indelible nexus of geographyethnicity-religion-language, which is embodied in collective memories, if not nostalgia, about past achievements and urgent longings about future possibilities. The main mechanism of diffusion of this Arabo-Islamic civilizational ecumene was initially through mainland-island migration (of teachers and preachers) that was subsequently complemented by a troika of cultural technologies of connectivity: television, Internet, and smart phones with their panoply of social media apps. Increasing access to these three types of media has engendered Soqotrans’ virtual leapfrogging of their geographical isolation and offered them externally referenced alternative lifestyles. Moreover, they have expanded Soqotrans’ imaginative horizon through their participation in an emergent mode of television-mediated urban sociality that is complemented by a social media-facilitated connectivity across a homeland-diaspora public sphere. They are becoming the new urban “institutions of conversation” (Mazarrella 2004), which are complementing face-to-face contact as the once sole means of information

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sharing and socializing. Consequently, they are engendering a gradual mutation in Soqotrans’ social imagination, as they break down their insular disposition toward the world, but also complicate intra-communal relations. While access to these media is a mostly urban phenomenon, they differ in terms of the nature of the social space they occupy. There are two dimensions along which they can be differentiated: the above-ground, publicly available, and mainstream discourse of television watching versus the underground (literally) selectively accessible, and potentially subversive discourse of the Internet. What follows are observations based on my ambulant participation in the experience of public television watching at the different TV cafés, Internet surfing of specifically Soqotran websites, and talking to Soqotran users of these media. The first section identifies the principal effects of the television’s mediation of urban Soqotrans’ lives. And the second section discusses the indispensability of the Internet and the increasing use of social media and their local functions and effects. 1.3.1

TV Cafés: Entertainment Gateway and Civic Forum

The inaugural catalyst to the emergence of Hadiboh as the island’s deprovincializing incubator was the television set located in the TV cafés (called k¯ aft¯ıriy¯ a in Arabic) operated by mainlanders initially for the benefit of their fellow migrants. Their emergence coincided with the migration of mainlanders after the civil war of 1994 when contingents of soldiers came to take over the island from the previous socialist regime. These soldiers were followed by civilians who gradually built Hadiboh into a market town. These cafés are the local replication of the ubiquitous tea shops on the mainland that sell tea, juices, and sandwiches. The local innovation is the addition of the television as the main attraction, which is always on and centrally located with volume in full blast. Until the early 2000s, there were many tea shops but only a couple of TV cafés. Subsequently, existing tea shops and all new ones became TV cafés. This was due to the availability of new technology after 2001, before that date only Arabsat was available, and it necessitated a massive and costly dish while it offered about twenty channels. The main attraction at the time was the Bollywood movies in Hindi with Arabic subtitle shown on the Arabian Gulf countries’ channels. Subsequently, Nilesat became available and it required a small dish of a meter in diameter, and offered over a hundred channels. This led to price reduction, ease of transportation, and installation. In these TV cafés, the television became, by default, an instrument

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for the experimental incubation of virtual consumers and avid voyeurs of the external world. In effect, the television filled a vacuum created by the dearth of alternative means of information dissemination (newspapers, magazines, and books) for which demand was limited by the relatively small segment of the educated population. As none of the newspapers available on the mainland were sold in any of the few stationary stores in Hadiboh, and their local availability depends on travelers bringing copies upon their return from the mainland. The pioneering role of television and its continuing primacy as a cultural technology is partly due to the minimal competency prerequisites for watching it: low to no level of literacy, just the ability to understand spoken Arabic (which is the case with the majority of Soqotrans). Also, there is a natural affinity between a predominantly oral culture and the virtual reality of television, as they both traffic in sounds and sights as their essential currency. The TV cafés catered to an emergent need for entertainment especially among those who inhabit the hinterland, as they offered a sanctuary for the occasional relief from the monotony of their daily existence, and from their chronic isolation from the larger world. These cafés, in effect, contributed to the foundation of a communal public sphere, as they facilitated heterogeneous contact between urban residents and visitors from the hinterland through conversation and television watching by means of the convivial ritual of loitering around the main areas of the town where the TV cafés and restaurants are located. In effect, they are instantiations of the “socio-cultural microcosm” which articulates “the transnational, the national, the local and the personal” (Abu-Lughod 2005: 52). They cater to an island-wide audience, as they are the obligatory resting stops for the mountain-dwelling “Bedouins,” the fishermen from the southern coast or more generally inhabitants from the hinterland. Visiting Hadiboh is a regular, if not compulsory, activity for inhabitants around the island, as it is the main distribution center for all goods, the location of the only hospital, the only court, and of all the main government offices. As such, the TV café is the ideal milieu for people to update themselves on the news of the island and elsewhere. In this way, these cafés serve as relay stations, reverberating the images and echoes of the outside world to the island’s hinterland. However, the absence of television has not deprived the hinterland of contact with the outside world. The short wave radio is the hinterland’s substitute for television, as I found on numerous occasions. One notable example is the case

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of an illiterate pastoralist who memorized parts of the Qur’an from assiduous listening sessions to radio broadcasts from Saudi Arabia so that he can lead prayers in his village. These TV cafés are the main and exclusively male socializing venues, which are enabling the emergence of a new urban sociability, as they facilitate interactions between urban residents and visitors from the hinterland through conversation and collective television watching. However, while women do not participate in such public setting, they seem to have their own schedule. As the poet al-Rijdihi put it: “one day a week she goes to a ‘religious discussion group’, / and another day a week she goes visiting and gossiping” (Morris 2005), in addition to watching television at home. While these TV cafés cater to everyone, there are differences among the clientele according to the location of the cafés. For example, some cafés cater to a regular clientele made up of neighborhood friends who meet there in the evening to watch specific programmes such as wrestling. Others seem to be frequented mostly by visitors from the hinterland and Hadiboh residents without television in their homes, as they have rows of benches facing the television set. And other cafés, especially among those located on the sidewalk of the only asphalted road trunk in the town called sh¯ ar‘a ‘ishr¯ın (Street Twenty), seem to attract the educated youth, members of the local political class, and businessmen. Noteworthy, is that just as the pastoralists in the hinterland have a schedule for herding their animal herds, Hadiboh’s male residents seem to have one for socializing at the TV cafés. For them, however, the television is merely background noise as they already have one at home, and are more interested in animated conversation about national, regional, and global politics. This TV café-enabled socializing is synchronized with prayer time, which begins after the ‘as.r prayer (3:30 p.m.) once the sun is on its setting path, until about 9 p.m., punctuated by the maghrib prayer (6 p.m.) and the ‘ash¯ a’ prayer (7:30 p.m.). During these prayer periods, there is an ebb movement out of the cafés toward the near-by mosques leaving behind a few stragglers, and even those who do not care to pray there is a ritual absence, for the sake of managing perception, timed with the completion of the prayer ritual, when there is a flow movement back toward the cafés. In this way, the prayer-based rhythm that regulates social life articulates symbiotically with secular activities. Paradoxically, these cafés offer a new context for the re-enactment of an old tradition among Soqotrans called muqhib (in Soqotri), which refers to sitting together for conversation in any setting but that takes place

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after the afternoon (‘as.r) prayer until the evening (maghrib) prayer, and is accompanied by tea drinking (see Fig. 1.3). This indigenous social ritual, without barrier to deliberative participation, offers a more locally affordable and acceptable alternative mode of sociability to the culturally corrosive, communally polarizing, and morally condemnable q¯at chewing session. Indeed, the muqhib held at the TV cafés or next to tea shops obviates the need for an imported “social lubricant,” which is the prevailing platitude about the positive effect of q¯at chewing (see Chapter 3). The dominant cultural comparator for Soqotrans is the television programmes from the pan-Arab region because they cater to their intrinsic desire to weave an indelible nexus of belongingness between the ArabIslamic polity and their communal homeland. Moreover, the absence of language barrier facilitates the dissemination of this Arab version of political community and cultural modernity. Consequently, the television mediates the viewers’ assessment of local life based on the alternative models of lifestyles it broadcasts through a variety of programmes. These programmes, which are being purveyed in the public sphere through the TV cafés and in urban homes through private television viewing, seem to fulfill the following functions:

Fig. 1.3 A Muqhib—Participants waiting for tea

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1.3.1.1 Cultural Enfranchisement: Modern Arab Consumerism The act of watching Arabic television programmes seems to produce simultaneously a communal disenfranchising and a regional enfranchising effect on the cultural practices and attitudes of the relatively limited but ever-growing television audience in Soqotra. As it is a visual inducement to transgress local cultural norms by provoking viewers’ emulative potential. For example, the many religious channels that educate local believers and reinforce the faith, the many poetry channels from the Gulf that serve as muse for local poets. Indeed, it was the example from one of those channels that inspired the idea of the annual Soqotri poetry competition launched in 2008. Worthy of note in the context of television viewing in the home is the special attraction of the women audience to the musalsal (soap opera series, especially Turkish and Mexican dubbed in Lebanese accented Arabic), which affords a vicarious participation in the socially liberated and romantically intense lives of modern women from elsewhere. Moreover, watching these shows seems to be fully integrated within their daily routine, as I found out when my Soqotran maid, who was late in completing her chores, implored my permission to leave early to watch her favorite soap opera. Also, the male members of household interviewed confirmed this practice by their female siblings. The relentless promotion of skin-bleaching products through commercials on Arab channels seemed to induce the adoption of a peculiar aesthetic sensibility, which I call the “Fair & Lovely” syndrome: The commercials depict the Cinderella rise of a tanned skin female, whose use of the cream propels her to public adulation. This seems to legitimize the local practice of ranking the attractiveness of women, especially, based on skin color. This has led to some quaint behaviors among men and women, such as phobic avoidance of the sun, and excessive soaping of the body in the vain hope of producing a permanent bleaching effect. In such a context, it could be asserted that the widespread veiling of the entire body, which became the norm only in the late 1990s after unification, is equally associated with avoidance of the skin darkening effects of the sun than just a sartorial accommodation to Islamic notion of female modesty. Finally, the combined effect of television watching with its visual incitements and the availability of the local stores and their tantalizing wares generate an urban cultural ambiance toward palliative consumption in residents young and old. Again, al-Rijdihi’s poem captures this effect through the words of a former “Bedouin” and now embittered Hadiboh

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resident complaining about “my unimportant wife… in her eighties” and her adoption of this consumer ethos: I buy her gloves for her fingers / and a covering to hide her nails so that they can’t be seen. Each week a veil for her face / and each week a multicolored dress. / A little bottle of ‘Ud perfume and one of cream perfume, / and two pounds-weight of Harazi henna. / Only then she will give me a tight-lipped smile / when I have brought her all those and placed them before her. (Morris 2005)

1.3.1.2 Political Pedagogy: Supra-National Membership Watching television in Soqotra is not an “instrument of national pedagogy” for the incubation of citizen imbued with a national sensibility, as Abu-Lughod (2005) claims rather hyperbolically to be the case in Egypt. Noteworthy, in the case of mainland Yemen, the importance of television as a cultural technology in shaping national perception was demonstrated in its indelible impact on defining Yemen’s national cultural boundaries. This was occasioned by a TV series shown in the early 1990s during Ramadhan in which the main character “dah.b¯ ash” with his brash and unscrupulous demeanor came to symbolize all that was perceived as obnoxious in north Yemeni culture from the point of view of southerners. The name has since given rise to the “dah.b¯ ash¯ı” syndrome, as emblematic of the uncivilized tribal cultural attributes of northerners. The use of the term has maintained its relevance as a cultural marker. In referring to mainlanders, dah.b¯ ash¯ı and shim¯ aliyy¯ın are the two terms alternatively used by Soqotrans, but only with benign derogatory intent. In contrast, national television programmes do not have such effects on the Soqotran viewing public. This is partly because national channels are normally not shown as part of the public viewing fare, as Soqotrans prefer the novelties offered by regional channels. As they present more aspirational images than the familiar ones of mainland Yemen. Indeed, Soqotrans have become dependent on pan-regional canons (i.e., Arab pedigree and Islamic religion) for their comparative individual self-assessment and communal evaluation. These cannons have become the pillars of an externally supplied civic education that transcends the boundaries of the state, and that constitute the frames of reference for a hyphenated geo-cultural identity that complicates their participation in the state-sponsored polity formation process.

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The crucial role of mass media in shaping the polity’s relationship to the state is aptly expressed by Appadurai as follows: “The electronic media are transforming the relationships between information and mediation, and where nation-states are struggling to retain control over their populations” (1996: 189). In this way, Soqotrans have been made to leapfrog their insularity into a kind of pan-regional politico-religious polity. This leapfrogging has engendered a political and cultural sensibility that has made Soqotrans keenly receptive to, and thus readily affected by, Arabic programmes and the events they broadcast. These broadcasts, especially from al-Jaz¯ıra channel, tend to reinforce a collective sense of ethnic belonging to the pan-Arab nation and religious solidarity with the Islamic community. Indeed, it was through such broadcast in Hadiboh’s TV cafés and living rooms that the Arab Spring of 2011 became familiar as it was a globally televised event. This event transformed the TV cafés into civic education fora as they became the public venues for the frequent impromptu political debates over Soqotra’s future status within or independent of the Yemeni state. This televised cultural pan-Arabism has made Soqotrans aware of the disparity between the involuntary asceticism of their daily lives and the relative socioeconomic opulence of their comparators in the Arab world. It has also generated an aspirational disposition animated by an opportunistic cultural curiosity and an eager experimental attitude toward the unfamiliar from elsewhere. This combination of opportunistic curiosity and experimental disposition is producing, among urbanized Soqotrans, a simmering doubt about, and a benign neglect of, their inherited cultural heritage. This is manifested in the quest for more expedient accommodations to the dominant cultural pan-Arabism through (a) an enthusiastic embrace of the lingua franca of the Arab nation (Arabic) to palliate their inadequate mastery of it; and (b) to pursue the acquisition of English to facilitate their participation in the tourism and development sector of the modern economy in order to enhance their capacity to transit from virtual to actual consumers. 1.3.2

Digital Mediation: Homeland-Diaspora Interconnection

The communications office for civilian purposes was established in Hadiboh in 1991, one year after unification. Prior to that date and throughout the socialist period, there was no radio contact, no telephone, no electricity grid only kerosene lamps (still the case in the hinterland), and a few generators that provided light at night for three hours and

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thus no television. The modernizing initiatives during that period were restricted to the socioeconomic realm of the island. During my first visit to the island in November 1996, the communications office was still minimally furnished with a radio transmitter and still no telephone. In 1999, a central telephone exchange was opened and landline telephones and Internet service (speed of 43 Kbps) became available in Hadiboh only. With the availability of landline telephones, a new economic sector was launched with the opening of call centers with their telephone booths and fax machines. The first mobile telephone service to the island started in 2005 by the state-owned company Yemen Mobile. This led to the gradual demise of the call centers and the spread of mobile use throughout the island. The first Internet café opened in 2006 as part of a travel agency, using a server outside of Yemen. It was intermittently accessible and was not in high demand partly due to unreliable connection. The first authentic Internet café—Soqotra Island Internet Café—with about ten computers opened in 2009 using a satellite-connected server based in Australia. It provided a lifeline to tourists and locals engaged in websitebased tourism who used the café to do business for US$ 25 cents per hour. Nearly a dozen of locally-run tourism websites were established and were rather successful in attracting clients, which previously came through mainland-based travel agencies exclusively. This Internet café facilitated access to a web-based island-diaspora public sphere that was mediated by two better-known websites (Soqotra.net and Soqotra.org), which served as the electronic newsletters for the island posting all of the latest events, hosting wide-ranging conversation fora and providing a platform for Soqotran public intellectuals (e.g., Ahmed Al-Anbali, ‘Awys Al-Qalansi, and Fahad Salim Kafayin). Throughout this period, Internet service on the island was formally illegal as it operated without government authorization, and access was further constrained by the limited availability of electricity from maghrib prayer (6 p.m.) to al-fajr prayer (4 a.m.). Ironically, in 2011 the year of the Arab Spring the mainland government launched its Internet service on the island. Only forty modems were distributed in Hadiboh between businesses (e.g., travel agencies, banks, money exchanges, and one hotel) and to a few individual households. This “legalization” of Internet access led to a number of cascading effects. The first casualty was the closure of the Internet café in 2012, which led to the conversion of the travel agencies into the new Internet cafés. This expanded access to a broader public by making it free through the

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operation of the local ethic of mutual assistance. As anybody can walk into a travel agency, hand the smart phone to the office manager who inserts the password and one is connected (see Fig. 1.4). The smart phone is no longer a luxury but a necessity among locals, which has embedded Internet use in the daily activities of an increasing number of urban Soqotrans. Three social media platforms have become the pivot of homeland-diaspora relations: Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube. It seems that everyone who possesses a smart phone is part of a communicative cluster founded around the first two platforms. While YouTube contains an archive of many aspects of life on the island, which can even be useful to those who are already familiar with the island. In my case, I was unable to witness the traditional rain prayer in Soqotra, until I saw it on a YouTube video recorded on a smart phone, which recorded others doing the same thing. Indeed, the smart phone has become a ubiquitous presence at all events on the island, as everywhere else on the planet. The purposes for which Internet access and social media use has become indispensable are essentially functional ones, as they are used as a means to an end. Soqotrans’ use of these technologies is unrelated to symbolic purposes such as identity construction as part of a collective quest for “our” place in the world (see Miller and Slater 2000). These functional purposes can be categorized in terms of the

Fig. 1.4 Internet Café-Travel agency

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following interactional modalities (see Kozinets 2009: 36): (a) informational: through sharing of fluctuating prices of goods, and of events on the island; (b) relational: through news of family and conversations with acquaintances); (c) recreational: through chat sessions, pictures, and videos sharing; and (d) most importantly transformational: through a plethora of social media-based groups and networks that mobilize for political events, engage in political debates, disseminate knowledge, and promote diaspora-homeland bonding. Regarding the transformational effects of social media, of Facebook in particular, one Soqotran describes it in the following terms: The free republic of Facebook, which accepts all refugees without any condition and grant them their most human rights, that is the right of useful talk and constructive words… [It is] a platform for oppressed people, and an international court where the downtrodden seek a refuge and the poor could complain and broadcast through it their repressed grievances, their forbidden sorrows and their rejected issues. (Al-Qalansi 2011)

Al-Qalansi went on to credit the transformational role of Facebook users in “the Arab revolution that triggered the collapse of the many tyrant regimes and Republics of Poverty in our large Arab world.” Ironically, Al-Qalansi wrote these words in “A Letter to all Soqotran Writers” posted on Soqotra.org to appeal to Soqotrans not to consecrate their time and thoughts to Facebook only, but to contribute to the websites mentioned above. As he put it: “We are awaiting your dazzling presence and your contribution that is filled with the light of knowledge, literature and culture in these forums and electronic websites to publish your works, creativities and articles to reach the readers on a daily basis.” His plea was not heeded, as both websites are no longer active. Their void was filled by WhatsApp partly due to ease of use even by illiterate pastoralists through its voice messaging system to communicate with the diaspora. It has become a lifeline to all its users, including myself who used it to update my information about Soqotra with interlocutors on the island. As of early 2019, a web-based news portal named “Soqotra Post: News from the Depth of the Ocean” (socotrapost.com) was established to serve partially as a source of critical perspectives, even if not always reliable, on events in Soqotra under the UAE regime. In spite of Soqotrans’ encounter with television and the Internet, Soqotra is still a minimally mediated landscape as this encounter is largely

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confined to Hadiboh. The availability of televisions outside of the two main towns is limited by the lack of electricity. Access to print media is limited to a few poorly stocked stationery stores in Hadiboh that sell some books, mostly religious ones, newspapers are available only intermittently from the mainland or elsewhere, and there is no local production of media items except for the occasional artisanal production of newsletters. Moreover, even where access to the digital media is available as in Hadiboh, it does not yet form “a constitutive part of the lived experience of a still largely face-to-face community” (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 10). Hence, social media neither present a threat, at least not yet, to “the existence of local sites of talk,” nor are they engendering the “waning of place as a container of experience” (Peters 1997: 79). As their use is still an occasional and socially marginal activity in the lives of most Soqotrans outside of Hadiboh; hence, terms such as online vs offline communities are irrelevant. Nevertheless, the trend regarding the role of these technologies of sociocultural mediation in Soqotrans’ lives, at least urban ones, is clearly one of progressive expansion and increasing entrenchment.

1.4

Spatial-Cultural Displacement: ¯ ¯ to H From Badawa . ad. ara

The rise of Hadiboh as a cultural magnet to the rest of the island is inducing a shift in socio-cultural milieu, as a form of spatial displacement. This is crucial, as it does not merely exemplify a topographical displacement from mountains to coast, or from rural (b¯ adiya’ ) to urban (mad¯ına), but from one cultural universe or “civilization” to another— i.e., from bad¯ awa (bedouins domain) to h.ad.¯ ara (urban life). The impact of this shift is the increasing re-articulation of intra-communal social relations, which has problematized Soqotrans ethno-cultural identity and commitment to communal traditions due to the mediation of a set of exogenous stimuli: national political imperatives, economic exigencies, newly imposed religious proprieties, and imported cultural alternatives. Moreover, the beckoning artificial space of the urban setting, with its cash requirement as means of exchange, has abandoned the exchange of hospitality that is practiced in the rural areas. This has exacerbated the already divergent cultural ethos of the village and that of the town through differentiation in the social imaginaries of groups from the island’s different geographical locations (see discussion of cultural geography in Vol. 1: Chapter 3). The end result is the persistence of a cultural discordance

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between Soqotrans’ rural and urban codes of conduct. For instance, the communal solidarity of the bad¯ awa and its web of cooperative informal institutions and its ethic of hospitality were not transferred, or could not be adapted, to the h.ad.¯ ara, wherein prevails a pecuniary ethos with its cash prerequisites to social intercourse. Hence the generalizing substitution of communal relations based on affective reciprocity for cash-mediated individualized interactions. Today, the conflicting cultural ideals between the townsmen and herdsmen persist as the two contrasting poles of Soqotrans’ communal identities; although they have been supplemented, but not replaced, by an Arab ethnic sensibility and a Muslim religious identity that was introduced, or more accurately was intensified, in the 1990s. This has led to an enduring urban-rural cultural dissonance between the townsmen who cast an inferiorizing gaze on the herdsmen’s rustic habits and lack of learning; and the herdsmen who reciprocate with a contemptuous sneer at the townsmen’s lack of etiquette (e.g., hospitality) and their abandonment of communal social mores in favor of an imported vice-ridden lifestyle. The bone of contention between them is the ultimate impact on Soqotra of the newly imported way of life, which entails attending school to learn how to read and write Arabic and English with the ultimate goal of getting a salaried position as well as indulging in vices such as smoking cigarettes and chewing q¯at with their deleterious social and economic consequences. Both, the townsmen and herdsmen, are beset by dilemmas about abandoning the b¯ adiya’ for the mad¯ına, and nostalgia once having done so as well as regret, for the main reason is to ensure the future of the new generation, whose ideal of success is a job with a regular salary that alienates them from their pastoralist upbringing, which spells the end of the traditional way of life of Soqotra. All of the above is instructively captured in a poem, really a moral tale, by Soqotra’s better-known poet Ali Abdullah al-Rijdihi about the dangers for Soqotrans in misappropriating the new way of life in the mad¯ına. Speaking of the urbanized Soqotran, the poet says: He has taken to buying cigarettes/from the idle louts of the street Who smoke then throw away the stubs, / and cough until their joints grow weak Who have foul-smelling breath and eyes reddened from staying up all night talking, / never sleeping but sniggering together the night through at each other tall tales instead. (Morris 2005)

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This new urban attitude is a function of a combination of factors: The relentless monetization of the economy and the exigencies of its cash nexus; the spread of tourism and its culture of paid service; the loosening bond of familiarity among urban residents due to the constant influx of rural migrants; and perhaps most importantly the high cost of satisfying the daily q¯at consumption habit of an increasing proportion of the urban population. Noteworthy, is that pecuniary relations that obligatorily characterized interactions with foreigners seem to have mutated into an obligatory quid pro quo among fellow Soqotrans. Services that were only recently considered a communal obligation by virtue of being fellow residents of the island are becoming paid tasks in the absence of a kinship or friendship bond. This perversion of the communal ethos of mutual aid is, fortunately, a mostly urban phenomenon, which has not yet spread to the hinterland, but for how long? The ensemble of modernizing processes and practices that are highlighted above constitutes the main vectors of communal modernization that are reconfiguring the social imagination and the interactional boundaries of the Soqotran community. They represent externally introduced disjunctive forces that instantiate the functions of Trojan horses, as they are changing the nature of the bonds between individuals and community, thereby modifying the grammar of communal relations. This change process is fostering the emergence of Hadiboh as a transient locality of residents increasingly afflicted with cultural anomie. This politically, economically, and socio-culturally transformative entanglement process between island, mainland, and diaspora is discussed in the next four chapters. They inventory the urban-based local strategies of accommodation employed by Soqotrans toward external influences. Chapter 2 addresses the dilemmas about mother tongue preservation engendered by conflicting motivations, which are severing the umbilical cord between mother tongue and cultural identity. Chapter 3 examines the local adoption of an imported consumption habit, namely q¯at chewing, through the mimicry of the cultural practices of the local diaspora of mainland migrants, and whose ramifications include the replacement of the communal value framework and its use as a political socialization tool. Chapter 4 narrates the transmutations of religious identification engendered by the mediation of the islanders’ religious practices by the state’s different political regimes. Chapter 5 anatomizes the socio-structural ramifications of the new urban-based consumer economy, which is

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monetizing the formerly cashless economy and introducing alternative economic activities and thus enabling the emergence of differentiation in social class and the associated socio-political aspirations.

Annex 1.1: Map of Greater Hadiboh

PART I

Cultural Modernization: National Integration Processes

CHAPTER 2

Linguistic Dilemmas: Communal Vernacular in Transition

The chapter focuses on the linguistic dilemmas faced by Soqotrans as an indigenous speech community under the Yemeni state’s deliberate absence of a policy toward the status of the Soqotri language within Yemen’s cultural patrimony. The state’s feigning non-existence of their indigenous language is the by-product of a cultural “protectionist ideology” that is shared by Arab states. This ideology postulates that an Arab ethnicity and the Arabic language are the exclusive bases of national polity formation. This leads to the non-recognition of the ethnolinguistic heritage of indigenous sub-national communities, as is the case with Soqotrans. This policy of neglect is exacerbated by a combination of involuntary and voluntary inducements to language replacement: such as, the political and cultural push of Arabic and the economic pull of English. Subsequently, the chapter elucidates the potential ramifications on the replacement of the Soqotri language through the following analytical tasks: First, it provides a synopsis on its discovery, etymology, genealogy, and recent attempts at its codification. Second, it explores the effects of the state’s lack of a language policy through a discussion of the

A different version of this chapter was published under the title “Cultural Accommodation to State Incorporation in Yemen: Language Replacement on Soqotra Island.” Journal of Arabian Studies 2 (1) (2012): 39–57. 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 II, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45646-7_2

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range of conflicting attitudes that Soqotrans hold toward their language. Third, it examines the multiple threats to the maintenance of the Soqotri language. Finally, it performs a preliminary assessment of the Soqotran community’s ethnolinguistic vitality and suggests a menu of remedial initiatives to ensure its preservation.

2.1

State Cultural Protectionism: Linguistic Heritage Ignored

Soqotrans constitute a sub-national polity that is confronting a dual cultural transformation process: first, a process of communal cultural atrophy through the dissolution of communal ethno-linguistic boundaries; and second, a cultural homogenization process through assimilation into a virtual national culture based on Arab ethno-cultural strictures and Islamic socio-religious injunctions. Underpinning this dual cultural transformation process is a “protectionist ideology,” which entails the following criteria of conditional inclusion into the national polity: an exclusionary notion of citizenship that privileges an Arab ethnicity and the Arabic language, and an obligatory Islamic patriotism that expresses a trans-historical continuity and a pan-regional commitment (Al-Azmeh 1996). Consequently, from the standpoint of the Arab state, linguistic diversity is a challenge both to the ethno-cultural homogeneity idealized as an integral part of the pan-Arab nation and to the hegemony of Arabic as the divine language of the religious community of Muslims. This has engendered a regionally shared intolerance of multilingualism among Arab-Islamic states. Indeed, in the West Asia North Africa region it is axiomatic that the nation-state would be “the altar on which minority languages are sacrificed” (Moseley 2007: xii). The Yemeni state is no exception, as the two pillars of cultural protectionism serve as the bases of its polity formation ideology and inform its undeclared policy of assimilation toward Soqotrans and their language. Soqotrans, as an ethno-linguistically indigenous community living within a predominantly Arabo-Muslim cultural zone, have had to adopt political and cultural accommodation strategies for communal preservation. This is especially necessary when the state considers that the national polity formation process is still a work in progress. In such a context, Soqotrans must avoid their being perceived by the mainland political authorities as compromising their social, cultural, and political attachments to the nation and state. As a result, an ethno-linguistic identity

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is no longer a communal inheritance but a politically fraught quest for an optimal way of being a citizen of the Yemeni state. The prerequisite to belonging is clearly expressed in the first article of Yemen’s constitution: “The people of Yemen are part of the Arab and Islamic nation.” The implication of this clause is tantamount to dissolving the symbiosis between mother tongue and identity that is claimed to be the defining characteristic of a sub-national ethno-linguistic minority community; and it betrays the state’s predisposition toward nationalizing the Soqotran community’s civic conscience and cultural consciousness. Accordingly, Arabic is the symbolic, or more aptly the ideological, articulation of national identity (Suleiman 2003); hence, it is privileged as the nation’s lingua franca regardless of the divergent historical experience and ethnocultural heritage of sub-national communities (Miller 2003). In this light, the existence of a local vernacular that vies with the official language for the cultural allegiance of a sub-national community is perceived as a threat to national unity. Accordingly, the government has de facto adopted a policy of deliberate neglect toward the fate of the Soqotri language, as it has never made any official declaration regarding the censuring or sanctioning the use of Soqotri. This explains the absence of any language policy toward the remaining pre-literate non-Arabic languages of Yemen, namely Soqotri and Mehri. Soqotrans seem to be a source of political anxiety to the Yemeni state, as they constitute a “compact” social group who occupy a well-defined geographical territory in which they constitute the majority population, although they make up a small proportion of the state’s population. The state’s ambivalence towards recognizing the Soqotri language is perhaps explained by the perception that it endows Soqotrans with an intrinsic preference for an exclusionary cultural communalism that might eventually lead to their demanding political autonomy. The state’s political anxiety about Soqotrans’ commitment to a national identity engendered their linguistic predicament as they seek entry into the national society. Accordingly, it has induced a voluntary de-politicization effect in matters that might appear to conflict with national political and cultural sensibilities. In Soqotra whatever passes for local cultural heritage is potentially in conflict with such sensibilities shaped by the “protectionist ideology” noted above. It is a political context in which some forms of cultural activity are perceived as potentially subversive, or at least regarded as less deserving of official sanction. In this connection, it is noteworthy that during the national holidays’ celebration on the island, or for

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the welcoming ceremonies of national governmental officials, there are usually drum playing and dancing by a muwallad¯ın group, but never the recitation of Soqotri poetry even with Arabic translation. In the recent past, the public display of a local vernacular in front of official representatives of the state was best avoided, as it would be a culturally jarring reminder of the otherness of Soqotrans, and not conducive to national bonding. The first time that Soqotri poetry was performed in front of an official delegation was when the German novelist Gunter Grass visited Soqotra in the mid-2000s. Indeed, the chronic absence of Soqotri oral arts from the public sphere, until 2008 when the annual Soqotri poetry competition was launched, is best explained by one Soqotran poet: “People from the north feel like a mouse among cats, when they hear Soqotri.” Yemeni mainlanders, and state officials in particular, have an intrinsic discomfort not only with the sound of the language, but more importantly with its potential political ramifications if it were to be officially recognized. The end-result was the Yemeni state’s abandonment of Soqotrans to their own uncoordinated initiatives to preserve their local cultural heritage, which were cautiously undertaken with limited, if any, national or international assistance: a small public library, Soqotri poetry competition, the experimental adaptation of the Arabic script to the Soqotri language, a museum of local cultural artifacts, and the establishment of the Soqotra Association for Heritage and History, the only NGO for the preservation of their cultural and historical heritage. Among these activities, the most noteworthy was the annual three-day Soqotri poetry competition that began in 2008 until 2012. It was held in different locations around Hadiboh town for a three-day period and was attended by overflowing crowds. Initially, it was organized by a local NGO, the Soqotra Association for Heritage and History with financial assistance from the Soqotran diaspora in the Gulf countries and without the government support. In sponsoring this poetry competition, some members of this diaspora seemed to be motivated by the pursuit of an island-diasporabased communalism aimed at fostering a post-national (i.e., non-Yemeni) cultural identity that envisions Soqotra as a cultural and economic satellite of the Gulf Diaspora (see below). Ironically, the poetry competition was largely ceremonial in effect, given that the competitors were mostly semi-literate pastoralists from the hinterland along with their judges, while the audience was mostly urban youth who dwell in a different lexical universe. The lexical universe of

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Soqotra’s urban youth is described by a linguist as follows: “Many young people in the town borrow from Arabic, and code-switch with Arabic; they do not remember any piece of literature, they ignore the heroes of traditional texts, and they do not understand any poem” (Simeone-Senelle 2003: 11). This urban-based dialect is being called “Hadiboh Sok.ot.ri” (Morris 2017: 27). This observation unwittingly blames the victim, as it failed to note that Soqotrans are citizens of a state that has yet to formally recognize their linguistic heritage and has never supported its use in the public sphere. Moreover, the notion of “code-switch” should perhaps be replaced by compulsory “lexical borrowing” as these youths must deal with new lexical exigencies of the new urban context given the new items that must be named, and interact with mainlanders and the Yemeni state. Consequently, urban audiences marvel at the poets’ diction and take pride in the rich lexicon of their mother tongue, but are confounded by the poems as they no longer understand, at least for the most part, their “cryptic and allusive” language (Morris 2007: 47). Indeed, Soqotran poets affirm that the use of “veiled language” is an integral part of their art: “Good poems are oblique and indirect, their real meanings hugged close to the chest. They make their way along the ground stirring up the red dust as they go along (i.e., concealing themselves and obscuring everything around them)” (Morris 2013: 240). This chapter focuses on the mediation effects of the “protectionist ideology,” which was the basis of the Yemeni state undeclared policy of assimilation of Soqotrans’ ethno-linguistic heritage. As it encouraged, by default, a process of self-indoctrination into an ethno-cultural Arabism (‘ur¯ uba), as a prerequisite for Soqotrans’ inclusion as citizens of the Yemeni state and of their integration into the national culture. Accordingly, it inventories the spectrum of attitudes held by members of the Soqotran community toward their mother tongue. This set of attitudes is a by-product of the dilemmas about mother tongue loyalty resulting from the encounter between national cultural exigencies, internationally induced economic incentives, and the associated adjustment effects on language preference as well as on the community’s commitment to its ethno-cultural particularities. After a brief overview of the salient aspects of the Soqotri language, the subsequent sections of this chapter elucidate these adjustment effects through (i) an inventory of the set of attitudes toward its functions within a changing cultural environment; (ii) a summary of the external incentives for language abandonment and the countermeasures for its preservation; and (iii) a provisional assessment of the ethnolinguistic vitality of Soqotrans as a speech community.

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2.2

The Soqotri Language: Primer and Lament

Soqotri is one of the six non-Arabic Semitic pre-literate languages of South Arabia that are collectively known as the Modern South Arabian Languages (MSALs), which are variously categorized as a South Semitic branch that derived from a shared West Semitic ancestor (Kitchen et al. 2009), or as an independent branch of West Semitic (Huehnergard and Rubin 2011). The conflicting categorization of the MSALs is due to the fact that “Within the Semitic family of languages, there is no consensus among scholars with regards to the proper subgrouping of the Semitic family, and probably there never will be” (Rubin 2010: 3). Also, the designation of these MSALs as “modern” is misleading because the term is based on their dates of “discovery” from the 1830s onward and not on these languages’ ancient linguistic features. Their ancient pedigree is speculatively attributed to a proto-West Semitic ancestor about 4650 years before present (YBP) or 2500 BCE from which they subsequently diverged into the clad of MSALs (Kitchen et al. 2009: 2707). Indeed, the MSALs are the most ancient of the extant Semitic languages as they reveal a higher level of archaic retentions in all of their linguistic dimensions (i.e., phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon) than the other Semitic languages (Simeone-Senelle 1999). In spite of their presumed shared descent from a proto-Semitic ancestor over 5000 YBP, there is no mutual understanding between MSAL speakers and those of Arabic, which is from the Central Semitic branch. Soqotri was the most isolated among the MSALs in terms of its contact with Arabic, given the geographic isolation of its speakers who reside on the two inhabited islands of the Soqotra Archipelago: Soqotra and ‘Abd al-K¯uri. Moreover, this geographic isolation was compounded by limited interactions with Arabic speakers who were immigrants from the South Arabian mainland but whose residence in Soqotra was confined to the northern coastal settlements. The other MSALs are listed below according to their date of discovery: Jibb¯ al¯ı was discovered in 1838 by Fulgence Fresnel under the name ´ . ari. Eh.kili, which is one of its many names (not dialects) including Sh It is spoken by tribes residing in the mountains and coastal regions of Dhofar in southwestern Oman. Mehri was discovered by James Wellsted who published a list of thirty-seven words in 1840. It is spoken by residents from the governorate of al-Mahra in the south-east of Yemen with a dialectal version spoken across the al-Mahra-Oman border. H us¯ı and . ars¯

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Bat.h.ar¯ı became known in 1937 with a corpus of words, phrases, and expressions published by Bertram Thomas (1937) whose work was elaborated upon by Thomas Johnstone (1981) and Morris (1983, 2017). H us¯ı is spoken in Jiddat al-Harasi in the central region of Oman, . ars¯ while Bat.h.ar¯ı is spoken in Oman’s southern coast, and is said to be “similar enough to Mehri that they may also be considered dialects of that language” (Rubin 2010: 7–8). Hoby¯ ot ’s existence was known since the 1970s and was first mentioned in the early 1980s by Thomas Johnstone, but the first words were collected by Miranda Morris (Rubin 2015). Its speakers straddled the border between al-Mahra and Dhofar in southwestern Oman (for overviews of MSALs, see Simeone-Senelle 1997, 1999, 2011). There is mutual understanding only between speakers of some of the different MSALs (e.g., H us¯ı, Bat.h.ar¯ı, and Mehri) but . ars¯ not all in spite of their geographical proximity and shared migratory movements. At present, the MSALs of Oman are formally categorized as “endangered” with the exception of Jibb¯ al¯ı, while the indigenous languages spoken in Yemen (Soqotri and Mehri) are not listed as such (see Sect. 2.5 below). Among the MSALs, Soqotri was the first to be “discovered” by Lieutenant James Raymond Wellsted of the British Empire’s Indian Navy during his survey of the island from 10 January to 7 March 1834 (Wellsted 1835: 220–229). However, it seems that Wellsted did not “discover” the language, as he did not collect the list of 236 Soqotri words for which he has earned the eternal gratitude of generations of linguists. Lieutenant Stafford Haines, the officer in charge of the 1834 mission to Soqotra, disputed Wellsted’s role: “He published my vocabulary and meteorological register, and stated other matters so as to make it appear that he was the principal throughout…. He was indebted for information he never acknowledged” (Haines 1845: 110). Wellsted died in 1842 and thus could not respond to Haines’ accusation. Noteworthy, in the novel Secret of the Sands (Sheridan 2010), which is about Wellsted’s life, his 1835 memoir figures prominently as a major source of animosity between the two. The list of Soqotri words contained in it marked the first time that Soqotri was brought to the attention of modern Orientalists-philologists. Wellsted and Haines’ mission to Soqotra was primarily, but not exclusively, to determine whether or not the island could serve as a coaling station (see the terms of reference of their mission in Haines et al. 1835; Elie 2006: 146–151). His (their) incidental discovery of Soqotri gave

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birth to the modern study of the MSALs through a series of scientific expeditions to South Arabia that followed in its wake. The purpose of this section is to provide an overview of Soqotri from a non-specialist perspective, which is not available to those who are interested in the language without being mired in the technical minutiae that are relished by specialists in linguistics. I utter a cri de coeur below that is unrelated to the perfunctory pleas for saving the language from extinction, but is about the fact that discussions of the Soqotri language are still cloistered within the ramparts of a community of specialists debating and researching its exoteric aspects in perfect oblivion of the current challenges of the indigenous community of Soqotri speakers and in neglect of the basic linguistic information needed by scholars working in other fields in Soqotra. Accordingly, the following three sub-sections provide (a) a brief chronology of the research undertaken on Soqotri and their legacy, (b) a summation of the linguistic conundrums that preoccupy specialists at the expense of the immediate language-related assistance needed by the community of Soqotri speakers, and (c) a succinct inventory of the urgent challenges that Soqotri linguists should consider. 2.2.1

Research Expeditions: Chronology and Legacy

The publication of Wellsted’s account of his mission to Soqotra in 1835 constituted a kind of inaugural research agenda-setting document. His account ranged over a number of topics with an economy of detail sufficient to arouse the diverse scientific interests of his countrymen and of others in Europe. His mission report led to a number of Western institutions of learning to sponsor multidisciplinary research expeditions. I will focus on three such expeditions because of their contribution to the study of the Soqotri language: Austrian, French, and Russian. The first and the most consequential in terms of the Soqotri language was the Südarabische Expedition (South Arabia Expedition), a multidisciplinary mission to South Arabia and Soqotra in the late nineteenth century funded by the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The expedition’s “aim was to collect pre-Islamic inscriptions, to study local languages and dialects, to make geological observations, to obtain natural history specimens and to study ancient buildings” (Macro 1990: 102). There were a total of seven expeditions sponsored by the Austrian Academy from 1897 to 1900, out of which two were dedicated to Soqotra. The first expedition to Soqotra took place for a

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two-month period in February–March 1897 specifically dedicated to the Soqotri language by two Orientalists: Carlo Landberg and George Bury. However, not much information is available on the result (Macro 1993). The second expedition was a follow-up to the first and was undertaken in November–December 1898 by a multidisciplinary team of scholars under the leadership of David Heinrich Müller. The expedition participants summed their initial assessment of Soqotri as follows: “We have here to do not with Arabian dialects in the narrower sense of the term, but with idioms which are daughter-tongues of the old Sabaean and Minaean.” As such it “bears throughout evidence of greater age” than the other MSALs on the mainland (Müller et al. 1899: 638–639). This Expedition resulted in the publication of a ten-volume collection entitled “Die Sud-Arabischen Expedition,” which “constituted the first library on the South Arabian languages and the first written archives” (Simeone-Senelle 1999). Three out of the ten volumes were devoted to “The Mehri and Soqotri Language” and were written by Prof. David Müller: vol. 4—1902, vol. 6—1905, and vol. 7—1907 (see Macro 1993 for details). These three volumes constitute the seminal publications on the Soqotri language, which subsequently became known as the “Vienna Corpus” (Naumkin et al. 2014). In effect, the published volumes of this mission could be said to have formally launched the study and further discovery of the MSALs. In the case of Soqotri, the three volumes served as the foundation for a series of seminal publications including the only Soqotri dictionary, which relied entirely on Müller’s texts (Leslau 1938). Since the Austrian expedition to Soqotra, collective research missions were abandoned. The void was filled with individual researchers’ excursion. The first was by T. M. Johnstone in 1967 (see Johnstone 1975) and subsequently by Vitaly Naumkin during the early 1970s that led to the publication in Russian of Where the Phoenix Rose from Ashes in 1977. The second collective initiative on the Soqotri language was that of the “French Investigative Mission in South Yemen” (Mission Française D’enquête Linguistique au Sud-Yémen) launched in 1982 until 1990 in collaboration with the University of Aden. Its principal investigators were Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle and Antoine Lonnet. The aim was to conduct a rather comprehensive survey of the indigenous languages spoken in al-Mahra and Soqotra in terms of their distinctive phonetic, morphological, syntactic, lexical, and dialectal dimensions and from a comparative perspective. This resulted in dozens of seminal articles on

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Soqotri and the associated cultural practices (see Simeone-Senelle 1999 for the list of references). The third collective expedition to South Yemen and Soqotra was the “Soviet-Yemeni Complex Mission” (SYCM) under the sponsorship of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Its annual “field season” started in 1983 until 1991. It was made up of a multidisciplinary team of Yemeni-Soviet researchers representing the following disciplines: history, ethnography, linguistics, archaeology, and physical anthropology (see Naumkin 2012; Knysh 1993; Souvorov and Rodionov 1999). The leader was Vitaly Naumkin, a Russian anthropologist-Orientalist, at the Institute of Oriental Studies in Moscow who was “one of the first Soviet citizens to visit Socotra” in 1974 (Naumkin 1993: ix). The SYCM conducted five research field seasons in Soqotra between 1983 and 1988 in quest of the following objectives: “to establish the ethnogeny of the Socotrans, to reconstruct their history and contacts with the populations of continental South Arabia, to describe their traditional culture and economy, to identify population types, and to compile a grammatical outline of Socotri and record their folklore” as well as to conduct archaeological surveys (Naumkin 1993: ix–x). These Soviet research excursions to Soqotra resulted in a number of publications, which included the first ethnographic monograph on Soqotrans, Island of the Phoenix: An Ethnographic Study of the People of Socotra, which was published in Russian in 1988 and translated into English in 1993. The other was a collaborative work with V. Y. Porkhomovski, Essays in the Ethnolinguistics of Socotra (in Russian) published in 1981. More recently, Naumkin has constituted a new team of collaborators who “first visited the island in 2010” (Naumkin et al. 2014: 26). One of the aims of this Russian research group is to update and expand the “Vienna Corpus” on the Soqotri language that was constituted by Müller over a century ago. It is worth highlighting the main contents of this Corpus: 150 pages of Soqotri texts, which include selections of Old Testament texts (in Arabic) and fairy tales including a Cinderella-like tale, and around 750 poetic compositions among other linguistic features (see Naumkin et al. 2014: 22–23). Their collaboration resulted in the publication of two volumes, with a third under preparation, of a three-volume series entitled, the Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature (2014, 2018), which can be appropriately called the “Russian Corpus.” According to Naumkin et al.’s, “For many decades to come, our understanding of Soqotri language and folklore will continue to depend on the text collections published in the

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beginning of the twentieth century by the distinguished Austrian orientalist David Heinrich Müller” (2014: 20). This is an odd praise, given that the Corpus’ contents were collected 116 years ago from the publication date of the Russian Corpus. Moreover, given the fast-changing pace of the contemporary use of Soqotri since the late nineteenth century, the Vienna Corpus is figuratively the equivalent of a paleo-linguistic archive. This observation aside, the Russian Corpus represents a phenomenal scholarly achievement on the Soqotri language. One fervently hopes that this team will devote their considerable knowledge of Soqotri to the preparation of a descriptive grammar and will collaborate with other linguists for the preparation of a dictionary. What is the legacy of the above research forays into the Soqotri language? Collectively, the resulting publications from the above expeditions have spawned the interest of other linguists to complement the knowledge they have bequeathed. However, the practical considerations that concern non-specialist audiences have only been partly addressed. For example: (a) the urgent need of the speech community of Soqotri speakers for a uniform Arabic-based orthographic system, which would enable them to write their language; (b) the interest of non-linguistic scholars in a uniform Latin script-based transliteration scheme for them to use Soqotri terms that are globally intelligible and which would put an end to the plethora of competing transcription schemes; and (c) the shared hope of locals and foreigners for a useable grammar and of a dictionary of Soqotri, even if it is a provisional one, has yet to be fulfilled. The knowledge that could remedy these deficiencies remains the exclusive property of specialists. 2.2.2

Linguistic Conundrums: Intramural Debates

Scholarly publications on the MSALs in general, and of the Soqotri language in particular, are caught up in debates that are theoretically fascinating but lack practical considerations. For example: (a) niche hypotheses testing about their genetic classification based on their trajectory of divergence from an imagined proto-MSAL ancestor; (b) detailed technical analysis of their idiosyncrasies, such as the minutiae of its lexical archaisms, grammatical peculiarities, and morphological-syntactical innovations; and (c) philological exegeses of word-lists, poetic compositions, and oral literature, in other to illustrate some linguistic enigmas. The hope seems to be

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that cumulatively these studies would contribute to the practical understanding of the language, which would then enable the formulation of a comprehensive grammar and a modern dictionary that are still not available. In this section, I will briefly discuss three issues related to the Soqotri language under the following rubrics: debatable etymologies, competing genealogies, and orthographic dilemmas. 2.2.2.1 Debatable Etymologies Paradoxically, the term Soqotra (Saqat.ra, Saqat.rí and its plethora of spellings) seemed to lack a concrete external referent that would assigned it a specific semantic content. This referential uncertainty gave rise to a cottage industry about deciphering the origins of the name of the island, its people, and language that was shrouded in mythical allusions. The source of this lexical conundrum is captured in the linguist T. M. Johnstone’s perplexed observation: The Socotris… have no word for their language. The name of their island… in their own language is sk’at’ri. But this is rather a vague word in Socotri which also means ‘everything, world’ and moreover it has no adjectival derivate which can be correlated with the Arabic word Suqutri. (Johnstone 1975: 3)

This intrinsic ambiguity engendered competing hypotheses about Soqotri’s etymological ancestry. Although there are a number of hypotheses about the etymology of the Soqotri language such as Greek (Bukharin 2012) and Indian (Strauch 2012), only two will be briefly considered here because of their relevance to the genetic classification of the Soqotri language (see below): Epigraphic and Arabic. Regarding the origin of the term in the Epigraphic South Arabian (ESA) languages, it is based on the fact that the MSALs, which emerged in the first century CE until the present, were preceded by, and partially overlapped with, the ESA languages of the ancient kingdoms of South Arabia. These kingdoms and their languages were extant from the eighth century BCE to the sixth century CE, as the last inscription is dated 571 (Institut du Monde Arabe 1997: 228). Walter W. Müller (2001) suggested an audacious hypothesis, namely that the radical letters “s k r d” derived from a name recorded in the Old South Arabian script and perhaps were vocalized as Sakarad. According to him, it is this version which constitutes the oldest source and the original form of the island’s

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name, and the island’s inhabitants adopted it when they migrated from the old kingdoms of South Arabia. The first physical testimony of the existence of the name, according to Robin (2012: 443–446), was in an inscription on the wall of a ravine bordering Wadi Amaqin located 90 kilometers from al-Mukalla that was written as “S3 krd” or Sakrad. The inscription, which is dated April 515 CE, was announcing the conquest of new territories by the H . imyari kings of H . ad.ramawt, who unified Yemen in 300 CE and ruled it until the Abyssinian invasion in 525 CE. Robin suggested that there is a shared consonantal structure between “Skrd” and “Sqt.r” or Suqut.ra (his spelling of the term). Noteworthy, is that even though the kinship between the Soqotri language (South or West Semitic) and the Epigraphic South Arabian languages (Central Semitic) is quite distant, the philological studies in Strauch (2012), which includes the article by Robin, seem to privilege the Epigraphic South Arabian term Sakrad as the origin of the island’s name. The epigraphic name, however, according to Robin (2012) was not an ethnonym, the name of a people, but a toponym, the name of a place or region. Concerning the hypothesis about the Arabic derivation of the name, it is worth noting that Arab scholars from the medieval period onwards referred to the island through a plethora of phonetic registers: Suqut.ra, ¯ . ra, and Sk¯ Suqut.r¯ a, S¯ uqutr¯ a, Asqut utrah (see Zabal 1971: 90; Ubaydli 1989: 138). The etymology of these names was not explained except for the following one: S¯ uqat.ra, whose etymology breaks down as follows: s¯ uq meaning market or emporium, and qat.ra meaning drop (pl. qat.ar¯ at ). Put together, it reads s¯ uq al-qat.ra, or the market for drop. Hence, the contraction of both terms gives S¯ uqat.ra (see King 1890: 189; Ubaydli 1989: 138). While this etymological hypothesis may lack historical validity, it has semantic plausibility, as it metaphorically refers to the once-dominant economy for which the island was known for millennia: a plantation economy based on resins producing trees and plants (e.g., frankincense, Dragon’s Blood trees, and aloes), from which the crystallized drops were collected and exported. Ultimately, the names of a territory tend to emerge from (a) arbitrary impositions based on political power, (b) phonetic corruption through demographic shifts, or (c) a consensus among a community of scholars. Accordingly, the above-discussed etymologies are partly folkloric given the lack of conclusive evidence due to the documentary lacunae in the historical sources and the continuing absence of a consensus among Soqotri scholars.

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2.2.2.2 Competing Genealogies The genealogical pedigree of the MSALs as part of the family tree of Semitic languages is an evolving one as the classification of all Semitic languages is provisional at best. Indeed, the genetic classification of language is the domain par excellence for the testing of niche hypotheses based on either shared morphosyntactic innovations or preserved lexical archaisms that result from the history-contingent and demographymediated trajectory of emergence, dispersion, and divergence from a putative proto-Semitic ancestor. The end result is the battle of genealogical charts between scholars (see Hetzron 1976: 106; Faber 1997: 5; Rubin 2008: 80; Kitchen et al. 2009: 2707; Huehnergard and Rubin 2011: 263; Kogan 2015: 598). In fact, as Huehnergard and Rubin suggest “There seems to be almost as many approaches to classification as there are scholars who work on the problem” (2011: 259). To mitigate these competing classification schemes that are predominantly constructed through “genetic models” of linguistic relatedness based on shared ancestry, Huehnergard and Rubin (2011) have proposed their integration with “a real models” of mutual linguistic influence through cultural contact occasioned by demographic movements. I beg the specialists to pardon my audacity to arbitrate their interminable debates by applying Huehnergard and Rubin’s suggestion to retrace the MSALs’ trajectory of emergence and geographic dissemination as they diverged both from their putative common ancestor and subsequently from each other. To do so, I use Kitchen et al.’s (2009) statistical reconstruction, but still inventive interpretation, of the phylogeny of twenty-five Semitic languages primarily because it offers approximate dates. According to their genealogical chart, the MSALs’ divergence occurred as follows: Starting from their common proto-Semitic ancestor circa 5750 years before present (YBP), they subsequently diverged into a proto-West Semitic branch circa 5400 YBP. This was followed by a further divergence into a South Semitic clad of languages circa 4650 YBP that included the Ethiosemitic languages. They diverged from the latter circa 2050 YBP into a common MSAL clad. By 2000 YBP, they further diverged into two further sub-branches that constituted the common ancestors of Jibb¯al¯ı and Soqotri in one branch and H . ars¯us¯ı and Mehri into another. Both group further diverged, as Jibb¯al¯ı and Soqotri became two distinct languages in 1450 YBP, and H . ars¯us¯ı and Mehri became distinct languages in 1050 YBP (see Figure 2 in Kitchen et al. 2009: 2706, which does not include Hoby¯ot and Bat.h.ar¯ı). This series of genetic splits within

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the MSALs are combined with the demographic movements of Soqotri speakers based on Naumkin’s hypothesis that they “branched off from its South Semitic stem at some point during the first half of the first millennium BCE, and this period accordingly constitutes the earliest time boundary with reference to the resettlement of the speakers of Soqotri from South Arabia to the island of Soqotra” (2004: 14). This demographic movement is corroborated by the molecular genetic study of the human population on Soqotra Island, which found two haplotypes that can be characterized as “founder lineages.” Moreover, the study suggests that these genetic markers provide evidence of the long-term isolation of Soqotra and locates its settlement during the late Holocene some 3000 years ago (or 1000 BCE) by way of colonization from southern ˇ Arabia (Cerný et al. 2009). This geographic dispersion trajectory was ˇ highlighted in Cerný et al. (2011) as part of a larger debate about the role of South Arabia within the migratory path out of Africa of the predecessors of modern humans. 2.2.2.3 Orthographic Dilemmas The considerable work carried out on the Soqotri language has not led to the formulation of an accepted orthographic system or, more importantly, of a descriptive grammar. This is confirmed by the authors of the two monumental volumes of the Corpus of Soqotri Oral Literature. As they inform us, the volumes do not include a grammar of Soqotri because “much further knowledge must be accumulated before a serious grammatical description of Soqotri can be compiled” (Naumkin et al. 2014: 21). Perhaps, the reason for this is partly due to the non-prioritization of practical considerations. This is revealed in their admission that “Commonly occurring phenomena of grammar and lexicon are rarely touched upon in the commentary. Instead, we have concentrated on what can be legitimately considered unusual, complicated or enigmatic” (Naumkin et al. 2014: 21). Similarly, they propose a transcription system for Soqotri using the Arabic script and their equivalent in the Latin alphabet with extensive explanation of some of the more complicated aspects (Naumkin et al. 2014: 11–20). However, the transcription is based on the contents of the Vienna and Russian corpuses and the linguistic particularities of their informants (i.e., their idiolects), which may not be representative of the speech patterns of all Soqotrans. This is problematic as the Soqotri language did not exist as one language but in the form of several regional dialects (as is the case with most languages), the full inventory of which

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has never been carried out systematically. In fact, the useful attempts at sampling Soqotri’s dialectal variety (e.g., Simeone-Senelle 2003) remain preliminary at best. Therefore, the transcription system is not only provisional but also not yet useable by literate Soqotrans, as it would have to be formally thought locally. Moreover, the transcription system is partly mired in pedantic considerations. One example will suffice: One particular innovation that will add to the cacophony in the spelling of the Archipelago’s name is the transcription of the velarized emphatic consonant in Arabic “” into the glottalized emphatic consonant “k.” in Soqotri instead of the usual “q” (see Hetzron 1997: xvi). This adds another spelling of the island “Sok.ot.ra,” in addition to the other existing versions that I have already listed above. Noteworthy is that the book did not always apply its own transliteration system, as is evident in the use of “Soqotra” throughout. I will do likewise in this book. 2.2.3

Challenges Ahead: Beckoning Opportunities

In sum, after nearly two hundred years since the modern discovery of the Soqotri language in 1835, the state of knowledge about it can be summarized as follows: There are no elaborate diachronic analyses of the language’s evolution, only tentative genealogies of its origin within the family of Semitic languages and as part of the MSALs. There is no proper dictionary (notwithstanding Leslau’s 1938 Lexique or Nakano’s 1986 Comparative Vocabulary of three MSALs with English), but many dispersed word-lists. There is no grammar, but a series of narrow scope analyses of its grammatical peculiarities. And there is still the absence of a consensus among scholars over, or of any interest by the Yemeni state (that controls the education curriculum) in, a transcription system that would turn the language into a written one. This is in spite of educated Soqotrans’ strong desire for one. One glaring case that highlights the urgency for a scholarly-based and government-approved transcription system is the utterly corrupted names of villages in the census report for Soqotra. Literate Soqotrans have to guess which villages are being referred to, given their unrecognizable transcription into Arabic. Nevertheless, there are a lot of important works. For example, the pre-modern records of oral literature as presented in the Vienna corpus and the more modern version of the Russian corpus that were discussed above; works on the extensive depth and scope of Soqotran indigenous botanical knowledge (e.g., Miller and Morris 2004); and scattered multi-media repositories of

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contemporary poems and poetry performances. More importantly, there are the Soqotran people—still speaking their language in a near-full spectrum of domains and in its various dialectal versions in spite of their conflicting attitudes and varying degrees of commitment to it, and under multiples challenges to its survivability—who await the engagement and assistance of linguists to write their indigenous linguistic heritage. The ultimate point of my lament is that these materials have yet to be integrated by specialists into usable forms accessible to both the Soqotran community and the interested public at large. Finally, beyond the oral literature, environmental knowledge, and cultural practices catalogued in the above-discussed publications, the reality of the Soqotri language is one of constant change. The independence of South Yemen in November 1967 was the catalytic event, which initiated the transformation of Arabic from a minority language into the lingua franca of the island, and the corresponding functional marginalization and gradual replacement of Soqotri as the dominant communal language. Furthermore, the rise of education under the socialist administration and its decline since unification has led to a politically fraught socio-linguistic situation on the island that exemplifies a complex communal linguistic ecology: First, there is the coexistence of a formal (High) and a dialectal (Low) Arabic, due to its being unevenly mastered by the local population as a result of its inadequate instruction on the island. Second, this is exacerbated by the coexistence of Arabic as the dominant language and Soqotri as the non-dominant one, which leads to a situation in which speakers use each language for a different set of functions, whereby the non-dominant language is used in informal and home contexts and the dominant language is used in official context (e.g., school and government communications). Third, there is the emergence of English as the lingua franca of higher-end economic activities (e.g., tourism and development). This transitional linguistic ecology is generating conflicting attitudes among Soqotrans toward their mother tongue as an inalienable communal patrimony, their commitment to Arabic as the lingua franca of citizenship and religious identity, and their desire for English as an economic asset. The following section explores Soqotrans’ conflicting attitudes toward their language.

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2.3 Socio-Linguistic Predicament: Dissonant Attitudes Soqotrans’ linguistic attitudes represent a pragmatic accommodation strategy toward the state’s attempt at making them into acculturated citizens. This process of acculturation, and the adjustment constraints on community members, is aptly described as follows: [It is] a dual process of self-making and being-made within webs of power linked to the nation-state and civil society, [and is manifested in the] cultural practices… produced out of negotiating the often ambivalent and contested relations with the state and its hegemonic forms that establish the criteria of belonging within a national population and territory. (Ong 1996: 738)

Consequently, Soqotrans’ dissonant attitudes toward their language betray varying degrees of cultural allegiance, which, in turn, cause problems of integration both within their changing communal context and into the national society. Their linguistic predicament, as discussed below in terms of the dissonant attitudes displayed toward, and thus their polarized allegiance to, their mother tongue, exemplifies the endemic cultural dilemmas of ethno-linguistic minorities who are citizens of Arab states and whose cultural heritage tend to be neglected by the state (Miller 2003). As is the case in Soqotra, where the state’s policy negligence toward Soqotrans’ ethno-linguistic heritage has had a dissuasive effect on their communal attitudes, as they harbor a gnawing feeling of linguistic insecurity, due to their uncertainty about whether or not it is politically permissible to use the island’s linguistic endowment as a symbolic cultural resource in an alternative project of self-making. Consequently, Soqotrans tend to assume that the state has a political aversion vis-àvis their language, as one local interlocutor puts it, “The government neither cares about its death nor its development.” This seems to have engendered a kind of “symbolic intimidation,” as culturally conscious Soqotrans betrayed a latent anxiety, or at least a sense of political vulnerability. This sense of vulnerability betrayed a kind of “self-awareness under state surveillance,” which is induced by the government silence about whether or not Soqotrans are free to endeavor toward the preservation of their language without being questioned about their political allegiance

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to the Yemeni state, or made to feel as lesser Muslims because of their advocacy of a language that is unrelated to that of the Qur’an. The dissonant attitudes that I have catalogued below are based on interviews conducted from 2002 onward during which I engaged Soqotrans from all walks of life, ranging from high school students, poets, rural residents, and political personalities. My aim was to determine the nature and extent of their concern toward the fate of the Soqotri language. More specifically, I inquired whether it would make a difference to Soqotrans if the Soqotri language were to disappear. The responses revealed the emergence of what I have labeled polarized allegiances. The latter are an effect of the process of national political incorporation and cultural assimilation, which has in turn challenged Soqotrans’ commitment to their communal cultural heritage. In assessing Soqotrans dissonant attitudes and vacillating commitment to their linguistic heritage one cannot speak of fully articulated views on the language with very few exceptions. Instead, what was offered were a series of opinions, or sentiments, expressed in the midst of conversations or prompted by specific questions, which might have generated previously unthought dispositions. Nevertheless, the fragments of views that I have organized into five types of dispositions and their motivations fairly capture the range of opinions that Soqotrans appear to collectively hold about the Soqotri language. The views discussed below betray Soqotrans’ divergent aspirational horizons in terms of conflicting attitudes toward their linguistic heritage as well as toward the island’s process of change: (i) the importance of social and economic upward mobility; (ii) the consideration of national unity; (iii) the primacy of religious identity; (iv) the preservation of ecological and cultural diversity; and (v) the reaffirmation of an exclusive Arab pedigree. 2.3.1

Aspiring to Mobility: Self-Modernization

The Soqotri language is seen as an impediment to progress (taqaddum) due to the new generation’ perception of it as irrelevant to improving their socio-economic status. The latter depends on becoming a teacher or a staff of one of the ministerial branches on the island. Knowledge of Soqotri is not an asset in either case. The Soqotri language is seen as containing some intrinsic limitations. For example, one’s thoughts cannot be communicated in writing, thus general information cannot be stored (except through the use of cassette tapes or more recently voice messagings through social media, which is used for sharing poetry

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between islanders and the Soqotran diaspora in the Gulf), accumulated or shared any other way but through oral communications. Such limitations are seen as obstacles to self-modernization. This position seems to be the default attitude among Soqotran youth who make up 60% of the total population, but especially among the urbanized ones. This cohort of young people is buffeted by a gauntlet of socio-culturally debilitating sentiments. For example, feelings of disenchantment with the perceived irrelevance of past cultural traditions for socio-economic advancement, and of discontentment with the inadequacies of the government’s institutional modernization. Consequently, their attachment to the language is becoming tenuous, through a process of cultural neglect produced by their participation in the formal social institutions that manage their lives, such as education, administration, and religion. In fact, the fluency in Soqotri of Soqotran youth who made it through high school seems to be on a declining course. This is exemplified in one Soqotran exasperated, and exaggerated, remark that even for oral communications Soqotrans seem to have abandoned their language. As he put it: “Arabic has even become the language of telephone conversations – it’s difficult to speak Socotri on the phone, as if the telephone only understands Arabic” (Baz 2010: 39). This attitude betrays an almost pecuniary relationship to the language. Soqotri is seen as a currency that is losing its value in the current socio-economic context of the island. There is no benefit to be derived from holding on to it, as it would no longer be accepted by the national language bank, metaphorically speaking. To continue with the banking metaphor, gradually, the Soqotri banknotes are being withdrawn from circulation as the members of the older generation who were the guarantors of its value die off. The urban youth’s indifference toward the Soqotri language is partly the result of their poor literacy engendered by local institutional deficiencies, but unfairly attributed to the limitations of their mother tongue. The major culprit in fomenting Soqotran youth’s alienation from their mother tongue is, in fact, their participation in an educational system that is dis-embedding them from their socio-cultural milieu, which is leading to an inexorable urban linguistic attrition. This dis-embedding process is aptly captured in a famous poem in Soqotra set in the form of a conversation between Hammudi, the goat herder, and Abduh, the town dweller, in which the former offers a bewildered response to the latter’s question as to why he was migrating “From the mountain heights to the town below”:

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I was told to send my son to get an education… So that he should learn to write and read Arabic and English letters. Then once he’d finished 8th year… I was told he should then set off and travel overseas, to study at a teacher training college. (Morris 2005: 4–5)

The result is an incomplete transition from the formerly predominant herder’s lifestyle based on a livelihood regulated by nature’s whims and relying on experiential knowledge, to the state-mandated “modern” formal education system. The latter is still saddled with the inherited lack of interest in secular education from North Yemen’s Imamate period when intellectual life was tethered to religious precepts, and a traditional religious education was the exclusive norm. This left a legacy of inadequate institutionalization of a secular curriculum at the national level. This legacy was transferred to Soqotra after unification in 1990, and it fostered a preference for Islamic studies (dir¯ as¯ at isl¯ amiyya) among the new generation of Soqotran college students. This represents a reversal of the rigorously secular and effective educational system established under the socialist regime (1967–1990), which had “an almost evangelical attitude to education” (Morris 2007: 45). The consequence of this educational dis-embedding of Soqotrans is their inadequate acquisition of Arabic language skills and general secular knowledge, which is leading to the appropriation of Arabic into the local vernacular, and thus generating a kind of creolized semantic imaginary. Indeed, this seems to be giving rise to a spoken dialectal synthesis, which leaves its speakers the jack of two, in fact three, languages and the master of none; thereby permanently handicapping their participation in modern institutions, and disorienting their sense of communal belongingness (Simeone-Senelle 2003: 71–72). The binary opposition between “literate change-makers” and “non-literate conservers” that is supposed to be produced by the spread of literacy in a once exclusively oral society (Goody and Watt 1968) seems to have consecrated the presence of non-literate conservers by default, as the relatively neglected rural periphery (b¯ adiya’ ) has remained the preserve of Soqotri language and cultural traditions due to its inadequate access to schools. However, the urban center (mad¯ına) has not generated those literate change-makers, as it is increasingly being plagued by a kind of cultural anomie, in which urban Soqotran youth are left straddling the margins of b¯ adiya’ and of the mad¯ına, belonging fully to neither of them, while expressing no linguistic

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loyalty and being nonchalant about the fate of their native language. As the former head of the Soqotra Association for Heritage and History, and editor of the (no longer published) magazine, Soqotra.Net, written by, and for, Soqotrans put it in exasperated and exaggerated terms: “The new generation isn’t fluent in Soqotri, nor Arabic, nor English. It is a generation without a language” (Baz 2010: 40). 2.3.2

Affirming National Belongingness: State Allegiance

The political incorporation of Soqotrans is taking place within a context where “national identity is still entrapped in the linguistic imaginaire of the territorial state,” which is manifested in the culturally protectionist ideology noted above, and its use of Arabic as a nation-building tool (Appadurai 1996: 166). The effect in Soqotra is a retroactive linguistic and ethnic homogenization of the population. The perception of the Soqotri language as an obstacle to ethnic assimilation would normally be associated with mainlanders. Paradoxically, that perception seems to be shared by some Soqotrans as well; however, it seems dictated by political correctness and is leading some Soqotrans to feign denial of any affective bond with their language. The argument offered amounts to a political pledge of allegiance to the imagined Arab Nation and not merely, if at all, to the Yemeni nation-state: The national language is Arabic so there is no reason for maintaining Soqotri. Moreover, as Soqotrans are of Arab origin, they belong to the utopian space of al-umma al-‘arabiyya, the foundational pillar of which is the Arabic language. Thus, they have a political obligation to be members in good standing. Advocacy of the preservation of another language could be seen as a rejection of the exclusive ethno-cultural foundation of the Yemeni nation-state, but especially of the pan-Arab nation for which Soqotrans’ affective bond seems stronger. This is now a standard response among many Soqotrans, who find it politically convenient not to burden themselves with linguistic dilemmas in favor of more pragmatic pursuits. One illustration of this disposition was from an unlikely source, as he is a well-known Soqotri poet whose composition in Arabic represents a small portion of his work. This is partly due to generational as well as educational reasons, as he is illiterate and uses the tape recorder as his means of composition and dissemination. Surprisingly, he expressed little concern about the future of the Soqotri language. When asked about the consequences of Soqotri’s likely disappearance, he said poets would

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use Arabic with a dismissive shrug as if to emphasize his lack of any sentimental allegiance to his native tongue and the very conduit of his creative urge. His nonchalance about the ultimate demise of the only language he knows best was contradicted by his suggestion that the main social function of Soqotri poetry was language preservation. Although the latter response was partly imposed by the question posed to him, in which two other choices were provided namely public entertainment and identity construction. However, when asked about his suggestion toward the preservation of the language, he mentioned the establishment of a governmental council for poetry, which would organize poetry contest to encourage young people to develop an interest in the art form of the Soqotri language. This suggestion betrayed the seemingly obligatory reference to governmental sponsorship of any public initiative regarding the preservation of the Soqotri language. What seems to be at work here is the internalization of the tension and the contradiction between the state’s promotion of a national culture through a hegemonic monolingualism, and the corollary dissipation of Soqotrans’ cultural traditions, language, customs, and communal allegiance that could encourage resistance to the imagined national community. This straddling of incommensurable sensibilities seems to be a form of justificatory subterfuge to make one’s political peace with the perceived aversion of the Yemeni state toward ethno-linguistic diversity. Not to be discounted is that this point of view might be an ethno-theory offered to the foreign researcher whose questioning may inspire suspicion about his motives, and fear of betrayal of confidentiality. However, the poem he played on his tape recorder in my honor was a panegyric to the head of state for being personally responsible for Soqotra’s progress. It seemed to have been prepared for its delivery to visiting mainland officials as an oath of political loyalty. Moreover, its unconditional denunciation of the socialist administration prior to unification, and absolute praise of the unity government betrayed a certain ambiguity about whether it is an expression of personal conviction or an act of political ingratiation. In the nineties [in the aftermath of unification] we were consumed by fear, but the contrary happened. Today the gloom has lifted… The leader of the unity has rescued it [Soqotra] from the dark abyss… The year 2000 is a history that speaks of achievements. Soqotra dances. You were forgotten, now you have an international airport…

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International communications and a promise of a sea port. We will not talk back to you, we will respond with gratefulness and promises. All my life under the [Socialist] party the situation was terrible and today the achievements have made me happy. There is no stored flour and deceit times have ended.

2.3.3

Asserting a Muslim Identity: Beyond al-J¯ahiliyya

Islamic monotheism seems to have its linguistic counterpart in the exclusive use of Arabic, which is regarded as an ideal, if not a compulsory, form of mono-lingualism wherever Islam is implanted and Muslims predominate. This is the cultural legacy of the advent of Islam, which signified a new era in world history, at least for Muslims, and which formally demarcated itself from previous historical periods by designating them as the age of ignorance (al-j¯ ahiliyya)—Islamic civilization’s version of a “dark age” prior to its emergence. One of the consequences of this historical demarcation is the active cultivation—almost as a prerequisite of being a good Muslim and an authentic Arab—of a historical amnesia, which entails the abandonment of the ensemble of cultural practices and customs related to the pre-Islamic period. The practical consequence of this historical amnesia is that: “[T]he elements in folk life are all locally re-interpreted in Qur’anic terms, which thus set a limit to the historic horizon… [and consequently] the folk vision of the world is articulated entirely within Islam” (Gellner 1972: 12). This is the perspective that many Soqotrans seem to be adopting toward the Soqotri language, and which engenders an identity anxiety that, in turn, seeks its dissolution through a cultural quest for Islamic legitimacy. This quest for a translocal, and ultimately religious, source to legitimize their identity is driven by the dilemma about whether or not too exclusive an emphasis on preserving a Soqotri-based communal identity would compound Soqotrans’ geographic isolation with a cultural orphanage from the Islamic Community (al-umma al-isl¯ amiyya). Soqotran protagonists of a communal disaffiliation from a j¯ ahiliyyatinted cultural legacy justified their quest through a reductive syllogism: Soqotrans are Muslims and the language of the Muslims is Arabic, the authentic badge of their membership in the Islamic Community, therefore Arabic, should be their sole language. To defend the continued existence of Soqotri would be to betray an attachment to the j¯ ahiliyya

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period. This situation has confronted the more educated Soqotrans with a dilemma: How to avoid denying their linguistic patrimony without undermining their allegiance to the Islamic Community. As the affirmation of an Islamic identity is the main motivation for many Soqotrans—even though many can neither read nor speak the classical language of the Qur’an—in their acceptance of Arabic as the communal lingua franca. Accordingly, Arabic is seen as the linguistic embodiment of an indispensable religion-based identity, while some use of Soqotri is castigated as a relic of j¯ ahiliyya. This is exemplified in the abandonment of Soqotri names for Arabic ones. Initially, this was to comply with the socialist regime’s political exigency toward the Arabization of Soqotran culture, but subsequently, it became a religious imperative to adopt an Islamic identity. As a result, this led to the retrospective Arabization of one’s ancestors: Herders in the hinterland not only changed their names into Arabic ones, but also that of their fathers and grandfathers as well. In effect, the emergent hegemony of an Islamic cultural sensibility over other cultural influences (e.g., communal and national) has engendered a paradoxical situation: While the state tolerates without promoting the use of the Soqotri language, religiously minded individuals and groups are actively discouraging the practice of some cultural traditions on the basis of the cultural primacy of an Islamic morality, which is something the state dares not do explicitly. This entails the attempted enforcement by local moral enthusiasts of, not only, selective language replacement, but also of a form of cultural assimilation that promotes a vertical affiliation with the supra-national Islamic umma, which paradoxically by-passes the symbols of national identification. As a result, the performance of the most communally integrative cultural practices is threatened with disappearance. For example, the traditional ceremony of circumcision has already been abandoned. Another cultural tradition that is being targeted because it involves the participation of women and men, which is prohibited in Islam, is the traditional Soqotran wedding celebration, zayafa in Soqotri,1 which is the main traditional forum for the performance of Soqotri poetry (tenotir). Indeed, it is during the wedding ceremony that new poets make their debut, and subsequently present their new material. To resist this cultural purge, some Soqotrans have sought to demonstrate—through the dubious method of establishing approximate similarities in sound with equivalences in meaning—that the equivalent of many Soqotri words, if not the words themselves, is found in the Qur’an. A case in point is the former Member of Parliament for Soqotra from the

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Islamic political party of al-Is.l¯ah., who declared that he had discovered about 400 Soqotri words in the Qur’an. The dubious nature of the claim is not relevant. What is significant is the means employed to justify that Soqotri is equally the language of Muslims. This seems to be the most acceptable, that is politically innocuous, way of defending the language as not only indigenous to Yemen but also associated with the language of Islam. The aim is twofold: first, to prove that Soqotri is etymologically a dialect (lahja) of Arabic, and therefore does not belong to the j¯ ahiliyya dustbin; and second, to argue that since Soqotrans have access to their real mother tongue (lugha) Arabic, there is no need to make a special case for its preservation (see Al-Dahri 2003). It is a strategy that seeks to induce cultural acceptance, or at least empathy, from culturally dominant others. Its pursuit is evocative of the practice of taqiyyah: the denial of one’s religious affiliation out of fear for one’s life during the early period of the emergence of Islam, without abandoning one’s faith. For Soqotrans who favor the official recognition of the Soqotri language, recourse to the practice of taqiyyah thaq¯ afiyya (cultural denial) is rendered necessary because religiously inclined Soqotrans may find such a public pursuit the nemesis of their own quest to be accepted as authentic Arabs and as long-standing members in the post-j¯ ahiliyya Islamic polity. 2.3.4

Preserving a “Semiotic Homeland”: Biocultural Communalism

There is a general recognition of the importance of the Soqotri language as the “semiotic homeland” of Soqotrans, given that its lexicon is seen “as mirrors of nature and sedimentations of cultural knowledge” (Errington 2003: 724). This is substantiated in the following perceptions of the still relevant functions of the Soqotri language: (a) as a repository of a rich taxonomic repertoire, which articulates the knowledge of the faunal, floral, aquatic, and terrestrial resources of the island; (b) as the ethno-geographical vernacular in which all aspects of the landscape are inventoried; (c) as the topographical nomenclature for the spatial dimensions of the island, and the names of villages; and (d) as the linguistic preserve of Soqotrans’ livelihood customs, co-operative traditions, and oral art (Morris 2011). Moreover, it represents the original and authentic communicative means among Soqotrans that belongs exclusively to them, and that enables them to assert their cultural specificity. Or stated differently in more evocative imagery: The Soqotri language is the

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“embodiment of intimate, lived relations among speakers, communities, and environments” (Errington 2003: 724). The attempt, in the mid-1990s, to “rescue” Soqotra from its obscurity through the medium of a development-with-conservation approach was accompanied by an outpouring of concerns about the potential negative impacts on the cultural and environmental heritage of Soqotrans. This concern was aptly captured in the following precautionary observation: The language [will be] in agony, unless an effort to think about its future is made by the community … and understood by the authorities. Anything that might contribute to rescuing Soqotra from its insularity should be examined within careful cultural policies. (Lonnet 1998: 297)

In spite of this awareness, the focus of the many teams of researchers sponsored by the United Nations (since 1996) was exclusively on preserving Soqotra’s biodiversity, and they seemed unaware that the latter is symbiotically linked to the repertoire of “traditional ecological knowledge” that is archived in the Soqotri language.2 This oversight is particularly astonishing, since the intrinsic interdependency of biological and cultural, especially linguistic, diversity—or put more comprehensively, the dialectical relationality between the biosphere (the world’s ecosystems) and the logosphere (the world’s indigenous languages)—was already familiar to environmental scientists and linguists (Maffi 2005). Moreover, the local appreciation of Soqotri as a communal heritage worthy of preservation, in spite of the Yemeni state non-recognition of it as a cultural asset in the national cultural patrimony, is an endemic commonsense view held not only by local intellectuals and poets but also the silent rural majority. They are anxious about the agony of their native language and the presumed impending demise of the cultural repertoire that it supports. In spite of the lack of a supportive national cultural policy, a kernel of local cultural advocates has constituted themselves into communal heritage preservers and has loosely congregated around the Soqotra Association for Heritage and History. This group seeks to promote greater linguistic loyalty through the advocacy of the formalization of Soqotri into a written language. As they endeavor to recuperate their vanishing “semiotic homeland” and to restore their only means to authentic self-expression. Abandoned to their own devices both by the state and the international community of researchers, they have adopted a salvage approach, which entails the recording of poetry, the quest for a

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transcription system of the Soqotri phonetics into the Arabic script as a means of writing Soqotri poems, writing articles in mainland newspapers about Soqotra, and most important of all these activities, is the holding of an annual Soqotri poetry competition. Unfortunately, the labor of a number of foreign linguists working on the Soqotri language has yet to contribute toward reversing its potentially endangered state. What is missing, among the international well-wishers of the Soqotri language, is an awareness of the local cultural context characterized by, on the one hand, the Soqotran community’s capacity deficit for whom the question—already settled among professional linguists—as to whether Soqotri is an independent language or a dialect of Arabic is still a conundrum (see below); and, on the other, the culturally tonedeaf political leadership of the state whose undeclared policy of passive assimilation of Soqotrans is one of the principal causes of the Soqotri language endangerment. Accordingly, the recent spate of important work on indigenous environmental knowledge and the Soqotri language (e.g., Miller and Morris 2004; Naumkin et al. 2014, 2018) will have to be shared locally through active pedagogical activities in situ by these scholars for their work to have an impact on language preservation. Thus far, local initiatives in language preservation undertaken by local intellectuals (e.g., Fahad Salim Kafayin and ‘Abdallah Musallam Qasim mentioned by Naumkin et al. (2014: 27), such as the quest for an Arabic-based orthography of the Soqotri language are not understood by most literate Soqotrans (see below). Moreover, these efforts are constrained by the lack of a politically enabling environment for the promotion of linguistic diversity on the island, which prevents their integration into the local school curriculum. As a result, most Soqotrans seem resigned to the inexorable demise of their language, and some even offer a prognosis about the approximate timing of its death: from five years to three generations. 2.3.5

“Soqotri Is a Dialect of Arabic”: Self-Arabization

The quoted phrase in the above title is, in fact, the slogan of a rather extreme version of an Arab-exclusive cultural redefinition of Soqotrans’ ethno-linguistic heritage, and it signifies the ideologization of Soqotrans’ identity. This view is shared among self-exiled Soqotran intellectuals in the Gulf diaspora who are advocating an ideology-infused conceptualization of Soqotran history and language, in which the Soqotran community is encapsulated as a patronized polity within a transnational Arab-Muslim

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ethno-religious bond. Accordingly, these writers seem to be engaged in the encompassment of Soqotrans into an Arab nationalist historiography and thus the retroactive Arabization of their language, as part of a redefinition of their ethno-linguistic identity and the re-orientation of their political allegiance from a national identification to a supra-national one. This distinction between a language (lugha) and a dialect (lahja) is an extension of the perennial debate over whether or not the national vernaculars of the different Arab countries are to be considered separate languages from, or inferior dialects of, Classical Arabic (Haeri 2000). This has led to the Arab states’ deliberate non-recognition of what local speakers regard as their distinct languages, as in the case of the Lebanese vernacular (see Salameh 2010). In the case, of Soqotra, promoters of this ethno-culturally exclusionary Arabism (‘ur¯ uba) argue that Soqotri is a dialect of Arabic and Soqotrans are originally Arabs. In calling Soqotri a dialect of Arabic, they betrayed ignorance of the fact that for two speech systems to be in a language-dialect relationship requires some degree of mutual intelligibility and shared lexicon, which does not exist between Soqotri and Arabic (cf. Crystal 2000: 8). In insisting on this language-dialect relationality, they denied Soqotrans and their language any autonomous existence outside a derivative cultural status.3 In effect, they have become cheerleaders, unknowingly to be sure, in their own indigenous cultural effacement out of a politically motivated allegiance to the “protectionist ideology” noted earlier. As one such exile categorically asserts: There is no doubt that the origin of the Soqotri dialect (lahja) is the ancient formal Arabic language (lugha) and it is a branch of the Himyari language in which three Arabic dialects have been attributed: A dialect in Oman, the Mahri dialect, and the Soqotri dialect. (Al-Dahri 2003: 19)4

Al-Dahri, however, is merely repeating what is regarded as a fact among Arabs from the medieval period onward: “For many Arabs the term ‘Himyar’ came to represent all things ‘South Arabian’. Thus they commonly refer to the MSA [Modern South Arabian languages] as ‘Himyari’, and believe them to be a continuation of the OSA [Old or Epigraphic South Arabian languages], also called ‘Himyari’” (Morris 2007). Moreover, these Soqotrans’ diasporic location has engendered a divergent sensibility from those who have stayed behind, as their advocacy of an exclusive Arabism that locals consider excessive. This Arabism is displayed in a

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retroactive ethno-cultural colonization of Soqotra through its encompassment within an Arabo-Islamic narrative that recognizes only those with an Arab ethno-cultural ancestry and linguistic heritage. This narrative seems partly inspired by, or at least evocative of, the tenth-century Arab historian al-Tabari, who offered “a vision of history inspired by the regular rhythms of Qur’anic narrative,” and that weaved a seamless historical web within “which the Muslim community could situate itself with respect to the past” (Khalidi 1994: 78–79). Ahmed al-Anbali, Soqotra’s most prominent native autodidact historian, is the main protagonist of the Soqotran version of this narrative. He encapsulates the island within a creationist narrative that takes its cue from the Qur’an, which is entitled “Soqotra is Arabic since the Dawn of History.” The creationist bent is evident in his inaugural invocation: “Since our forefather ‘Adam, may God bless him, humans have gone through many events and Allah told us in the Holy Qur’an about some of these events and what happened in ancient times, for which we do not need the philosophy of some historian but only the word of Allah” (Al-Anbali 2007: 38). He narrates a monogenesis story of the origin of the Soqotri language that can be summarized as follows: Noah “called his people to follow God one thousand years minus fifty” after Adam to embark on his Ark. Following the Flood, Noah’s Ark anchored in a village near al-Jawd¯ı Mountain in Iraq. The people on the Ark settled there and some migrated throughout the Arabian Peninsula. One such ¯ tribe who settled in Wadi Hadhramawt and subsepeople were the ‘Ad quently migrated to the coastal village of al-Shihr, and from there went to Soqotra (Al-Anbali 2007: 38–46). Al-Anbali is not alone in adopting this creationist perspective, which seems to be the norm among Soqotrans who present themselves as “researchers” and who seem motivated by a religion-inflected animosity toward, and reflexive non-engagement with, foreign researchers. For example, al-Dahri published a pamphlet “to respond to those who allegedly say Soqotri is not Arabic without any evidence or shred of science, except for the allegations of Western Orientalists with their intellectual invasion which strayed from the true divine methodology” (2010: 10). The main lessons of this antiquarian reconstruction of Soqotrans’ ethno-linguistic heritage that this creationist narrative seeks to impart to Soqotran readers are: (a) that Soqotrans are originally direct descendents of ancient authentic Arabs; (b) that the Soqotri language is an ancient dialect of Arabic, which was spoken among the flood survivors on Noah’s

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Ark; (c) that the subsumption of Soqotri within Arabic is the best way for Soqotrans to re-claim an authentic Arab-Islamic identity; and (d) that Soqotrans should not believe the myths of foreign researchers who claim that the six Modern South Arabian Languages, which include Soqotri, are not dialects of Arabic. Al-Anbali’s egregiously unfounded assertions are in complete denial (assuming he is aware) of the array of evidence marshaled by studies in the paleography and in the Semitic philology of South Arabian languages, which have invalidated every one of his lessons (Robin 1991–1993). His cloistered antiquarian perspective on history and language invites sarcastic dismissal. However, I will resist the temptation and engage him, because he deserves credit for his intellectual effort—although misguided—on behalf of his native land and culture, and because he occupies a bully pulpit, both on the web and in print, from which he is advocating a politics of cultural mobilization among his compatriots based on an exclusionary mono-ethno-linguistic identity. Accordingly, I will briefly highlight the ramification of one of the four lessons, namely the subsumption of Soqotri within Arabic, because by implication Al-Anbali is promoting a kind of linguistic ethnocide. This is exemplified in an article entitled “Preparing to Write the Soqotri Story” in the first issue of a magazine Soqotra Net that was published to commemorate the 2010 Soqotri poetry competition in Hadiboh.5 In effect, the article is an attempt at proposing a “solution” to the absence of a consensual mode of transcribing the Soqotri language. There is currently no established script and a very dim prospect of one being officially formulated and adopted in the near term, and which is a prerequisite for it to be taught and used locally. This is due to the national government’s deliberate neglect of the existence of Soqotri and to the Soqotrans’ lack of the requisite technical knowledge in linguistics. Al-Anbali is filling this void with some brazenly untutored propositions, which are not, and perhaps cannot be, challenged locally. After acknowledging the absence of a script, he asserts, erroneously, that it was never a problem, as Soqotrans always understood Arabic, and wrote Soqotri using the Arabic script. He explains this conundrum as follows: The Soqotri oral speech has no alphabet to write it with. How did the Soqotrans do when they needed to write some of their affairs? The answer is they wrote it in the formal Arabic alphabet, and no two persons will disagree about that, as no two goats will butt heads over that. Do they understand the Arabic alphabet when it is read to them? Yes, they

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understand it very well, and they respond to it with the same language. (Al-Anbali 2010: 14)

To elucidate the mystery of this mutual intelligibility of two mutually incomprehensible languages, and how this transcription feat was achieved, Al-Anbali follows this implausible claim with an audacious assertion: I believe I have found the first step of the solution to this problem. What the Soqotrans do when they write their speech in Arabic is not a translation because the letters pronounced by Soqotrans are originally Arabic. … Apart from some sounds, that are not more than the fingers in one hand, which comes out with a side scratch [i.e., a lateral sibilant], and it becomes similar to the vocalization of some Arabic letters and it is written with it. (2010: 14)

Alas, al-Anbali’s renegade discourse toward his linguistic heritage betrays a musta‘ariba complex: The aspiration to be a descendant of Yareb bin Qah.t.¯an the progenitor of the genuine Arabs of the south of the Arabian Peninsula, in spite of the absence of a vindicating genealogy. However, he is not a protagonist as much as a victim of the “protectionist ideology” mentioned earlier, which engenders a propensity toward cultural self-abnegation among members of ethnolinguistic minorities within the Arabic koiné, as well as conflates Arabian geography with Arab ethnicity, and thus promotes a retroactive as well as prospective essentialized ethno-linguistic homogeneity throughout the Arabian Peninsula.

2.4 Beyond the Arabic Koiné: Recognition of Multilingualism Paradoxically, in spite of the above-discussed dissonant attitudes toward their language, Soqotrans remain emotionally attached to it and continue to use it first and foremost in their daily interactions. This attachment is conveyed by one interlocutor who was mindful of the state’s assimilationist vision: “They can paint their flag on the mountains, as long as they leave us alone to use our language.” Nevertheless, the range of attitudes expressed by Soqotrans toward their linguistic heritage has problematized the assumed permanence of an umbilical cord between mother tongue and identity. This is captured in the prosaic formula: “The primary

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barometer of identity is language.” In contrast, Soqotrans seem to be replacing their mother tongue on the basis of other considerations, such as economic exigencies, religious proprieties, and externally anchored cultural identities, as more significant determinants of their self-concept and sense of place in the world. In effect, the evolving linguistic situation on the island has undermined the conventional assumption about language being “a necessary condition of ethnocultural identity … or essential quality of community membership” (Silverstein 1998: 402, 415). Instead, Soqotrans, the youth in particular, seem to conceive language as a mere adaptive tool to the changing socio-economic ecology of the island. Indeed, the dissonant attitudes and contradictory dispositions of native speakers toward their mother tongue are best understood as the adaptive effects to the combination of forced and voluntary inducements engendered by Soqotrans’ political incorporation and social modernization process. This process is influenced by the political order of the nation-state, the local economic interventions of international institutions, and the cultural mediation of satellite television and local access to Internet, and their ramifications on communal cultural politics. The resulting divergent linguistic attitudes indicate the shifting scale and changing content of Soqotrans’ cultural loyalty and political allegiance, as they adopt new criteria of self-identification and alternative norms of local prestige, at least in the urban context. These criteria and norms are no longer confined to the boundaries of clan, as they straddle not only communal but also national and international contexts and are further mediated by diasporic cultural politics. These factors have predisposed Soqotrans toward various forms of socio-cultural compromise and economic opportunism. Hence, for the new generation, the preference is for addressing the socio-economic exigencies of the present, and not for preserving the linguistic legacy of their cultural past. Indeed, Soqotran youths are being inducted simultaneously into (a) an Arabophone world that provides them with a prestigious membership in a pan-regional community with a globe-spanning civilization, and (b) an anglophile club that is contributing to the UN dream of metamorphosing Soqotran pastoralists and urbanites into English-speaking ecotourist guides. Both are furthering the government’s tacit objective of expunging Soqotrans’ ethnolinguistic loyalties. In effect, in the value scale of urban youth, in addition to Arabic, English is perceived as a status-enhancing language, and more importantly as an economically-empowering asset. The trailblazer in the Soqotran youth’ cathexis with English was the Australian-run

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English school established in 1999 with the approval of the Ministry of Education. English is still being taught locally in the local college and in a private English language institute, in response to an ever-increasing demand among the urban youth. In the emergent generation of urbanized Soqotrans, this trend is generating a resigned attitude toward the Soqotri language, at least in its pure form free of code-switching, as being confined to the cultural domain of pastoralism. Indeed, all of the contestants in the Soqotri poetry competitions are from that domain. The emerging linguistic environment of the island, however, is characterized by the uneven linguistic acculturation of Soqotrans into an asymmetric tri-lingualism of Arabic, English, and Soqotri. Noteworthy, urbanbased Soqotrans recognize the need for a symmetrical tri-lingualism given the complementary motivation for their use of these three languages: Soqotri affirms the authenticity of their indigenous identity; Arabic ensures their membership in the Islamic umma; and English enhances their access to economic opportunities. Indeed, the shared grievance among educated Soqotrans is the official government neglect of Soqotri, while English and Arabic are included in the school curriculum. Nevertheless, the resulting socio-linguistic situation in Soqotra is characterized by emergent threats, which are partly mitigated by stabilizing trends that may not be sustainable in the long run. The major mitigating factor to the emerging threats to the language is that Soqotra is differentiated into partially overlapping livelihood domains between the urban (service sector, tourism), coastal (fishing), and rural hinterland (pastoralism), in which the pace and scope of social changes vary among their residents. This variation is due to each domain’s varying degree of socio-geographic isolation, partial integration in the modern economic sector, and uneven access to government services. These factors are leading to differentiation in their residents’ level of literacy, which generates uneven patterns of language replacement. The latter is further constrained by the limited reach and ineffectiveness of educational institutions on the island. Two more mitigating factors that have the effect of the proverbial finger blocking the leak in the dam: First, Soqotri is still the dominant language in most urban and all rural homes; and second, while Arabic is the official language of public administration, the actual language of public service delivery is Soqotri or a mixture of the two, as over 90% of civil servants are Soqotrans and the majority of their clients are Soqotri speakers with only oral knowledge of Arabic. There is relative bilingual parity between

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Arabic and Soqotri as means of communicative interactions. The main exception is public education where Arabic is the sole language used. In sum, the immediate sources of the threats to the survival of the Soqotri language are the following: (1) the new generation emerging in a communal context riven by multiple externally induced exigencies (e.g., urbanization, cash-mediated consumer economy) that are engendering social differentiation, geo-cultural segmentation, and cultural alienation within the population; (2) the politico-cultural dogma about belonging to the pan-Arab nation, which engenders a tendency toward communal cultural disaffiliation; (3) the religious priority attached to the use of the Arabic language, which induces an ambivalent commitment to the Soqotri language and its associated cultural traditions; and (4) the international launch of the “Saving Soqotra” campaign to transform the island into an ecotourism destination and a biodiversity reserve, but that failed to promote the intrinsic linkage between biological and linguistic diversity preservation. Paradoxically, this international promotion campaign for the island has accelerated the functional marginalization and relative devalorization of the Soqotri language by enabling the predominance of English as the language of the most remunerative economic activities on the island, in addition to the already exclusive use of Arabic as the language of government planning. All of the above factors are contributing to the further relegation of the use of Soqotri as the perfunctory medium of dissemination to illiterate locals of decisions taken in Arabic and English, and to its increasing confinement as the livelihood vernacular of pastoralists in hinterland enclaves. Beyond the above-identified threats, there is an additional one that emerged in the aftermath of the UAE’s intervention on the island in 2015. After the discontinuation of the Soqotri competition in 2012, it was revived in 2018 as an annual event by the UAE’s Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Foundation, which sponsored the organization of a week-long “Soqotra Cultural Heritage Festival” that included a poetry competition. It allocated the astronomical sum of 100,000 thousand Dirham (over $27,000, half of the UK Booker Prize) or one million Yemeni Riyal as prize money for the winning poem. Beyond the potentially corrupting influence on the motivation and creativity of Soqotran poets, there is the worrisome fact that its organization is no longer spearheaded by members of the local NGO Soqotra Association for Heritage and History, but by non-Soqotri speaking Soqotran émigrés and UAE citizens brought in by

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the Foundation. This could introduce some corrupting linguistic influence on the poets and poems selected. For example, the participants could gradually mutate from hinterland-dwelling pastoralists poets addressing local themes to urban-based ones writing mostly in Arabic-laced Soqotri poetry as panegirics to foreign heads of state. More ominously, is that the UAE, compelled by its imperious philanthropic élan to “revive the cultural heritage of Soqotra,” could initiate the codification of Soqotri and thus inaugurate the process of turning the Soqotri language into a dialect of Arabic. Moreover, this kind of cultural festival could be appropriated into the UAE-promoted cultural tourism economy (see Chapter 5 for details). Indeed, international consultants in this domain are being invited to attend Soqotri poetry competition to ponder how its cultural folklorization and economic instrumentalization could be achieved (see Hellyer 2019). These threats and the gradual process of language replacement they are producing are partly the result of the self-interested choices of individual social agents are making in assigning differentiated use value to the locally available languages: Arabic, English, and Soqotri. Paradoxically, this is a source of optimism regarding the future of the Soqotri language, because it suggests that the current process of language replacement is not only due to external exigencies but also to the rational choices made by individual Soqotrans. Therefore, this replacement process is susceptible to reversal through an enabling environment generated by the state’s political support and investment in education. Accordingly, the eventual death of the Soqotri language, which is assumed by many, is not preordained but depends on the Yemeni state’s policy decision. The question is whether or not the state is willing to abandon the mono-ethno-linguistic criterion of national belongingness that prevails in the Arab region, which entails the renunciation of communal cultural particularities as a precondition of citizenship, in favor of an inclusive ethno-linguistic diversity as a national cultural norm.

2.5

Ethnolinguistic Vitality: Provisional Assessment

In spite of Soqotrans’ conflicting attitudes toward their mother tongue, and of scholars’ knowledge deficiencies about the Soqotri language, it is not considered an endangered language; hence, there is no need for its premature obituary. This explains its absence (along with Mehri)

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in the UNESCO’s Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages (Moseley 2007). In contrast, the other three MSA languages (Bat.h.ari, H . ars¯usi, and Hoby¯ot) are included. The criterion for inclusion is that the language must be “to some extent under threat of extinction within the next two generations of their native speakers” (Moseley 2007: viii). The main vector of the threat of extinction is the lack of intergenerational transfer: That is, “knowledge of the language as a tool of everyday communication is not being passed from one generation to another.” By this criterion, the community of Soqotri speakers remains one of high ethnolinguistic vitality as the intergenerational transmission process is still going strong. Indeed, even in Hadiboh, where most, if not all adults, are bilingual (even if some cannot read or write Arabic) are engaged in occasional lexical borrowing and where there is relative lexical impoverishment compared to hinterland residents, Soqotri remains the primary language of communications in the home, in the public sphere, and in government offices. Beyond the above-highlighted knowledge deficiencies about the Soqotri language, there is even a more glaring one concerning the community of Soqotri speakers. Presently, there is no assessment of the functional allocation between Soqotri and Arabic that would enable a determination of the level of endangerment or vitality of the Soqotri language. In this section, I undertake a provisional assessment of the process of language shift or replacement. This process is defined, paraphrasing Fishman (2001: 2), as the changes in the number and kinds of social functions for which an indigenous language is utilized in power-asymmetric interactions, if not competition, with an introduced lingua franca. This assessment is based on the following sources: (a) my many years of fieldwork in Soqotra; (b) the model of language shift/replacement formulated by Fishman (2001); (c) the terminology used in the literature on appraising ethnolinguistic vitality; and (d) the assessment criteria in the UNESCO “Language Vitality and Endangerment Framework” (2003). The critical issue to ascertain is the configuration of the intra-communal allocation of language functions. Fishman (2001: 10–11) usefully divides these language functions into two categories: the state-controlled “power functions”—employment, education, government administration, and mass media that employ the introduced lingua franca—which enable the state to sustain its hegemony over the public sphere, and the community-controlled “non-power

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functions”—the ensemble of practices associated with family life, neighborhood interactions, and community gatherings that are carried out in the local vernacular—which are the “intimacy functions” that ensure the “ethnolinguistic self-maintenance” of the Soqotran community. Fishman suggests that the ideal situation for stabilizing an indigenous language threatened by a dominant one is to achieve a compartmentalized allocation of language functions as described above. In Soqotra currently, this compartmentalized allocation of functions is the prevailing situation. This is because the intermediation of a number of mitigating factors that constitute the key criteria for maintaining ethnolinguistic vitality is fully operational in Soqotra’s context: (a) intergenerational transmission, (b) sustainable demography, (c) social cohesion, (d) emotional attachment language-based identity, and (e) active informal sociocultural institutions (see Ehala 2015: 1). In this light, the Soqotri language faces a functional threat but not an existential one. That is, the source of the threat is from the “functional diversification” of Arabic into the domains reserved for Soqotri, thus far. Language replacement in Soqotra is still at an embryonic stage, as the critical umbilical cord in the transition from a functional threat to an existential one is the state of intergenerational transmission of the mother tongue to a new generation, which remains strong. Nevertheless, Soqotri remains vulnerable and thus a “potentially endangered” language over time as replacement pressures accumulate from different sources: (a) the state’s nation-building strategy and the associated exclusionary ethno-linguistic policies; (b) the social exigencies to participate in the modernizing economy; (c) the continuing exclusion of Soqotri from the formal educational process; (d) the knowledge deficiencies that were identified above are sustaining the language’s lack of local prestige and are limiting its usefulness in a modern context; and (e) the gradual breakdown of the intergenerational transmission process engendered by the above factors’ cumulative effects on the home environment. To try to quantify the nature and impact of the emergent replacement pressures as well as their mitigating factors, I have undertaken a preliminary assessment of the Soqotri language’s location within the vitality-endangerment continuum. I have used the UNESCO framework cited earlier, which was formulated for “determining the vitality of a language in order to assist in policy development, identification of needs

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Fig. 2.1 Factors influencing language vitality and endangerment (Adapted from UNESCO 2011: 5)

and appropriate safeguarding measures” (UNESCO 2003). This framework is based on nine evaluative factors of language vitality, as identified in Fig. 2.1, which combine both types of determining factors of ethnolinguistic vitality: (a) “objective vitality” (e.g., demography # 2 and # 3, government policy # 7, institutional support # 6), and (b) “subjective vitality” (e.g., group perception # 8, adoption of new media # 5) (see Yagmur and Ehala 2011). Out of the nine factors, only two were addressed in the chapter: community members’ attitudes (8) and government policy (7). With the exception of factor 2 (number of speakers), which is more indicative than evaluative, each of the other factors has a set of six evaluation criteria ranked according to a descending scale of value from 5 to 0. The maximum obtainable score is 40, which means that the language in terms of all the criteria of evaluation, is “safe” and 0 means that the language is near-extinction or “extinct” (no living speakers). As already noted, the underlying catalyst that provokes the transition process from one stage to another is the discontinuity in the intergenerational transmission of the language in both the private and public spheres. Between these endpoints—“safe” and “extinct”—the other possible levels of endangerment are characterized as follows: (1) “Stable yet threatened” (dominant language is usurping the functions of local vernacular), (2) “unsafe” (not

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spoken by children outside the home), (3) “definitely endangered” (children not speaking), (4) “severely endangered” (only spoken by the oldest generations), and (5) “critically endangered” (spoken by few members of the oldest generation). Noteworthy, in the above figure the list of factors is numerically ordered but not hierarchically ranked in the framework. Also, both the factors and their evaluative criteria are organized into a continuum that suggests an integrated and dynamic process of language assessment, which is symbolized in the circular shape with the connecting dots in Fig. 2.1. Using the model described above, I have undertaken a preliminary assessment of the ethnolinguistic vitality of the community of Soqotri speakers. The result of this provisional appraisal is presented in tabular form at the end of this section. It provides best “guesstimates” based on information gathered from a combination of local observations and conversations over more than a decade. These observations were complemented by an engagement with the literature on language endangerment and were informed by the definitions of the evaluation criteria proposed in the UNESCO’s framework. In essence, it is a distillation of my relatively long process of familiarization with many aspects of local life that are presented in the chapters of this book. The table below shows that Soqotra’s speech community is still endowed with relatively high ethnolinguistic vitality, as the intergenerational transmission of Soqotri remains strong and the indigenous population is on a sustainable demographic path (see Table 2.1). This is facilitated by the fact that Soqotra is an island and that migration is limited to mainlanders who are the island’s economic middlemen and whose interactions with the local population are socially circumscribed. Henceforth, the principal task is the prevention of language replacement. However, one of the key obstacles remains the absence of official support for Soqotri’s maintenance as the Yemeni state is in denial about its existence, although it does not engage in active assimilation and does not prohibit the use of the language. Long-term sustainability of Soqotri remains contingent on government policy, which is the primary enabler of the institutional basis for language maintenance and the provider of the incentives for local speakers’ commitment to language use. While local linguistic activism is necessary, it is not a sufficient means to sustain the language if it is not integrated within local educational institutions. This lack of integration will accelerate the process of language replacement.

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Table 2.1 Evaluation of Soqotrans’ ethnolinguistic vitality Factors

Score

Explanations

1. Intergenerational language transmission

5

This high score—“stable yet threatened” (5)—refers to the fact that home transmission of Soqotri is unbroken but is under stress by the hegemony of Arabic in the formal educational process. The latter’s relative ineffectiveness further reinforces Soqotri’s home front dominance, as it sustains female illiteracy rate (70%). This will continue in the foreseeable future as only 40% of girls attend school. In the absence of pro-multilingualism policy, mothers’ illiteracy will be a safeguard against language replacement

2. Number of speakers

50,000+

This population figure is based on the 2004 census; thus, the population could be much higher. There is little inter-group interaction with mainland immigrants and minimal inter-marriage. Population growth is above the replacement rate, and thus a lack of demographic erosion, hence the sustainable reproduction of a critical mass of speakers

3. Proportion of 5 speakers within total population

This is the highest score, which means “all speak the language,” as Soqotrans are the majority on their island, with a relatively negligible proportion of Arabic speaking Yemeni mainlanders

4. Trends in existing language domains

4

Soqotra’s ethnolinguistic context is characterized by a de facto situation of “multilingual parity” between Arabic and Soqotri. A form of diglossia prevails, as the two languages are coexisting in different functional domains: Soqotri in the private and cultural spheres, while Arabic is the official language of government communications and in the mass media

5. Response to new domains and media

2

Soqotrans have avidly embraced all new media platforms (e.g., WhatsApp chat groups, Facebooking enclaves, Internet use, etc.). Moreover, television is available in urban family homes and in many “TV cafés,” as well as Internet cafés in Hadiboh town. However, the language used is Arabic because of the absence of an officially adopted Soqotri script. The score reflects the current level of use: “coping” as the language is used in “some new domains”

(continued)

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Table 2.1 (continued) Factors

Score

Explanations

6. Materials for language education and literacy

2

This score means “restricted utility.” As there are some written materials in Soqotri using the Arabic script (e.g., poetry books), they are accessible to a few community members (e.g., literate poets and cultural activists), but not used as educational resources

7. Government attitude and policy

3

This score reflects the state’s policy of “passive assimilation” (3) as it officially ignores Soqotri’s existence. It promotes Arabic as the official language in the public domain, but it does not prohibit the use of Soqotri in any domain

8. Community members’ attitudes

5

In spite of the dissonant attitudes that the chapter surveyed, it cannot be asserted that only “some” (2) or “many” (3) Soqotrans are interested in supporting language maintenance. The chapter has shown that Soqotrans’ ambivalent attitudes are due to a series of introduced exigencies. The overwhelming majority “value their language and wish to see it promoted”

9. Amount and quality of documentation

2

The documentation is “fragmentary” in the form of a miscellany of audio and video materials, simple word-lists with illustrations. The primary impediment to the documentation’s growth is the unavailability of a practical orthography for Soqotri

Total score

28

This suggests that Soqotrans as a speech community are not yet at risk of language replacement. This is primarily due to the strength of their mother-tongue transmission process. However, the lack of an orthographic script could endanger its maintenance in the long-term

In sum, Soqotrans are contingently situated at a linguistic threshold and cultural crossroad, due to the accumulation of communicative events in which the use of Arabic is becoming essential, and where English is monopolizing the higher-paying jobs in tourism and international donors’ projects. The eventuality of the scenario in which the Soqotran community surrenders to total cultural assimilation and its language is replaced by a combination of Arabic and English will ultimately depend

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on whether or not the following initiatives are carried out: First, the Yemeni state (or whichever state replaces it) should officially recognize Soqotra as a bilingual district and bestows formal legal recognition on Soqotrans as Yemen’s own ethno-culturally distinct indigenous community. Furthermore, it should sponsor the formulation of an Arabic-based script for the Soqotri language, officially adopts it through formal legislative authorization of its use in schools. These state actions need to be complemented by the constitution of an epistemic community made up of external specialists and local speakers who are dedicated to promoting the institutionalization of the Soqotri language within the communal public sphere (especially within the formal educational process) just as is the case for the island’s environmental protection (as discussed in Chapter 6). Such a community could then engage in international fund-raising for community-based initiatives (e.g., language workshops, preparation of educational materials, language classes at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, special classes for educated adult Soqotrans to learn the script, book publishing, oral literature recording for audio library, survey of regional dialects, poetry competition around the island, local radio station with island-wide diffusion). Then, the Soqotran community will be able to engage in its own ethnolinguistic self-maintenance.

Notes 1. Zayafa seems to be a lexical borrowing from dhay¯ afa, which is the Arabic term for entertainment or receiving guests, which has been appropriated into the Soqotri semantic domain. In Soqotra, it refers not only to the wedding ceremony, but also to the celebration of other major life events. It had crucial linkages to the sustainability of other rituals. However, this does not herald the death of Soqotri poetry, as poets have resorted to using the tape recorder and the cassette as their means of performance and dissemination, and, as noted earlier, the holding of poetry competition in other venues. 2. Regarding the preservation of the Soqotri language as an integral tool in biodiversity preservation, there has been a complicit silence that pandered to the state’s policy neglect toward Soqotrans’ ethno-cultural heritage. Every opportunity to integrate language preservation in the island’s policy framework for environmental conservation was systematically missed. This is evident in the systematic absence of a single paragraph about it in key policy documents: The EU funded ten-year Socotra Archipelago Master Plan that was adopted in 2000; the Presidential Decree on the Biodiversity

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Zoning Plan for the Socotra Archipelago enacted in 2000; and the Soqotra Archipelago: Proposal for Inclusion in the World Heritage List /UNESCO formulated in 2006 and that led to Soqotra’s selection in 2008. 3. One anecdotal illustration of this self-Arabization process is an incident recounted to me by a foreign Arab visiting the western part of the island. In his attempt to establish rapport, he used the Soqotri term for good morning (al-ba‘aroh) in addressing an elderly Soqotran, who was most probably illiterate, instead of the customary reply (tiba‘arak diya di-ál..la), he was rebuffed with the comment: “You know our language [i.e., Arabic] why don’t you use it?” 4. Noteworthy, is that the same type of arguments is being made about the genealogy of the Mehri language by intellectuals from al-Mahra as part of a self-Arabization process (see Liebhaber 2016). 5. In the “Russian Corpus” discussed earlier, the authors claimed that an Arabic-based orthography that was “not radically different from the orthographic system currently implemented by our team” was used in the “pages of the popular and authoritative magazine Soqotra.net ” (Naumkin et al. 2014: 27). Back in 2010, to test the viability of this transcription system, I showed many educated Soqotrans in Hadiboh the winning Soqotri poem, which was transcribed in Arabic script in the magazine, and no one could understand it. Indeed, those who transcribed the poem confessed that the transcription could only be recognized by those who knew the poem, and that the script served as a meaning marker, mnemonic symbol, and ultimately as a provisional device for storing printed Soqotri words. The script’s limited usefulness will persist until an official orthographic system is formally adopted and taught locally so that it becomes a “publicly useable alphabet.”

CHAPTER 3

Consumption as Alienation: Diffusion of the National Pastime

This chapter describes the incorporation of Soqotra as the last frontier in the relentless conquest of a commodity over Yemen’s territorial totality and over the overwhelming majority of the national polity. The island’s geographical distance from the mainland acted as a barrier against the diffusion of the mainland’s national fetish of q¯at chewing. The unification of the two Yemeni states in 1990 broke that barrier as northern cultural practices became hegemonic throughout the national territory and the partial prohibition of q¯at consumption in the south was abrogated. The spread of q¯at to Soqotra as part of a process of diaspora formation among economic migrants from mainland Yemen to the island. The chapter focuses on how the local adoption of q¯at chewing is engendering a gradual process of exogenous cultural assimilation and indigenous cultural disaffiliation among an increasing proportion of the island’s urban population. This process is discussed in terms of the main domains in which its local effects are manifested: the urban milieu as a generative matrix of consumption; the rituals of consumption and their ramifications on islanders-mainlanders relations; the transformation of the communal

A different version of this chapter originally appeared under the title of “Q¯at Consumption in Soqotra: Diaspora Formation and Cultural Conversion.” Northeast African Studies Journal 13 (1) (2013): 1–42. Reprinted by permission of the publisher Michigan State University Press. © The Author(s) 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume II, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45646-7_3

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ethos of sociability; and the policy dilemmas of the local government. Finally, the chapter concludes with an assessment of the adequacy of the liberal policy orthodoxy for regulating q¯at in Soqotra, and of the likely future of q¯at consumption among Soqotran youths through a comparison with Djibouti’s q¯at-dependent state and polity.

¯ 3.1 Diaspora Formation: Qat as Vector of Cultural Assimilation Soqotra is Yemen’s most recent, indeed the last, conscript of the national conquest of a commoditized plant that became the singular object of commodity fetishism on a national scale. As its mode of consumption structures the functioning of Yemen’s social order, and regulates the quotidian existence of the Yemeni population. Indeed, on the mainland q¯at consumption became a totalizing cultural immersion with metasubstitution effects on all other sociocultural activities. This is a truism lamented by Yemenis themselves: “Today life [in Yemen] is to a large extent planned by, and adapted to the use of q¯at. The consumption of the plant controls all social functions” (Humud 2002: 31). This has led to the drastic restriction of the non-traditional repertoire of cultural practices in Yemeni society. This was presciently noted by Yemen’s famous poet and revolutionary hero Muhammad Mahmud al-Zubayri in a 1958 poem entitled the “First Ruler of Yemen” to highlight q¯at’s tyrannical rule over the life of the Yemeni people. Also, its consumption dictated the architecture of homes as exemplified in the ubiquitous presence of either the mafraj (the top floor of the traditional rural residences, and in modern urban homes designated for q¯at chewing), or the d¯ıw¯ an (located on the lower floor and serves as a reception room or q¯at chewing hall). As al-Zubayri explains: “The q¯at tree dictates its will on the building design of villages and towns, which leads to an adjustment of residential buildings to the requirements of the magic ecstasy of q¯at chewing” (quoted in Humud 2002: 40). As such, al-Zubayri affirms that the q¯at chewing diwan or mafraj has substituted all other modern forms of entertainment or enlightenment: “It is the cinema, the amusement park, the theater, the sport field, the café, the writers’ association, the sports club, the lecture room, and the reading room in a library. This room is the luck of the Yemenis for it has all the entertainments, which people of the world enjoy” (AlZubayri 1982: 23). However, al-Zubayri was not praising but lamenting the prospects of cultural stagnation through the spread of a culture of

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“sociable procrastination” that atrophies the polity’s aspirational horizon, and generates the societal degeneration of a nation in thrall to the q¯at chewing habit (see Elie 2015). This Yemeni proverb—“Qat is nice, but there is nothing worse than it” (quoted in Serjeant 1983: 172)—captures the endemic social ambivalence and cultural inertia among its consumers due to the temporary pleasure it induces and the lasting despondency it produces. This ambivalence has sustained its practice over centuries. In Soqotra, q¯at consumption could have a similar effect on the island’s cultural reconfiguration, as it is contributing to a communal transformation process that can be described as an “emerging culture of consumption.” In Soqotra, q¯at consumption is a town-centered and urban-based transformational process that is engendering simultaneously the “culturalization and deculturalization of space and place” (Sanjek 1996). This entails the abandonment of local cultural practices and the appropriation of external ones and their corrosive effects on the sentiment of communal and cultural belonging. This is the product of the ever-widening shadow of the leaves of the Catha edulis plant, or q¯at, whose mildly narcotic leaves contain an amphetamine-like stimulant which induces a state of euphoria (called kayf ) when chewed. It has spread beyond its native grounds in the countries on the southern rims of the Red Sea littoral to engender an intercontinental chewing culture through the migratory pathways of their Diaspora and the latter’s nostalgia for the psychoactive substancemediated sociability back home (Carrier and Gezon 2009). The inaugural year of q¯at’s introduction to Soqotra remains a matter of conjecture, as its local consumption was prohibited under the socialist administration. However, q¯at seems to have been available to soldiers from North Yemen who were stationed on the island following the end of the 1994 civil war. That event signaled the complete “pacification” of South Yemen, which inaugurated civilian air travel to Soqotra and the permanent traffic of mainlanders as economic migrants. This migration process, which began in the aftermath of the 1967 revolution in the south when Soqotra was incorporated in the newly established Yemeni state, has accelerated since the 1990s through institutional and economic modernization initiatives. The new wave of migrants led to the creation of a new sector in Soqotra’s urban economy: the import and trade of q¯at. At the beginning of the q¯at trade, its sale was in the hands of amateurs for whom it was a source of supplementary income, and not an exclusive source of livelihood. This group of sellers represented a motley of individuals: former soldiers turned grocers-q¯at sellers

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who were the pioneers of the q¯at trade in Soqotra; local teachers from Hadhramawt seeking extra cash; itinerant job prospectors who occasionally engaged in q¯at selling; grocers who sold q¯at from their refrigerators; and a couple of professional q¯at sellers seeking a less competitive and more lucrative market. These migrants brought along their cultural habits in order to recreate locally the familiar surroundings of their place of origin as well as their skills and commercial activities as their means of livelihood. These migrants have consolidated themselves into a “diasporic ethnos” constituting an expatriate community collectively referred to by their mainland regional provenance as shim¯ aliyyin (Northerners) or through the cultural epithet of dah.b¯ ash¯ı (discussed in Chapter 1), and composed of transient members (i.e., workers and shopkeepers) harboring a strong allegiance to a “mobile cultural sovereignty” as expressed in their practice of q¯at chewing. These mainlanders’ in-migration catalyzed Soqotrans’ subsumption into the national culture, and accelerated the partial replacement of some of their traditional cultural practices, which in turn engendered a process of communal alienation. 3.1.1

Communal Commodity Conquest: Accidental Proxies

The “opening” of the island in the mid-1990s unleashed Soqotrans’ emulative impulses toward imported cultural practices and thus inaugurated their entry into the social ritual of q¯at chewing. The adoption by Soqotra’s urban residents of this most quintessential northern Yemeni tradition has initiated a process of cultural assimilation through selfconscription into a new lifestyle by mimicking an imported consumption habit of an economically indispensable, but socially marginalized, local diaspora of mainlanders. This inaugurated a gradual cultural conquest of the island’s urban population, as q¯at chewing began its local career as the dominant mode of sociability among an ever-increasing number of urban Soqotrans. Its initial spread to the island occurred through the process of a commodity shadowing the movement of its primary users and was adopted by a new clientele. Indeed, this is the primary means of the spread of q¯at consumption beyond its native milieus in the southern Red Sea littoral (Yemen, Ethiopia, and Somalia) and its East African periphery (Kenya), which encompass the primary q¯at producing and/or consuming countries in the world. The intercontinental migration of these countries’ nationals (especially Somalis and Yemenis) and the subsequent Diaspora formation process and the local re-enactment of a home-based social

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practice have led to the establishment and entrenchment of q¯at consumption as an indispensable cultural accessory to the sociability and identity, especially among males, in these diasporic communities. For example, Yemenis were the main agents of diffusion of q¯at consumption in East Africa and the Indian Ocean (Madagascar) (see Beckerleg 2009; Gezon 2012), while Somalis were the principal propagators in the Western diaspora (Klein 2007). Similarly, the migration of mainlanders to Soqotra and the preservation of their cultural habit of q¯at chewing in a non-native setting are engendering a comparable process in the guise of a “commodity conquest” that challenges the hegemony of the local norms of sociability, as the cultural habitus of a socially marginal diasporic enclave migrates to the local cultural mainstream through a gradual corrosion of the communal barriers to such influences. As a result, these mainland economic migrants were unknowingly the de facto recruiting agents on behalf of the state’s policy of fostering northern cultural hegemony through spreading northern cultural traditions—namely q¯at chewing— as means of mass enculturation and political pacification (see Elie 2015; Gatter 2012). Q¯at consumption represents a culturally corrosive Trojan horse that is reconfiguring the social imaginary of, and the practices of sociability within, the Soqotran community through the introduction of a series of sociocultural wedges between individuals and the communal polity. In effect, the adoption of this social ritual in Soqotra is tantamount to participating in an imported value regime because it inexorably engenders a value shift through the replacement of the communal value framework (i.e., the locally evolved ensemble of tacit regulatory protocols about intra-communal relations and social comportment) that enforces a local conception of acceptable norms of sociability within the communal public sphere. This process explains my use of the term “cultural assimilation,” which refers to the voluntary appropriation by individuals or groups of a particular culture from the sociocultural practices of another. This cultural assimilation is leading to the dissipation of shared protocols of sociability through the disarticulation between personal cultural demeanor and communal cultural tradition, as individual q¯at chewers engage in the mimicry of imported cultural practices and the associated behavioral regime. Noteworthy, is the fact that Soqotra is exclusively a “zone of consumption” as q¯at cultivation on the island was banned in 2000 by a Presidential Decree, which stipulates that “it is prohibited to import q¯at

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seedlings to cultivate in all parts of Soqotra islands.” As a result, Soqotrans are excluded from the economically remunerative activities of the q¯at trade—production and distribution—which are controlled by mainlanders; thus, the q¯at trade serves as a financial resource transfer from island to mainland. 3.1.2

Q¯ at and Community: Culturalist Interpretations vs. Historicist Explanations

In light of the above, the encomiums about q¯at as the “leaf of Allah” or the “flower of paradise” that prevail on the mainland, lose their romantic appeal, and take on a more ominous emblem as the leaf of sociocultural colonization in the Soqotran context. Accordingly, my discussion of the phenomenon of q¯at consumption on the island will not employ the dominant culturalist interpretive approach that has informed most recent discussions of q¯at consumption in Yemen (Varisco 1986; Wedeen 2007; Weir 1985). This culturalist perspective insists on privileging the epiphenomenal aspects of the q¯at consumption culture and thus focuses on the meanings that objects bear to explain why people consume them. Moreover, it uses a synchronic (ahistorical) descriptive framework that focuses exclusively on the symbolic significations of q¯at consumption and the sociocultural benefits to consumers, while deliberately avoiding inconvenient economic, cultural, and political facts on the ground. Accordingly, it interprets consumption primarily, if not exclusively, as an individuallybased practice of choice-making, meaning appropriation and identity assertion, and usually, it fails to engage local opinions about the harmful societal consequences of q¯at consumption. The emphasis on the individual consumer by the culturalist approach fails to realize that, “patterns of consumption reflect and recreate the structures of social life… and are less a manifestation of individual consumer choices” (Carrier 2006: 273–274). In order to avoid the interpretive misdemeanors of this culturalist framework, I situate my discussion of q¯at’s local consumption within a historical context and map the evolving communal politics over its admissibility into the local repertoire of cultural practices. Indeed, as Cassanelli observed, “Q¯at [is] an ideal subject for ethno-historical inquiry: for to study the changing economy of q¯at production, trade and consumption is also to study the entire process of cultural transformation” (1986:

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255). Moreover, the historical contextualization of its use is a prerequisite as q¯at is a “commodity in motion.” As the enabling matrix of consumption—i.e., the local market structure, procurement mechanism, sale modality, and motivations for chewing it—never remains the same over time. Moreover, its consumption incarnates a sequence of “temporal symbolic state[s]” that are historically delimited and always susceptible to change, and thus, the symbolic significance associated with its consumption has a shifting temporality (Appadurai 1994: 84). This assumption frames my discussion of q¯at consumption in Soqotra, which not only considers the individual motivations but also addresses the communal consequences of the recently adopted social habit of q¯at chewing. This chapter intervenes in the debate on q¯at consumption that emerged during Yemen’s post-revolutionary period in the 1970s and that has persisted ever since in the form of two opposing discourses and their divergent evaluation of the effects of q¯at consumption on society: on the one hand, foreign observers (mostly Western anthropologists) who deployed a rather excessive adulatory gaze toward q¯at consumption (in contrast to the “ethnocentric censure” of their Orientalist predecessors); and on the other, modernizing Yemeni intellectuals and political leaders who, in contrast both to Western anthropologists and their pre-modern poets and other compatriots, employed a largely condemnatory discourse toward q¯at consumption. Indeed, as a very long-term resident scholar in Yemen and an occasional participant in the q¯at chewing ritual, and therefore a witness to the existential dilemmas engendered by the q¯at chewing habit among Yemenis (Soqotrans included), I cannot partake in the discursive tradition of “hyperbolic partisanship” on behalf of q¯at and its consumers practiced by my disciplinary colleagues who seem oblivious to the societal challenges presented by the pandemic scope of q¯at consumption (see Elie 2015). The chapter is based on my survey of the evolution of q¯at consumption on the island through interviews with Yemeni sellers, Soqotran consumers and non-consumers. The end result is organized into four parts that describe each of the main domains in which the local consequences of q¯at consumption are manifested: (i) the socially atomizing and inter-communally polarizing effects of the locally divergent q¯at consumption rituals; (ii) the gradual, and perhaps inexorable, replacement of the communal value framework through the local political and cultural ramifications of q¯at consumption; (iii) the policy dilemmas of the local

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government confronted with the q¯at trade that generates no local benefits; and (iv) the uncertain future of the island, which depends partly on the cultural disposition of the youth toward q¯at consumption that is likely to prevail in the near term.

3.2 Consumption Rituals: Segregated Venues and Divergent Motivations The q¯at session represents an ideal micro-space for cross-cultural integration, which could fulfill, at least symbolically, the potential for genuine social integration between the two communities—islanders and mainlanders—or at least segments of them. However, whether q¯at chewing offers a conduit to cross-cultural integration or merely displays a local act of cultural mimicry depends upon who chews with whom? The nature of inter-group relations between Soqotrans and mainlanders could be fairly characterized as a case of resigned reciprocal tolerance out of mutual economic necessity. Therefore, social interactions seem to be characterized by a superficial cordiality and the sublimation of mutual antagonisms. Soqotrans always put on public display an impeccable social etiquette, thus relations with outsiders never stray from respectful demeanor, even though they may harbor negative stereotypes about them. The economic transactions in Hadiboh’s s¯ uq, which is the main contact zone between the two communities, seem mediated by mutually nurtured misanthropic prejudices that are not conducive to shared q¯at chewing sessions. This set of attitudes seems to have mutated into a de facto social segregation that the intrinsic conviviality offered by the q¯at session could not overcome. This section examines why q¯at’s consumption could not fulfill its cultural integration potential. First, however, I undertake a brief overview of its distribution of q¯at on the island. 3.2.1

Supply and Demand: Expanding Circuit of Consumers

Q¯at is the only commodity whose supply chains permeate the totality of Yemen’s territory; wherever Yemenis live a daily supply of fresh q¯at will be available. Indeed, the q¯at trade throughout the national territory of Yemen epitomizes a “commodity ecumene,” as it encompasses a symbiotic spectrum of activities that constitute a commodity’ social life, and which articulates a translocal “network of relationships linking producers, distributors, and consumers” (Appadurai 1986: 27). The 1990s marked

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Soqotra’s incorporation within this commodity ecumene, as the island became the latest, and last, colony of its supply tentacles, which have implanted themselves within the cultural domain of the islanders. The year 1996 inaugurated q¯at’s commercial distribution in Hadiboh, as the increasing numbers of mainland migrants reached a critical mass along with their demand for q¯at. Henceforth, its local distribution overcame all sorts of distributional and political obstacles and heralded its conquest of the island, given the ever-evolving adaptability of its modality of distribution and the ever-increasing scope of its local consumers. During the mid-1990s, the q¯at procurement process was partly a family affair and partly mediated by brokers called muq¯ awil (contractors) from the main q¯at transshipment locations on the mainland (Sana‘a’, Aden, and al-Mukalla). Accordingly, procurement took two basic forms: The first was based on connection back in one’s village where the q¯at is purchased by a friend or relative in an agreed-upon quantity and sent to the seller according to the schedule of flights to the island. The second form involved the purchase through an array of agents based in these trans-shipment locations and with whom the sellers were familiar, as the agents paid for the packaging and shipping and were reimbursed after the q¯at was sold. This system was operational until the mid-2000s, when a major restructuring of the Hadiboh q¯at trade occurred, through a process of increasing professionalization: From an income-supplementing activity pursued by amateurs gainfully employed elsewhere, to a full-time activity by professionals who derived their livelihood exclusively from selling q¯at. This professionalization led to the monopoly of one variety and one price, as well as the centralization of the procurement of q¯at from the region from which most of the sellers originated: namely Dham¯ar, an agricultural province south of Sana‘a’. This engendered a regionally-based monopoly in the sale of q¯at in Soqotra. This signified that q¯at consumption among Soqotrans had reached a critical mass that made the q¯at trade the most remunerative activity on the island, and crossed a cultural threshold as they were becoming habitual chewers, and thus cultural converts, in ever-increasing numbers. Soqotrans’ demand for q¯at was geographically circumscribed to those places that are either urban or where there is an enclave of mainlanders, as in the following locations: Hadiboh has the highest number of consumers; M¯ur¯ı in the northwest where there is a high concentration of mainlanders, mostly resident soldiers in the army base next to the airport; Qalansiyah in the west, where there is an army camp, and an increasing

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number of local q¯at consumers, especially among fishermen and government employees; and N¯oged in the south where there is another army base. Demand was contingent upon regular access to some kind of income and the ability to pay cash as credit was highly selective, and therefore, q¯at consumers must be part of the cash economy. The profile of q¯at chewers reflects the occupational structure of the local economy, as all consumers must be engaged in some form of remunerative activities on the island: civilian staff of local government, policemen, army personnel, fishermen, the occasional pastoralists, tourism workers, construction laborers, and all of the mainlanders, which include subcontractors and their workers, all shopkeepers and odd-jobbers. As of the early 2000s, Soqotran chewers were occasional consumers (i.e., once a week), partly out of concern for the image they project of themselves among other Soqotrans. Since then, many have become regular customers and chewers on a daily basis. A significant indicator of the anchoring role of q¯at in the urban economy is that the cost of a daily laborer’s pay is linked to the minimum required for a day’s chewing session: 2000 Yemeni Rial. All of these suggest that the circuit of local demand for q¯at and the nature of its clientele are on an ever-expanding trajectory (for details, see Elie 2014: 9–14). 3.2.2

Consumption Ethos: Maqyal vs. Makhazzin

Sotrans and mainlanders chew separately among themselves according to their own internal social divisions (shared regional or village origin, status/class distinction, similar age group), personal preferences (nextof-kin, neighbor, or like-mindedness), or corporate identifications (i.e., common political outlook, work colleagues). Worthy of note, is that the q¯at chewing culture and its social protocols have introduced a series of previously non-existent barriers to socializing among Soqotrans. In effect, q¯at consumption does not play an integrative role—either at the intercommunal level or in intra-communal relationships—but an atomizing one, as it sunders the micropolitan space of Hadiboh into “a mosaic of separated worlds.” Moreover, its social integration potential is undermined by the divergent particularities in the consumption ethos practiced by Soqotrans in contrast to mainlanders. Soqotrans’ self-assessment about the difference in consumption ethos is aptly captured in Varisco’s observation: For mainlanders, q¯at chewing is a “fulfillment of the day’s work,” while for Soqotrans it is a “substitute for work” (1986: 40). In fact, the two communities illustrate two divergent cultures of consumption:

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The maqyal ethos of consumption is one characterized by chewing in a collective social setting as a means of relaxation and entertainment, which Soqotrans exemplify, and the makhazzin refers to chewing as a performance enhancer as part of work disassociated from any convivial purpose, which the shim¯ aliyyin typify (Rodinson 1977: 7). The comparative distinction is that maqyal refers to the place where q¯at is chewed convivially in the company of others, while makhazzin refers to the act of chewing mostly alone devoid of any socializing purpose. In the case of Soqotrans, as new converts into this chewing ritual, financial capacity is the initial condition of entry. Beyond this pecuniary prerequisite and the mediating role played by the above social protocols as determinants of who chews with whom, there is also the participants’ ability to evade the social ostracism that continues to plague this activity on the island. Among the pioneering cohort of Soqotran chewers, q¯at was consumed either in two types of setting: The first was the local replication of what is informally called by some the S.ana‘¯ a’n¯ı d¯ıw¯ an: a reception room with an attached bathroom situated at the front entrance, and that is independent from the house’s private quarters. It is a “modern” architectural prerequisite for Soqotran q¯at chewers, which is unavailable in most traditional Soqotran houses, and that determines the suitability of the place for collective q¯at chewing. The other setting was a rented hotel room from early afternoon to evening that was used by visiting chewers from the south of the island and local government officials in order to shield their indulgence in a practice that was, and still is, publicly scorned. These surreptitious modes of consumption are being abandoned by a younger generation of urban Soqotrans who parade through the streets with their conspicuously displayed plastic bags of q¯at and bulging cheeks while puffing on cigarettes—a sight that affronts the prevailing cultural sensibility. Initially, the q¯at session made up for the absence of the local newspaper (there is none thus far) or community radio station (as there is none currently) in a still predominantly oral culture, and perhaps as a momentary reaffirmation of the communal bond that prevailed in the b¯ adiya (hinterland), but is now partly dysfunctional in the mad¯ına (city). In a community where the predominant mode of interaction remains “face-to-face,” the q¯at chewing session threatens to displace the other “local sites of talk.” Ultimately, the q¯at chewing session is a void-filling activity for these marginalized spectators of modernity whiling away time in the company of acquaintances or friends, and to chase away threatening boredom

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in a collective social gathering. Perhaps the best way to capture the motivational élan associated with Soqotrans’ adoption of this ritual is in the words of a Soqotran chewer that confirms the maqyal ethos of consumption: “There are really no benefits to chewing q¯at, except for the momentary pleasure it affords and the forgetfulness it induces about the daily concerns. There is no alternative to q¯at for time filling purposes except sleep.” This maqyal consumption ethos has expanded among a new generation of q¯at consumers, but without the obligatory social nexus and the re-enactment of the customary communal conviviality attempted by the precursors of this new consumer cohort whose motivation is purely hedonistic. One indication of this shift is the use of the l¯ ukanda, which is a public venue for q¯at chewing and water pipe smoking located in the main cities of mainland Yemen and that caters to the recreational needs of migrant workers from rural areas (Martignon 2004). In Soqotra, the l¯ ukanda seemed to serve not only as a socializing venue for youth migrants from the hinterland, but more importantly as offering the prospect of cultural laundering to these youths eager to shed their ascribed status as “bedouins,” a marker of derision in Hadiboh’s cultural pecking order, and to transform themselves into urbanites. In the recent past, l¯ ukandas were discretely located in unmarked buildings and known only to their customers who were mostly mainlanders. Subsequently, two were prominently located at the Hadiboh’s entrance and ideally built on a promontory overlooking the sea to evoke the view from above as in the mafraj in mainland houses. Indeed, they symbolized a public transcultural space that offered a quasi-authentic experience, as a form of cultural tourism to the mainland without leaving Soqotra. They functioned as mass consumption halls that offered relative anonymity and thus served as an ideal recruiting ground for new consumers. The seating arrangement was structured for individual chewing and collective spectatorship as everyone was seating in rows facing the television located in front of the room. Indeed, this setting was more conducive to the transient conviviality of a bar, then to the reproduction of the Soqotran tradition of muqhib (late afternoon social tea-drinking and conversing while seating on the ground in a circle). In effect, the l¯ ukanda symbolized the commodification of q¯at consumption and its promotion as a hedonistic activity. Their presence suggested the emergence of new cohort of chewers who have abandoned the surreptitious chewing practice of the pioneering group of chewers.

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For mainlanders, chewing q¯at in Soqotra was not merely a nostalgic crutch for a cultural habit acquired back home during early adolescence and that became a social necessity; but it was also driven by the need to dissipate the feeling of isolation from cultural and familial environments as most came unaccompanied by family members. Hence, the necessity to indulge in familiar cultural practices, as mainlanders seem to be afflicted with the sentiment of being foreigners in an alien land. Indeed, a migrant truck driver from Abyan, a province on the south-eastern coast of the mainland, referred to the words of a poet from his native land to characterize a mainlander’s motivations to go to the island: He was either crazy (majn¯ un), deep in debt (mad¯ı¯ un), and in search of a place to escape, or was running away from fulfilling his obligations toward his parents (huq¯ uq al-w¯ alida¯ın). In fact, there was neither opportunity nor desire for integration, given the perceived relative backwardness of the island’s sociocultural milieu. In Soqotra, mainlanders’ q¯at chewing session is not part of a convivial gathering as is the prevailing norm on the mainland. Instead, it is either a relatively solitary momentary respite from work, at least for those who work according to a schedule (e.g., restaurant workers and daily laborers), or an aid to work for those whose occupation is continuous (e.g., shopkeepers). Indeed, they used q¯at primarily as a means of stamina enhancement to maintain their long work hours, which is the primary purpose for their coming to Soqotra. One example of this q¯at chewing practice is called fadhh.a: After breakfast, the chewer takes just a few branches of q¯at that are chewed until lunchtime. The folkloric explanation of this practice is that it cools the body during the daytime heat; however, the practical effect is to sustain energy while working. In fact, q¯at is used to enhance the work ethic, and not to undermine it. For mainlanders who are shopkeepers, in contrast to most Soqotran-owned shops, theirs are the first to open and the last to close, and remain open both at lunchtime and on Fridays. Their shops are also their live-in and chewing space, as it is turned into a makeshift d¯ıw¯ an in the form of a bunch of blankets piled over the floor next to the counter, with a box of canned goods as an armrest covered over by the blankets. In fact, mainlanders are undiscriminating toward the use of any place to recreate the space and atmosphere of their d¯ıw¯ an back home. Beyond the intra-communal atomization of the urban public, the inter-group segregation between local and mainland chewers, and their divergent rationale for chewing, all q¯at chewers are unwitting inmates of a political, social, and cultural panopticon under the shared supervision

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of the Yemeni state and its tribal q¯atlords. As citizens-consumers, mainlanders, and Soqotrans flounder in a state of resignation to a communalnational context characterized by the endemic deficit of opportunities for socioeconomic mobility in a nation-state governed by a political cabal (see details in Elie 2015, 2018a).

3.3

Value Entrapment: Political and Cultural Ramifications

In light of the above discussion about Soqotrans’ consumption ethos, the q¯at session could be innocuously described as another instantiation of the face-to-face “institutions of conversation.” However, such a view would minimize the socially harmful ramifications of q¯at as a commodified cultural practice that, as al-Zubayri explained, acted as a tyrannical ruler over that national polity by regulating the functioning of the social order and imposing an inexorable rhythm on the quotidian existence of the population. The end result on the mainland was the national polity’s daily hibernation within mini assemblies of discursive conviviality, which splintered the urban social space into a myriad of micro enclaves of urban villagers mimicking the entertainment-poor lifestyle of rural hamlets. This has atrophied the development of an urbane modernity, as the urban milieu’s entire repertoire of sociocultural activities was circumscribed to the q¯at chewing session. Moreover, it led to the ruralization of its urban culture and generated a widely shared perception among urbanized Yemenis that their society is trapped within a post-traditional impasse: a stalled societal transition process that is characterized by stagnation in its cultural, institutional, and human development. Ultimately, on the mainland q¯at consumption was instrumentalized as a tool of the state’s political socialization of the national polity, and it has permanently leashed Yemen’s urban society to the cultural ambit of rural traditions regimented by the political power of tribal shaykhs (see details in Elie 2015). 3.3.1

Travelling Theories of Q¯ at Consumption: Interpretive Anachronisms

This is not the conclusion that the profusion of travelling theories about the nature of the q¯at consumption phenomenon would have ever allowed. The interpretations produced by these theories have ignored

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the multiple historically-mediated incarnations of a social practice that has existed for over half a millennium in its “customary circuits” of production and consumption (i.e., Ethiopia and Yemen). The historycontingent signification of q¯at consumption is epitomized in the notion of a commodity having a “semiotic virtuosity”: the “capacity to signal fairly complex social messages” according to different historical periods (Appadurai 1986: 38). In the case of q¯at consumption in Yemeni society, it has undergone the following “semiotic” transitions since the fourteenth century to the present: (a) an ancient medicinal plant used in a concoction to restore the balance in the body’s humors; (b) an enabler of an individual or collective spiritual quest in which q¯at was designated as q¯ ut al-s.¯ alih.¯ın (“the food of the pious”) as part of a clerical devotional ritual; (c) a muse to poetic and artistic creativity and an aid to intellectual productivity; (d) a solvent of social taboos regarding status distinction and class hierarchy; (e) a medium of political mobilization; (f) a symbol of national cultural identity; (g) a conduit to a hedonistic conviviality; and (h) currently the social opiate of the national polity. A society’s historical evolution transforms the purpose and/or signification of the polity’s consumption practices. This is the basic axiom that is consistently neglected by the imported theoretical frameworks that cater to the interpretive predilection, if not the imaginative fancy, of metropolitan-based observers. I provide a brief overview of these interpretive frameworks as a foil against which to explain the effects of q¯at consumption in Soqotra. The traditional status hierarchy dissolution theory, which emblematized q¯at consumption as a contestatory gesture against Yemen’s traditional ascriptive social status system and promotes the democratization of Yemeni social relations. As an early advocate of q¯at’s democracy promoting effect avowed: “Q¯at consumption has been democratized and the q¯at branch is… being brandished by the majority at the traditional system of rank and privilege which it once help support” (Weir 1985: 168). This view was challenged by the status hierarchy reinforcement theory, which argues that q¯at consumption sustained this social order through the hierarchical seating arrangement during the q¯at session (Gerholm 1977). These two social system-focus interpretations are supplemented by a cluster of theories that prioritized the consumer’s personal quest. For example, the analgesic theory assumes that people chew q¯at for escapist reasons to blot out the discomfort of a harsh physical reality; the pleasure principle theory states that q¯at is consumed entirely because of its pleasurable effect; and the drug theory, asserts that its

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consumption is based on addiction to the narcotic effects of the q¯at (Kennedy 1987). The favorite of anthropologists is the “national marker of Yemeni identity” theory, which suggests that the act of consumption is a means to symbolically affirm a collective identity. Indeed, this theory has mutated into an identity fetishism among anthropologists who see it as an interpretive touchstone of q¯at chewers’ motivation (e.g., Varisco 1986, 2004). The “tournament of value” theory posits that q¯at consumption is an instrument in a status contest through conspicuous consumption, which authenticates the economic class and relative affluence of the participants (Meneley 1996). There is a recent rehashing of the democracy promotion theory of a generation ago that employs Habermas (1991) theory of the public sphere to extol the q¯at chewing session as a “forum for political self-fashioning, for the enactments of deliberative democrats in the absence of procedural democracy.” This anachronistic theory elevates q¯at chewing into a politically emancipatory activity that sustains a democratic public sphere in the absence of the state’s institutional support for democracy (Wedeen 2007: 60). This plausibility-challenged interpretation of q¯at’s role in Yemeni society was extended to the realm of agriculture with the following hyperbolic claim: “q¯at farming can be considered a social equalizer and thus a contribution to Yemen’s nascent political democracy” (Varisco 2007: 253). This fanciful democracy engendering theory was replicated through a parody of a “Latourian actor-network approach” that was divorced from the social reality of q¯at chewers, as it launched into an encomium about the democratic promises of q¯at chewing sessions using hyperbolic metaphors: “socially generative spaces” that nurture political subjectivities, “discursive public spheres” that engender “an organic democratic activity,” and that serve as “a powerful mediator of democratic discussion” (McGonigle 2013: 7; see critique in Elie 2013). The shared assumption among the above travelling theories is that the q¯at session was, and still is, the incubator of collective shifts in social sensibility, which generated aspirations for societal transformation. Indeed, that was the case in the 1930s literary salons of the Imamate’s social elites who gathered to read clandestinely the literature of the Arab Awakening forbidden by the Imam (Douglas 1987: 39). This kind of subversive gathering animated by q¯at was reproduced in the South under British rule (Gatter 2012: 92). Also, in the immediate aftermath of unification in 1990, the q¯at chewing session became the central site for political organizing in preparation for the Parliamentary elections of 1993. However,

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by the dawn of the twenty-first century, the q¯at session had been drained of its subversive cachet and emancipatory potential and mutated into a prosaic ritual devoid of any revolutionary symbolic significance and of any democracy-promotion effect. The prevailing fact about q¯at chewing today, paraphrasing Iyer (2000: 275), is that it is a “habit that leaves the political and economic status quo alone,” as the polity hibernates daily in state-enabled micro social panopticons of discursive conviviality while “building castles of spit.” 3.3.2

Shifts in Symbolic Significations: From Identity Legitimacy to Cultural Anomie

These theories about the utilities of q¯at chewing have sedimented into explanatory platitudes that seem impervious to the local population’s evolving rationales for chewing q¯at and their quotidian existential dilemmas caused by its consumption. Beyond the individualistic emphasis of most of these theories, the issue is not only what motivates individuals to chew q¯at, but more importantly the consequences on the community’s collective fate from the spread of q¯at consumption among the local population. What is significant about q¯at is that its consumption makes it a “Trojan horse of value shift” not just among individuals but also collectivities when it spreads to a new cultural context or among new consumers (Appadurai 1986: 57). In effect, q¯at is a value-laden commodity and its consumption entails a value shift, which mediates the cultural relations between the state and civil society within the public sphere. Therefore, q¯at consumption engenders an “intra-cultural value divergence” through an imported “regime of value” that generates a process of value entrapment with political and cultural ramifications (Appadurai 1994: 83). In fact, this process of “intra-cultural value divergence” is already underway within Soqotra’s public sphere, as the habitual consumption of q¯at encompasses a greater proportion of the urban public. Already, three political and cultural effects of q¯at consumption on the Soqotran community can be identified: (a) it facilitated the local community’s political socialization, or segments of it, into a state-regulated polity formation process; (b) it fomented the local hegemony of North Yemen’s cultural practices through a process of cultural assimilation; and (c) it provoked a rejectionist reaction by galvanizing a communal aspiration to political and cultural autonomy from a perceived threat of cultural assimilation and

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political cooptation. Below, I discuss the emergence and transition to three phases that mirror those three political-cultural ramifications. 3.3.2.1 Political Assimilation: Local Elite Formation The first phase produced the political cooptation of the local “elite” from 1996 to the 2006 Presidential elections, when the power of the ruling party was at its peak. This “elite” who occupied positions of authority or held government jobs and led this process can be designated as “political assimilationists” as they pioneered the culture of q¯at consumption. Among this group, q¯at consumption was a form of cultural mimicry that served as the most expedient means to socio-political mobility. For them, q¯at chewing was an extroverted display of political allegiance to the ruling party, which offered access to local political power and privileges. Q¯at chewing among this group implied the consolidation of a class-for-itself as the enablers of the local hegemony of the mainland state’s patronage culture of governance (see Vol. 1: Chapter 8). Their participation in this national pastime engendered the following dispositions: (a) actual membership in, or at least an ideological affinity with, the dominant political party; (b) the adoption of a dismissive aloofness vis-à-vis their community’s cultural sensibilities; and (c) acquiescence in, if not advocacy of, an hegemonic mode for Soqotra’s incorporation into the national society, as a culturally homogenized sub-national community. This set of dispositions was emblematically expressed by a member of this group: “l¯ azim tadkhul ” (You must enter!). According to him, q¯at chewing was a socio-political imperative if one wanted to engage those in power and be included in the patronage system and therefore was the indispensable entrance ticket into the political status quo. What he meant was that in the absence of one’s self-conscription into this social ritual, Soqotrans cannot participate in the larger national conversation and thus cannot be considered valid interlocutors of those in the political center and from the dominant culture. Accordingly, this necessitated the adoption of their cultural habits, as the q¯at chewing session is the cardinal medium of social intercourse among mainlanders. In this context, q¯at consumption initiated a personal experiment with modalities of belonging to the nation-state through the assumption of “legitimizing identities,” which are based on a notion of personhood authorized by state’s institutions (Delanty 2003: 163). Predictably, Soqotrans who embody this “legitimizing identity” occupied the strategic posts at the apex of the local authority structure (i.e., the local council, the

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civil service) and influence the local culture of governance. Among this group, q¯at chewing sessions were not assemblies of political dissenters, but the reproductive fora for political conformity to the status quo. Ultimately, this group of higher-level Soqotran staff in the local government who interacted frequently with mainland politicos, along with Northern residents of all stripes, became the “original nexus of consumers” who unwittingly constituted the agents of diffusion of the q¯at chewing habitus among the rest of Soqotra’s urban population. Moreover, they fashioned themselves into an exclusionary political club, in which q¯at chewing not only provided the cultural cement for the pro status quo local political class, but also served as a criterion for who can get access to preferential treatment from state institutions. 3.3.2.2 Mass Enculturation: Cultural Renegades The second phase, which began in the aftermath of the 2006 Presidential elections, led to the cultural annexation of an ever-widening swath of Soqotra’s urban population. This period (2006–2011) marked the emergence of a group of q¯at chewers who can be characterized as “cultural renegades.” They did not aspire to join the political status quo whose tenuous legitimacy collapsed entirely in the wake of the Arab Spring in 2011. Instead, they indulged in the individualization of their lifestyles through acts of self-enculturation into the imported practice of q¯at chewing. This led to the formation of a provincial cosmopolitan fringe in the main urban enclave of the island. In effect, this group has constituted themselves into a virtual space of “dissident marginality” in which they “strike out on a new personal itinerary … [as a kind of] voluntary alienation which will distance them from their original group without, however, allowing them to merge with the dominant group” (Yerasimos 1999: 36). However, their inhabiting this space was not a conscious decision, but an inexorable consequence of what I call the value entrapment effect associated with their participation in the q¯at chewing ritual. In fact, four reasons were given by Soqotran youths about why they have taken up q¯at chewing, which coincidentally constitute the transmission steps of the cultural assimilation process that symbolized a socially fashionable activity: (i) the availability of waqt far¯ agh (leisure time), which (ii) predisposes youths toward fadh¯ ul thaq¯ af¯ı (cultural curiosity) that, in turn, (iii) leads to taql¯ıd (imitation) of an imported cultural activity, and (iv) which is subsequently integrated as a cultural rite de passage to adulthood. Consequently, this population segment of Soqotran q¯at consumers

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can be said to inhabit “lifestyle enclaves” in which their q¯at chewing practice is “disembodied from the guidance of communal mores” (Lash 1994: 160). In this light, q¯at consumption among the new generation epitomized the agonistic quest for an elusive freedom from the unrelenting asceticism of island life, and the epidemic of unlimited leisure time through the ephemeral gratification of a hedonistic practice. This is illustrated in one youth’s exasperated rejoinder as to why he chews q¯at: “Where can we go, what is there to do?” Indeed, the limited opportunities for “killing time” constructively are driving the youths to flaunt the communal censure of q¯at chewing. Indeed, the community’s approval of their behavior seemed to be no longer essential in finding a place in a local social order, which is undergoing a national acculturation process. In effect, this category of Soqotran q¯at chewers is not engaged in an individual act of self-definition through consumption whereby a social identity is asserted, but rather in an unwitting, indeed a situationally constrained, act of self-incorporation into a national consumption pattern with a pre-existing value framework, which entailed their communal cultural disaffiliation. 3.3.2.3 Resistance Mobilization: Traditional Sociability Defenders The third phase was catalyzed by the Arab Spring of 2011, which emboldened a group of local youths—who could be described as the “defenders of traditional sociability”—to mobilize against the q¯at trade on the island and to challenge the increasing prominence of the above groups of q¯at chewers in the public sphere. This group represents the majority of Soqotrans who harbor a high degree of moral reservation toward the cultural ways of mainlanders and thus perceive their fellow Soqotrans who take part in their imported social ritual as protagonists of an invasive cultural practice that is tantamount to an insidious form of self-imposed cultural colonization and political subordination. Indeed, they consider their strategy of national integration as inappropriate modes of entry into the national society. As they consider the first group’ strategy of political ingratiation as an opportunistic self-conscription into the dominant culture, and the second group cultural assimilation strategy as a boredominduced self-exclusion from communal mores. These Soqotrans have an intuitive grasp of the value shift associated with q¯at consumption as they have formulated their own litany of the negative moral, economic, social, and generational ramifications on the Soqotran community: (a) corrodes the religious commitment of its consumers by transforming them into

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“functional agnostics” who neglect the regular performance of prayers, especially at the mosque, which represents one of the most concrete affirmations of one’s status as a Muslim; (b) undermines the economic viability of the household through a debt-ridden consumption habit; (c) engenders social irresponsibility through chronic absence from the home and thus neglect of family responsibilities; and (d) generates a cohort of cultural renegades who have transgressed the community’s ethical and sociocultural boundaries, and who are flaunting a negative example to the new generation. Soqotra’s best-known poet ‘Ali ‘Abdullah al-Rijdihi composed a widely circulated poem in the Soqotri language that blames q¯at consumption for local forms of dereliction, and which influenced a number of youths to abandon q¯at chewing: Crop of the most evil Jinn / that blights the stoutest heart/… Q¯ at is life-threatening / and curing people of it problematical, / … Q¯ at is an accursed tree, / its permissibility doubtful. He who has learned to chew / to abuse vegetation this way… He will spend his evenings in an agony of worry, however clever a man he is, / tossing and turning all night. How will he be able to buy the necessary materials / for his children to study at school? What will he use to buy food / to feed those who come to the house in the evening and again in the morning. (Morris 2005: 18)

In sum, these three phases of accommodation to, and reaction against, the diffusion of the q¯at consumption culture on the island are consolidating into coexisting modes of adapting to it by different segments of the population: political assimilationists, cultural renegades, and traditional sociability defenders. The ultimate challenge is the evolving configuration of these three population segments and the lasting political and cultural ramifications for the Soqotran community. Which one of the three segments will be the dominant one will determine the fate of q¯at on the island. The next section narrates how the opposing segment confronted the ascendancy of q¯at consumption on the island.

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3.4 Policy Dilemmas: Confronting the “Accursed Tree” Ever since the introduction of q¯at in Yemen from Ethiopia in the fourteenth century, its consumption acquired the stigma of a “social evil” and public authorities were compelled to deliberate over how best to contain its spread. The concerns that animated these public policy deliberations over q¯at consumption centered on whether or not its use conformed to Islamic moral standard, had debilitating effects on social behavior, engendered negative health consequences, or undermined the economic solvency of the polity’s households. There was a chronic ambivalence about what to do about q¯at partly due to the absence of clear guidance from the primary sources of Islamic law—the Qur’an and the Prophet’s sayings called Hadith (h.ad¯ıth)—as q¯at was unknown during the Prophet’s time. Hence, decisions relied on the arbitrary whims of the Islamic jurists. Accordingly, the menu of policies alternated between reluctant tolerance, complicit silence, regulated distribution, and absolute interdiction. The determining consideration in the adoption of one or the other of these policies was whether or not it affected the fiscal health of the state’s treasury, or its potential for political instability due to social unrest by unhappy consumers and sellers (Kennedy 1987; Krikorian 1984; Serjeant 1983; Varisco 2004; Elie 2015; Wagner 2005). The policy dilemmas have continued ever since in all social milieus where q¯at is consumed. As a prelude to the q¯at policy dilemmas faced by the local administration in Soqotra, I briefly discuss the policy adopted by both the British in South Yemen and the socialist government after independence. The British initially imposed an outright ban on the sale of q¯at in the Aden Colony on the justification that it was an economic drain on the Colony’s finances, which averaged ₤200,000 per month, and 85% of that sum went back to Ethiopia the Colony’s main supplier. The opposition to the ban was swift, as the Ethiopian government cancelled the landing rights to Aden Airways among other protestations, and q¯at sellers associations pressured the government through organized protests threatening civil disorder (see Brooke 1960: 52–59). In spite of effective opposition, the ban lasted fifteen months (1 April 1957 to 24 June 1958) and was replaced by a punitive taxation policy (see Ingrams and Ingrams 1993, vol. 13: 635–653). Following independence, the southern state did not totally ban q¯at consumption but imposed a partial prohibition and proscriptive regulation under the 1977 Q¯at Law. The latter stipulated

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that q¯at could be consumed on Thursdays, Fridays, and public holidays only. In the south-east regions of the mainland where it was unknown, such as Hadhramawt, al-Mahra, and Soqotra Island, its introduction was prohibited (Lackner 1985: 119–120). Moreover, the law stipulated stiff punishment for violators including incarceration of four to ten years and the payment of a fine of five thousand Dinars ($14,500 at 1977 rate of exchange). The southern government policy seemed to have been more effective, partly due to its reputation for ruthlessness. Worthy of note is that one of the first policy decisions of the government after the unification of North and South Yemen in 1990 was the abolition of all restrictions on the proliferation of q¯at throughout the territory of the new republic; and thus enlisting q¯at as a resource in consolidating the political and cultural unity of the nation-state under northern hegemony (see Elie 2015). 3.4.1

Elusive Legislative Solution: Prohibition vs. Dissuasion

Soqotra was not exempted from the social dissention generated by this “accursed tree… that blights the stoutest heart” as a Soqotran poet put it. It was in response to an emerging chorus of moral indignation toward the sale of q¯at in Hadiboh that Soqotra’s local government was constrained to search for a q¯at policy. In launching its campaign against q¯at, the Local Council was unknowingly reenacting South Yemen’s experience both under the British and subsequently under the socialist government. As the Local Council initially called for the banning of the importation of q¯at to the island, which was followed by a kind of regulated access through a restricted trade location. Q¯at policy in Soqotra retraced the above trajectory, as the island’ situation was similar to the Aden Colony, which was exclusively a zone of consumption as its q¯at was imported by plane from Ethiopia and by camel caravans from North Yemen. Also, as in the Aden Colony, the q¯at shops represented a stain on the urban landscape and they galvanized the local government’s opposition to their presence. Indeed, they symbolized a collection of “evil shacks and [squalid] trading stalls,” as the British described q¯at shops in Aden when calling for their ban (Ingrams and Ingrams 1993, vol. 13: 641). In Hadiboh, these shops were minimally and grubbily furnished (one refrigerator, one multiple-use counter for chewing and with a scale for weighing the q¯at), and manned by mainlanders squatting on the counter with bulging cheeks, wide-eyed, manically preparing bags of q¯at as they await customers.

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It was this eyesore that was cited in a 2007 decree from the Local Council calling for the “prohibition of q¯at shipment to Soqotra Island.” The reasons given for the prohibition in the decree were: (i) “It caused uncivilized scene in the capital Hadiboh when female and male students pass by q¯at shops on their way to school”; and (ii) “Women and children have to do their shopping in front of q¯at shops” (Local Council Decree No. 57, 2007). In effect, the decree sidestepped the main problem, which is the bad example given by the adult Soqotrans’ participation in this imported custom that included a good number of Local Council members, and instead laid the blame on the offensive display of this “evil Jinn” by mainland q¯at sellers enticing the vulnerable youth, as if to ensure the sustainability of their trade by corrupting the future generation. However, the Governor of Hadhramawt refused to recognize the legality of the decree, arguing that it would deprive citizens of rights enjoyed throughout the country since unification. The Local Council reenacted the decree in 2008 and early 2009 but without the intended effect. Finally, it was during the visit of the (former) President of the Republic on 15 March 2009 that the issue was raised, and the President showed “understanding of the negative effect of q¯at that has caused a lot of trouble for the residents and the population of Soqotra.” Accordingly, “he agreed to the prohibition of q¯at shipment to Soqotra.” Subsequently, an official memo was issued to all authorities in Hadhramawt and Soqotra “to prohibit q¯at shipment on all in-coming flights to Soqotra, and any airline that ships it will be responsible for shipping it back on the same flight and no q¯at will be received in Soqotra after this memo” (Local Council memo of 4 April 2009). This instruction was duly respected by all airlines. However, within a month of its enactment the ban was already being gradually subverted by the local military authorities from the mainland, who were the main facilitators of the q¯at trade as airport security personnel. As a World Bank report noted: “the head of the Socotra airport security was one of the major qat importers on Socotra and staunchly opposed to any regulation of the Socotra qat trade” (2009: 15). Also shopkeepers from the mainland complained about loss of business, and the migrant workers threatened, and some carried out the threat, to stop coming to the island, as they could not work without q¯at. The specter of a ghost town loomed large. More significantly, the q¯at sellers deposited a complaint at the local court suggesting that the ban in Soqotra violated Yemeni law as q¯at was not prohibited anywhere else in the country. There

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began to develop a black market among members of the local political elite, and others, as this window of opportunity for gains was too tempting to pass up. Against this crescendo of mainlanders’ opposition, the political authority of the Local council was simply disregarded. By October 2009, the ban was effectively a dead letter—even though the decree was not officially rescinded—as all flights were transporting q¯at as before, and the sellers were still in business tempting the new generation with impunity (see Gatter 2012: 454–460). This episode of mainlanders’ opposition to, and gradual sabotage of, the q¯at ban in collusion with state representatives (army officers) was a stark reminder of who were the real power on the island. This political-cultural conflict pitting the state against the community exacerbated an already simmering political resentment that was conducive to a local form of radical oppositional politics. This possibility was acted out in events that echoed the Arab Spring in late 2011 in Soqotra. 3.4.2

Youths Against Q¯ at: An Existential Challenge

The Local Council, which has been trying unsuccessfully to get rid of Soqotra’s q¯at problem since 2007, found an unexpected ally in the National Youth Council of the Soqotra Archipelago (NYCSA)—one of the many civil society organizations that emerged from the local ramifications of the Arab Spring of 2011 (see Vol. 1: Chapter 7)—when it capitalized on a q¯at consumer rebellion to organize an opposition to the q¯at trade in Hadiboh. Its moment came at the beginning of the second week of November 2011. Hadiboh was on edge as Soqotran q¯at consumers were protesting q¯at sellers’ exorbitant price hike after creating an artificial shortage, as the bag of q¯at that was normally one thousand Rials was being sold for four to five thousand Rials (approx. $18–$23). Soqotran chewers stormed the shops forcing them to close until the standard price was reinstated. The NYCSA led the establishment of a roadblock at the entrance of Hadiboh to prevent q¯at from entering the town and searching all cars (see Fig. 3.1). The blockade lasted for a week of “rage,” and timed to occur on the days of the flights to the island. Ironically, most of the demonstrators were q¯at consumers whose participation was driven primarily by a deep anger at the sellers’ blatant price manipulation and their intense desire to have the price hike rescinded and thus the restoration of “affordable” access to q¯at. Indeed, the mobilizing slogan shouted during the blockade betrayed that anger: “l¯ a dah.b¯ ash¯ı ba‘ad al

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Fig. 3.1 First mass demonstration against Q¯at

yawm” (“no mainlanders after today”). This slogan expressed a visceral resentment among some Soqotrans who consider q¯at a conspiracy-laden foreign import introduced by cultural interlopers seeking the disintegration of the sociocultural uniqueness of their community. Indeed, one of the local organizers of the roadblock described q¯at as “a weapon of mass destruction.” The blockade was a test of will between the mainland’s muqawwit¯ın (q¯at sellers) and the Soqotran mukhazzin¯ın (q¯at chewers), which the latter won. As the blockade was lifted after agreement was obtained from the army and police chiefs that q¯at will no longer be sold in the center of Hadiboh, and that the price would be returned to its previous level. There occurred an immediate demobilization of the demonstrators, especially among the q¯at consumers who, according to my interlocutor at the time, literally “flew” to the q¯at market that was set up next to the airport where q¯at was being sold from the back of cars. The 2011 mass mobilization against q¯at was the first of its kind, which revealed the ambiguous disposition of the local public toward q¯at, as

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the majority of the demonstrators were against the q¯at sellers’ price hike and not against the sale of q¯at. Nevertheless, it brought into the public sphere two issues: (a) it showed the increasing scope of the urban public’s increasing dependency on q¯at chewing, and (b) it initiated a permanent struggle between the pro- and anti-q¯at segments of the population. As a result, demonstrations against q¯at have continued ever since, although at irregular intervals. In September 2014, the local authority renewed the 2011 ban on the sale of q¯at in Hadiboh’s, which failed to keep the sellers out of town, using the prosaic rationale that it caused traffic jams and garbage pile up in the town’s center. The failure of the ban on the sale in the town center led to its ban from the island. In November 2015, the Governor imposed a ban on q¯at import to the island citing health risks and financial drain on both individuals and the island, and burned a boat shipment of two tonnes that violated the ban. Again, the subsequent lapse in enforcing the ban occasioned another demonstration in July 2017 took place in the center of Hadiboh against both q¯at sellers and the ineffectual local authority to demand an import ban on q¯at. The slogans were “We abandon q¯at for a safe future” and “No to q¯at, yes to education and learning.” The aim was to remind the sellers and the local government that q¯at was not a settled issue. The most recent protest against q¯at occurred in March 2018. It brought together protesters from the two main towns of the island: Hadiboh and Qalansiyah. They denounced the sale of q¯at in grocery shops and demanded that it be sold, if it must, in q¯at shops only. The aim of this demand was to protect children from the sight of this “accursed tree” and the corrupting effects on the new generation’s “ethics, customs and values” (al-akhl¯ aq¯ıy¯ at, al-‘¯ ad¯ at, wa al-q¯ıyam). These three terms—ethics, customs, and values—are the pillars of a “civic loyalty” to a communal conception of appropriate social behavior that seeks to preserve the remnants of an indigenous communal cultural boundary. Their persistent invocation during these q¯at demonstrations— in spite of their irregular occurrence, ritualistic performance, and lack of success—suggests that the threshold between resistance and surrender has not been crossed and that the communal censure of q¯at has not dissipated. Nevertheless, the repeated failure of the q¯at bans due to the sustained local opposition to them suggests either that the communal moral condemnation of its local use is dissipating, or that the local government is afflicted by an intrinsic administrative incapacity to implement its policies. The outcome of this existential war of mutual attrition between opponents and proponents of q¯at remains uncertain. The near future,

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however, will put to the test the prognostic offered by the poet alRijdihi—in his poetic denunciation of q¯at chewing as a festering social problem and not an innocuous cultural practice—about which of the two types of Soqotrans among the new generation will prevail: [The Righteous Ones:] Those of the one sort pay due homage to God / and do their duty as they should. They are the light of their home and a light to guide their people, / lovely to look at and beautiful to see. Visitors flock to them of an evening; / they are vigilant against any crack (in the family or tribal honor) and stand guard at the door (to keep dishonor out).

[The Lost Ones:] But those of the other sort have lost any wit they ever had. / They strut around with shoulders stiffly raised (in stupid arrogance); They have sold their land, sold their date-palm plantation; / they are chewing their way through the inheritance of their forefathers. One half of the face bulging up as far as the sinews of the neck, / the eye sunk deep beneath the eyelid…. They have no son to stand before the door / and no wife at home. They will be plagued by worries until the day they die, / and the day will come when (even their relations and neighbors) will no longer put up with them. (Morris 2005: 21–22)

In effect, q¯at consumption has become the principal barometer of the mutation of Soqotrans’ cultural sensibility in terms of the lowering of their resistance threshold toward imported cultural ways, and thus of the gradual shredding of a shared communal sociocultural fabric and its ethos of sociability.

3.5

Future Stakes: Policy and Community

Soqotra is at a critical political and cultural crossroads in which q¯at will play a determining role in the socio-economic trajectory that the island community will follow henceforth. As the q¯at trade in Soqotra exemplifies an extractive industry that is monopolized by a “diasporic ethnos,” and in which all of the negative externalities (e.g., financial drain on

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the communal economy, environmental pollution from water bottles and plastic bags, alienation from communal ethos, among others) are borne exclusively by the island and its indigenous inhabitants. The only “benefit” for Soqotra is potentially the tax on q¯at, yet it is not clear how much of it is collected and how it is used locally. In effect, the pillars of the q¯at economy—production, distribution, and trade, in addition to taxation, and with the exception of consumption—are controlled by mainlanders. The above discussion has shown the emergence of a relentless process of dissolution of the traditional norms of sociability and solidarity within the communal public sphere. As an increasing number of Soqotrans engage in the mimicry of imported cultural practices and their value regime, there is the potential for the permanent disjunction between the new generation’s cultural preferences and their communal traditions. In effect, Soqotrans are engaged in an existential war against q¯at. The fact is that mass consumption in q¯at-importing communities is, in the words of one Soqotran anti-q¯at protester, a “weapon of mass destruction” that threatens the economic productivity of community members, the social cohesion of the household, the cultural integrity of the collectivity, and ultimately the social reproduction of the community as a whole. This simple admission of a patently obvious fact is seen as controversial by the q¯at-promoting epistemic community of “liberal” anthropologists in the metropolitan academy. This epistemic community of self-appointed q¯at defenders on behalf of native practitioners of their cultural tradition has established a “regime of truth” about the anthropology of q¯at consumption that is based on shared assumptions and “networked facts,” which have consolidated into the hegemonic academic discourse on q¯at. Therefore, elucidating the morally indefensible nature of their epistemic support for q¯at is a necessary task prior to envisioning Soqotra’s future with or without q¯at. In the two sections below, first, I show how the prevailing consensus among metropolitan scholars on the positive effects of q¯at chewing is an expression of political correctness that is analytically disingenuous; and second, I illustrate the inexorable fatality that awaits the Soqotran community through a brief overview of the situation in Djibouti as a mass-consuming polity in a q¯at-importing state.

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3.5.1

Social Problem Deniers: Drug Consumption not Cultural Practice

A critical event took place in Sana‘a’ in April 2002, which marked a paradigm shift in the national debate over q¯at in Yemen. This event was the “National Conference on Q¯at,” which was held “to discuss problems and solutions, and thereby help develop a national policy and action plan on q¯at based on the recommendations of the conference.” The published proceedings of the conference represent a substantive compendium of information on the “q¯at phenomenon” in terms of its impact on health, environment, water, agricultural production, rural economy, culture, and Yemeni society as a whole. The papers were prepared by Yemeni researchers, and thus symbolized a national verdict on the impacts of q¯at on Yemen and Yemenis, and their conclusions did not engender contrived positive assessments of q¯at’ societal consequences (see details in Gatter et al. 2002; Gatter 2012; Elie 2015). In effect, these Yemeni scholars’ fact-based pessimistic perception of the role of q¯at in their society confirmed the interpretive disjuncture with their foreign scholars’ imported sensibility-inspired positive appreciation of the role of q¯at in Yemen (and elsewhere). In spite of a data-driven national consensus among a cross-section of Yemeni society about the national challenge, if not an existential threat, posed by the ever-increasing scale of production and consumption of q¯at, foreign liberal scholars persist in displaying a “hyperbolic partisanship” toward q¯at’s positive societal contributions (e.g., its democracy promoting effects), or a skeptical demeanor toward its negative societal effects. As noted in this chapter’s introduction, this reflexive skepticism has consolidated the constitution of two opposing community of interpreters with divergent interpretive standpoints: a foreign adulatory predisposition versus a local condemnatory stance toward the collective consequences of the q¯at chewing habit. I briefly sample the tenor of this adulatory gaze on q¯at. The prevailing liberal ethos of inquiry with its complicit oath to political correctness among metropolitan scholars of the q¯at phenomenon promotes a discursive orthodoxy that is characterized by an endemic skepticism about the negative effects of q¯at consumption. This skepticism is typically formulated as follows: “The negative consequences are mostly a matter of presumed excess” (Varisco 2007: 253, my emphasis). This discursive orthodoxy engenders a complacent policy approach and an apologetic analysis of the q¯at consumption culture. Accordingly, its

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policy preference is for brokering a coexistence with the societal problems engendered by q¯at production and consumption by emphasizing the positive aspects of q¯at on local producers and consumers, and by engaging in a patronizing defense of native “q¯at enthusiasts” against foreign governments’ “moral panic” and international agencies’ “negative value judgments on a cultural product” (Anderson et al. 2007: 187). In interpreting the local cultures of q¯at consumption, members of this epistemic community betray a deep bias against local “q¯at bashers” who are invariably portrayed as being alienated from their culture and in thrall to Western influence, and thus denies their autonomous agency as well as delegitimizes their views. Even local government policies toward q¯at are dismissed as mere “window-dressing for foreign observers.” The castigation of Yemenis who reject q¯at as mimicking a foreign sensibility is exemplified in the following empirically dubious generalization: “Many of the ideas and opinions concerning the negative effects of q¯at being brought back by the migrants from abroad were acquired during the last three decades, particularly by Yemeni and Adeni intellectuals who were influenced by European opinion” (Kennedy 1987: 20). This line of argument toward Yemeni “q¯at bashers” has been a shared platitude among metropolitan social scientists since the modernization period in North Yemen in the early 1970s. Indeed, they went “native” by siding with local cultural traditionalists against cultural modernizers and thus have taken up the cause of q¯at chewers against the “modernist pretensions” of their local detractors, whom they accused of denigrating “one of their own most important cultural practices” (Weir 1985: 66). This cultural partisanship seems to have become a travelling sensibility among metropolitan scholars, as exemplified in the following paternalist scolding of Northeast African q¯at chewers as cultural renegades: “Perversely, large numbers of khat chewers in Ethiopia, Kenya and the diaspora support a ban on… what is not only a major pastime and source of pleasure but also a symbol of collective identity” (Anderson et al. 2007: 206). More importantly, this orthodoxy promotes a lexicon replete with semantic evasions, as evidenced in the diversionary insistence that q¯at chewing is a “cultural practice” and not a “drug consumption.” This is complemented by the socially irrelevant distinction that q¯at use engenders “habituation” (psychological dependency) and not “addiction” (physical dependency) based on the pharmacological distinction that the fresh q¯at leaf is a stimulant and not a narcotic. Indeed, this unwillingness to see q¯at chewing as recreational drug use with dysfunctional “habituation” effects

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and thus a social problem, leads to the perpetuation of a myth about the continuing existence of regulative cultural protocols that prevent abusive consumption of q¯at. This myth is epitomized in the following assertion: “A recreational pattern of khat [q¯at ] use within the strictures of custom and tradition, punctuated etiquette and embedded in the rhythm of daily life, can then slip into a dysfunctional obsession that is exacerbated by stringent control measures” (Anderson et al. 2007: 206). Astoundingly, these scholars blamed the policy measure for the “dysfunctional obsession,” but not the q¯at user’s behavior. Scholars should stop being faithful to their liberal principles and start being truthful about the evidence on the ground, and thus to come to terms with the fact that q¯at chewing has long ago mutated from a “social institution” that promoted social solidarity and communal conviviality through celebrating the major events of life (i.e., birth, marriage, and death), to a “dysfunctional obsession” driven by a hedonistic quest in a miscellany of milieus devoid of any social etiquette against abusive consumption. In this light, foreign scholars’ abandonment of their pro-q¯at sensibility is overdue, as it appears complicit with an Orientalist gaze, in which foreign observers’ preferred exoticist interpretations are substituted for local actors’ critical assessment of the consequences of their own practices. More importantly, this gaze authorizes an interpretive licentiousness that misrepresents a social problem as a cultural celebration and even as a means to political emancipation. This misrepresentation not only violates scholarly standards of intellectual integrity, but also exemplifies an ethically delinquent ethos of interpretation. 3.5.2

The “Djibouti of the Indian Ocean”: Endemic Chewing

While in environmental terms Soqotra is being touted as the “Galapagos of the Indian Ocean,” in its q¯at consumption practices it is emerging as the “Djibouti of the Indian Ocean.” Djibouti and Soqotra’s are worthy of comparison because they are both importers of q¯at and their geostrategic location has attracted foreign powers. Their shared features include the following: Djibouti’s strategic location in the Horn of Africa has attracted the military interests of over half a dozen foreign states that have leased parts of the national territory as bases (USA, China, Japan, France, NATO, Turkey, and the UAE). Accordingly, the state’s political economy is that of a “classic rentier economy” entirely dependent on leasing fees from military bases and seaport services (Styan 2013).

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Similarly, Soqotra’ strategic location has led to its subordination as a “humanitarian” protectorate of the UAE that could mutate into a neocolony depending on evolving regional geopolitics. More significantly, is the kind of future that the present state of Djibouti portends for Soqotra as a q¯at-importing country and q¯at-dependent polity. Djibouti’s statistics paint a bleak outlook: The national poverty rate is estimated at 60–75% and rural poverty is nearly 100%; the unemployment rate is nearly 60% and is estimated at more than 70% for young people (under the age of 30); more than 75% of q¯at users are under 25 years of age; the Human Development Index ranks it 172 out of 189; malnutrition afflicts 17% of the population; q¯at import takes up one-third of all food import; and q¯at consumption takes up at least 30% of household budget. Paradoxically, while the population is burdened by these metrics of despair, the state is profiting from them through fiscal extraction. Taxes on q¯at represent 4% of GDP and 15% of all fiscal revenues; all activities related to the q¯at sector make up 20% of GDP; and the q¯at trade is the first informal employer in the country, which compensates for the state’s incapacity or unwillingness to generate employment (World Bank 2011; Benyagoub 2013). In sum, q¯at consumption in Djibouti is sustaining a vicious circle between q¯at and society, which generates an intergenerational poverty reproduction cycle. Appadurai has observed that the state in “all societies tend to restrict, control and channel exchange of commodities… in order to harness them into the reproduction of social and political systems” (Appadurai 1994: 88). Indeed, the q¯at trade is symbiotically related to a state-managed politics of consumption, which enables the extension of “state authority over the social organization of leisure” as a means of pursuing its polity formation objectives (Appadurai 1986: 28). In the case of Djibouti, the role of the state in enabling its polity’s indulgence in consuming q¯at seems motivated by two aims: The first is economic exploitation given that the profits generated from the trade seem to benefit exclusively the politicaleconomic elite as confirmed by the above metrics of a nation in distress and the fact that the state ranks 122 out of 175 in Transparency International Corruption ranking. The second is political pacification as q¯at consumption is primarily conducive to a sedately contemplative, if not an intoxicated, polity that is politically indifferent to the affairs of state. In Djibouti—which is a de facto city-state as over 70% of the population (along with the bulk of the electorate) resides in the capital city—this disposition is favored by the state, which is a patronage-based, patrimonial rentier state. In mainland Yemen, q¯at consumption is instrumental in

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the political pacification of the public and the economic cooptation of the tribal q¯atlords’ lobby who dominate q¯at production; and from which the q¯at tax is haphazardly collected by the state and is largely embezzled by its collectors (see Gatter 2012; Elie 2015). In comparison, what could be the strategic gains for the Yemeni state in q¯at consumption becoming endemic in Soqotra? In fact, the main economic beneficiaries of the q¯at trade in Soqotra are individual mainlanders as it generates employment and profits exclusively for them In contrast, the state does not benefit, as it does not obtain any fiscal revenue from the local q¯at trade. Moreover, for the political pacification of the Soqotran polity q¯at is not essential as it is not organized into potentially violent arms-bearing tribes under politically opportunistic tribal shaykhs. In this context, the policy motto of the liberal orthodoxy—“containing harm and maximizing benefits” (Klein et al. 2009)—is not of much help in Soqotra. As all of the remunerative aspects of the q¯at trade that could benefit the local economy are monopolized by outsiders. Therefore, there are no rural livelihoods to protect, no processing industries to develop, and no benefits to be maximized. If left on its current trajectory, q¯at consumption in Soqotra will become a poverty generation activity with potential culturecide effects through the epidemic spread of cultural anomie. The Yemeni state does not have strategic political-economic stakes in Soqotra’s q¯at trade for it to promote its continuation on the island. Therefore, in spite of the transitional nature and institutional deficits of governance on the island, the local authorities are by default empowered to pursue a number of policy measures beyond banning it. For example, the imposition and rigorous enforcement of a regulatory regime on q¯at import and to institute a system of restricted access by its sellers and consumers through licensing fees for q¯at shops, price control, double taxation at point of entry (custom duties) and at point of distribution (sales tax). The revenue generated could be used to mitigate the negative externalities of the q¯at trade and could be reinvested in the organization of sustainable alternative leisure and vocational activities to capture the youth’s imagination and the use of their time. Finally, there are two potential scenarios regarding the future of q¯at consumption within the Soqotran community: • The first is that Hadiboh’s emergence as a translocality could consolidate into an exilic enclave for “lost” local micropolitans

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who are culturally deracinated from the rest of the island and thus socially ostracized and marginalized within a counter-cultural sub-community. • The second is Hadiboh’s transformation into the main center for spreading vulnerability to this imported practice throughout the rest of the island, which would herald the demise of the “righteous” ones. This would cast a veil over Soqotra’s future through q¯at’s inexorable impoverishment of the economic, social, and cultural aspects of the islanders’ lifeworld. The existential threat posed by the second scenario might galvanize Soqotrans into refusing to engage in drug consumption as a mode of belonging to a nation-state whose governance modality, institutional functioning, and political sustainability seem “addicted” to the perpetuation of a psychoactive substance-dependent polity. Failing that, Soqotra might be saddled with a new endemic practice as a q¯at chewing dystopia with its metrics of communal despondency à la Djibouti.

CHAPTER 4

Religious Re-Conversion: Mediations of Local Islamic Practices

This chapter situates the role of Islam in the change process on the island. It narrates the mutations in the islanders’ religious identification as Muslims that were engendered by the mediation of Soqotrans’ religious practices by different political regimes demarcated into distinct historical periods. First, it highlights the paradoxical situation of Soqotra whose population was originally and predominantly Muslims, at least as of the eighteenth century if not prior to that period, had to be literally reconverted into their faith. Second, it offers a historically contextualized narrative of how the recursive relationship between state and community determined how Islam as a supra-national creed was incarnated at the communal level. In doing so, it stresses that this incarnation was manifested in the meticulous performance of Islam’s ritual orthopraxy instead of a deep familiarity with its creedal orthodoxy. Third, it identifies the local agents of re-conversion that competed for the spiritual allegiance of Soqotrans and elaborates on their distinctive doctrines and practices. Finally, the chapter explores the communal ramifications of the above in terms of the dilemmas induced in Soqotrans’ ethical commitments and briefly speculates on the evolving path of the practice of Islam in Soqotra.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume II, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45646-7_4

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4.1 Reclaiming a Religious Heritage: Pietization of the Communal Sphere For most Soqotrans, especially those in the hinterland, the encounter with conventional Islam is of recent vintage, in spite of the widely held view among them that they have always been Muslims. Although the island’s location is within the geo-cultural zone of a predominantly Islamic orientation, the islanders’ Muslim identity has been nominal and the actual practice of their putative faith was restricted to a few coastal enclaves and pockets of religious enlightenment in the eastern part of the hinterland until the socialist period. Throughout the Sultanate period, Soqotra was a polity of predominantly nominal Muslims, even though the shari’a—the body of norms and rules guiding the life of a Muslim polity in matters of law, ethics, and etiquette based on the Qur’an and Hadith as primary sources—is said to have been the equivalent of the Sultanate’s constitution and was used mostly as a guide to mete out punishment to perpetrators of social crimes (mostly livestock theft and witchcraft). Indeed, it was the post-facto realization that they have been living outside the compass of Islamic strictures, which animated their re-appropriation of the Islamic faith and their self-reinvention as practicing Muslims, especially since the unification of the two Yemeni states in 1990. In effect, this reinvention, indeed re-conversion, process has taken the form of a continuous struggle to efface the traces of the recent past through attempts at expunging from local memory the beliefs and practices associated with the Sultanate period. These attempts have led to the abandonment of cultural traditions that are now deemed patently evocative of pre-Islamic customs. The dominant motif of this process seems to be the expiation of a sense of collective shame that entails the intra-communal or inter-village competitive display of sacred symbolic capital in the form of mosque construction and the rigorous adherence to ritual orthopraxy. This has made religion a determining factor in the reconstitution of the island’s social topography partly through the persevering endeavors of local religious actors toward establishing a synonymy between Islam and communal life. This attempt at reifying religion onto the island’s social landscape is an evolving quest to forge a communal path into a post al-j¯ ahiliyya spiritual environment. Indeed, for Soqotrans, al-j¯ahiliyya is not that historically distant period of ignorance of proper religious knowledge that existed in the Arabian Peninsula prior to the birth of Islam in the seventh century CE. Rather, it

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is as near as the third quarter of the twentieth century when the Sultanate was abolished. However, this seemingly belated encounter with Islam is in fact a re-linking with it, as Soqotra had a checkered history of allegiances to different corpus of religious beliefs, which reflected the multiple provenances of the varying population groups that inhabited it at different historical periods. What is particular about this re-linking with, or more aptly re-conversion into, the Islamic faith is (a) the extent to which its ritualistic rigor (free of syncretistic traces) has permeated the social rhythm of the community, if not dictated, metaphorically speaking, its metabolic functions; and (b) the generalized scope of its receptivity beyond the few northern coastal enclaves of relative religious enlightenment in the recent past to encompass every residential domain on the island. This is symbolized in the now obligatory presence of the mus.alla (prayer ground) in every village, wherever a mosque is not available. In terms of Soqotra’s recent history, this process is best understood as a form of diffusion and consolidation of a faith-based social order, which has engendered a culturally transformative transition from superstition to revelation—hence what I call religious re-conversion. This chapter undertakes a conjunctural narrative of Islam’s communal role in Soqotra’s process of change. Accordingly, it identifies the enabling historical conditions through the shifting configurations of political power during different periods in the island’s history, which produced different dynamics in state-community relations that mediated Soqotrans’ religious practices and sequentially altered their identity as Muslims. This narrative takes into account the shared problematic that has informed the political dynamics of Arab states. That is, their conflicting reliance on state-centric ideologies (e.g., Arab nationalism) and non-state-centric ones (i.e., Islam) as part of their polity formation and nation-building project to politically mobilize the polity on the basis of ethnicity and/or religion. However, the state’s claim to promote the unity of the Arab nation and to defend communal Islamic values is now widely seen as a disingenuous politicomoral posturing. In effect, Arab states’ attempt to politically mobilize a Muslim majority-based national polity through an appeal to Islamic values is no longer seen as a viable strategy. Indeed, since the defeat of Nasser’s Egypt in 1967 by Israel, Arab nationalism has long ceased to be the rallying cry of nation-building and has largely been replaced by the twin pillars of authoritarian rule: elite patronage and mass clientelism. Moreover, the subsequent rise of Islamist politics into an oppositional

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movement has deprived the Arab state of its mantle of defender of Islam and thus forfeited its claim to moral authority over the national polity. Subsequently, the invocation of Islam as a political mobilization ideology by non-state actors was a strategic displacement of the primacy of the state as an object of fidelity, given these states’ precarious legitimacy and contested authority within their national polities (cf. Anderson 1987: 13). Henceforth, there occurred a de facto division in the exercise of public authority, or a shared sovereignty, over the Arab polity: On the one hand, moral-religious authority was appropriated by a welter of oppositional Islamist groups, which sought to reinstate the classical Islamic theory of the state, in which the state is regarded as “an instrument of unqualified good, facilitating the implementation of God’s law (shari’a) as well as Muslim supremacy among nations” (Hefner 2006: 263), and on the other, secular political authority was ceded to the state, which it exercised through a variety of polity mobilization strategies. In Soqotra, especially after unification in 1990, a similar division of labor between the Yemeni state and Islamist groups, especially al-Is.l¯ah., was enforced: The government assumed responsibility for nationalizing the polity’s civic consciousness, and the Islamists assumed spiritual control through the pietization of communal social mores and the public sphere. Worthy of note, since the emergence of the modern Yemeni state in the north following the revolution of 1962, and in the south in 1967 and finally in the aftermath of unification in 1990, the role of Islam has presented persistent dilemmas about the modality of its integration within the conduct of state affairs. In effect, the pivot of the power struggle among Yemeni stakeholders during each of these three historical moments was about the reconfiguration of the relation between religious creed and social structure. The contentious issue was, and still remains, the relative importance to be accorded to democratic legitimacy versus Islamic authenticity within the context of accommodating the worldly exigencies of modern statecraft and the otherworldly requirements of faith symbolized in the shari’a. These concerns were further mediated by the obligatory membership in the pan-regional Arab Nation (al-umma al-‘arabiyya) and the supra-national Muslim Community (al-umma alisl¯ amiyya). This set of considerations became integral to the mechanism of state governance due to the increasing importance of Islamist groups in Yemeni politics beginning in the 1930s (see Douglas 1987; Schwedler 2007). Ayubi’s (1991: 231) typology of the relationship between Islam and modernity, whether as an objective of state policy within a Muslim

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polity, or as the ideological orientation of Islamic groups, captures the range of positions taken by the different participants in the politics of state and religion in Yemen: (a) modernization of Islam; (b) Islamization of modernity; and (c) Islam as an anti-modernity creed. Soqotra, as a sub-national entity of the Yemeni state, was subjected to its polity formation exigencies; hence, the change process on the island was externally introduced through the deployment of state-driven mechanisms. In this chapter, I will discuss Islam as a form of state-mediated embodiment of religious knowledge through the adoption of an orthopraxy as the public display of a “fidelity to correct behavior” (Metcalf 2003: 139). This orthopraxy is manifested in the correct practice of prayer rituals and more generally Muslims’ behavioral etiquette, instead of the cultivation of deep knowledge of the corpus of religious creed. Its performance was subjected to state and non-state policing of the islanders’ religious practices at different historical conjunctures in the island’s social transformation. The term “policing,” an alternate of mediation, refers to the exercise of political control, either by the state directly or its religious proxies and/or competitors, over the type of religious discourses and practices that are allowed as the spiritual currency in a given community, and over the social ends pursued through the use of such discourses and practices. The discussion below focuses primarily on the external policing by the state of local Islamic practices under different political regimes, and the resulting mutations in the local manifestation of an Islamic tradition and the assumption of a Muslim identity—hence what I termed politically mediated traditions. The discussion of the political mediation of Soqotrans’ practice of Islam is situated within the shifting historical conjunctures demarcated by the reign of different political regimes and their polity formation objectives. Accordingly, I analyze the “recursive relationship” between the Yemeni state polity regimentation goals and the accommodation effects on communal social forces in order to retrace within a historical trajectory the mutations in Soqotrans’ Muslim identity and the related local Islamic practices. To illustrate the range of analytical approaches, as well as to contrast my own approach, I provide a tabular presentation of analytical frameworks in the study of Islamic polities (see Box 4.1). In the following three sections of this chapter, first, I describe the three main historical phases in terms of the particular articulation of Islam and the prevailing political regime; second, I identify the main orientations to Islam that are

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practiced in Soqotra’s contemporary phase; and third, I discuss the social, political, and ethical ramifications of the state-religion nexus on Soqotra’s communal life. Box 4.1: Anthropologies of Islam An Inventory of Analytical Frameworks To illustrate the comparative possibilities in the analysis of a Muslim polity, I highlight a sample from the plethora of existing anthropologies of Islam. Accordingly, I briefly describe each in terms of their main orientation and identify their chief protagonists, or cite examples. However, these are not mutually exclusive, as they partially overlap, but are differentiated by particular theoretical orientation, conceptualization strategy, and analytical focus. These approaches reflect the heterogeneity of the discursive formations within the Islamic civilizational ecumene. Pluralist: Multiple Configurations

Nominalist: Believer’s Penchant

It privileges the pluralization of Islam, given the multiplicity of Islamic expressions due to the variations in the historical and cultural contexts and the social differentiations among the carriers of the Islamic creed (ElZein 1977). Moreover, it asserts that all such expressions are equally valid since they emanate from underlying universal Islamic principles. On this view, there are as many Islam(s) as there are adherents of the Islamic faith that are differentiated on the basis of the communal or regional peculiarities of their Islamic practices.

This approach is captured in its very definition of Islam “as a word that identifies varying relations of practice, representation, symbol, concept, and worldview within the same society and between different societies” (Gilsenan 1982: 19). Thus, it follows that Islam is what the anthropologist’s informant says it is, or the communal religious practices prevailing in the fieldwork site. On this view, the meaning of Islam for Muslims has become contested due in part to the intrusive exigencies of modernity that have induced multiple reconfigurations of the Islamic tradition. This approach is a reification of the pluralist one. It entails an itinerant ethnographic encounter with a variety of contexts and informants where Islam is the dominant ethos and reporting on the peculiarities of reconfigured traditions found in different Islamic social formations.

Essentialist: Singular Manifestation This approach seeks to validate a social causation theory based on three components that are claimed to be intrinsic to Muslim societies: (a) a social structure characterized by the opposition between centrally and hierarchically organized cities and egalitarian and segmentally organized hinterland that was animated by a “pendulum swing” theory of circulation of elites; (b) a dualistic corpus of religious practices (e.g., scripturalist vs. ritualistic) the performance of which depended on social topography (i.e., rural vs. urban) and that was theoretically mediated by the sociology of religion of Ibn Khaldun and David Hume; and (c) a segmentary political behavior pattern that was informed by British anthropology of segmentary lineage theory (Gellner 1981). These components interacted with each other in a pan-regional and historically immutable Islamic totality to invariably reproduce Muslim polities.

Culturalist: Symbolic-Social Nexus This approach appropriates some of the assumptions and conceptual repertoire of the essentialist paradigm, but it attempts to tease out cultural meanings out of religious protagonists engaged in a dramatic struggle unfolding in a national polity conceived as an Islamic theater (Geertz 1968). It deploys the strategy of “figuration of spirituality” where the biography of individuals is rendered emblematic of the national trajectory of Islam as state religion. The purpose is to elucidate the articulation of the symbolic endowments and social arrangements, which constitute the initial “structures of possibilities” of any given social formation, as part of a social history of the nation’s cultural imagination.

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Thematic: Epistemic Choice

Discursive: History Embedded

A Muslim polity is analyzed in terms of any of its constitutive elements, which serves as analytical-topical entry point into an Islamic social formation depending on the researchers’ interest. Accordingly, a Muslim society can be investigated in terms of the political predicament of a local sect (e.g., vom Bruck 2005 on the Zaydi sect in North Yemen); the peculiar performance of Islamic rituals (e.g., Knysh 2001 on saint worship in Hadhramawt); an anthropology of mobility that maps the migration of religious scholars and their diaspora formation effects (Ho 2006); biography of a religious leader (Haykel 2003); and gender-mediated practice (Mahmood 2005).

This perspective is partly dismissive of the above approaches and asserts that an anthropology of Islam should refer to the Islamic discursive tradition as embodied in the founding texts of the Qur’an and Hadith, and the subsequent Muslim discourse that addresses itself to conceptions of the Islamic past and future, with reference to a particular Islamic practice in the present (Asad 1986: 14). Such anthropology entails a critical engagement with indigenous Muslim discourses and their practitioners, as they grapple with the multiple constraints of the socio-historical milieu in which they find themselves as carriers of the Islamic tradition. As Asad (1986: 17) explains: “An anthropology of Islam will seek to understand the historical conditions that enable the production and maintenance of specific discursive traditions, or their transformation, and the efforts of practitioners to achieve coherence.”

Contextualist: Locale-Dependent It focuses on the dialectic between founding texts and particular contexts. Accordingly, “The challenge is to describe and analyze how the universalistic principles of Islam have been realized in various social and historical contexts without representing Islam as a seamless essence on the one hand or as a plastic congeries of beliefs and practices on the other” (Eickelman 1982: 1–2). However, the nature of context entails finding the right scale of fieldwork intervention. The aim is to find a “middle ground” between specific village locale and the meta-space of universal Islam, which would facilitate an adequate understanding of the specific contextual imbrications and ramifications of a religious tradition and its social organization under the influence of local political and economic forces.

4.2 Becoming Muslims Again: Three Historical Conjunctures As a caveat, it is worth stressing that my focus is not on the traditional beliefs and rituals of Soqotrans, such as witch trials (Snell 1956), the persistent streak of goat fetishism in Soqotran culture (Naumkin and Porkhomovsky 1996; Morris 2002: chap. 15), the traditional healer’s role

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in daily life (Simeone-Senelle 1995), or the Soqotrans’ obsession with magic (Naumkin 1993: 315–323). These have nothing to do with Islam, and moreover, their relevance to Soqotrans’ daily life began to diminish in the 1990s and seem to have ceased completely since then. Curiously, none of the references just cited discussed Islam, in spite of the longevity of its presence on the island. Indeed, when Islamic practices are referred to, it is to show the persistent influence of pagan customs (e.g., Naumkin 1993: 331–336), or of the Soqotrans’ sheer ignorance of the Islamic faith (Botting 1958a: 212–216). Furthermore, there is an absence of a clear chronology between the pre-Islamic and Islamic period on the island. This is undoubtedly due to the credence, or at least benefit of the doubt, accorded to travelers’ reports up until the seventeenth century about the remnants of Christian religious practices, or more aptly what seemed to have had some resemblance to such practices (see Biedermann 2001). Indeed, Christianity, in multiple guises, appears to have had the most persistent presence on the island. It is said to have been present long before it was adopted as the official religion of the Greco-Roman empire in 312 CE and lasted until the seventeenth century (see Medlycott 1917). Regarding the Islamization of Soqotra, it is merely implied that it may have occurred around the middle of the fifteenth century when Soqotra was subordinated to the Mahri Sultanate (Naumkin 1993: 34–36). In my attempt to remedy this situation, I offer a chronology by way of a discussion of three historical conjunctures through which the practice of Islam underwent successive mutations as it accommodated the shifting, and externally orchestrated, political context in Soqotra: The first conjuncture—“communal al-j¯ ahiliyya”—covers the period from the rise of Islam to the end of the Sultanate in the 1960s, when the dominant manifestation of Islam was as the Sufi practice of saint worshiping, as part of a geographically circumscribed (mostly in the northern coast of the island) folk practice mediated by a ritual-oriented and mystically empowered sacerdotal caste (al-ashr¯ af ). The second conjuncture—“liberation credo”—encompasses the duration of the socialist administration of the island from 1967 to the mid-1990s, when Islam was deployed as an ideological tool at the service of the state, under which it was incorporated as state religion, in order to buttress the state’s secular ideology of progress. And the third conjuncture—“era of atonement”—starts from 1994 when the civil war in the aftermath of Yemen’s unification and is still ongoing created an opening for the dissemination of multiple versions for the practice of Islam.

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Communal al-J¯ahiliyya: Syncretism Prevalent

In contrast to mainland Yemen, which converted to Islam during the Prophet’s lifetime, Soqotra seemed to have remained, until relatively recently, a multi-faith community; or more accurately, a place where various forms of religious syncretism were practiced. The religious practices on the island tended to resonate with the geopolitically-driven vicissitudes of faith on the mainland and in the region as a whole. Moreover, the island’s location as a cardinal node on the sea-lanes linking multiple civilizations fomented a human mélange as well as a religious and cultural métissage. This was coupled with the island’s extreme peripheral location from the neighboring continents—not to mention its seasonally inclement weather—that made it attractive as an object of only intermittent political tutelage of regional powers. Thus, the island was spared the symbolic regimentation that is the corollary of colonization, which made it a safe haven for vagrant adherents of all faiths (see Strauch 2012). Indeed, since the demise of the incense trade in the fourth century CE, Soqotra lapsed into a stateless peddlers’ emporium loosely linked to the 1 Kingdom of H . imyar on mainland Yemen and subjected to the occasional raiding parties for booty, slaves, or taxes from marauders of all provenances. The first attempt at formal colonization by a state-like entity seemed to have occurred in the middle of the eighth century CE and led to the institutionalization of the multi-faith character of the island (Wilkinson 1981: 275–281). This was the result of the establishment of the first Imamate in Oman in 752 CE, as part of the rise and spread of the al-Ib¯ ad.iyyah (Ib¯ ad.¯ı) movement2 that ultimately incorporated parts of the Arabian Gulf, eastern parts of Yemen, and East Africa. Oman built a powerful navy to regain control of the regional sea-lanes from the baw¯ arij (i.e., ships of sea pirates from polytheist areas such as India and subsequently European invaders such as the Portuguese), in order to achieve hegemony over the commercial traffic in goods and slaves. At that time, Soqotra had probably a majority Christian population, perhaps of Abyssinian origin, with whom Oman concluded a .sulh. (peace agreement), which entailed the payment of a per capita tax, while remaining free to practice their religion. The agreement was to be renewed every year, failing which ghan¯ımah (slaves and goods) could be taken from the island. A Muslim governor from Oman took up residence on the

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island to enforce it. A century later (between 851 and 873), the Soqotran Christians rebelled against the agreement, and an Omani fleet was sent to regain control of the island.3 This formal arrangement between Oman and Soqotra seemed to have lasted until the thirteenth century, as is evident in a quotation from Ibn al-Muj¯awir writing in the thirteenth century, which suggests that Soqotra was a dependency of the rulers of Dhofar (Zafar) in today’s Oman: “The people of the island [of Socotra] pay a levy (qit‘ah) to Ibn al-Hab¯ud¯ı.” The al-Habudi dynasty, originally established by a family from Hadhramawt, was brought to an end by the Rasulid conquest of Dhofar in 1279, which might explain the end of Oman’s control over Soqotra (Smith 1985: 84, 85).4 The Omanis may have been replaced soon thereafter by Yemeni émigrés from Hadhramawt, many of whom were from the class of s¯ ada (sing. sayyid) or ashr¯ af (sing. shar¯ıf ),5 as they embarked on a continuous emigration process to Asia and Africa starting in the thirteenth century until the Second World War (Serjeant 1981: 23–26). As Ho explains: “Hadhrami sayyids’ rise to prominence… was part and parcel of the expanding transregional, cosmopolitan Muslim ecumene which got its start in the thirteenth-century shift in Indian Ocean trade routes” (2006: 49). Accordingly, political control of Soqotra shifted to the tribes from al-Mahra Sultanate in 1480, and the Sultanate’s sacerdotal class of alashr¯ af partly inter-mediated the religious practices of Soqotrans; as they brought their saint worshipping practices with them to the island. This particularly Hadhrami form of religious practice (see Knysh 1993, 1997) was to become the dominant motif of religious expression on the island, even if only limited to certain parts of the northern coast. However, while this class of religious migrants succeeded in establishing their own form of practice, they seemed not to have uprooted what appeared to European visitors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to resemble Christian practices. Indeed, the Portuguese’s attempt at colonizing Soqotra in the sixteenth century was based partly on the presumption that the islanders were Christians. The Portuguese were not dissuaded when confronted with practitioners of a form of religious syncretism that could have had only an imagined resemblance to Christianity. As the leader of the expedition, Captain da Cunha partly acknowledged when he “begged them to receive the doctrine of Christ and learn the ceremonies of our church, which they had already long ago forgotten” (Birch 1875: 54). Over a hundred years later, a Carmelite priest who seemed to have been the last

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visitor to observe the actual practice of religious rituals that his precursors associated with Christianity did not share the self-deception of the Portuguese. As his description revealed a syncretism of animistic rites, which he described as follows: “The people still retained a perfect jumble of rites and ceremonies, sacrificing to the moon, circumcising, and abominating wine and pork. They had churches called moquame […and] the priests were called odambo” (Yule 1875: 402; Medlycott 1917). In effect, this statement might have been a summarizing overview of the practices associated with East African animists, Arab Muslims, and Abyssinian Christians, all of whom might have shared the island, or at least its northern coast, at different historical conjunctures. However, of more immediate pertinence to the notion of communal al-j¯ahiliyya is the observation of Thomas Roe, ambassador of King James who visited the island in August 1615 on his way to India. His description of the saint worshiping practice not only confirmed the longevity of the practice, but also resonates with Hadhrami religious custom and is validated in the recollection of Soqotran elders today. As he explained: They bury their dead all in tombs, and have in great reverence the monuments of their saints, whereof there have been many, but of most account Sayyid Hashim, buried at Tamara [Hadiboh], who being slain 100 years since by the Portuguese […], appears to them, and warns them of dangers to ensue. They impute the violence of winds to his walking, and have him in wonderful reverence. (Foster 1926: 23)

This practice of interring people in a tomb or mausoleum (called dhar¯ıh. in Arabic) is the customary manner of symbolizing the intermediary status of sainthood achieved by a religious personality. (A caveat: The reason why this practice is considered part of al-j¯ahiliyya in Soqotra today is because it violates the Islamic notion of the oneness of God (tawh.¯ıd) in worship, which means that intermediaries (such as saints) are forbidden when seeking God’s favor.) In Hadhramawt, this “saint” is called wal¯ı (pl. ¯ awl¯ıya’ ) meaning “friend of God,” but shaykh in Soqotra. Roe’s description conveys the signal attributes of al-ashr¯ af, namely their miracle performing power. In Soqotra, perhaps in contrast to Hadhramawt, the al-ashr¯ af ’s primary function was to intermediate between the people and nature: first, to ward off spirits (jinns ) whose presence Soqotrans

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perceived as an intrinsic and pervasive feature of the natural environment, and who either hindered or facilitated their interaction with it; and second, to enhance nature’s baraka by engendering a plenitude of the environmental resources (e.g., water, grass, dates, and fish) on which Soqotrans depended. There seems to have evolved a division of spiritual labor, as the al-ashr¯ af were dedicated to the service of the Sultan; therefore, they neither provided comfort for personal or physical ailments nor engaged in Qur’anic instruction of ordinary Soqotrans. However, the tombs of the al-ashr¯ af ’s ancestors provided spiritual consolation to the population through their ritual visitation (z¯ıy¯ ara). The curative functions were the responsibilities of the mekoli (traditional healer) who exorcised evil spirits, which Soqotrans deemed invariably to be the cause of whatever misfortune had befallen them, and the instructional function was performed by the al-mu‘allim (Qur’an teacher) who ran the m‘al¯ ama (Qur’anic school). The latter was introduced during the late 1950s or early 1960s and was based on rote learning without the acquisition of literacy and that functioned as the only form of formal education on the island during the Sultanate. This particular division of spiritual functions was accompanied by a division between the hierarchically structured ascriptive social categories on the island (see Vol. 1: Chapter 4) and forms of religious practice, which was articulated as follows: Arabs frequented mosques, the imbu‘ileh sought the intercession of saints, and the “bedouins” relied on the mekoli. However, all Soqotrans shared a belief in the existence of jinns, which persists even today, albeit in diminished intensity. This articulation of religious practice and social groups was not mutually exclusive, as any member of these social categories could, and did, seek solace in the other forms of worship. However, this segregated practice operated as a norm due to the intrinsic constraints of the social structure’s articulation with the island’s residential geography: Arabs resided in the northern coastal settlements where there was the only access to mosques and some kind of Qur’anic instruction, and therefore were socially expected to display publicly the ritual markers of their status as believers, namely to pray and attend the mosque; the imbu‘ileh were deprived of such instruction and depended for their livelihood on nature’s baraka, which saints were believed to be able to induce; and the “bedouins” dwelled in the hinterland where neither saint’s tomb nor m‘al¯ ama was available and had access only to the mekoli.

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In addition to these socio-geographic constraints, there were conjunctural factors that reinforced this differentiated articulation between social groups and religious practices, and marginalized the observance of proper Islamic practices in the life of most of the population. For instance, Soqotra under the Sultanate was characterized by the absence of the most basic of social amenities (e.g., school or health clinic). By the time of independence in 1967, there were about three Qur’anic schools in Hadiboh with two teachers trained in Hadhramawt instructing about twenty students each, and a few more scattered in the eastern part of the island (M¯omi), in Q¯ad.ub to the west of Hadiboh and Qalansiyah on the north-western coast. There was only one health clinic for the entire island, which was established in Hadiboh in the early 1960s. In the case of mosques, the number was always limited. 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” (1835: 218). By 1967, the number of mosques had increased only by two in Hadiboh (Serjeant 1992: 168), and they seemed to have been added in the last decade of the Sultanate. More revealing of the greater importance and persistence of saint worship was that the number of saint’s tombs outnumbered the mosques, at least for a while, as there were three in and around Hadiboh.6 In light of the above, the main purpose of mosques in practical terms was merely as symbolic reminders to the majority of islanders of an alternative conception of God. For most of them, access to proper religious instruction or to a mosque was not available, as they were left to find their own syncretic practice in the form of saint worship. Indeed, one major religious ritual that took place in Hadiboh emblematized the syncretism of saint worship and animistic rites. It was celebrated at one sacralized site in Hadiboh named medawwar al-nakhlah (“the palm tree circle”). The place was not a saint’s tomb but a dry well in which a palm tree grew “miraculously” in spite of the lack of water, and thus rejuvenating powers were associated with the well. This ritual took place every year at the end of the monsoon season in October. It lasted for a few days, during which there was no work, as the Sultan decreed them as holidays. Soqotrans dressed in their best attire and marched in a procession accompanied by drum music, singing and dancing all the way to the site while invoking the name of Shaykh bin ‘Ali as a form of incantation. Food offerings were made and incense burned. People rubbed their bodies with the

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soil from the well and took some home as blessing. It was essentially a celebratory-prayer ritual practiced by agropastoralist and fishing communities on the northern coast of Soqotra, and who gathered together for a mass entreaty of Shaykh bin ‘Ali’s intercession for God’s blessing so that the new season would bring good rains for their date groves, and that the sea would abound with fish.7 The above set of religious practices characterized the Sultanate’ spiritual context, which was dominated by the quest for an ecstatic divine release from the vicissitudes of nature and the cognitive impoverishment that was partly organic and partly sustained by the Sultanate’s ascriptive social hierarchy. This was the social and religious legacy inherited by the socialist administration after the 1967 revolution. 4.2.2

Liberation Credo: Islam Radicalized

The socialist administration sought to redeem Soqotrans from this communal al-j¯ahiliyya—or more accurately in terms of the secular socialist lexicon, communal takhalluf (“backwardness”)—in which Islam was based on an Islamic consciousness tenuously linked to knowledge of the Qur’an and was practiced only by a minority. The majority of the population, however, remained cloistered in their caves and preoccupied with jinns causing them ill health and harassing their herds with their only source of spiritual solace either the mekoli’s magical incantations or the saints’ miraculous intercession. However, the socialist government’s redemption was not through the equalization of access to a more authentic Islam, but the appropriation of the latter as an appendage to the state’s secular ideology of progress. In fact, the socialist government perceived Islam as “an ideological system posing an intellectual challenge to socialism” that had to be domesticated (Cigar 1985: 45). Accordingly, the social revolution envisaged by the Marxism-inspired socialist government needed an official Islam as a justificatory discourse for its political agenda. This was all the more imperative given the pervasiveness of an Islamic sensibility among the population of South Yemen. Indeed, Islam was the primary ideology legitimating the traditional social order of Yemen. The government’s strategy was to attempt to sunder this symbiotic relationship through the de-traditionalization of the established social order and the de-Islamization of its cultural mores. The challenge was to reconfigure a social system insulated within a tradition of tribalism, hereditary social status, and occupational caste system ordained by a ritualistic

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Islam, into a new social order in which Islam has recovered its original revolutionary mantle and is enlisted in the quest for the population’s secular emancipation from a feudal social order. The nature of this radical Islam is explained by one of the Presidents of South Yemen, Abd al-Fattah Ismail, who stated in 1978: “Islam, which came essentially as a revolution, was transformed by feudal and aristocratic forces, voiding Islam of its revolutionary essence and diverting it to serve other goals” ever since the Umayyad era (Ismael and Ismael 1986: 165).8 The role of this liberation credo was to institutionalize a religious discourse through state-hired clerics that would be acquiescent to the state’s agenda of societal transformation and that would whittle away the population’s commitment to a conservative practice of Islam (Cigar 1990). In effect, the socialist regime sought to engineer a mutation in the practice of Islam from a historical inheritance with an established tradition of beliefs and rituals to a state policy-driven religious discourse that promotes the state’s polity formation objectives. This led to the reconceptualization of the meaning of Islam that was subservient to the state’s political vision: “the essence of Islam… is equality and the end of class exploitation [and] the establishment of a prosperous and just life, the promotion of democracy and social justice and a society free from social contradictions and exploitative relationships” (Cigar 1985: 45). As a means of implementing the official recognition of Islam as state religion in the Constitution, a policy menu was adopted to ensure the standardization of religious practice in all of South Yemen. This menu included the following measures: (a) nationalization of the waqf system a’ (class of religious scholars) (religious foundation) deprived the al-’ulam¯ of its source of economic independence and entailed the state’s maintenance of local mosques, and the payment of a civil service salary to full-time local clerics; (b) Islam was integrated into the primary school curriculum but its instruction was limited to two hours per week; and (c) Islamic holidays were official national holidays (Ismael and Ismael 1986: 165; Lackner 1985: 109–110). Moreover, “the Qur’an was taught in schools as a social and political document, and [was] portrayed as supporting anti-imperialism and social radicalism” (Cigar 1985: 45). This attempt at the radical secularization of the practice of Islam was not unanimously welcomed nor willingly heeded. This was especially so in Hadhramawt, where the symbiosis between religion and the traditional ascriptive social order was the most ingrained. Indeed, adopting the government’s measures would have undermined both the social primacy

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of the s¯ ada class and the ensemble of social practices associated with saint worship, which was what the government hoped for (for a description of these social practices, see Serjeant 1981; Knysh 1993). The southern state’s official declaration of tolerance toward Islam was a peace offering to the international Islamic umma, which provided a cover for its local subversion through attempts at engineering the demise of Islamic discourses and rituals that were considered socially backward such as saint worship and Sufi practices, or politically defiant groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and members of al-‘ulam¯a’ in the south. These groups were official enemies of the state and contemptuously referred to as kahn¯ ut¯ı: retrograde clerics. Paradoxically, while Islam was being selectively undermined in South Yemen, in Soqotra it was being strategically promoted. This difference in approach was due to the different socio-religious contexts found on the island. In Soqotra’s context, the majority of the population was largely ignorant of Islam and was abandoned to the psychological traumas of superstition manifested in the locally universal belief in jinns, while the rest had a superficial acquaintance with Islam. Moreover, the overwhelming priority of the population was relief from the chronic hunger and from the generalized destitution maintained by the patrimonial Sultanate. In this context, the implementation of the policy measures noted above led to the actual spread of the knowledge of Islam beyond its previous demographically circumscribed constituency and more importantly to the eradication of superstition. The establishment of primary schools for the first time catered to islanders of all backgrounds, who were introduced to literacy and provided with a smattering acquaintance of subjects including Islam. The building of mosques, albeit regulated, went apace with population concentration and requests from villagers that were judged reasonable by the local government. Thus, four mosques were added to the existing ones in the new neighborhoods of Hadiboh, and about twenty were built in other parts of the island. However, the study of Islam in mosques was discouraged, as this was thought to be conducive to the development of political opposition cells. This was not entirely a figment of the state’s paranoid political imagination, as al-Tabl¯ıgh group did constitute itself as a religious opposition cell through this process in 1978 (see below). Instruction in Islam was circumscribed to that provided in school, with the exception of one of the three Qur’anic schools that were established under the Sultanate, which remained open until the death of its teacher in 1976. Furthermore,

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the government’s zero tolerance approach toward superstitious practices led to the interdiction of the functions of the mekoli, the discontinuation of saint worship and all rituals associated with it, and the active dissuasion of Soqotrans’ belief in jinns. Ironically, Islam in Soqotra was the government’s ideological handmaiden in weaning Soqotrans away from superstition, as part of a process of secularizing the islanders’ spiritual purview and modernizing the island’s socialscape. Unwittingly, this contributed to the emergence of an embryonic Islamic sensibility, albeit submerged by the predominantly secular orientation (e.g., absence of veiling, availability of alcohol, and lack of gender segregation) and politicized cultural milieu that prevailed on the island (see Vol. 1: Chapter 7). Ultimately, the liberation credo initiated the transition of Soqotrans from a state of being symbolically dominated by superstition to achieving a literacy-mediated acquaintance with the knowledge of revelation and thus partly contributed to preparing the islanders for the practice of an unadulterated orthodox Islam subsequent to the demise of the socialist administration. 4.2.3

Era of Atonement: Collective Expiation Exercise

The decade of the 1990s marked a significant shift in the religious ecology of the island, as the latter became the theater for the re-enactment of a politico-religious struggle between the forces of secularism emblematized by South Yemen’s Marxist regime and its ruling Socialist Party, and of the forces of Islamism that had coalesced into a powerful opposition political party in the north, al-Is.l¯ah., which was established five months after the unification of North and South Yemen in May 1990. Just prior to, and in the aftermath of, unification, the principal aim of al-Is.l¯ah. was to stamp out of Yemeni society this “damnation” of secularism (‘ilm¯ aniya) and especially the type advocated by its purveyors in the south who were called “atheistic communists” (shu‘¯ıyin) (see Stiftl 1999; Burgat 1999). As a result, al-Is.l¯ah. gained prominence during the civil war of 1994, as it offered its services to the government’s prosecution of the war through the fielding of armed militias against the southern forces. For its contribution to the war effort, al-Is.l¯ah. was generously rewarded, as one-third of the cabinet posts, half of the key post in the public administration and was given champ libre and carte blanche to re-Islamize the south (see Rouleau 1995). Fortunately, however, Soqotra was spared the need for armed conquest, since Soqotrans have instinctively prioritized the survival

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of their island-nation and thus have always displayed a strategic allegiance to the externally imposed political order. Accordingly, there was no local outward display of public support for the socialist regime, once it was vanquished on the mainland. Therefore, the islanders were cautiously receptive to the national unification process. They were apprehensive, however, as this unification process on the mainland was characterized on the one hand by military conquest and on the other by a radical Islamism. The latter was animated by a violent proselytizing zeal against the remnants of popular Islam (i.e., the Sufi brand of saint worship and grave visitation), which led to the destruction of tombs (Ho 2006), and toward the socialist secularists who were to be regarded as apostates and thus deserving of death (see Mermier 1997). Soqotrans having partaken in this secularism considered themselves as potential targets. There was a pressing need to clarify the status of Soqotrans within the national unification process and to seek to prevent their being the object of political or religious exactions. Accordingly, toward the end of 1994 and early 1995, a large delegation of Soqotran shaykhs (sixty was the, perhaps inflated, figure mentioned to me) went on a tour of Sana‘a’ to meet the leadership of the newly unified Yemen. Their mission had the following aims: (a) to seek arbitration in the election of the Shaykh al-Mash¯ayikh for the island; (b) to present Soqotra and its needs, such as infrastructure development and jobs, especially to obtain guarantee of preferential hiring of Soqotrans for local government posts; (c) to pledge allegiance, on behalf of the islanders, to the President; and (d) to secure an “entente cordiale” between the representatives of the state and the island. According to local interlocutors’ recollections, the President at the time—Ali Abdallah Saleh—seemed to have advised the delegation that Soqotrans should not belong to any of the political parties but to the “party of Soqotra.” This seemingly benevolent injunction to the Soqotrans to engage in the voluntary de-politicization of their community was perhaps an attempt to extend a patronal tutelage over the island. More importantly, the President’s advice betrayed a concern about the island’s being captured by the political opposition, and a preference for it to become a politics-free but religion steep zone. Indeed, the state was to relinquish control of religion, at least initially, to focus on establishing its hegemony over the political institutions, the security apparatus, and the economy of the island. The islanders were almost by default handed over to non-state religious actors as subjects of a socio-moral re-appropriation crusade. Moreover, the apprehension generated by the

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uncertainties of the transition from the southern socialist regime to its northern political nemesis seemed to have induced a symbiosis between the religious activists’ counter-secularization offensive and the Soqotrans’ spiritual expiation exercise—a kind of communal act of contrition for their past association with the socialist regime and the resulting deficiencies in their Islamic demeanor. Although this expiation exercise was undoubtedly motivated by the desire to escape the previous regime’s social regimentation inspired by an alien ideology—the end of which Soqotrans greeted as an “opening” to the world—it was nevertheless a situationally induced pledge of allegiance to the new politico-religious status quo. This period engendered what I call an expiation exercise in quest of a religion-mediated “collective melioration” that led to the intensification of Soqotrans’ religious demeanor in order to accentuate their distance from the island’s superstitious recent past. Furthermore, this period launched the building of community-funded mosques all over the island, whose most important function was not only as an alternative to the dirt floor prayer ground (musalla), but also as a prestige symbol in the undeclared tournament of values among villages over the relative rigor heeded in the performance of the rituals of Friday prayers, for which mosque attendance is compulsory. The remarkable result of this expiation exercise was the relative thoroughness with which the overwhelming majority of Soqotrans have relinquished the religious practices that were associated with the period of al-j¯ahiliyya: the belief in jinns, saint worship, traditional rain ritual with sacrificial offerings, consultation with the mekoli, mixing of the sexes, immodest attire, negligent observance of prayer ritual, and the use of Soqotri names instead of Muslim ones. The socialist period initiated the process of name changing both as an administrative imperative and as a means to cultural assimilation given the need to overcome the language barrier. Subsequently, name changing became a widespread practice, which was the equivalent of a baptismal act of religious re-conversion, especially for Soqotrans in the hinterland, as Soqotri names became embarrassing artifacts of the al-j¯ahiliyya past that was to be patronymically dissociated with and historically erased. This practice of name changing was similar to the situation of the Zaydi s¯ ada in North Yemen after the 1962 Revolution, as they abandoned honorific titles and patronymic markers that might betray their former exclusive status, as a means of deflecting social ostracism and political exactions in the post-revolution era (see vom Bruck 2005).

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This renunciation was so nearly categorical that the distinction between an official and popular Islam, or stated differently—using the standard terminology in the anthropological lexicon—between a scripturalist and a ritualistic Islam is not a pertinent one in Soqotra.9 The main reason for this seems to be the fortuitous combination of the relatively low level of learning on the part of those spreading the word of Allah and the elementary spiritual condition of those who were to receive it. By necessity, the focus was on achieving ritual orthopraxy among all Soqotrans, which entailed the uniform standardization of the performance of prayer ritual and the observance of Muslim behavioral etiquette. Indeed, this expiation exercise could not have been based on creedal orthodoxy, as its local missionaries had an Islamic consciousness in-formation: that is, a consciousness “that desired to be and, however inexpertly or at a third remove, actually attempted to be Quranic” (Geertz 1968: 42). This era led to the presence of three main proselytizing groups on the island (al-Tabl¯ıgh, al-Is.l¯ ah., and Salaf¯ı) who are discussed in the next section.

4.3 Agents of Re-Conversion: Three Proselytizing Paths During the era of atonement, which is still the contemporary phase of Islam in Soqotra, the agents of this transformation were for the most part Soqotrans; some of whom had migrated to the mainland to attend religious schools called ma‘¯ ahid ‘ilmiyya (Scientific Institutes), and were aided and abetted by co-religionists from the mainland. These institutes were initially established with funding from Saudi Arabia, and they have since become autonomous from government control and a permanent fixture in Yemen’s educational landscape. They continue to exist in spite of the government’s attempt to shut them down on the ground that they operate outside the framework of the education law. Initially, it was this cadre of religious “petty scholastics,” who upon their return to the island launched the “re-conversion” of their fellow Soqotrans on an island-wide scale. While Soqotra is free of the region-bound divergent ritualistic peculiarities and doctrinal enclaves found on the mainland, it has not escaped the phenomenon of denominationalism: the practice of Islam through the mediation of particular schools of interpretation of the Qur’an by religious scholars, and who have gathered disciples and established organizations to promote their approach to Islam. The groups represented in

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Soqotra are the legacy of the different doctrines imparted by the “scientific institutes” Soqotrans attended. In fact, to understand the current configuration of Islam on the island, it is obligatory to highlight the modality of operation of the groups that mediate Soqotrans’ practice of Islam. The three schools that competed for Soqotrans’ hearts and minds are discussed below: al-Tabl¯ıgh (a missionary movement), al-Is.l¯ ah. (a religion-based political party), and Salaf¯ı (a clique of Soqotran students who studied at a Salafi school, the d¯ ar al-h.ad¯ıth, in Sa‘ada province in the north of Yemen). In discussing these three movements, I retrace the dissemination trajectory of each from their external provenance and original formulation and their subsequent discursive modifications on the Yemeni mainland and Soqotra Island. 4.3.1

Al-Tabl¯ıgh: Pietistic Quest

Al-Tabl¯ıgh, which means conveying Islam’s message, is a moderate Islamic missionary movement. Its formal name is Jam¯ a‘at al-Tabl¯ıgh that was founded by Maulana Muhammad Ilyas (1885–1944) in India in 1927. Its initial objective was to teach proper Islamic practices to the semi-Islamized Indian peasants in the vicinity of Delhi. It became an international organization as of 1946 to spread Islam on the basis of a grassroots approach aimed at socially marginalized believers. It is roughly the Islamic spiritual equivalent of Mother Theresa’s Christian social crusade among the poor. From the early 1950s, the movement began to send missionaries to the Arab world and elsewhere (Gaborieau 2002: 39; Metcalf 2003). In the case of Yemen, it seemed to have started in Aden during the British period when there was constant traffic of labor migration between India and South Yemen. Shaykh Saleh Ahmed Makbal started the group in Aden in the early 1960s, perhaps through the influence of the followers of the group who came as missionaries among the workers from India. He seemed to have migrated from Aden to alHudaydah, on the western (Tih¯ama) coast of Yemen, after the rise to power of the socialist government in order to escape persecution. The center of al-Tabl¯ıgh movement is in al-Hudaydah. Al-Tabl¯ıgh was the first religious group to be established in Soqotra, which sought to rekindle and sustain Soqotrans’ commitment to the proper knowledge and practices of Islam. It was a politically quietist and purely pietistic movement that endeavored to pervade Soqotrans’ daily life with Islamic norms. Indeed, the group has its own myth of origin

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in Soqotra. It is said that Shaykh Naharhen Sahat from the village of Qashibhen, in the western part of the island, started the group. He is portrayed as a man sharing the attributes of the Prophet in that he was illiterate (a widely shared feature among Soqotrans that is meant to demonstrate the accessibility of God’s message to all who are similarly handicapped), and who seemed to have been similarly inspired through a kind of personal revelation to take the words of God to his fellow Soqotrans. He left Soqotra clandestinely in the early 1970s for Aden, where he met adherents of al-Tabl¯ıgh group. He subsequently left Aden and under the cover of secrecy walked all the way to al-Hudaydah, where he began his full induction into the Islamic faith according to al-Tabl¯ıgh principles. He returned to Soqotra clandestinely with a core group of five to start a branch in 1978. Al-Tabl¯ıgh became a local movement only after unification in 1990, since public religious activity by private groups was not tolerated by the socialist state. Al-Tabl¯ıgh’s approach to teaching Islam is the most organically adapted to the socio-economic conditions of the overwhelming majority of the islanders. Given that the group’s objective is to spread Islam in a manner that would facilitate understanding by people of all social background, but especially the common rural folk and urban marginals with little if any education. Moreover, its foundational principles (u’s.¯ ul ), which were originally six, have expanded to ten to accommodate the socio-spiritual needs of the Soqotran community. As they seek to encourage the widespread adoption of a religious ethic in people’s interaction as well as in support of mutual aid practices that underpin community life. The leader of Soqotra’s al-Tabl¯ıgh, Shaykh Ali Ibrahim, listed the locally adapted principles as follows: (i) spread the message of God (bay¯ an); (ii) maintain good relations with neighbors (h.usn al-juw¯ ar); (iii) keep close ties with women relatives (s.alat al-¯ arh.¯ am); (iv) parental obedience (birr al-w¯ alida¯ın); (v) seek the knowledge of God from the prophet (ma‘arifat ¯ allah min alnab¯ı); (vi) follow the example of the prophet (i’tib¯ a’ sannat al-ras¯ ul ); (vii) perform the five pillars of Islam (¯ ark¯ an al-¯ısl¯ am al-khamsa); (viii) acquire knowledge of the shar¯ı’a and of religion (‘ul¯ um al-shar¯ı‘a wa ald¯ın); (ix) call upon the glory of God (da‘awah li dhikr ¯ allah); and (x) show sincerity in work and intention (¯ıkhl¯ a.s al-‘amal wa al-niyah). The movement adopted a door-to-door approach in reintegrating Soqotrans onto the “straight path of Islam.” The group practices what it calls al-khur¯ uj f¯ı sab¯ıl ¯ allah (“going out for God”), which entails going to villages and staying with the people for a few days, meeting with them

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individually or in small groups, which is called m¯ uadda (“fellowship”), for the mutual sharing of the message of God. They patiently engaged Soqotrans of all background through a bilateral dialogue of persuasion, and never in mass meeting, and always in their territory: home, school, garden, villages, and grazing grounds. However, the group’s activities are predominantly rural in orientation, where it seeks to ensure the pastoralists’ conformity to the ritualistic requirements and behavioral proprieties prescribed by Islam. In Hadiboh, it organizes occasionally three-day retreats in the masjid al-n¯ ur, the mosque of the local leader of al-Tabl¯ıgh. The group does not seek adherents, it recruits volunteers for the duration of its khur¯ uj missions, and it welcomes everyone to its prayer retreats. Moreover, it has adopted an exclusively religious focus in its activities, and it shuns organized politics. From 1989 to 1995, the group constituted itself into a mass “re-conversion” movement, as its brigades of itinerant preachers dispersed throughout the hinterland where Islam was the least acquainted with. Ultimately, al-Tabl¯ıgh was instrumental in the institutionalization of Islamic practices in the everyday life of Soqotrans throughout the island, and in instigating the omnipresence of the mus.alla (prayer ground) and the mosque as well as the introduction of the practice of women’s veiling. Since then, the two other groups discussed below have contested al-Tabl¯ıgh’s primacy. 4.3.2

Al-Is.l¯ah.: Islam Politicized

The formal name of this political party and religious organization is “The Yemeni Congregation for Reform” (al-tajammu’ al-Yaman¯ı li-l-Is.l¯ ah.). It was established in September 1990 in North Yemen and became the foremost embodiment of the Islamist movement in Yemen. It is the incarnation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen, and it offers itself as an alternative to the rather secular orientation of the other major competing party the al-mu’tamar al-sha‘ab¯ı al-‘¯ amm (General People’s Congress or GPC). The party slogan, which is taken from the Qur’an, expresses its raison d’être and exclusive source of inspiration: “I only desire reform to the best of my power. And my guidance cannot come except from Allah, in Him I trust and unto Him I repent” (from verse 88 in chapter 11: H¯ud). In contrast to other Islamist movements, its inaugural intervention in Yemeni politics was as a coalition partner of the secular governing party (GPC) and not in opposition to it. This chronic opportunism for politically convenient alliances to advance its interests remained its

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defining feature (Hamzawy 2009). Moreover, its socially heterogeneous composition confounded observers about what it stood for. This has led to scholarly debates about whether its Islamic ideology was fundamentalist or moderate, and whether its social composition was a tribal or an Islamist coalition. The provisional verdict that seems to have been rendered is that first, regarding its Islamic ideological orientation, alIs.l¯ah. represents a comparatively enlightened Islamism, which provides a bulwark against fundamentalism, and that acts as a guarantor of multiparty politics in Yemen given the relative political weakness of the other parties. Second, concerning al-Is.l¯ah.’s compositional make-up, it confirms its name as a “congregation,” as it contains the following categories: leaders of northern tribal groups; representatives of Islamic movements; modernist elements such as big merchants and technocrats; and a contingent of mediators, with straddling sympathies, that liaise with the ruling party as well as other societal sectors and institutional actors (e.g., military, security). Scholars have assumed that this aggregation of diversity constitutes the party’s internal mechanism of checks and balances, and generates a moderating effect (see Mermier 1997; Burgat 1999; Stiftl 1999; Schwedler 2007). Al-Is.l¯ah. offered its own interpretation regarding its historical genesis and phases of its political evolution, and ideological genealogy through identifying its pantheon of venerable religious scholars. The following discussion of al-Is.l¯ah. is partly based on one of its founding documents published in the early 1990s, the “Political Programme of the Islah Party” (available at al-bab.com), which captures the principles that continue to inform its contemporary political practices. A close reading of this political programme problematizes the consensus regarding its moderate political orientation, as both the tenets and tenor of this programme ambiguously straddle the ideological spectrum from moderate to fundamentalist. As an oppositional manifesto, the programme provides a competitive alternative to the secular tendency of Yemeni governments in the recent past (prior to the Huthi’s coup d’état in 2015). However, as the policy framework document of a governing party, it might lead to the substitution of a theocratic authoritarianism for the rather secular orientation of Yemen’s other competing parties (except the Huthis), given its compulsive ideology of unity. An interpretive summary of the political programme’s contents is provided below. Al-Is.l¯ah. locates its initial organizational impetus in the perceived “agony of Islamic civilizational decline” and adopts as its ultimate political

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challenge “to relive a new civilizational revival.” Yemen’s role in the latter is seen as crucial, given the historical primacy and consistency of its citizen’s participation in the spread of Islam, its internationally renowned stable of local religious scholars, and the crucial contribution of local Islamic reformers in the undermining and toppling of both the Imamate and its Royalist insurgents, and the southern communists that were instrumental in the unification of the country. Al-Is.l¯ah.’s national political goals are aimed at enhancing Yemen’s capacity and effectiveness to contribute to this Islamic civilizational renaissance as well as to constitute an exemplar of it. Accordingly, it proposes to pursue the following objectives: (1) “Protection of the united homeland and removal of the remaining signs of division”; (2) “Strengthening of the modern state and developing the new political experiment which is based on sh¯ ur¯ a, democracy and multiparty system”; and (3) “Comprehensive re-development” of country and polity. These objectives are underpinned by the following principles: First, Islam is the foundational pillar as it offers a “complete vision for humans, the universe and life, and a law (shari’a) that organizes every aspect of life.” Second, there is a trinity of values, which constitutes the “faith-based safeguards” in an Islamic polity: (a) justice, which is reified in the edict “commanding right and forbidding wrong” (al-¯ amr bi-lma’r¯ uf wa al-nah¯ı ‘an al-munkar); (b) liberty, which is defined as the unrestrained freedom “to serve God alone,” partly in order to carry out the above edict; and (c) equality, which is regarded as an intrinsic and inalienable feature of all human beings because of their shared progenitor in Adam. Third, sh¯ ur¯ a (consultation) is promoted as a synonym of democracy, and the governance mechanism of choice for an Islamic polity. Fourth, the republican system is to be maintained as it provides the macro-institutional matrix, and is seen as the bulwark against a relapse of an Imamate system. Fifth, and significantly, “Yemeni unity” is considered an unfinished project that is best pursued through an educational strategy that seems to rely on religious inspired homogenization of society into a corporatist Islamic state. As the programme cryptically calls for the “speedy removal of the remains of division where they exist within the laws, state apparatus and schools syllabi as well as public organizations and trade unions.” The potential ramifications of the implementation of such a programme are the following: (a) the Islamization of public institutions (i.e., infusion of religiosity in education, judiciary, and civil administration) and (b) the moralization of the public sphere (i.e., adoption of

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“modesty” as the socio-cultural code of conduct, and a pious public discourse). The end results of the implementation of these objectives are most likely a theocracy and not a “moderate” Islamic public sphere. This is unlikely to comfort the casual religious ritual observer, which is the prevalent type of Yemeni Muslim, at least in the main urban centers and among the new generation. This moderate disposition prevailed until the US war on terror catalyzed the spread of jihadist movements and the rise of al-Huthis in Yemen along with a polarizing sectarian political discourse and religious practices on the mainland; however, Soqotra was unaffected. Al-Is.l¯ah.’s politico-religious foray into Soqotra followed the end of the civil war in 1994, which allowed the spread of multi-party politics on the island that was still under the exclusive control of the Socialist Party. Indeed, the Party won the 1993 Parliamentary elections on the island. In the post-civil war period, the northern political victors (GPC and al-Is.l¯ah.) seemed to have assumed responsibility for different domains in local affairs, as the GPC focused on institutional integration of Soqotra, and al-Is.l¯ah. led the ideological incorporation of Soqotrans. In contrast to al-Tabl¯ıgh’s organically adapted and de-politicized insertion of Islam among Soqotrans with the aim of transforming their personal religious conduct, al-Is.l¯ah. initiated the politicization of religion through the ideologization of Islam, as it sought to broker an island-wide social transformation based on Islamic sovereignty. Al-Is.l¯ah.’s entry on the island was as a politico-religious organization; thus, its Islamic activism was pursued for electoral gains and ultimately political power. Its presence has instigated a political competition over the choice of a communal societal project: secular citizenship in a modern nation-state or a self-governing religious community. Its political mobilization activities won it the 1997 parliamentary elections. In Soqotra, the nature of the local reception of al-Is.l¯ah.’s political Islamic discourse and the relevance of its programmatic ideals (as listed above) were contingent on Soqotrans’ socioeconomic exigencies of their quotidian existence. The fact is that the local political pursuit of these ideals does not necessarily address, and is far removed from, Soqotran priorities. In the testimony of one committed local supporter of alIs.l¯ah. in a village in the south-eastern part of the island, and who is the director of the local school, these priorities are first and foremost for Soqotrans to become better Muslims, the availability of more jobs, and better health and education services, and security and stability (‘¯ amn wa ¯ıstiqr¯ ar). Beyond these basic priorities, what is most significant about

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the role of al-Is.l¯ah.’s Islamic political discourse is the discursive space it provides to Soqotrans who desire to preserve their communal autonomy from the mainland’s political and cultural hegemony to articulate their dissent toward the state. In effect, Soqotrans’ appropriation of Islam as a political discourse is a form of discursive resistance against mainland assimilationist influences, especially in terms of its socio-cultural practices (q¯at chewing) and in protest of the mainland government’s endemic corruption. Also, the adoption of an Islamic discourse provides the most appropriate means of placating the seemingly omnipresent but latent suspicion of state authorities toward Soqotrans’ presumed intrinsic predisposition for cultural communitarianism and political secessionism. Beyond the local instrumentalization of political Islam as a means of discursive resistance against the state, there is the equally important role of religious conviction, which carries greater meaning in the daily lives of Soqotrans. It is in this light that one of al-Is.l¯ah.’s objectives, namely the moralization of the public sphere, resonates with a majority of Soqotrans, without being translated into electoral support. As there is a fundamental distinction between the active supporters of al-Is.l¯ah. and the rest of the Soqotran population regarding the moralization strategy: For al-Is.l¯ah.’ supporters, Islam is used as an ideology that nurtures their politico-cultural dissent toward the state, while for non-supporters Islam is relied upon as an orthopraxis to enhance their resilience in the face of the chronic hardships of livelihood-making, especially in the hinterland. Noteworthy is that despite the combination of euphoria and anxiety in the aftermath of the 1994 civil war that gave al-Is.l¯ah. a temporary ideological hegemony over the communal polity and swept it into office during the 1997 parliamentary elections, there is no political Islam in Soqotra. That means, neither is the slogan “Islam is the solution” part of Soqotrans’ political discourse, nor is the instauration of shari’a law among their political demands. In the final analysis, the religious credentials of a political party are not determinative, as Soqotrans are looking for concrete results, in the absence of which they will shift their political allegiance to another party. Indeed, the islanders harbor a strong skeptical disposition toward political Islam without socio-economic benefits. This attitude was confirmed in the April 2003 parliamentary elections, when al-Is.l¯ah. was voted out of office in favor of the GPC candidate for the parliamentary seat for Soqotra and it has remained in the GPC hands ever since. In the aftermath of the Huthi coup d’état in 2015, the GPC and al-Is.l¯ah. have

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joined forces as the ruling parties in areas under the control of the exiled government. 4.3.3

Salaf¯ı: Social Asceticism Ethos

The term Salaf¯ı (pl. Al-Salafiyyin but Salafis hereafter) is an abridgement of the Arabic term al-salaf al-s.¯ alih. (the righteous ancestors) that refers to the companions of the Prophet including his first four successors as leaders of the Islamic community, al-umma, and prior to the rise of al-fitnah—i.e., the civil wars for the political control of the Muslim community that began in the middle of the seventh century. It is a late nineteenth-century Islamic reform movement initiated in Egypt, which spread throughout the Muslim world in mutated forms, and that emerged in response to the challenge posed by the West’s economic domination and secularizing cultural invasion. It entailed an attempt to meld selective aspects of Western modernity and Islamic religion and civilization. In its initial manifestation, the Salafi movement represented an Islamic modernism that sought to engage the West in a competitive civilizational dialogue. This dialogue was initially envisioned as a selective accommodation to key resources of liberal secularism through the appropriation of modern science and technology, however subordinated to an Islamic religious-cultural framework. The guiding principles of this movement can be summarized in the words of one of its prominent initial protagonists, Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905), as follows: (i) “to liberate thought from the shackles of taql¯ıd [blind imitation], and understand religion as it was understood by the elders of the community before dissension [al-fitnah] appeared”; (ii) “to return, in the acquisition of religious knowledge, to its first sources [i.e., Qur’an and Hadith], and to weigh them in the scales of human reason [¯ıjtih¯ ad], and … summoning the believer to respect these established truths, and to depend on them in his moral life and conduct”; and (iii) to re-establish mutual obligation “between the obedience which the people owe the government, and the just dealings the government owes the people” (quoted in Hourani 1983: 140–141). These three guiding principles constitute the central pillars of a debate that animates the religious-intellectual life in different Muslim polities over how to counter the West’s preeminence and to reconstitute the ideal Islamic community. These principles have gone through a series of mutations in the hands of different religious scholars in various national

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contexts. I elaborate on these principles briefly in order to show their subsequent mutation in the Yemeni context and their derivative appropriation in Soqotra. First, it advocated an epistemological openness to the modern world by rejecting the intellectual confinement entailed by taql¯ıd, which meant the blind imitation of the established opinions by the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence (madh¯ ahib), and more generally the attitude of mind that called for the categorical “rejection of all the new and culturally alien ways of the Occident” (Hodgson 1974 vol. 1: 274), and the restoration of ¯ıjtih¯ ad, that is the individual interpretation of what constitutes ethical conduct, which was declared closed centuries earlier. Second, recuperation of the Islamic faith as expounded during the Prophet’s time and preserved in the Qur’an and Hadith, because it was devoid of the later creedal accretions (e.g., Sufism), sectarian communalism (e.g., Shi’ism), and ritual deviations (e.g., saint worship) that were the consequences of al-fitnah. Third, the institutionalization of a participatory consultation (sh¯ ur¯ a ) between ruler and ruled, in order to arrive at a representative consensus (¯ıjm¯ a’ ) of the members of the Muslim community. The Salafi movement was introduced in Yemen in the early 1980s by Shaykh Muqbil bin Hadi al-Wadi‘i (1920s–2001) through the establishment in 1979 of the madrassa D¯ ar al-H . ad¯ıth in the town of Dammaj in Yemen’s northern province of Sa‘ada until it was destroyed by the Huthis in 2013. The school’s multinational student body made it “one of the leading centers of Salafi teaching and propagation in the Arab and Muslim world” (Haykel 2002: 28). Shaykh Muqbil was a native of the Sa‘ada region in North Yemen and was educated in Saudi Arabia. A noteworthy caveat: In scholarly evaluations of Shaykh Muqbil’s brand of Salafism (e.g., Burgat and Sbitli 2002; Haykel 2002), the determinative influence of his socio-cultural background on his particular interpretation has escaped explicit analytical attention. This aspect is crucial to understand the difference in Abduh’s and Muqbil’s respective interpretive appropriation of early Islam. In Abduh’s case, the broad intellectual culture and complex institutional context of Egypt and his wide travels led to an interpretation that was selectively open to the modern world. In contrast, Muqbil’s confinement to the Arabian Peninsula and his limited travel circuit led to a rejectionist disposition toward the modern world. Therefore, Muqbil’s intellectual genealogical link with Islamic modernism was severed in favor of an Islamic atavism.

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The dominant feature of Muqbil’s brand of Salafism is a phobia of innovation (bid‘ah), which is aptly captured in the following injunction: “The most evil matter is novelty and every novelty is an innovation, and every innovation is an error, and every error leads to hellfire” (Haykel 2002: 29–30). If the seventh-century Islamic community of Arabia is Muqbil’s frame of reference, it is difficult to see which aspect of modern life that was not a novelty. Hence, rejectionism became the defining intellectual attitude and behavioral disposition of the adherents of this brand of Salafism. As Haykel explains: “Salafis state that all Muslims who disagree with them are deviants, practitioners and believers in innovations” (2002: 30). One significant exception to Muqbil’s blanket rejection of other views is his sympathy for the views of the founder of the fundamentalist movement in Saudi Arabia, Muhammad ‘Abd alWahhab, as noted by Burgat and Sbitli (2002: 135–136). Both in light of his biographical itinerary and his doctrinal sympathy, it would seem reasonable to characterize Muqbil’s version of Salafism as a form of neoWahhabism. In contrast, Bonnefoy (2012) insists that Yemeni Salafism is not a derivative creed from Saudi Arabia’s doctrinal influence and material support, but an indigenized travelling transnational discursive formation. Accordingly, the three principles discussed above underwent a complete metamorphosis in Muqbil’s interpretive grid: First, the epistemological openness is discarded in favor of an epistemological fundamentalism and its corollary intellectual literalism. This is evident in the fervent reaffirmation of taql¯ıd and the idealization of all aspects of the Islamic way of life back in the seventh century. This is further reinforced by a complete elision of history between the seventh and the twenty-first century, since it is the source of the crisis affecting the Islamic community, and Western modernity is seen as a forbidden source of innovation. Regarding ¯ıjtih¯ ad, it is confined to an acquaintance with the Hadith as the sole basis of one’s ethical conduct. Second, the exclusive reliance on the early Islamic creed can be authentically performed only through the interpretive literalism that Muqbil advocates, and it must be accompanied by an extreme ritual orthopraxy in which the lifestyle of the Prophet and his early companions is mimicked scrupulously (see examples in Burgat and Sbitli 2002: 29–30). And third, the notion of consultation (sh¯ ur¯ a ) between government and people represents an innovation, as it entails democracy, which is neither mentioned in the Qur’an nor in the Hadith. Instead, consultation is the exclusive prerogative of a competent al-‘ulam¯ a’ (scholars of religion). The prevailing socio-political situation on mainland Yemen

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is structured by the mediation of institutional innovations (e.g., political parties), which has sustained the chronic polemical stridency that is articulated in the rejectionist discourse of Muqbil and his followers ever since. This is the form in which it manifested itself in Soqotra. The Salafis were the last to introduce their creed in Soqotra and did so as freelancers. They do not represent a formally constituted group, but merely formed a loose gathering of like-minded young high school graduates and urban-based Soqotrans. The common denominator is their attendance—for a relatively short period—at the school of Shaykh Muqbil, D¯ ar al-H . ad¯ıth. Noteworthy is that only those who are known to have attended Muqbil’ school are locally recognized as Salafis. This is illustrated by the head of a local charity organization who is a self-declared Salafist and displays all of the accouterments associated with such an identity—long beard and its sartorial accessories (see below)—is widely regarded as inauthentic, if not an impostor, precisely because he never attended that school. The local Salafis by virtue of their brief educational experience, and thus elementary mastery of Hadith, have constituted themselves into an embryonic self-appointed al-‘ulam¯ a’, merely, however, as sermonizers on the need for conformity of local norms with Islamic proprieties according to the al-da‘awah al-salafiyya (the call to the Salafi way). In the mid-2000s, there was a self-appointed leader who was the Imam of one mosque in Hadiboh. The designation of leader, however, is arbitrary in terms of formal status, as there is none, but appropriate in terms of exemplary behavior. As a high school instructor, he had the obligatory title of ust¯ adh (teacher) before his name, and the subject matter that he teaches Islamic studies (al-dir¯ as¯ at al-isl¯ amiyya) seems to have earned him the honorary title of “shaykh.” However, more self-distinguishing is his sartorial style: A long white robe held up by his hands, with long white underpants with the cuffs rolled up halfway up the calves, which seemed parodic by the Soqotran standard of simple shirt over a f¯ u.ta (male skirt) without any calves’ exhibitionism, turned out to be an imitation of the way the Prophet is said to have worn his clothes and is a Salafi virtue. In addition to this sartorial solidarity with the Prophet, there is the stern, almost angry, look with the eyes casting a reproaching gaze upon others, as if to warn them that their deviant ways are a sure invitation to hellfire on the Day of Judgment (yawm al-q¯ıy¯ ama). This brief portrait in sartorial symbolism and attitudinal rectitude is illustrative of the manner in which the Salafi creed was appropriated in Soqotra, namely as an extreme ritual

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orthopraxy: a personal behavioral regime based on religious injunctions to proper conduct and an attitude toward belief framed by the doctrinal avoidance of novelties. What this regime entailed was the adoption of an ethic of social quarantine, as is evident in the following litany of prohibitions recited to me by a Soqotran Salafi: non-use of TV and telephone; confinement of women in the home for reproductive function (a new pregnancy every two years), and familial duties; exclusion of girls from school beyond the primary level; zero tolerance for local cultural heritage that evokes alj¯ahiliyya; non-participation in politics; condescending rejection of al-Is.l¯ah. and al-Tabl¯ıgh as their creed constitute innovation that has no basis in the Qur’an or Hadith. Beyond a shared agreement on some aspects of women’s roles, all of the other injunctions seemed unlikely to find much sympathy among the current generation of Soqotrans, who remain avidly receptive to the novelties of modernity (i.e., TV, telephone, music, and clothes) if only they could afford them. In fact, the Salafis in Soqotra represent a narrowly based sub-cultural group of petty scholastics turned abstentionists from modernity, who are more preoccupied with identity construction and self-assertion than winning adherents, and whose practice, however, falls short of their stated ideal. Moreover, that ideal—i.e., the strict regimentation of behavior—is minimally appealing to a generation of Soqotrans longing to be free of the involuntary asceticism imposed by the limited economic opportunities on the island.

4.4

Communal Ramifications: Ethical Quandaries

For many Soqotrans, in the immediate aftermath of Yemen’s 1994 civil war, which heralded the period of al-infit¯ ah. (“opening”), the display of an orthodox Islamic demeanor, or of a willingness to acquire it, was a source of personal security, cultural mobility, and social identity. Indeed, conformity to Islam was, after all, a constitutional requirement for these belated citizens of the recently unified nation-state. In effect, the adherents of alTabl¯ıgh and al-Is.l¯ah., in spite of their divergent creedal allegiances, were contributing to a state-acquiesced revival of an Islamic and Arab sensibility, and to the social and spiritual reform of the islanders. This process led to a transition in the practice of Islam: from a narrowly practiced, if not largely neglected, tradition under the Sultanate, by way of a strategically tolerated practice under the socialist regime, and since then to a

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situation in which Islam provides the normative underpinnings of Soqotrans’ daily lives. While the socio-religious projects undertaken by the three groups discussed above partly contributed to establishing the spiritual sovereignty of Islam, they have not been successful in imposing the hegemony of their particular creedal parochialism. However, given the still evolving political and thus religious context in Soqotra, it might be useful to reiterate the main objectives of each briefly as they remain in contention for the hearts and minds of Soqotrans: • Al-Tabl¯ıgh is concerned to spread knowledge of Islam, among the rural population primarily in the form of a ritual orthopraxy as a behavioral anchor, and a set of rudimentary precepts as spiritual guide that would prevent the temptation to revert to the superstitious practices of the past and, more as a coincidental effect, to provide a source of spiritual security against the anxieties produced by the changing socio-economic context. • Al-Is.l¯ ah. seeks to foment a hegemonic and politically driven Islamic sensibility that could be redeployed as the means of institutionalizing a traditional religious community, in which communal power is exercised by religion-using political actors as authority figures. In such a context, political Islam serves as a discursive alibi for political dissent through the prioritization of a Muslim identity that affirms ‘aq¯ıda (creed), which takes precedence over a national identity based on jinsiyya (nationality). • The Salafis advocate the view of Islam as a form of ascetic negation of the cultural present, and urge a monastic-like social withdrawal, until presumably the arrival of a “renewer” (mujaddid) of the faith. The end result of the separate pursuit of these projects has collectively contributed to the moralization of the public sphere and thus to the permeation of Islam as a pervasive socio-cultural determinant of Soqotrans’ communal life. However, the practice of Islam that prevails in Soqotra is characterized as follows: (a) It is informed by a pragmatic spirit and not a doctrinal fervor, and is thus free of any denominationalism, since the majority of Soqotrans insist on the singularity of Islam and do not regard themselves as belonging to any particular group; and (b) it is animated by an existential praxis, according to which the practice of religion is anchored in the demands of daily life and in which the creed

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and its rituals provide a social structuring mechanism and a convenient otherworldly rationale to palliate the anxieties of Soqotrans’ livelihoodmaking exacerbated by the cash exigencies of a modern economy and the institutional inadequacies of local governance driving the communal transition. 4.4.1

Divergent Ethical Commitments: Rural vs. Urban

The appropriation of this singular Islam and its existential praxis had different ramifications in the hinterland than in the urbanizing areas. In the former, it generated ethical incentives, while in the latter it induced ethical dilemmas that are briefly illustrated below. In the case of the hinterland, the appropriation of Islam has had a modernizing influence, where it provided a crucial socio-spiritual alternative to a rural life previously dominated by superstition, and a redemptive identity as a Muslim to mitigate the cultural derision once associated with being a resident of the hinterland as a “Bedouin” (see Vol. 1: Chapter 4). Moreover, it engendered constructive effects, as in the following examples: (i) It has encouraged micro-practices of self-emancipation, as in the case of some adult illiterate pastoralists who learned parts of the Qur’an through assiduously listening to religious broadcasts on their short-wave radio, in order to be able to lead prayer sessions in their villages, or even to deliver the Friday sermon based on a Qur’anic story that was heard over the radio; (ii) it created a symbiosis between performance of religious rituals such as attending Friday prayers at the mosque and identity construction, as such an act affirmed and sustained the irreproachability of one’s Muslim demeanor in the eyes of fellow villagers; and (iii) it provided the main occasion for communal bonding as the mosque is the only site for the social gathering of people from different villages—especially during Friday prayers—in rural areas. It is significant to note that mosques outnumber schools and clinics, and that most of them were built with diasporic in-kind contributions and communal labor. Islam’s influence in Soqotra, however, was not entirely salutary, as it led to the problematization of Soqotrans’ relationship to their socio-cultural traditions: (a) It induced the reconsideration of their attachment to their mother tongue among other cultural practices; (b) it promoted the adoption of Islamic proprieties as the sole frame of reference through which to evaluate the social standing, if not the cultural fitness, of fellow islanders (e.g., whether or not they perform regularly their prayer rituals); and (c)

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it consecrated the use of sartorial criterion (e.g., the full body veil) as the primary barometer of Soqotran women’s moral worth. This rather extreme form of ritual orthopraxy is the only aspect on which all Soqotran males agree, which is complemented by a less rigorous observance of gender segregation. Noteworthily, both practices were introduced in the post-1990s. Indeed, women’s vestmental protocol has occasioned the facile use by Western visitors of the epithet “fundamentalist” to characterize the nature of Islam on the island. However, what the full body veil symbolizes is the unchecked masculine hegemony, which is a pandemic social condition in all societies, and that happens to take this sartorial form in Muslim societies, and thus is not a sufficient criterion of fundamentalism. It is, instead, an index of male-imposed social conservatism. In the urbanizing spaces, located mostly on the northern coast, and more specifically in Hadiboh the main urban center of the island, where the institutional web of modernity is at its densest, the ethical dilemmas are most pronounced. Hadiboh is not only the main center from which cultural, political, religious, and other influences radiate to the rest of the island, it is also the principal site toward which the consequences of those influences are refracted back and have their culminating impacts. It is precisely in this interstitial space that the ethical dilemmas are being generated. At issue here is the ramification of the dysfunctional government-led institutional modernization of the island in contrast to the relative success of the non-government-led spiritual reform of the islanders. One ramification is the chronic floundering of the local educational system at all levels and the tragic parody of the act of teaching and learning that takes place in the schools. Indeed, there is a consensus that those who received an eighth-grade education under the socialist administration were better educated than those who graduate from high school today. The ethical dilemma that this raises for the students in particular but for the new generation more generally is the choice between the “ethic of self-improvement” for the modern world and the “ethic of self-preparation” for the Day of Judgment. This set of religion-based ethical choices is deeply embedded in Islam’s repertoire of ethical injunctions and is emblematized in two contrasting, indeed contradictory, injunctions expressed by two notables in Islamic history: The first is by the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali Ibn Abi Talib and the fourth Khalif of the Islamic polity (CE 656–661), who declared: “Work for your worldly life as if you will live forever, but work for

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your afterlife as if you will die tomorrow.” In contrast, Abu Hamid alGhazali writing in the twelfth century in a work entitled “Letter to a Disciple” revised Abi Talib’s balanced injunction to prioritize the afterlife instead: “Work for your terrestrial life in proportion to your location in it, and work for your afterlife in proportion to your eternity in it” (Al-Ghazali 2005). What seems to have happened, thus far, in Soqotra is that the religious non-state actors have succeeded in convincing Soqotrans why the “ethic of self-preparation” for the afterlife should be given priority, while the government has failed to justify why the “ethic of selfimprovement” in the present life is worth the effort. This divided ethical commitment to the present or the afterlife risks undermining Soqotrans’ pragmatic disposition toward their practice of religion. However, the danger is not the emergence of a radical religious ideology, but the instrumentalization of Islam into a dissuasive discourse toward the ethic of self-improvement, partly due to the permanency of the failure of local educational institutions. This could lead to the local hegemony of a fundamentalist epistemology manifested through the gradual desiccation of the imagination and cognitive capacity resulting from inadequate government-provided secular education. This would leave Islam as the only communal currency of intellectual intercourse with unpredictable, but potentially destabilizing, communal consequences. This ethical quandary is part of an internal communal struggle between opposing conceptualizations of Soqotra’s present and future, which is animated by a shared resentment toward the mainland state. Moreover, this quandary is manifested in the divergent political ethos of the adherents of two of the main political parties: GPC and al-Is.l¯ah.. Local supporters of the GPC have resigned themselves to an unprincipled, yet anxious, accommodation to the ideological hegemony of the ruling party. As they have participated in the local replication of the imported political culture of patronage and thus dedicated themselves to maximizing their individual material satisfaction at the expense of the community (see Vol. 1: Chapter 8). The adherents of al-Is.l¯ah. claim a higher moral ground and thus seem committed to a religion-circumscribed ideology of governance that seems to prioritize the spiritual welfare of the community. This is coupled with an ethically-grounded opposition to state power and a condescending contempt for its local servants who are seen as betraying their fellow islanders’ trust by treasonably neglecting their responsibility for the social and moral well-being of the community. However, if the recent regional history of political Islam in power is any guide, this moral

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posturing may be a convenient opposition-induced disposition, which might be abandoned once in power in favor of imposing Islam as a socio-organizational totality through a kind of “divine sovereignty” as the regulative ideal of the island’s communal life. These were the communal ramifications of the political mediation of Soqotrans’ practice of Islam when the Arab Spring took place in February 2011 and scrambled the political and religious status quo. While the Arab Spring led to the fulfillment of one of Soqotrans’ long-sought aspiration, namely the designation of the island as a governorate, it also opened up the possibility of a return to patrimonial politics of the Sultanate era when shari’a served as the constitution of the micro-state. Indeed, given the political rise of the second son of the last Sultan based on a significant following especially among the rural population, his leadership of tribal shaykhs is amenable to such politics (as was discussed in Vol. 1: Chapter 8). This fact becomes crucial under the UAE’s humanitarian protectorate established in Soqotra in 2015 and still in place in 2020. The UAE is averse to a republican form of government and could conveniently invoke Islam as its political mobilization strategy. Hence the potential for an externally orchestrated conversion of Soqotrans’ apolitical and denomination-less Islamic orientation into the contrived mobilizing rationale in support of a Sultanate regime as a political proxy of a foreign state. Soqotra is on the threshold of another phase in the local practice of Islam. However, only the future will reveal by which political actors, how, and to what communal end its practice will be mediated.

Notes 1. H . imyar was one of South Arabia’s ancient civilizations, which unified South Arabia for the first time by incorporating the kingdoms of Saba and Hadhramawt between the end of the third century and beginning of the fourth century. This led to a transition from polytheism to monotheism, first under the endogenous creed of “Himyarite Rahmanism,” as Beeston (1984: 268) termed it, and later with Judaistic overtones. Subsequently, the Christianity of the Abyssinians (Ethiopians) took over in 525, which was displaced by the Zoroastrianism of the Persians in 570 and the latter taken over by the Islam of the Arabs starting in 628 (see Gadja 2002; Bowersock 2013). 2. Refers to an Islamic sect that originated in late seventh century in Basra (Iraq) advocating the reestablishment of the imagined original constitution of the Islamic state before it was perverted by the Umayyad dynasty

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(661–750) and its aftermath. See Lewicki (1978) for an overview of this sect in the Muslim world. This civil strife between Christians and Muslims occasioned a poetic epistle written by a Soqotran woman named Zahra Saqat.riyya calling upon the Imam of Oman to come to the rescue of Muslims. In response to this letter, Oman dispatched a fleet of 101 ships. However, the facticity of this event and the authenticity of the poem are doubted by Serjeant (1992). See brief accounts and some background information in Serjeant (1992: 136–140) and Wilkinson (1987: 332, 344). In the text by Al-Salimi (1997 [1927]: 166–181) cited in Wilkinson, there is a long letter giving instructions to the two leaders (Muhammed bin Ashira and Said bin Shamlal) of the expedition to re-establish order in Soqotra. Stookey reports that “the province of Dhofar [was] conquered in 1279 in retaliation for the local ruler’s interference with international shipping. The area was left largely to its own devices, thereafter, under the rule of a collateral branch of the Rasulid dynasty” (1978: 117). While the terms s¯ ada and ashr¯ af tend to be used interchangeably, each carries a particular historical connotation: s¯ ada is used to designate the descendants of al-H af refers to the descendants of al. usayn, and al-ashr¯ H . asan. These two ancestors are the sons of the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and her husband Ali ibn Abi Talib, the martyred fourth Khaliph of Islam. I hasten to add, however, that these two distinguishing features are among a long list of differentiating characteristics over which there is no consensus. The main one is located behind the oldest mosque in Hadiboh’s old town, al-Jam¯a‘a, and it was dedicated to Shaykh al-Hashimi, who is probably the same Sayyid Hashim bin Ali, or his descendent mentioned by Roe in 1615, and whose tomb Serjeant identified in 1967. The other two are located at the western entrance of Hadiboh and are dedicated to Shaykh al-‘Itas (in Heybak), and Shaykh Dilly (in sha‘ab rahaba), but are now abandoned, as they no longer serve their former purposes. However, there might have been more, but a fundamentalist Wahabi sect from Saudi Arabia, which swept through Hadhramawt and Soqotra in the early nineteenth century and targeted for destruction of all signs of saint worship (see Wellsted 1835; Serjeant 1981; Mermier 1997). Elders do not remember the name of this ritual, perhaps due to selfimposed amnesia, since this custom is now cast away into the dustbin of the period of ignorance (al-j¯ahiliyya). However, it is similar to the ritual called “fi?óse .lђ-mE´ sE” in Soqotri (Naumkin et al. 2014): This is a prayer ritual, which involves some kind of sacrifice, a goat usually, or other offerings to God in order to bring about rain or some other livelihood enhancing blessings. It is still performed whenever there is a need for it, but is now referred to by its Arabic appellation .sal¯ at al-¯ıstisq¯ a’, and is done without any sacrificial offering.

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8. This is confirmed by Lapidus in a characterization of Islamic society that is still valid for contemporary societies: “Islamic society has evolved in un-Islamic ways. In fact, religious and political life developed distinct spheres of experience, with independent values, leaders, and organizations. From the middle of the tenth century effective control of the Arab-Muslim Empire had passed into the hands of generals, administrators, governors, and local provincial lords; the Caliphs had lost all effective political power. Governments in Islamic lands were fully differentiated political bodies without any intrinsic religious character, though they were officially loyal to Islam and committed to its defense” (1975: 364). 9. However, there is one exception, namely consulting with the mekoli. The purpose is no longer to exorcise jinns, but for the application of a branding iron (mis.h.…ro) to parts of the body as a cure to any and all ailments (e.g., chronic stomach ache or malaria). The persistent recourse to this form of cure is undoubtedly related to the relative dearth of access to modern medical practice in most places around the island. However, its use was not an exclusively rural phenomenon. Indeed, I have heard many testimonies on the curative powers of the mis.h.…ro from urbanized and modernized locals who were skeptical and reluctant to submit themselves to the practice and were surprised at the positive results.

CHAPTER 5

Economic Reconfiguration: Emergent Social Differentiation

This chapter undertakes a structural anatomy of the emerging modern sector of Soqotra’s economy and performs a social inventory of this economy’s participants. It highlights Soqotra’s historical predicament as an economy that was always subjected to an externally imposed political economy. It situates the emergence of the modern economy in the mid-1990s through government-led modernization initiatives. It traces its subsequent evolution into a complex imbrication of four economic domains that are partly differentiated by the nature of their economic activities and their participants: a municipal economy based on the mainland government’s interventions in the form of salaries for the local civil service, infrastructure investments and subsidies; a social economy that is based on social enterprises dedicated to the well-being of collectivities through community-based organizations and cooperatives; a service economy that is based on trading activities that cater to the islanders’ consumer needs and ecotourism that seeks to attract foreign visitors; and a diasporic economy driven by émigré remittances and a foreign government-led aid diplomacy that is emerging as the dominant driver of the island’s economy. The chapter concludes with a provisional assessment of the social and structural ramifications of this emergent modern economy.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume II, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45646-7_5

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5.1 Elusive Communal Economic Sovereignty: Dependency Dilemmas Soqotra’s current economic situation is one of chronic dependence on external sources not only for the islanders’ livelihoods, but also for the provisioning of their necessities, as the island emerges from a formerly dominant political economy of subsistence pastoralism (see Vol. 1: Chapters 5 and 6). Historically, Soqotrans’ livelihoods were always incorporated within externally imposed dominant political-economic regimes. From the period of the Sultanate to the present, Soqotra’s economy has experienced six political-economic regimes, which were described in Chapter 7 of the first volume. However, the fifth political regime’s (the Arab Spring) lifespan was too brief (two years) to have a defining economic impact. Accordingly, only five will be summarized as follows: (1) a tributary regime, under the Sultanate (1890s–1967), which depended on maximizing surplus extraction on all productive and trading activities of the population, and whose preferred economic agent was a tax-paying pastoralist confined to the hinterland herding livestock and producing butter-oil; (2) a redistributive regime, under the socialist administration (1967–1990), which encouraged, if not coerced, part of the population of Soqotran pastoralists into a population transfer toward coastal and into urban-based occupations either as fishers and administrative cadres; (3) a patronage regime under the unity government (1990–1996), which employed an extensive employment generation strategy in the public sector as a polity cooptation strategy; (4) a conservationist regime (1996–2015), which overlapped with the patronage regime and sought to promote the development of a production sector based on the sustainable use of endemic environmental resources and an ecotourism-based service economy in which Soqotran pastoralists and non-pastoralists were encouraged to participate as environmentallyconscious and economically-opportunistic individual actors; and (5) a philanthrocapitalist regime under the UAE’S humanitarian protectorate administration (from 2016 to the present) in which humanitarian assistance to Soqotrans serves as a pretext for profit-making ventures (e.g., fishing) and the pursuit of the communal polity’s socio-political mobilization on behalf of UAE long-term geopolitical objectives that could lead to Soqotra’s permanent political and economic annexation by a foreign state.

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The modern economic sector emerged under the patronage regime in the post-unification period of the mid-1990s, and since then Soqotra became a persistent economic policy dilemma-inducing challenge to the central government of mainland Yemen. The dilemma was, and remains, how to enable Soqotrans to achieve some degree of economic selfreliance, so that the island does not remain eternally a dependent ward of the state with its economy in perennial need of financial infusion from the national government’s coffers or in expectation of the episodic and whimsical generosity of international donors. The dilemma-inducing nature of Soqotra’s economy is not only for the government or for Soqotrans alone, but also for the social scientist trying to explain the island’s modern economy. This is because Soqotra has a transitional economy that is interstitially located between a rural sector dominated by a noncommercialized pastoralism and an urban sector devoid of any industry producing for a local or external market (with the exception of fishing), which was partly and ineffectively discouraged by a resource over-useprevention biodiversity conservation regime. Moreover, the dominant economic activity is the import and trade of goods for consumption and the cash that is used to purchase these goods is predominantly from external subsidies, such as government salary, diaspora remittances, donor funding through projects and, until 2014, tourism. Furthermore, Soqotra’s emergent modern economic sector presents an economic context in which it would be premature to invoke global economic forces as a determinant of local economic activities, as the “global” presence takes the form of haphazard foreign philanthropic ventures (e.g., basic needs and conservation projects). Also, the use of the metrics of conventional economics (e.g., GDP, growth rate, income per capita, etc.) would not elucidate the internal socio-structuring dynamics of the local economy. 5.1.1

A Transitional Economy: Economic Anthropology’s Inadequate Lexicon

Given the embryonic nature of Soqotra’s modern economy, it seemed at first sight an ideal milieu for the application of the updated conceptual repertoire of “economic anthropology.” Recourse to this sub-discipline, however, was unhelpful given its contemporary practitioners’ straddling two incompatible historical conjunctures: (a) enthrallment to the traditional conceptual repertoire of its early twentieth-century disciplinary godfathers: Malinowski’s “kula exchange,” Mauss’ “gift exchange,” and

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Polanyi’s “embedded vs. disembedded” economies; and (b) an opportunistic accommodation to the present historical conjuncture through recourse to an amalgam of neoliberal-inspired themes that blends the economic and the idiosyncratic interpretive sensibility of the anthropologist into sophistic interpretations of the domain of study. Indeed, economic anthropology seems uncertain about its object of study given the perception that its traditional research domains and the associated thematic repertoire have been overtaken by the supposed universal diffusion of neoliberalism (see Carrier 2005). Moreover, its contemporary relevance as a sub-discipline is undermined by the prevailing tendency to employ an ideal type analytical framework (e.g., the formalists vs. substantivists’ debate) that statically dichotomizes and anachronistically typologizes economies into theoretical effigies. These practices of economic anthropology are still in vogue, as I illustrate in a brief review of representative texts on economic anthropology. In spite of their authors’ claim to revitalize the moribund sub-discipline in order to emancipate it from its “primitivist niche” to confront the globalized world in understanding local economies, they betrayed an epistemic obsession with the inexorable local effects of globalization forces, and a misanthropic fixation with theory. Indeed, economic anthropologists see their primary task “as the moral and political one of revealing the inadequacies of neoclassical economics” and of its progeny neoliberal economics (Carrier 2007: 465). The first text is that of Chris Hann and Keith Hart (2011), which aspires to elucidate a “human economy” (Polanyi’s term) that eschews the “individualistic logic of utility maximization” of neoliberal economics. However, this task is pursued through the ethnocentric and provincial prism of West-stream anthropology: First, they invoke the “Immaculate Conception” of Western history, which places Greece as the foundational model of economy. As the authors explain: “The idea of economy started out more than 2,000 years ago as a Greek principle of rural household management” (2011: 174). This statement ignores the preceding ten thousand years of history since the Neolithic revolution: the discovery of agriculture, the sedentarization, and subsequently urbanization, of populations around the world, the rise of ruling classes and state formation, and the establishment of political and economic institutions (Scott 2017). Second, they betray a lamentable epistemic nationalism through a reflexive subservience to a “national container paradigm” by whimsically locating the foundation of a revitalized sub-discipline on “a critical

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anthropology that has its roots in the democratic revolutions and rationalist philosophy of the eighteenth century” (p. 10). This represents an attempt at erasing the fact that economic anthropology’s core conceptual repertoire is founded on the colonialism-enabled comparative analyses of the cultural practices within defunct social formations in the Global South. Indeed, one of the two authors (Hart) coined the widely used term “informal sector” of the economy while studying Ghanaian rural migrants in the early 1970s. Third, they insist on relying on an archaic toolkit as they “strongly favor retaining ethnographic methods,” which takes “world history seriously” (p. 13). However, this caveat about world history turned out to be disingenuous as it is never pursued in the book, and as its concluding sentence confesses: Economic anthropology’s “Western roots must be cross-fertilized with other intellectual traditions if it is to fulfill its global mission and contribute to a more inclusive future” (p. 174). The authors confess that until this cross-fertilization takes place, the application of West-stream economic anthropology to non-Western social formations is tantamount to an act of semiotic imperialism. By their own admission, economic anthropology has yet to be emancipated from its eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century milieu, which was the inaugural mold of Occidentalism and its ethnocentric fantasy about global modernity as an “immaculate Western conception.” The second text is by Stephen Gudeman (2001), who is described as the producer of “the most complete and influential American corpus” of economic anthropology (Carrier 2007: 466). He offers a model of “cultural economics” in which the economy is conceived as a “domain of value,” as an alternative to the neoclassical and Marxist models of the economy. It is a model-building exercise that is founded on a binary framing of economic systems: a community economy that is embedded within an endogenous local model of its particular modus operandi, versus a market economy that is embedded within a neoliberal globalization with its standardized universal mode of operation. The model seems not to take into consideration economies in transition, as it assumes that the community economy seeks to preserve its traditional boundaries of operation, and is therefore locked into an agonistic struggle with a global market economy that may be more imagined than real, given the plethora of mediating factors and actors at the local, national, and global levels. Consequently, it betrays a theory formation exercise that is quite insular as the alternative conceptual lexicon it generates seems to be inspired by a

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peasant-based agricultural economy, and thus cannot be applied to differently organized economies. However, to be fair to Gudeman, his central argument is that ultimately there is no universal travelling economic model armed with “axiomatic and prescriptive” tenets that can illuminate the jarring specificities of the world’s plethora of communal economies embedded within their “local models” composed of “disparate value spheres” and fashioned through “contingent and mixed constructions” (Gudeman 2005). Leaving aside the hopelessly Eurocentric recuperative project for economic anthropology advocated by Hann and Hart, and embracing Gudeman’s assertion that there is no travelling universal model of economy to be applied everywhere à la IMF and World Bank, I employ two of the analytical practices of the mesographic approach that enables a grounded understanding of the subject being investigated: (a) a structural anatomy of the actual components of the emergent local modern economic sector and (b) a social inventory of the actors/participants in this emerging sector. This structural anatomy maps out the configuration of the locally available “field of opportunities” in the modern economic sector and examines its articulation with local participants, mainland migrants and the role of diasporic actors who are seeking to take advantage of these opportunities. In carrying out this structural anatomy and social inventory, I heed Gudeman’s suggestion that anthropologists should not “arrogate to themselves a privileged right to model the economies of their subjects,” but should seek to understand and interpret local models (Gudeman 1986: 38). My aim, however, is not to construct a model of Soqotra’s emergent modern economic sector but to map the improvised arrangements structured around the participants’ complex range of motivations: from the minimalist objective of sustaining self and family back home (for mainlanders), to the maximalist aspiration of accumulating wealth to acquire the goods that display social mobility such as cars and houses (for Soqotrans). The end result is a provisional portrait of an ever changing reconfiguration of the urban social structure generated by the emergence of a still incipient class division among the local population.

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5.2 Nascent Modern Economy: Structural Anatomy and Social Inventory The year of 1996 was a watershed, as it marked the beginning of the accelerated modernization process of Soqotra’s economy. This process was launched by the mainland government’s intensification of its presence on the island through (a) the expansion of public sector employment, (b) the construction of social and transportation infrastructures throughout the island, and (c) the launching of the UN-sponsored conservation experiment through ecotourism as the leading sector of Soqotra’s modern economy. The platform for the diffusion of this three-prong economic modernization process was Hadiboh, Soqotra’s main urban center. It was always the island’s only market place, as the main physical location where goods are imported and traded. The ever expanding array of consumer goods available at this market place is spawning the consumeristic desires of the island’s population, and thus is molding the economic motivation and social behavior of people in the rural, coastal, and urban areas. Moreover, it is a context animated by the imperative to integrate the cash economy, and where monetary considerations increasingly mediate social interaction. Consequently, this is heralding the generalized replacement of affective communal relations by pecuniary-driven individualized transactions. Hadiboh is the current epicenter of the modern economic sector, which constitutes a derivative market place where the locally traded goods are produced elsewhere. As such, it is a truncated economic sector as there is only the circulation of goods and their consumption, but not their production. In spite of this marketplace unsophisticated appearance, it encompasses a complex series of partially overlapping economic domains that contain different sets of participants who are embedded in partially differentiated procurement networks, provisioning relationships, “spheres of circulations,” and “chains of transactions” between the island, the mainland, and the Gulf diaspora. Accordingly, the discussion of this emerging modern economy is divided into four “economies”: (1) The municipal economy is urban-based and is dominated by government-funded participants and activities; (2) the social economy is characterized by the use of social enterprises (e.g., CBOs and cooperatives) whose activities benefit collectivities (e.g., extended families and villages); (3) the service economy is driven by profit-making activities undertaken by a plethora of actors engaged in servicing the need of their particular clienteles; and

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(4) the diasporic economy is constituted by local actors who have familial links to the Gulf diaspora and external state actors with historical affiliations to Soqotra and are exercising a centrifugal influence in the island’s sociocultural and political-economic evolution. The discussion of each domain highlights the relevant aspects that are contingently associated with each one, which include the following dimensions: (a) the divergent motivations of the participants in their various roles; (b) the economic significance in terms of the financial value and the number of people affected; (c) the structural ramifications in terms of socio-economic differentiation; and (d) the transformational ramifications on the islanders’ social mobility and economic emancipation. These economic domains are caught up in an opposing field of forces characterized by the diminishing pull effects of the island-mainland axis and the increasing pull effects along the island-diaspora axis. These divergent pull effects are the result of the implosion of the Yemeni state in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and the opportunistic geopolitics of regional states. As was shown in Chapters 7 and 8 of the first volume, events on the mainland engendered Soqotrans’ political awakening, which loosen their socio-political bonds of loyalty to the Yemeni state due to the latter’s chronic neglect of the communal polity’s basic needs. This situation engendered a more receptive attitude toward politically solicitous and territorially covetous regional powers. Moreover, given the increasing probability that Yemen may never regain the status of a unitary state, regional powers are pursuing strategies that could engender (a) the tactical erosion of Soqotra’s multiple linkages (historical, political, and economic) to the Yemeni mainland, and (b) the virtual, if not actual, territorial de-linking from the mainland given its geographical orphanage as an island-dwelling communal polity. In this context, the diasporic economy is the domain where these objectives are being pursued, and which portends the diversion of Soqotra’s economic relations away from the mainland and toward the diaspora. This would lead to the mutation of the diasporic economy from a sectoral activity to the encompassing matrix for all other sectors. Figure 5.1 maps out the four sectors, their components and the opposing forces shaping the modern economy’s evolution. 5.2.1

Municipal Economy: Governmental Sector

Ever since the socialist period, the public sector was the engine of the island’s economy and remains its central pillar. In effect, Soqotra’s modern economic sector, and indirectly the rural economic sector, is

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Fig. 5.1 Modern economic domains

kept afloat through governmental budgetary allocations and other types of development activities and their associated expenditures. Indeed, the government’s preponderant political and economic roles on the island cannot be replaced by the private sector or by international donors, given their comparatively insignificant contributions to the local economy. Therefore, relying on state institutions is an unavoidable experience for all Soqotrans. The relative importance of the public sector to the local economy is discussed in terms of the main three domains of governmental interventions: (i) the wage bill associated with the staff of its administrative apparatus; (ii) the infrastructural expansion projects; and (iii) the subsidies of essential items and social services—however inadequate these services are judged by the local population. 5.2.1.1 Social-Physical Infrastructure: Spreading “Civilization” First, the bureaucratic apparatus is the most pervasive in terms of the number of people directly as well as indirectly affected, and this has islandwide economic ripple effects. This presence is manifest through over sixty-two governmental offices representing the branches of mainland

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ministries in both the Hadiboh and Qalansiyah districts, which constitute the island’s public administration system. The staff contingent of this system includes approximately 1531 civil service employees including police personnel, but excluding the army. The monthly wage bill is estimated at half a million dollars, which does not include other types of administrative expenditures.1 This salaried class represents nearly 3% of the population and is the legacy of the policy of state-sponsored growth through post-creation that started in the early 1970s under the socialist administration and was accelerated in the mid-1990s. For example, in 1971 the government budget for the island was 25,000 Yemeni Dinars, out of which 23,000 was for the salaries of 116 administrative staff and soldiers (Zabal 1971: 99). This public sector employment policy led to the constitution of a permanent class of salaried clerks whose purchasing power, however relatively limited, provides the stable underpinning of the consumer economy of the private sector. The salaries made available through government jobs have initially enabled and subsequently sustained the participation of a significant proportion of the urban population in consumption activities beyond the basic food items to nonessential ones (e.g., q¯at consumption, the regular visit to the restaurants by the Soqotran male head of household as a relief from the monotony of the household diet). The economic significance of the public administration sector may not be the most important in terms of the number of people involved and financial value; it is, however, the only source of financial resources that is not susceptible to seasonal vagaries, as are most of the other economic activities on the island. Accordingly, a government job remains the most sought after occupation offering a relatively high average monthly salary of $325, primarily because it signifies a lifetime of salarial security, since firing for poor performance or chronic absenteeism is rare; and neither are government staff prevented from holding second jobs outside the public sector. The second component is the government’s project portfolio, which includes the physical infrastructure of the public sector in the form of government buildings. However, many of these buildings, especially in the hinterland, are seen as “white camels” that benefitted primarily the contractors. For example, the over-size police stations in the hinterland for a relatively small staffing contingent; the many health clinics without staff and equipment that served as goats’ shed; and the partially used school buildings. Also, the government’s portfolio involved large-scale infrastructure projects with the most transformative ramifications for the

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island for better or worse. In economic terms, such projects constitute, what could be called, a form of national direct investment, as an alternative to the largely absent foreign direct investment thus far. As the foreign involvement is limited to a repertoire of short-term micro-projects with relatively paltry sums. The most significant of these government infrastructural projects are the Soqotra airport, completed in 2002, the planned new seaport that was supposed to have been built next to the northern coastal village of Ghubba, and the network of asphalted roads that were under construction until 2012 (see Fig. 5.2). The latter project illustrates the level of state investment in Soqotra, as cost figures are available. The cost per kilometer, depending on degree of difficulty, ranged from $135,000 to $270,000. Out of the planned 430 km that were to be constructed, it is not clear how many miles were actually completed, as the Arab Spring-induced resignation of the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh in November 2011 led to the closure of the road construction company without leaving behind maintenance equipment (see Hawa and Abdulhalim 2013: 11–15). Soqotrans joked that “Saleh took the roads with him.” Based on the above price range per kilometer, the total sum for the completed roads network ranged from $58,050,000 million to $116,100,000 million. In fact, Soqotra has “the highest expenditure per capita road expenditure in the country” (Scholte et al. 2011: 405). Most

Fig. 5.2 Asphalted roads network

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of that money, however, was not spent in Soqotra. Besides the excessive profit of the sub-contractor, it was used on imported materiel and equipment, and an imported staffing contingent, which, at its peak, was made up of two hundred mainlanders, nine expatriates (Pakistanis) as technical staff, and was complemented by some one hundred fifty Soqotrans as occasional laborers. In spite of the perception that the asphalted roads network around the island has caused environmental damages along its trajectory, it represents a local public good that has alleviated the previous difficulties of transporting peoples and goods around the island. Also, the roads have enabled a new source of livelihoods through the establishment of a new transportation sector, which links the capital Hadiboh with the rest of the island through a fleet of individually owned taxis. Nevertheless, the government investment in infrastructure reflected the historical fact that Soqotra’s initial purpose was as a tax farm under the Sultanate to its contemporary use as a graft farm, especially under the regime of the former President Ali Abdulah Saleh, whose kleptocratic ethos regulated the operational logic of state institutions (see Elie 2018a). At least, this was the widely shared view among locals, who saw infrastructure developments as mere opportunities for mainland government officials and their local partners “to eat the people’s money.” The third component of the municipal economy is the provision of public subsidies from the mainland government for essential items (e.g., cooking gas cylinders, petrol, and diesel), and municipal services from the local government (e.g., electricity, telephone, Internet connection, etc.) without which modern life would be impossible on the island. Another aspect of public services to the island is the air bridge between mainland and island through the national airline, which is the only means for island residents of getting in and out of the island throughout the year. Also, these flights are the only way of supplying the island with perishable consumer items (e.g., fresh vegetables, fruits, eggs, chicken, q¯at) and tourists, and the indispensable mainland workers. All other goods that are available on the island are transported by privately owned boats coming from the mainland, Oman, United Arab Emirates, and occasional ships from India. The following impacts of the above economic activities on the reconfiguration of the socio-structural and organizational aspects of communal life could be noted: The maintenance of the island’s administrative system has helped to consolidate a relatively new social stratum into a kind

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of “middle class,” which established a new tier in the amorphous mass that the socialist administration sought to create. Also, the public sector salaried jobs have indirectly engendered the demise of the pastoralist as Soqotra’s predominant economic agent. As these jobs represent a sought after respite from the disabling sense of financial insecurity and the gnawing uncertainties of the seasonal variability and economic contingencies that are chronic to the pastoralist livelihood. Indeed, it is the possibility of obtaining a government post that partly motivates Soqotran youth to complete their schooling; as such a job is emblematic of salarial security. Moreover, the government’s infrastructure projects, especially its asphalted roads network, have substantially facilitated the transport of goods and people as well as the spread of “civilization” throughout the island. However, they might generate unintended consequences such as new land use pattern as villagers abandon old settlements to agglomerate next to asphalted roads, and which might in turn induce secondary ecological effects due to the further weakening of commitment to the pastoral economy and the increasing disuse of its herd management practices. And the government public subsidies on essential items have ensured the availability and affordability of essential goods and services that render possible a life-style that approximates the rudiments of a modern existence. 5.2.2

Social Economy: Community-Based Sector

In Soqotra, the term community-based sector refers to that nebulous interstitial space, which is situated between two economic actors: (a) the government’s economic interventions aimed at infrastructure development, the financing of the public sector’s recurrent expenditures, and the sustaining of the economic livelihood of thousands of local civil servants and their families that was discussed above; and (b) the private sector exclusive prioritization of financial gains and whose mode of operation is circumscribed by familial ties and by regional affiliations and that is discussed in the next section. I label the interstitial space between these two sectors, the “social economy,” as it is the repository of economic activities undertaken by non-profit social enterprises that empower participants to become environmentally conscious economic agents (e.g., CBOs), or promote the economic use of resources to sustain communal livelihoods (e.g., fishing cooperatives). The community-based sector’ social economy is a space created by two main actors and their

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associated economic activities: (a) the UN-led and grant-funded development and environment projects that sought to establish the sustainable use of environmental resources as a new sector of the local economy; and (b) the initiative of local fishing cooperatives, partly regulated by government, to benefit from the exploitation of the aquatic resources of the island. As such, this sector is supposed to constitute a strategic domain in which local economic actors are assisted in the sustainable commercial exploitation of targeted environmental resources (e.g., endemic plants and fish stocks). The two main set of actors in this sector are the following: The trailblazer was the GEF-UNDP conservation and development experiment, which encompass a suite of projects that have systematically violated the objective they claim to pursue in Soqotra, namely “sustainable development” since these projects have exemplified the practice of ephemeral intervention that leaves little, if any, trace of their impact. The second is a collective set of actors constituted principally by fishing cooperatives, which represent all of the fishermen of the island. The relevance of these two actors is that they are supposed to catalyze the commercially sustainable use of local resources. Each of those two actors is discussed below in terms of their contribution to the local economy. 5.2.2.1 Eco-Farms: Commercializing Natural Resources The sustainable use of environmental resources as an economic sector was inaugurated in 1997 with the launching of the UN conservation experiment in Soqotra with the project entitled “Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity of Soqotra Archipelago,” which was followed by four more related projects. This experiment sought to operationalize a vision for the sustainable conservation and development of the island to be pursued through multiple objectives that will be addressed in Chapters 6 and 7. In this section, however, the focus is on the sustainable commercial exploitation of the previously subsistence production of locally endemic environmental resources and other natural resources through communityrun farms. The establishment of these eco-farms was supposed to expand economic participation of Soqotra’s rural residents through catalyzing all sorts of trickle-down economic and environmental benefits throughout the rural domain. However, the attempt to revive the commercial cultivation of resins-producing plants and trees for export for which Soqotra was famous from the fourth century BCE to the nineteenth century CE

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turned out to be a Sisyphean undertaking. Soqotrans’ capacity to cultivate these endemic resources on a viable commercial scale seems to have been lost, as was attested by a British Assistant Adviser on agricultural development following his 1966 mission to Soqotra: There is not, in fact, such a person as an arable farmer, in the sense of one who deliberately set out to grow more than he can eat so as to exchange his surplus for other goods and services, in the whole of Socotra…. It is not a question of teaching bad farmers to farm better, but of establishing the possibility of farming as a way of life in the first place. (Brown 1966)

The same challenge presents itself to establishing sustainable rural livelihoods based on the cultivation of endemic species for their salable resin (e.g., aloes, frankincense, and Dragon’s Blood resin) and other local produce (e.g., finger millet, dates, vegetables). In spite of the UN experiment’s stated objective to create sustainable rural livelihoods through eco-farming activities, it neglected such a pursuit in favor of vegetable home gardens. Indeed, throughout the implementation period of the UN experiment, it was preoccupied with these home gardens as a bargaining ploy with the targeted local communities to induce them to accept the establishment of Protected Areas (see Chapter 7). Eventually, it was the German development agency, GIZ, which launched in 2011 the “Programme on the Sustainable Use of Biodiversity” (GIZ 2011). Its aim was to reverse the long-term degradation of the rural population’s livelihood base through a series of pilot activities that would demonstrate that the rural sector’s economic development could be achieved through the sustainable use of the island’s biodiversity. The GIZ programme’s ultimate objective is “the transformative commercialization of a subsistence livelihood.” This objective is being pursued in two areas: the revival of finger millet farming, and the sustainable farming and conservation of aloe plants. In the case of millet farming, the GIZ claimed that it had supported “the revival of 119 millet fields in 25 villages benefiting more than 300 families.” In the case of aloe plants, training was provided on leaf harvesting and juice and gel extraction. The outstanding challenge to the marketable exploitation of these biological resources is to convert mostly occasional, if not accidental, gardeners into dedicated farmers of the island’s plant resources. This challenge was successfully met in the bee-keeping project that was launched by an international NGO in

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2004 and has since been sustained by the independent initiative of Soqotran pastoralists (see Vol. 1: Chapter 6). Can this success be replicated in the commercial production of endemic plants remains to be seen? The GIZ project, however, is ongoing and its sustainable impact has yet to be assessed (Siebeck and Saleem 2014). Ultimately, however, the economic potential of agriculture remains limited given that less than 1.5% of the island’s total surface is arable land, which is equivalent to only 380 km2 . Today, agriculture is largely in the form of vegetable gardening, which remains a predominantly, if not exclusively, women activity, although men participate in selling the harvest. The UN-sponsored eco-farming initiatives, thus far, have failed to demonstrate how local environmental resources could be commercialized, and to generate economic benefits for the local population from the sustainable use of biodiversity. Instead, these initiatives engendered the lasting perception that the life situation of Soqotrans will change not through the UN’s local pursuit of sustainable resource use, but by becoming employees of its projects. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of its inauguration, the UN conservation experiment was saddled with the perception that the usefulness of its local presence was primarily as an employment generation agency and not for the conservation and development of the island’s environmental resources. In effect, the sustainable development promised to Soqotrans based on the use of their natural resources was substituted by salarial dependency on the UN projects’ financial resources. Ultimately, its real achievement was as a statusenhancer, if not life-transforming, employer for its local staff. Indeed, the most remarkable impact of the UN-funded and implemented conservation projects was to have taken a group of people, most of whom with few exceptions had limited educational achievements, totally unaware of environmental issues, earning a living as subsistence fishermen, agropastoralists or primary school teachers, and to have transformed some of them into English-speaking “barefoot scientists,” as proto-professional occupants of a number of previously non-existent occupations on the island. For example, environmental awareness team leader, herbarium assistant, environmental guide, marine laboratory assistant, among others. Moreover, these projects provided them with a salary that catapulted them into a “middle class” status by removing them from their previous modest existence, and enabling them to acquire the markers of social mobility (houses and cars).

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5.2.2.2 Fishing Cooperatives: Translocal Endeavor The second actor and the most important thus far in the local economy are the fishermen cooperatives. After the collapse of the state-guaranteed purchasing system under the socialist administration, these cooperatives have gone through a remarkable process of organizational evolution along the following trajectory: (a) from kinship-based fishing teams dealing individually and haphazardly with buyers from the mainland; (b) by way of village-based associations mired in internal problems based on mutual suspicion between clan-based groups that were more like social clubs as they had more non-fishermen members as parasitic economic partners; and (c) presently to region-wide cooperatives with established mode of operation, with management and offices, and composed exclusively of active fishermen. This organizational structure is informed by the ethic of mutuality, as fishing is an integrated village-wide activity that encompasses the collectivity of households within a regime of allocated tasks (catching and selling) and a modality of resource sharing (distributing proceeds of the sale) adopted democratically by members of the cooperatives. While this evolution in organizational maturity was partly mandated by government laws, it also reflected Soqotrans’ gradual realization that cooperation among them was the only way to reclaim their usufructuary rights over the island’s natural resources that were being appropriated by outsiders. The number of cooperatives has grown from five in 2009 to 25 in 2013. However, Soqotrans still have a long way to go in fully asserting those rights, as their role in the fishing sector is entirely as fishers. The buying, processing, shipping, and international distribution are either done or controlled by outsiders. Nevertheless, fishing has gone from an occasional subsistence activity practiced by a few under the condescending gaze of their pastoralists neighbors, to the principal occupation of many Soqotrans from all over the island, and the supplemental activity to many others who once felt culturally or socially obliged to avoid it (e.g., urban professionals). The most important fishing grounds of the island in terms of catch are: Qalansiyah in the west where there is a long tradition of commercial-scale fishing since the Sultanate period, Irisel in the east, N¯oged in the south, and Hadiboh in the north. In spite of the fishing sector’s potential as a generator of employment for Soqotrans, it remains underdeveloped as illustrated in the official production figures for 2011 that were collected from the 25 fishers’ cooperatives—representing 3589 fishermen working on 1041 fiberglass boats—to the Soqotra branch of the Ministry of Fish Wealth. Prior to

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listing the figures, which are provided for present illustrative and future comparative purposes, a caveat is apropos: Caution is advised regarding the official figures on the annual catch. As the organizational streamlining of the fishing sector was partly motivated by the government’s desire to centralize control over the independent activities of fishermen in order to maximize tax collection. Hence, under-reporting was probably used as a defensive strategy against perceived external interference. Also, other aspects of the trade may not be included, such as the export of dried shark meat and their fins. With these caveats in mind, the official figures for the total catch were 430,473 kilograms (kgs), which generated 110,220,816 million Yemeni Rials (YR). In dollar terms, the total income generated was less than half a million dollars ($466,143), which amounts to less than $130 per fishermen for the entire fishing season of eight months (October to May), and the average per kilogram paid to Soqotran fishers was $2.17 cents. Worthy of note, is that the total catch for 2003 was double that of 2011 at 1,048,455 kgs, which generated an income of nearly a million dollars. Besides the annual fluctuation in total catch, the consistent factor is the low price paid to Soqotran fishers, which is according to 2013 figures about a third of the price paid on the mainland. For example, Soqotran fishermen were paid 250 YR for a kg of tuna while it was sold for 850 YR, and they received 450 to 500 YR for a kg of kingfish which is sold for 2000 YR. Soqotra’s main attraction is a buyers’ market, in which both the quantity of the catch and the price paid can be dictated almost at will by buyers, given the absence of bargaining power by the locals, and their incapacity to participate at a higher level in the trade (e.g., local processing or direct transport and sale to the mainland). For buyers, it is the availability of captive sellers that offsets the inconveniences and the risks associated with the seasonality of the fish trade in Soqotra. In effect, activities in Soqotra’s fishing sector are determined by the commercial priorities of mainland and international buyers and not by the islanders’ income needs, or the development of the sector’s full economic potential. The underdevelopment of Soqotra’s fishing industry is partly due to an absence of a strategy on how it can be made more economically remunerative for Soqotran fishers. Also, the government’s lack of services to the local fishing industry and most importantly its inability to prevent foreign trawlers from fishing in Soqotra’s waters correlate with the problem of lower catch by local fishermen. Another significant contributing factor to the sector’s underdevelopment is the legacy of the UN environmental conservation practices, which failed to establish a linkage between

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marine research, regulatory policy, and enforcement activities. Indeed, the UN conservation ethos encouraged the minimization of aquatic resource exploitation through a kind of minimalist intervention (e.g., occasional awareness campaign, and limited distribution of environment-friendly lobster traps) that effectively dissuaded governmental assistance to the fishing sector. This was tantamount to a deliberate strategy of benign economic neglect. The latter point is the opinion of the head of the Union of Fishers’ Cooperatives conveyed to me during an interview in 2013 as a reason for the lack of government assistance. Regardless of the veracity of this claim, this is the endemic perception among local fishers of the impact of the UN-sponsored resource conservation policy. As a result, one of a few local resources that has the potential to provide a sustainable livelihood to a significant number of Soqotrans was, and still is, kept in an undeveloped state partly because of the state’s inadequacy of means compounded by the relative neglect induced by externally imposed eco-conservationist priorities that failed to harmonize with Soqotrans’ economic interest. In spite of the dissuasive effects of the UN conservation campaign, there occurred frequent over-fishing. This was due to (a) lack of a strategy and funding for the enforcement of conservation regulations around the island and (b) the availability of loans to the fishing sector from the recently opened branch of CAC Bank. The combination of policy neglect, loan availability, enforcement failure, monetization imperative, and the illegal activities of foreign trawlers caused not only the fluctuation of the total catch but also the over-exploitation of aquatic resources. One example is the non-availability of sea cucumbers, a prized export species, from the Qalansiyah coast by 2013, according to the head of the Union of Fishers’ Cooperatives. Whether the disappearance of sea cucumbers was a seasonal or permanent event should be of crucial empirical import to conservationists. More importantly, it should prompt a rethink of their ineffective conservation strategy for aquatic resources, which prioritizes their conservation for research purposes, and neglect their value as a livelihood resource. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring in Soqotra, the cooperatives’ union, in a gesture of rebellion, stopped giving catch figures to the government and to pay taxes. Also, it stopped sharing catch data, as the primary purpose was to calculate the tax amount owed to the government and to allocate union fees. With the imposition of a UAE protectorate in Soqotra, which effectively began in 2016, the fishing sector became the target of “philanthropic” interventions: Boats, engines, and fishing

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equipment were donated; training was provided; marinas for the boats and resting areas for the fishermen were built; and the purchase of the catch was guaranteed. Furthermore, Soqotra’s only fish factory, which was established by a mainlander in the early 2000s in Hadiboh and subsequently closed in 2009, was reopened in 2017 under the management of an “Emirati philanthropist” named Mahdi Al Hassani. All of the fish catch on the island are processed in the local factory and exported to the UAE as of April 2017. The “philanthropreneur,” turned fisheries monopolist, boasted of having made in one month a profit of 100,000 Emirati Dirham (approx. $30,000), which suggests a huge difference between buying and selling price and over-fishing (see Dajani 2018). Indeed, the problem of over-fishing led to a decree from the Ministry of Fish Wealth in February 2019 that called for the suspension of the export of three types of fish (all small fishes, goatfish, and whitefish) “Due to the scarcity of fish in the local market and rising prices.” These are the kinds of fish that are consumed daily by Soqotrans. This epitomizes the transactional nature of the UAE’s economic interventions: Economic exploitation is camouflaged by social philanthropy. In spite of these activities, the Yemen’s Ministry of Water & Environment on behalf of the EPA branch in Soqotra submitted in the same month its 2019 version of the annual report on the “State of Conservation in Soqotra” to the UNESCO’s World Heritage Center, which incredibly declared that: “The State Party reiterates that fishing remains seasonal and traditional, and that fishing activities have decreased due to public sector employment resulting in reduced pressure on the marine environment. The reopened fish factory has not led to an increase in fishing but continues to enhance local livelihoods.” In sum, the fishing sector encompasses a vital rural-coastal-urbanregional socioeconomic and geographic nexus. As such it will remain the pillar of the local economy as it constitutes 80% of local employment. More importantly, it provides the most accessible source of employment for the local population and will sustain the interest of external economic actors (mainland and regional) for the foreseeable future. 5.2.3

Service Economy: Private Sector

This section will highlight the two major pillars of the service economy that emerged in the aftermath of the government’s opening of private sector-led economic activities in Soqotra. The first is the retail trade sector that has a long genealogy on the island, which is briefly highlighted

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below. The second is of more recent vintage, namely ecotourism that sought to monetize access to environmental assets through the establishment of eco-campsites in Protected Areas and pristine beaches that would generate income for locals through fee-paying ecotourists. Both are discussed below in terms of their economic actors, their different economic objectives, and their contributions to the local economy. 5.2.3.1 Retail Trade: Shopkeepers’ Emporium Historically, Hadiboh was the main location of “private sector” activities. As it always served as the exchange platform between the hinterland and the coast, and as a relay station between Soqotra and the outside world. During the Sultanate, the activation of this exchange platform and relay station was performed by a few individuals who were the main, if not sole, micro-scale middlemen between Soqotran goods and external markets. They operated from stores within their residences in Hadiboh and were from the following places: Hadhramawt, Aden, Oman, Emirates, and a handful of Soqotrans from Q¯ad.ub and Di Hamd.. Arab expatriates were, and still are, the majority of the island’s economic intermediaries. Together they made up the merchant class or the “business community” in Hadiboh. They collected the local goods from the pastoralists and coastal residents and sold them abroad and purchased in return the goods they requested. Locally, these transactions were mediated by a barter system as money was not used by, indeed was not available to, rural dwellers. The emergence of a modernizing private sector started after the end of the civil war of 1994, which was followed by the arrival of economic migrants from the mainland and the subsequent changes in policy that led to the complete removal of the economic constraints on profit-based exchanges imposed by the socialist administration (see Vol. 1: Chapter 7). During the latter period the role of private merchants was strictly regulated, which atrophied the development of trading activities by independent individuals as the government took over the local supply of goods. This was partly out fear of creating a capitalist class of traders and a petty bourgeois class of consumers, which were anathema to the socialist regime. These constraining factors that were imposed by the socialist administration were swept aside as of 1996, which heralded the opening-up of Hadiboh to an influx of mainland civilians as economic migrants who would cater to the consumption needs of the new urban population of income earners and who would provide the skills and services required

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for the construction boom launched by the government. This ultimately led to the arrival of a plethora of job-seekers and skills providers. This wave of migrants engendered a surge of shops and trading activities in Hadiboh and the professionalization of trade, as dedicated shopkeepers began to replace the unwitting pioneers of this sector who were northern soldiers who came in 1994 as part of the army, and who settled down on the island. These soldiers opened grocery shops as part-time supplementary income activity. Their brothers or male relatives soon joined them. As of 1996, through word of mouth, Soqotra began to attract a wider circle of migrants from the major towns on the mainland, escaping their structurally endemic unemployment problem. The influx of migrants and their gravitation into the retail trade and services led to a division of labor: The northerners acquired a preponderant role in private sector economic activities, while the locals secured a monopoly on jobs in the governmental sector. However, a few government employees participated in the retail trading sector. In 1996, there were less than twenty shops in Hadiboh and only eight of which were owned by Soqotrans. Since then the number has catapulted into the hundreds. The retail sector in Hadiboh, as manifested in its marketplace, was an incubator of urban development through a mutual structuration process. As the nature of the shops reflected the emerging and changing local consumer demands. In effect, the shops are itinerant enterprises as there is a relatively high turnover in their composition due to the necessity of adapting to changing local needs as well as to new consumers’ requirements (e.g., tourists). Indeed, merchants, especially mainlanders, are highly adaptive as the commercial viability of their shops depends on meeting local demand. As such Hadiboh’s marketplace is a barometer of the island’s evolving economy and reflects the prevailing political economy. In spite of this marketplace’s ever changing composition, one structural aspect has remained constant: the dominance of the retail trade by mainlanders, or “Arab” as they were called during the Sultanate period and “shim¯ aliyyin” today. This fact is illustrated in the table below, which provides a comprehensive, but not exhaustive, profile of the retail trade sector that is represented by thirty-seven types of commercial ventures. Out of the 348 businesses inventoried, 250 (72%) are owned by mainlanders and 98 (28%) are Soqotrans-owned. These figures provide a key variable for future comparison of the evolving empowerment of Soqotrans as economic actors.

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Another noteworthy feature is the countries of origin of the boats transporting the goods to Hadiboh’s marketplace, which is an indicator of the changing nature of trade relations and economic influence as boats are the primary mode of transportation for the majority of imported goods. The available data on boat traffic is from 2013, which is the year in which Soqotra became a governorate and thus provides a comparative framework to evaluate the nature of the subsequent reconfiguration of trade relations in the future. In that year, during the shipping season—from January to May and October to December—there were a total of 81 boats: from mainland ports: Al-Mukalla (32) and Aden (15) and from regional ports: Salalah in Oman (13), Sharqah in the UAE (19), and India (2). Nearly 42% of the boats originated from regional ports, while the remaining 58% came from the mainland. The origin of the boats coming to Soqotra is not only an important indicator of its main trading partners, but also a crucial barometer of the changing economic relations between the island and the mainland and/or between the island and the diaspora. The information in Table 5.1 was initially gathered from the tax office register (by a third party) and subsequently compared with existing shops through multiple ambulant updating surveys of Hadiboh’s marketplace. It provides a comparative snapshot that is accurate as of 2014. Prior to discussing the participants in the retail trade sector, it is worth highlighting the invisible pillar that underpins Hadiboh’s marketplace and which allows the chain of transactions to take place. This is the credit system, which is a relatively recent adaptation to the demands of the cash economy that was initiated in the 1970s by the socialist administration with the introduction of money to pay salaries and to purchase goods. This led to the gradual demise of the barter system and the monetization of local trade. Beyond these historical factors, the prevalence of the use of credit is due to the salary dependency of most clients, the seasonality of most non-government occupations (e.g., tourism, fishing, and livestock sales), and the occasional availability of some jobs (e.g., construction). In addition, credit is a familiar practice among shopkeepers and their clientele on the mainland, which is known as ‘al¯ a al h.is¯ ab (“on the account”). This entails the purchase of goods to be paid in installments upon reception of one’s salary at the end of the month. In the absence of such a system sale transactions would be occasional at best. Accordingly, a significant proportion of transactions in the retail trade sector in Soqotra runs on a credit system between mainlanders-owned shops (especially grocery stores) and the Soqotran clientele. Furthermore, participation in this economy is facilitated by an urban custom of mutual borrowing of cash among Soqotran consumers.

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Table 5.1 Hadiboh’s marketplace Business types

Number

Ownership Mainland

Auto Spare Parts Bakery Bank Barber Shop Beauty Product Shop Block Factory Car Repair Workshop

Notes Local

6 2 2

5 2 2

1 – –

6 6 8 10

2 5 8

4 1 8 2

–

Carpentry

6

6

–

Cement Wholesale

4

4

–

Clothing Store

30

20

10

Electronic Shop Fish Market

6 1

6 –

– 1

87

35

7

1 6

Grocery

122

Hardware Store Honey Shop

8 6

Hotel

4

1

3

House Decoration Household Item Shop

1 2

1 2

– –

Ice Factory Jewelry Lumber Store

2 5 2

2 5 2

– –

–

Consumer and business loans as main focus

Growth sector given the ever increasing number of imported cars Carpenters produce household furniture Ordered from Oman and H . ad.ramawt Soqotran clothing shops are for women only Beach hangar where fishermen sell their daily catch Soqotran shops are poorly stocked, and depend on wholesalers for their supplies Soqotran honey is available in most grocery shops Only 2 are opened as of 2015 Ceramic tiles for homes Decorative items for the new homes

(continued)

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Table 5.1 (continued) Business types

Number

Ownership Mainland

Meat Market

1

Metal Workshop

5

5

–

Mobile Phone Shop Money Exchange

5 3

5 2

– 1

Photocopy Shop

4

4

–

3 23

2 23

1 –

Restaurant Stationery

7 5

6 3

1 2

Tea Shop Telephone Call Center

6 3

4 3

2

12

12

–

Travel & Tours Agency Vegetable Stall

8 3

2 3

6 –

Wholesale Grocery Shop

4

4

–

17

5

12

348

250

98

Photo Studio Q¯at Shop

TV Café

Wholesale Food Shop (flour, rice, sugar)

Total

–

Notes Local 1

Makeshift tables in suq alley manned by seasonally varying numbers of butchers Value-added production of house gates Remittances are transferred through them Typing services for official documents I.D cards production Q¯at shops’ numbers and location tend to shift due to recurrent protests Exclusively male clientele Serve also as bookstores and sell cassette tapes for music and religious sermons There were more before the introduction of government Internet service Important urban male socializing venues Serve as Internet Cafés Augmented by stalls selling locally grown vegetables from October to February Import in bulk from Yemen and resell to local grocery shops Soqotrans import mostly from the UAE, and mainlanders primarily from H . ad.ramawt

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5.2.3.1.1 Migrant Economic Actors: Trade and Service Mediators To understand the internal dynamics of, and to appreciate the role of the participants in, the retail trade sector the discussion will proceed according to the main categories of players: The mainlanders (al-shim¯ aliyyin) are discussed, then Soqotrans economic actors are sub-divided into two categories in order to reflect the differentiated access to economic opportunities. • Al-Shim¯ aliyyin: Ethnic Qabyala The composition and proportion of the population of mainland migrants on the island are not known because the census does not differentiate between mainlanders and Soqotrans as they are considered undifferentiated Yemeni citizens. The overwhelming majority of mainland migrants reside in Hadiboh. In spite of the lack of census data, a rough portrait can be provided in terms of the regional provenance and occupational distribution of this group as follows: the surplus labor from the population of the agricultural zones (e.g., Ibb, Lahij), and q¯at cultivation areas (Dhamar); the semi-skilled laborers (e.g., masons, electricians, plumbers, carpenters) made prematurely redundant by the saturated labor markets in the major cities of the mainland (e.g., Sana‘a’, Aden), and who were brought by the building sub-contractors; those with a traditional propensity for trade (e.g., Ta‘iz); and elementary school graduates and high school drop-outs whose skill deficiency seemed to have induced a propensity toward vagrancy especially to places in which rumors of high wages were circulating, and who became shopkeeper’s and restaurants’ assistants or cooks, q¯at sellers, or itinerant odd-jobbers. Also, some high school teachers from Hadhramawt have opened shops as a complementary occupation. In fact, only ten governorates are represented on the list of businesses kept by the local tax office. And given that migration followed a local recruitment process, therefore, others followed those who went first from the same regions, which reproduced the same population provenance. This is further reinforced by the fact that their businesses are structured by primary relationships based on kinship (e.g., brothers and cousins), and on secondary ones, such as corporate identities that are mutually shared (e.g., village and region of origin).

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Collectively, these migrants constitute the backbone of the trade and modern service sector. Worthy of note, mainlanders as local economic migrants do not normally become a vagrant “lumpen proletariat” in Soqotra, as they must be earning an income to support themselves or they leave. This is because they have to pay for everything (lodging, food) as there is neither local government nor family-based safety net, as is the case for Soqotrans’ urban residents. Moreover, while the mainland immigrants might have come with the intention on establishing themselves on the basis of their traditional specializations, the Soqotra context forced some of them to partially abandon their occupational or trade specialization inherited from their place of origins. This phenomenon is explained by the fact that the default occupation is shop-keeping, given that the grocery/variety stores account for a third of the business establishments on the island. Initially, these stores filled the void created by the demise of the subsidized food company established by the socialist government. The market has evolved since then, and it is continuously diversifying in response to external stimuli and changing local consumer needs. There is no competition among the northerner’s shopkeepers, given that prices are relatively similar, as they are partly based on mainland prices and high transportation costs to Soqotra. Instead, there seems to be much cooperation, which is made all the more necessary by their minimal integration into the Soqotran community. The most appropriate means of integration would be marriage. However, this seems to be a rare occurrence, partly due to cultural differences and local family objection to such marital arrangements motivated by mutually shared cultural aversions. Even during the socialist period marriage between mainlanders from the south and Soqotran women was not frequent as only a handful of such mixed families are encountered today. Indeed, for these mostly young and celibate economic migrants, the goal is not social integration but to remain economically afloat and if possible to accumulate enough capital to earn a wife back in their village. In the meanwhile, they maintain their own convivial network in which q¯at chewing plays only a partial role as mainlanders tend to chew in their workplaces (see Chapter 3). Also, this convivial network is based on, as well as mitigates the isolation associated with, their shared status as socially marginalized mainland economic migrants. Indeed, they are locally perceived as merely using the island as a temporary refuge while pursuing provisional livelihoods or seeking the elusive economic emancipation that would enable them to return back home with some savings.

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While there is no mutual aid customs among the mainlanders, there is a tacit socioeconomic collaboration ethos that I have labeled qabyala, which is a Yemeni colloquial term that is derived from the Arabic term for tribe qab¯ıla. Noteworthy, in the early ethnographies of Yemen, qabyala served as the default conceptual prism through which Yemenis were ethnographically appropriated. As the term was supposed to emblematize the essence of tribalism in Yemen, as it embodies the well-articulated ideal characteristics of being a tribesman: honor, hospitality, generosity, and mutual responsibility (see Adra 1982: 138–160). My use of the term qabyala is based on its invocation by one of Hadiboh’s pioneer shopkeepers from Ta‘iz, who used it to explain the nature of cooperation between the mainland migrants in Soqotra through mutual extension of line of credit, borrowing of stocks from each other’s stores, etc. Its use, however, was devoid of any tribal connotation in Soqotra’s context given the unrelated backgrounds of the mainlanders. Instead, qabyala referred to a locally forged group solidarity that is not based on tribal belongingness, but on their undifferentiated ethnic identity as Yemeni mainlanders constituting a diasporic enclave on the island. It is a status that is partly ascribed to them by Soqotrans and partly assumed by them for the purpose of economic survival in a context of inter-communal relations characterized by sublimated socio-economic antagonisms. The latter are generated by a shared perception among Soqotrans about Yemeni mainlanders as unfair competitors for limited economic opportunities, while simultaneously acknowledging the economic utility of their presence on the island. After all, it is the individual efforts of these economic migrants that supply the island with most of its food among other goods as well as essential but locally non-available skills-set. Indeed, they are the primary provisioning agents to Hadiboh’s marketplace. Soqotrans, however, are gradually emerging as viable competitors, as they move beyond owning their minimally frequented “decorative” grocery stores with manicured rows of canned goods to engage in the sale of goods for which there is local demand both in urban and rural areas (e.g., water pipes, flour, sugar, oil). The next section examines Soqotran participants in the private sector. 5.2.3.1.2 Soqotran Economic Actors: Pecuniary Catharsis Soqotran participants in the retail trade sector are divided into two categories of economic agents, as each category reflects a differentiated process of adjustment to the monetization of the economy and the spread

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of a pecuniary motivation that animates their attempts to make use of new opportunities. These two categories are based on a divergent combination of inherited social position, accumulated economic assets through migration to the Arabian Peninsula and Gulf countries, established political connection, and continuing link with the diaspora. The two categories are: rentier capitalists and budding micro-capitalists. • Al-Ma¯ıs¯ ur¯ın: Rentier Capitalists This group represents the pioneers among Soqotran economic actors in the urban economy’s modern sector. Some among them were the early émigrés who left Soqotra soon after the 1967 Revolution and who became the early returnees (al-mughtarib¯ın) in the early 1990s, who got an early start in the changing economy. These émigrés exemplified the fundamental economic role played by migration to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries, as an obligatory rite de passage for economic emancipation. They are joined by others whose wealth comes from the following sources: (a) accumulated financial capital from abroad that was invested locally in real estates, or that enabled their transformation into traders; (b) high social position under the Sultanate and the access to land it afforded; (c) political clout through making common cause with connected mainlanders, which facilitated their participation in the public sector economy as sub-contractors; and (d) exploitation of local resources, such as the illegal sales of coral to the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Al-ma¯ıs¯ ur¯ın— an Arabic word meaning “the well-off” or “the comfortable ones”—is the local term used to refer to a group of locals whose wealth, especially displayed in their residences and other properties differentiate them from the majority of Soqotrans. The use of this term, however, relativizes their level of wealth vis-à-vis others elsewhere, as their possession would appear rather insignificant in comparison with the wealthy class on the mainland. The investment modality of choice for this group was in real estate as a rent generating sector: residential villas and commercial buildings (e.g., storefront and hotels). Their émigré status as well as the accumulated capital from the Arabian Peninsula enabled them to act as viable contractors for the government’s infrastructure development projects launched after the mid-1990s. Also, they were able to purchase plots of land in strategic locations in Hadiboh on which to build the new hotels, building complexes, and houses that are rented out. In fact, investment in real

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estate is almost a tradition among Soqotrans with some cash surplus. Initially, however, the buildings were of more rudimentary design and structure, and they served as the shops of the first batch of mainland migrants. Indeed, most of the stores in Hadiboh’s s¯ uq are rented from these early real estate investors. The number of people in this category may have initially constituted a handful and could be considered an older generation. As of the mid-2000s, this group of early returnees was being eclipsed by some diasporic residents in the Gulf who commute to the island seasonally to prospect for investment opportunities as means of stored wealth in their homeland. These newcomers to this class of rentier capitalists have built most of the newer hotels and the apartment complexes for the increasing number of urban residents from the hinterland and elsewhere. • Retailers: Budding Entrepreneurs The example set by the mainland economic migrants, many of whom came with nothing or not much and whose shops dominate Hadiboh’s marketplace, has generated a mimic effect among Soqotrans. Those most susceptible to emulation can be categorized into three groups, which overlap, but can be differentiated by the type of business they engaged in, their particular motivation, and practices: The first group is made up of government employees or anyone with a salary or access to a regular flow of income. For this group, the grocery store was the initial means of entry into the urban retail sector, as it requires relatively less capital. As a result, Soqotrans have literally invaded that sector, as they make up one-third of the grocery stores’ owners. These stores, however, tend to be stocked with items purchased from mainlanders’ wholesale stores as their Soqotran owners do not have their own provisioning network on the mainland. Noteworthy, is that the decision to open such store, in some but not all instances, seems to be driven more by status seeking or as a means of keeping occupied retired parents, than by economic considerations. Moreover, both their limited repertoire of items would suggest that profit-making is not the primary justification for these micro-economic enterprises. They seem to constitute the primary phase of reclaiming a domain occupied by outsiders, as part of a process of participation in exchange relations with goods unfamiliar to (i.e., not produce in) the traditional economy, and the value

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of which seems more symbolic than economic. Moreover, for the Soqotran storekeeper having full shelves whether or not anything gets sold betrays a certain resemblance to the pastoralist’s umbilical attachment to his flock whether it generates an income or constitutes an expenditure. Businesses practices seem to be characterized by a transfer of the subsistence ethic from the b¯adiya (rural) to the mad¯ına (city). Some of these stores, however, have attracted Soqotran patrons partly out of communal solidarity and the facility of purchasing on credit regardless of repayment capacity or punctuality. The second group is constituted by individuals with a diasporic connection through which saleable goods can be procured. The diasporic connection, especially with the United Arab Emirates, is crucial as a significant proportion of the imported food items that constitute the staple of the Soqotran diet (e.g., flour, rice, and sugar) come from the Emirates. Initially, the importation of these food items (called maw¯ ad ghadh¯ a’iyya) was a commercial activity carried out by a few wholesalers of mainland origin. Part of these imported items was sent as a form of external assistance from Gulf relatives to complement the subsistence diet of their extended families on the island. More recently, however, this assistance has turned from its primary use as a diet complement to an economic activity, as evidenced in the proliferation of shops in Hadiboh selling these items. Soqotrans owners of shops that rely on supplies from the Gulf diaspora are gradually constituting an emergent class of local micro-competitors who are gradually undermining the commercial hegemony of mainlanders. A new sub-group with international connections has emerged since the launching of the GEF-UN conservation experiment. As some of the environmental projects’ employees have accumulated enough wealth to build respectable residences and engage in business as rentier capitalist or shop-owners. The third group is composed of enterprising individuals from the hinterland who have relocated to the principal coastal towns (Hadiboh or Qalansiyah), and have carved out a niche as intermediaries for their fellow villagers, as a loyal clientele whose business transactions guarantee a minimum level of economic viability. These stores, which might include any shop run by Soqotrans, play a central role in the web of domestic security linking the rural and the urban sectors, as they are the conduit to the operation of the mutual aid institutions of mah.rif (discussed in Vol. 1: Chapter 3). Moreover, they serve as collecting points for local products such as rugs, aloes juice, as well as ghee and honey; some of

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which may be exported to the mainland or use as payment for items purchased from these stores. Also, joining this group are some seasonal tourist guides whose accumulated capital has enabled them to open grocery stores as an off-season occupation. Furthermore, there is an emerging transportation sector created by the increasing network of asphalted roads, which is generating employment among former pastoralists who purchased minivans to transport passengers between Hadiboh and the rest of the island where these roads are available. The money to purchase such cars is generated through the following means: the sale of landholdings, the swapping of a piece of land for a car, and through the financial assistance from families in the Gulf diaspora. Interestingly, this road network has been the target of foreign-based environmentalists as ecologically destructive, yet it is providing sustainable livelihoods and making travel throughout the island a less arduous activity. The UN-led conservation projects managed by these environmentalists have yet to provide similar benefits in their domains of intervention. 5.2.3.2 Ecotourism: Monetizing the Landscape Ecotourism is one of the economic pillars of the UN-led conservation experiment in Soqotra that was launched in 1997. It was launched as part of an island-wide landscape management system that was to be operationalized through the establishment a series of Protected Areas (PAs) organized as ecotouristic attractions that would generate revenues for rural residents in their proximity. The objective was for the projects associated with the UN-GEF conservation experiment to provide start-up funds to selected community-based organizations (CBOs) to act as managerial entities of the established PAs. The discussion below briefly narrates the rise and demise of this initiative. • Eco-Start-ups: Sponsored Economic Agents The relative novelty of this ecotourism sector necessitated the recruitment and training of Soqotran participants both as organizations and individuals. As a result, the initial organizational participants in this sector were literally created by the first three UN-funded environmental conservation projects (1997–2008). They needed tailor-made local organizations to manage the eco-campsites within the PAs that were initially selected and to interface with ecotourists. In effect, the UN got into the

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business of creating ecotourism related NGOs and CBOs with the hope that they will eventually become financially self-sustaining managerial entities. The following organizations were the most active and their rise and demise were related to the fate of the project that funded them: The Soqotra Ecotourism Society (SES) was created by the UN using its own project staff and paying the rent of the office. The aim was to catalyze the ecotourism service sector, which did not exist prior to the launching of the UN conservation experiment. It was based in Hadiboh and served multiple functions: tourist information office, on the job training in interacting with tourists, and provided guided tours around the island. The rent and staff was paid by the UN project. Another organization was the Soqotra Women Development Association (SWDA), an independently established NGO that the UN project helped to set up a local handicraft shop for tourists. Despite the UN project best effort, only two (Homhil and Di Hamri) out the eleven PAs that were initially selected in 2002 were formally endowed with a local CBO as management unit under the rubric Conservation and Development Association. For some of the other PAs signs were posted at the entrance but CBOs were not established. The principal obstacle in establishing these PAs and their management units was the problem of land ownership since in the rural domain land is held collectively and a CBO as a management entity is seen as claiming private ownership. Establishing a CBO entailed a number of bureaucratic procedures: the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding between the UN project and responsible community members; the social competition-generating process of selecting office holders among the members; the opening of a bank account with the UN project and the CBO management contributing each 25,000 Yemeni Riyal; the subsidizing of travel expenses to Hadhramawt to have the CBO’s papers stamped by the proper government agency; the initial purchase of office equipment and supplies; and subsequently, the CBO personnel were to be trained by the UN project in Protected Area and campsite management. These are just some of the entailments of creating a CBO in a domain unfamiliar to the local population and who was suspicious of the motives and trustworthiness of the soliciting UN project. More importantly, the challenges of engaging in business practices that were unfamiliar to the islanders’ customary economic relations led to the low quality of these campsites. For example, human resource development through acquisition of interactional skills with foreigners along with English-speaking skills;

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maintenance of premises and quality service delivery in cooking, food presentation and entertainment planning, etc. These requirements were beyond the capacity of these fledging organizations and they remained dependent on the UN project for technical and financial support, which was haphazardly provided. Indeed, the feedback I got from interviewing tour agency personnel was that tourists reported dissatisfaction with the quality of the premises and services. These environmental CBOs were not organic communal entities as their raison d’être was unrelated to the conservation or protection of their territory’s environmental assets but depended entirely on an external clientele as a source of income generation. Indeed, their very creation by the UN project was part of a transactional strategy to induce these communities to allow the UN to demarcate their territory as PAs in exchange for visitors’ fees. As such they were intrinsically unsustainable. 2008 was a critical year for ecotourism on the island as UNESCO declared Soqotra a Natural World Heritage Site in July of that year. Simultaneously, the third phase of the UN project ended along with all subsidies to the abovementioned organizations. In addition, the focus on ecotourism as well as on sustainable resources use was to be replaced by an emphasis on building island-wide management institutions in the fourth phase of the project. As a result, the local staffing contingent that accumulated since 1997 was let go and the two environmental CBOs were left to fend for themselves. Also, the office of the Ecotourism Society was taken over by a private touring agency, and the Women Development Association closed its handicraft shop due to inability to pay the rent once the project terminated its subsidies. More importantly, ecotourism mutated from a niche activity for high end clientele for which the infrastructure was never put in place to a tent-dwelling mass tourism activity partly as a result of the publicity generated by the UNESCO designation. As newly created local travel agencies and mainland ones entered the sector and undermined UN management and control over the tourism sector. Figure 5.3 traces the fluctuating number of tourists to the island. Regarding the economic contribution of the ecotourism sector, I have formulated a provisional estimation based on the data provided by one of the most successful Soqotran-owned tour agencies (Socotra Eco Tours), as there are no official estimates. The tourism season is from October to May, during this time the average visitor is a couple. The high season is between Christmas and New Year when groups come mostly from Europe (see Fig. 5.4). The majority of visitors booked through web-based tourism

Fig. 5.3 Tourists in Soqotra 1997–2015 (Source Director of Soqotra Tourism Police)

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Fig. 5.4 Departing tourists Soqotra Airport

agencies run by local and mainland individuals. The minimum expenditure in Soqotra is $140 per day, which breaks down as follows: $100 for local transportation ($70 for car, $10 for driver, $20 for guide), $20 for hotel room, and $20 for 3 meals for a couple. For visiting groups staying on campsites there is an additional expenditure of $30 for cook and $30 for food and campsites’ fees and the tour agency takes an additional 10% for overhead. To give a rough idea of the income generated locally by tourism for one season, I use the peak year of 2008 and assume that most visitors were couples and stayed at a hotel for the normal duration of 5 days for $140 per day: $1,452,500. How was that amount distributed locally and who were the main beneficiaries remain an unanswered question as no official study was ever carried out by UN projects’ consultants in spite of the fact that the sector was regarded as a potential “growth engine” of the island’s sustainable development (see Chapter 7). The potential contribution of the ecotourism sector toward enhancing Soqotrans’ economic aspiration was undermined by the schizophrenic sensibility of those in charge of the UN conservation experiment on the island. Indeed, they were, and still are, conflicted about allowing the full development of the very sectors that their reports have identified as the island’s growth engine (fishing and tourism) while wanting to preserve the island as an undeveloped ecotopia for research purposes (see

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Chapters 6 and 7 for details). As a result of their dithering, ecotourism lapsed into mass tourism as a tent-dwelling two star level enterprise. This was not the original vision established in a 1999 report entitled “EcoTourism Development Plan for Socotra Archipelago” (see Chapter 7: phase 3).

5.3 Diasporic Economy: Philanthropy as Political Cooptation The roots of the diasporic economy are deeply embedded in Soqotra’s history of interaction with its regional neighbors—Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UAE—prior to their becoming independent states, as they were the primary destinations of Soqotran émigrés. However, the UAE was the most important of the three destinations, as it is distinguished by being the host country of a distinct group of Soqotran émigrés who became unwittingly the founding members of the diaspora in the Gulf region: the women who were banished from Soqotra after being accused, tried, and found guilty of being practitioners of witchcraft (sah.r in Soqotri). This group was joined by the voluntary exodus of the upper echelon of the island’s social status hierarchy who were dispossessed of their properties and socially demoted by the new socialist administration from 1967 onward. The year of 1968 is remembered as a watershed moment in local history, as hundreds of Soqotrans went into permanent exile to the Arabian Gulf. According to one recollection, among the ships that took on board the first batch of emigrants was the “Al-Mumtaz,” which was cramped with hundreds of people including entire families. Its human cargo included members of the social elite driven by fear of political exaction, and migrant workers who were motivated by economic opportunism. The latter was a politically acceptable justification to leave the island, as economic migration was a widespread phenomenon in both the north and south of the mainland and was considered a revenue earner for the state. In fact, emigration was a significant factor, as the 1994 census of Soqotra identified 4% (4995) of the population as emigrants. This group was preceded in the 1950s by emigrants to the proliferating labor market generated by the oil wealth in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, or to join the British-controlled armed forces in what was known then as the Trucial States that became the UAE in 1971. Collectively, these émigrés would become long-term exiles from their homeland, and ultimately permanent residents of another state, as well as the founding

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members of a vibrant diaspora, whose economic support to the homeland is generating ripple effects in all the economic domains discussed above. The diasporic economy is discussed separately because it is not merely another component of the communal economy, but a competing one that portends the “colonization” of the other three components discussed above through their gradual de-linking from the mainland. There are two major actors within the diasporic economy: The first set of actors are members of émigré community of Soqotrans in the UAE who have established a diasporic solidarity network between them and their relatives and fellow villagers in Soqotra through the transfer of remittances. They represent the first generation of émigrés and their descendants are poised to become the driving force of Soqotra’s economic future. The second actor is the UAE state, as the host of the largest diaspora of Soqotrans. It is claiming privileged affinity with, and special responsibility for, the people of Soqotra as justification of its philanthropic interventions. Accordingly, the UAE, through its individual and institutional proxies, is pursuing an aid diplomacy that is committed to achieving the political objective of replacing the Yemeni state’ sovereignty over Soqotra. A caveat about the discussion that follows: The brief and highly provisional profile of the Soqotran diaspora is based on interviews with members of the diaspora during their visits to Hadiboh; the data on remittances is based on estimations provided by the head of one of the money transfer agencies; and the information about other aspects was gathered through many fieldwork trips to Soqotra. 5.3.1

Émigré Remittances: From Safety Net to Investment Capital

The Soqotran diaspora in the UAE is made up of an estimated eight thousand families, most of whom are living in the Emirate of Ajman, which is one of the seven Emirates of the UAE. Members of this diaspora are mostly from the eastern part of Soqotra Island. They have congregated in four neighborhoods in Ajman: Aswan, Zahra, Hamadiya, and al-Nahmiya. It is estimated that two-thirds of the residents of Ajman are of Soqotan descent. As of 1999, a system of local communal representation based on the shaykh system was approved by the local authorities to represent Soqotrans in official matters with the state. Soqotran residents of the Emirate of Ajman select their representative who is subsequently appointed by the local authorities. The first appointed occupant of the post was Shaykh ‘Ali Sa‘ad al-Shaibani (Arabization of the Soqotri clan

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name Shibnihi from M¯omi in the east). The shaykh, who left Soqotra in 1968, is an officer in the UAE’s army and has three wives with fifteen children. This reproductive detail is offered as an indication of the high fertility rate among families of the diaspora, which is partly incentivized by the state through a stipend of 500 Dirhams ($150) per birth until adulthood to which Soqotrans are entitled. This suggests that the potential population size of the diaspora could be more than half of the homeland’s population. Noteworthy, as a diasporic community Soqotrans are not eligible to become citizens (muw¯ a.tin¯ın) and thus they remain as permanent residents (muq¯ım¯ın). This has constrained them to intermarry among themselves or for males to “order” a wife from Soqotra; however, women of Soqotran descent can marry Emirati citizens. This straddling location has sustained a double loyalty to host country and to homeland.2 These are some of the motivational factors that underpin the remittance economy of the island. Given the ever changing conjunctures of all aspects of life on the island, the remittance economy has evolved along with the changing local political and economic context, the generational change in the diaspora, the diversification of homeland economic opportunities, the available transfer mechanisms and correspondingly the nature of the remittances. However, one factor about the remittance economy that has persisted is that the majority of both senders and recipients are from the eastern part of the island, as the inaugural members of the diaspora originated from there. The first generation of Soqotran émigrés occupied an economic slot in the Gulf that enabled them to meet the expenses for raising their large families, as they were mostly soldiers and policemen earning just over a thousand dollars a month. Accordingly, their contribution was primarily in the form of in-kind remittances to their extended families back on the island for consumption, as remittances in cash were rare partly due to the absence of a wire transfer mechanism. The main components of in-kind remittance were food items (e.g., flour, rice and sugar), clothing, and construction materials (e.g., wood and cement) especially for building mosques, and water pipes for the perennial water access problem. Also included were a few cars and a smattering of household items. The date garden was a prized investment item until the mid-1990s through landswapping agreements or purchase with cash remittances. As the date palm tree in the local scale of value was a source of economic wealth and social status, and more importantly dates were considered a providential food item against the seasonal frequency of hunger on the island. In sum, in

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its early stage the remittance economy was a crucial complement to the “patching up” ethic that is used to plug the many holes in the Soqotrans’ wheel of life (as discussed in Vol. 1: Chapter 6). In this way, it palliated the frequent deficiencies in the local availability of food, and expanded the distribution network for, and access to, essential goods. These goods supplemented the limited safety net provided by the state. From the dawn of the twenty-first century, Soqotra’s integration into the larger world accelerated with the construction of an international airport and regular flights, increasing boat traffic transporting a greater quantity and variety of merchandise, the availability of wire transfer, the rise of a tourism sector, and the establishment of a mobile phone network. This new historical conjuncture and the availability of a transport and communication infrastructure led to the use of remittances as investment capital in addition to the safety net functions it performed in the previous phase. For example, all of the items identified above that were used for consumption or community use have now dual purposes: for private consumption and as commercial goods for sale in Soqotran-owned shops. This direct link to a provisioning network of their own has enabled Soqotrans to become viable economic competitors of the mainlander-owned shops in Hadiboh’s marketplace. Items that were in the recent past either unavailable or seen as non-essential are increasingly considered indispensable accessories to everyday life on the island, at least in the urban centers: the television and satellite dish as well as other household electrical appliances (e.g., the refrigerator), although the usefulness of such appliances are constrained by the availability of electricity in the two main urban centers only. The car, which was considered a much faster beast of burden than the camel and its ownership was merely a convenience until the 1990s, is now an aspirational possession. The car, however, not only possesses a status-enhancing cachet, but also serves as a means of livelihood through transporting fellow islanders around the island on the asphalted roads network and the occasional rental to tourists and other visitors. Real estate investments have become a thriving sector. The result is a gradual transformation of Hadiboh’s skyline, as the multiple floor residential buildings and some of the hotels are all built by the diaspora’s money. In addition in-kind remittances are complemented by cash remittances due to the availability of wire transfer. The two main sources of money transfers are the UAE and Oman. The available figures of the estimated amount transferred are for 2013, which is the year Soqotra became a Governorate, and thus provide a benchmark for future comparison of

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the volume of remittances to the local economy: From the UAE, the monthly sum ranges from YR 9 to 12 million per month, or YR 108 or 144 million a year, or the equivalent of $503,000 or of $670,000. And from Oman it ranges from YR 1 to 2 million per month, or the equivalent of $55,000 to $111,000 annually. Seventy percent of the recipients are in the east including Hadiboh, and 30% are in the west and south of the island. In spite of this extensive flow of both in-kind and in-cash remittances and the economic and investment activities they spawned, the émigrés until recently saw the island as an occasional excursion destination. There were only a few seasonal visitors from the first and second generation, who came to the island, usually during the “milk and meat” season during the months of October to February (see seasonal calendar in Vol. 1: Chapter 3). Among the émigré visitors, some spent their time in the hinterland, learning about their roots and sampling “bedouin’s” life, as a tourist would. However, the establishment of the UAE protectorate regime has strengthened the diaspora’s link to the island and has transformed these leisure excursions into investment prospecting trips. Potentially, the new generation in the Soqotran diaspora could constitute the economic “locomotive” class who could have a pull effect on the economy, society, and culture of the island. 5.3.2

Aid Diplomacy: State Substitution

By virtue of its geostrategic location, Soqotra was always coveted by global and regional powers in their quest for geopolitical (military base) or economic (resource exploitation) objectives. This quest was brought to a provisional end with the expulsion of the British from South Yemen in 1967, as the new South Yemeni state assumed full sovereignty over its territorial jurisdiction (see Vol. 1: Chapter 7). However, with the perceived disintegration of the Yemeni state in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, regional interest in this strategic outpost was revived. This led to political rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran on the one hand and Qatar vs UAE on the other, according to both local and international news reports. The UAE prevailed, even if provisionally, because of its strategic implementation of an aid diplomacy in Soqotra that is motivated by geopolitical considerations in which benevolent acts constitute a form of “social foreign direct investment” (SFDI). The latter is

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pursued through the strategic investment mechanism of philanthrocapitalism (Edwards 2008), which prioritizes the key social welfare needs of the local population in quest of the primary objective of accumulating social capital among the targeted population in order to induce its gradual political loyalty. This tactic is the initial phase in a strategic process of winning local conscripts in its pursuit of larger geopolitical objectives. Indeed, the UAE’s aid diplomacy has effectively arrogated the role of remedying the Yemeni state’s neglect of the islanders’ social welfare through politically ostentatious charitable acts. The latter are generating a tug of war between the Yemeni state and regional powers for the hearts and minds of Soqotrans whose political allegiance to the Yemeni state was already tenuous. Indeed, President Hadi was partially motivated by the ramifications of this tug of war over Soqotrans’ political loyalty when he travelled to Soqotra in October 2013 to inform local leaders that the Archipelago will be made into a Governorate. The timing of his trip was perhaps not a mere coincidence as he was preceded in May of that year by a high-level delegation from the UAE prospecting for SFDI opportunities and by the wife of the Emir of Qatar on a four-hour touristic excursion ¯ . w¯ around the island (Al-‘Ad a’, 5 May 2013). The UAE began in earnest their aid diplomacy in 2009 with the launching of two projects that generated state substitution effects, as they highlighted the government’s inability, indeed failure, to remedy the islanders’ chronic social welfare deficits. The first project was the rehabilitation and modernization of Soqotra’s only hospital funded by Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Foundation (KBZ Foundation); and the second was the building of an eighty-one units housing compound for the poor that became known as “Istanbul City” that was funded by the Emirates Red Crescent Society (ERC). The first phase of the first project was completed in December 2012, while the mainland government funded hospital that started in 2000 was still under (postponed) construction. The opening ceremony of the hospital—formerly called “Hadiboh Hospital” and renamed “Shaykh Khalifa Bin Zayed Hospital”—coincided with the forty-first anniversary of the establishment of the Union of the United Arab Emirates. The guests list suggests an element of intentional political fanfare, as it included the Ambassadors from Kuwait, Malaysia, Oman, and the UAE, the UN Resident Coordinator, the WHO representative and the Governor of Hadhramawt among other dignitaries. During the opening ceremony, the Director of the hospital highlighted the Yemeni state neglect of local health needs, perhaps unwittingly, when he observed

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that with “the opening of the hospital, modern medicine has finally arrived to Soqotra” (Alitih.¯ ad, 8 December 2012). The second project, which built “Istanbul City” for the poor, was opened in May 2013 and it is the size of at least two-football fields (see Fig. 5.5). In Istanbul City, every household received a monthly stipend of YR 20,000 in addition to a monthly food ration. Besides the construction of these housing compounds, the ERC engaged in wide-ranging acts of charity that dwarfed all of the Yemeni state interventions in local social welfare. In Soqotra, the government’ social safety net is maintained by the Social Welfare Fund (SWF), which was initially established in 1986 by the socialist administration and was subsequently continued by the post-unification government. The SWF covers 6000 beneficiaries each of whom receives a monthly stipend ranging from YR 2000 per person to YR 4000 for a family of more than two members. The stipend is collected every three month at the local post office. The restricted category of recipients (e.g., widows, orphans, and handicaps) leaves most of the population outside its net. In contrast, the ERC, prior to the UAE’s protectorate regime, performed the following charitable acts: supported a roster of 3080 poor who received YR 20,000 each; distributed assistance to twenty-seven mosques around the island; sponsored yearly thirty-three persons to do the Haj; distributed YR 20 million in zakat around the

Fig. 5.5 Istanbul City

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island, among other acts. In 2017, the ERC launched the construction of “Shaykh Zayed City” that will include 161 houses along with a clinic, a school, a mosque, a children’s park, and a football field. This aid diplomacy, even if it is not politically motivated, is unwittingly having a state substitution effect on a population who largely feels abandoned by the Yemeni state. Moreover, the work of those two organizations—the KBZ Foundation and the ERC—constitutes a parallel economy, as their activities by-passed the national government’ supervision and the amount of money involved are known only by a few individuals (who provided the above figures). As of 2015, these two institutions are the de facto political and economic governance agencies of Soqotra under the aegis of the UAE’s humanitarian protectorate. Moreover, their interventions (including those discussed in Vol. 1: Chapter 7) exceed in scale and scope not only their previous charitable initiatives, but also are increasingly surpassing the interventions of the Yemeni state both in the past and present, thereby gradually effacing its local raison d’e“tre. Collectively, these two strategically “charitable” organizations and the renewed engagement of the Soqotran diaspora with the island represent the field of forces that are pulling Soqotra out of the Yemeni state’s political orbit toward the UAE’s sphere of influence.

5.4

Coda: Transformational Effects

The current economic configuration of the island is in a transitional phase driven by multiple contradictory vectors: (a) a state-dependent municipal economy, with the local government bureaucracy as main employer and social service provider in the main urban centers; (b) a social economy constituted by the fishing sector that was, until recently, under monopsony conditions formerly imposed by mainland buyers and more recently by the UAE’s “philanthropreneurs,” and the UN-funded eco-farms that are failing to demonstrate the viability of the commercial production of local natural resources that would emancipate the rural population still eking out a livelihood from a subsistence pastoralism; (c) a service economy that has limited employment generation prospects as its retail trade sector is dominated by mainland merchants, and the UN-promoted tourism sector that was intended as an incentive to rural communities who allowed the establishment of PAs, but that generated seasonal jobs for urban residents as English-speaking tourist guides, drivers, and car owners, and not pastoralists as initially anticipated; and (d) finally

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a diasporic economy for those with relatives in the Gulf diaspora, who participate in a supplemental economy of remittance dependency, and which allowed the UAE as host country of this diaspora to deploy a Trojan horse strategy of aid diplomacy to subvert political allegiance to Yemeni state. In spite of this modern economy’s work-in-progress status, it has already generated significant impacts as partially inventoried below: • Social Mobility: Self-Distinction Tournament There is an emerging transformation of sociocultural aspirations, through the manifestation of a tournament of self-distinction through consumption as a means of individual social mobility among some in the urban population. This tournament is animated by a pecuniary mania that is induced (a) by the monetization of the economy, which has replaced the barter economy based on the exchange of goods by means of a complementary reciprocity; and (b) by the urge to emulate imported consumption habits. This is manifested through the drive for personal distinction mediated by remittances from the Arabian Gulf and by jobs available from the ongoing projects of the UN conservation experiment. This takes the form of a new house that reveals a transition in architectural style and aesthetic re-orientation: From the old aesthetically-challenged Soqotran rectangular houses with their flat and constantly leaking roofs, built with rocks of multiple shades, shapes and sizes or cement blocks, held together by an uneven mixture of mostly mud and cement; to the new residential buildings’ use of symmetrically sculptured stones stacked in a regular alternation between white and rust colored ones, which are sealed with cement inlaid with a black line with almost artistic finesse, as in the application of eye shadows called takkh¯ıl, for full aesthetic impact. For the urban youth, it is about self-advertising through the wearing of brand name f¯ u.tah (male skirt), regular change of models of mobile phone, the wearing of watches (of doubtful utility as the calls to prayer are the local markers of time), listening to music through the earplugs of a smart phone (instead of a portable radio, an antiquated technology), and learning to speak English. Collectively, the above modes of local selfpresentation as expressions of individual social distinction are generating an incipient class division, or more aptly a new system of cash-based and consumer goods-mediated status distinction.

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• Car Culture: Mobile Investment Related to the above quest for self-distinction is the obligatory possession of a car, preferably a Toyota Landcruiser, which completes the required arsenal in the competition for social status. This has led to the spread of a car culture on the island through the largess of the Soqotran diaspora in the Arabian Gulf. Beyond its status-enhancing effects, the car has replaced the camel of the recent past to become the key investment asset of individual participants in the tourism economy as the means of transport for “ecotourists,” and other foreign visitors. Also, the car has achieved the status of a consumer fetish that is breeding social competition and differentiation within the hinterland. This is manifested in the frequent incongruous site of a relatively new car parked next to an archaic compound. This ostentatious display could undermine the hinterland’s communal ethos of “subsistence egalitarianism.” As of January 2014, according to the Director of Traffic Police, there was a total of 1716 cars in Soqotra, constituting a ratio of one car for every 29 inhabitants. This ratio is likely to reach the single digit within less than a decade and could be a significant source of environmental stress. Beyond the individual benefits accruing from owning a car, there are other collective effects. For example, the availability of car transport between hinterland villages and Hadiboh that was facilitated by the asphalted roads network have engendered a new urban phenomenon of mass loitering along Hadiboh’s main asphalted “boulevard,” named “street twenty.” Soqotrans from the rural areas take a day trip to Hadiboh where they become urban flâneurs as they sit on mats sipping tea and watching the strolling crowd. • Rural-Urban Relations: Unraveling Complementarity Throughout its historical trajectory, Hadiboh maintained a complementary relationship with the rest of the island. Paradoxically, one unintended salutary consequence of the UN conservation experiment’s de-emphasis on development was that it did not generate the phenomenon of rising expectations among rural Soqotrans. As it was based on the promise that it would generate sustainable livelihoods in the rural domain. Indeed, its proposed vision of Soqotra’s future was based on the assumption that Hadiboh’s regulated modernization, while the rest of the island is maintained in a rustic state with marginal

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improvements, will not induce the pastoralists to expect and demand the same kind of transformation of their territorial domain. Such prudish calculation is being abandoned by the UAE’s recent spate of make-over projects under implementation, or in the pipeline. In such a context, the phenomenon of rising expectations is being unleashed among Soqotrans with potentially destabilizing demographic effects. As Soqotra’s rural residents are already afflicted with a nature-imposed livelihood diversification imperative through the opportunistic recourse to a miscellany of odd jobs with which to “patch-up” the deficiencies of the pastoral economy. The end result would be extensive rural-urban migration, and the formation of a lumpen urban population as a vagrant labor force expecting nonexistent jobs. Furthermore, Hadiboh’s marketplace which is dominated by opportunistic merchants in quest of new customers could breach the still distinctive economic orientation between the urban and rural sectors, which would lead to the annexation of Soqotra’s entire population within the orbit of its logic of cash-mediated exchange and consumption. • Conservation Parody: Endemic Disappointment The sustainable resource use initiative launched by the UN conservation experiment left a permanent legacy on Soqotra’s economy with both constraining and perverting effects: First, it introduced on the island the politics of “sustainable development” by means of a culture of “project aid” that strategically neglected economic development in favor of environmental conservation. Second, it elaborated a blueprint (the Biodiversity Zoning Plan), which imposed severe restriction on the areas where productive economic activities could be undertaken on the island (see Chapter 6). This restriction effectively discouraged production-related local business initiatives. Third, it institutionalized a monetary quid pro quo as incentive structure in international agencies’ relations with locals that has undermined their ethic of reciprocity. Paradoxically, the legacy effect of the series of UN conservation projects exemplifies in a perverted way Gudeman’s notion of “cultural economics” as a domain of value, in which the values are not organically rooted and emergent but imported and locally imposed ones. As a result, local expectation from international assistance that was initially generated was followed by the spread of disappointment with, and chronic doubts about, international donors’ projects and promises. The disappointment was due to the implementation of an incongruous nature-preserving, pastoral livelihood-neglecting, and modernization-prevention “sustainable underdevelopment” model

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for the island that was driven more by opportunistic land-grabbing than a thorough empirical analysis of environmental threats. This has led to the estrangement of most Soqotrans from international donors’ environmental protection initiatives, given their chronic demonstration effect deficit. As the established PAs and their associated eco-farms failed to show that biodiversity conservation through the sustainable use of local environmental resources is an economically viable livelihood (see Chapter 7). • Ecotourism Curse: Pecuniary Angst The promotion of an ecotourism economy that quickly degenerated from the ideal of an “ecologically sensitive low-volume tourism” with pastoralists as its primary beneficiaries, to the reality of an ecologically indifferent mass tourism that has benefitted mostly urban-based Soqotrans. Paradoxically, it was the promise of this tourism economy that led the government to construct a 430 km network of asphalted roads that is now seen as a threat to the island’s pristine landscape and endemic biodiversity. Relatedly, this tourism economy engendered a coastal land grab by external actors and exacerbated local disputes over the communal ownership of land based on the expectation that potential external interests in land as conservation enclaves or tourist business ventures would become a source of rent extraction. This generated incentives to monetize communal landholdings through the privatization of property rights. Paradoxically, while Soqotrans have been spared the afflictions associated with a resource curse as their island’s environmental resources are not commercially viable to lure biocolonialists and their collateral damages (e.g., land dispossession, mass rural-urban migration and emigration), the scenic vistas offered by its landscapes, however, have given rise to a neo-colonial environmentalism that entailed the relative loss of their sovereignty over the management of their island’s natural endowments (see Chapters 6 and 7). • Living Museum: Folklorization of Indigenous Heritage Soqotra’s indigenous ethnocutural endowments present the UAE with a potential goldmine of cultural tourism for its citizens, its resident expatriate community and eventually the global tourism market. This

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would provide an additional cachet to the UAE as a “resort state” “offering a consumable simulacrum of local culture” through camelriding and tent-dwelling excursions in its desert hinterland (Chocano 2020). Soqotra could be promoted as an exotic destination for an authentic encounter with a primeval landscape and the traditional culture of its indigenous population through the following exotic activities: watching drum-beating performance by a group of muwallad¯ın; listening to Soqotri poetry reading through translation; night dinning with a “bedouin” family in the mountains; witnessing a traditional marriage ceremony; mountain trekking while learning about herding with a “bedouin”; shopping for local handicrafts; and visiting local pottery-making or rugweaving villages. Some of these activities were included in the itinerary of tourism prior to the arrival of the UAE. The difference, however, would be the intensive commodification through the folklorization of Soqotrans’ indigenous cultural practices and traditional life-style. The first indication of this evolving tourism strategy was the organization by the KBZ Foundation of a one-week-long Soqotra Cultural Heritage Festival in January 2018, which is slated to become an annual event. Its aim is “to revive the cultural heritage, customs, traditions, and crafts of the Governorate.” It featured a Soqotri poetry competition that offered 100,000 Dirhams ($27,000) for the winning poem. Significantly, the setting was all imported from the UAE: the tent, the carpet, the cushions. The event, which was formerly independently organized by a local NGO (Soqotra Society for Heritage and History) with funding from the diaspora and without government sponsorship, was appropriated as a government promoted event with the flags of Yemen and the UAE and the pictures of the two state leaders affixed in the background. The slick videos that were uploaded on the Internet had all the markings of a tourism promotion campaign for the new cultural tourism sector. These incipient transformations engendered by the modern economic sector are the new social, economic, and cultural vectors of Soqotra’s transition process that will determine the fate of the communal polity’s quest for economic sovereignty. Thus far, this quest was provisionally achieved by some individuals. For the community as a whole, however, economic sovereignty remains elusive, as it is contingent on the denouement of an always evolving regional geopolitics.

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Notes 1. The figures for staff are based on the author’s collection of data on the staffing of the government offices and from the development reports for the two districts published in 2006. The salary figures are based on an average salary of $325. The result is an estimated annual wage bill of $5,623,937 or a monthly wage bill of $468,661.42. The median monthly salary, however, is much closer to 45,000 YR, or $209 (based on 2014 exchange rates: 215 Yemeni Riyal per US dollar). 2. This ambiguous status has provided an opportunity to the UAE to dangle the promise of citizenship as a means to induce Soqotrans’ acquiescence to their annexation. Indeed, this is illustrated in a statement by an Emirati citizen (Hamad bin Hamdan Al-Matrushi), either acting as a freelancer or on behalf of the state, during a meeting in December 2018 with a group of Soqotrans that included a former Governor of Soqotra and STC member, in a video that went viral: “I assure you, God Willing, that the people of Soqotra will be part of the UAE. They deserve the citizenship without asking because we had a history together and we see them as one of us especially in Ajman where two-thirds of the population have their fathers and grandfathers from Soqotra” (see Al Jazeera online, 31 December 2018: https://urlzs.com/kx4Kg).

PART II

Environmental Annexation: Global Governance of Local Conservation

CHAPTER 6

Trojan Environmentalism: Ecological Gentrification of an Island Community

This chapter offers a detailed narrative reconstruction of the formulation process of an internationally-led environmental adjustment regime, which annexed the totality of Soqotra’s territory. This regime imposed new forms of regulation on the island’s human-environment relations and sought to inculcate a new environmental subjectivity among the local population, and to promote an eco-centric communal polity. The chapter situates the virtual formulation and local imposition of this regime within the context of the emergence and dissemination of the Global Environment Facility’s hegemonic travelling policy regime of biodiversity conservation that mutated from a utilitarian sustainable development ideal to a financialized green economy paradigm. Subsequently, it focuses on the nature and impact of the mediation of international actors and factors in the local articulation of the phenomenon of Trojan environmentalism. The latter entails the subordination of all aspects of communal life under the binding jurisdiction of a global regulatory framework supervised by globe-trotting ecocrats prescriptively enforcing a virtually conceived environmental adjustment regime. The chapter exhaustively explores the ecological gentrification effects engendered by the managerial hegemony of international agencies through their symbolic appropriation and arbitrary reconfiguration of the island’s territorial totality, and their external determination of the aspirational horizon of an entire community.

© The Author(s) 2020 S. D. Elie, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume II, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45646-7_6

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6.1 Global Conservation Regime: Hegemonic Travelling Policy In 1896, when Theodore and Mabel Bent, the antiquarian-archeologist couple, visited Soqotra Island they encountered a relatively pristine environment, which was undisturbed by the predatory interventions of the competing imperial powers at the time. They observed that, “It is undoubtedly a providential thing for the Soqotran that his island is harborless, that his mountains are not auriferous, and that the modern world is not so keen about Dragon’s Blood, … frankincense and myrrh, as the ancients were” (Bent and Bent 1900: 394). By an ominous coincidence, exactly one hundred years after the Bents’ observation, the year 1996 heralded Soqotra’s inaugural conscription into a global environmental conservation campaign. As globe-trotting conservationists developed a similar interest in Soqotra’s environmental resources and landscapes—conceived as transactional commodities and touristic spectacles—that in the past galvanized the imagination of the ancients, and that titillated the pecuniary desires of their merchants (Elie 2006a). Soqotra’s rediscovery under the banner of biodiversity conservation and ecotourism—the two substitutes that rival in value (although more symbolic than economic) the harbors and minerals that were the coveted prizes of imperial competition in the recent past—has similarly incited the imperial fantasy of foreign conservationists, intensified the jostling over governance prerogative among national institutions and political actors, and aroused the pecuniary angst of the locals. All of them seemed to have been taken in by the effluvium of encomia regarding the island’s environmental endowment and the rising expectations of generous international attention through increased economic activities in the form of infrastructure projects as investments in tourism. From 1996 onward, Soqotra lost its status as one of the few remaining places in the world that has managed to escape the invasive discursive web and the subjugating snare of imported templates (i.e., projects, plans, and policies) formulated and implemented by travelling consultants that are the pre-requisites to participate in the international regime of “sustainable development.” The latter term gained global lexical currency through the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED 1987). The Brundtland Report, as the WCED report is commonly referred to, heralded the emergence of the environment as a

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critically important facet of international governance. However, its definition of sustainable development exuded a utilitarian idealism: It “is a process in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investments, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are all in harmony and enhance both current and future potential to meet human needs and aspirations” (WCED 1987: 46). This definition sought to establish an “equilibrium paradigm” between the anthropocentric priorities of development with the eco-centric requirements of environmental conservation. This reconciliation of humanity’s prosperity and nature’s sustainability through the enhancement of the environment’s economic serviceability became the primary task of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Brazil, known as the Rio Earth Summit. For example, Principle 12 of the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development sanctions the coupling of “sustainable development” with the discourse of neoliberalism or, the term I prefer to use, “post-liberal environmentalism”: “States should co-operate to promote a supportive and open international economic system that would lead to economic growth and sustainable development in all countries.” Indeed, the UNCED “institutionalized the view that liberalization in trade and finance is consistent with, and even necessary for, international environmental protection and that both are compatible with the overarching goal of sustained economic growth” (Bernstein 2002: 2). In effect, the 1992 Rio Summit should be regarded as the inauguration of the corporate take-over of the previously civil society-led environmental movement through the cooptation of its organizational infrastructure, policy discourse and its funding and implementation mechanisms as epitomized in the transnational clientelistic environmental governance regime established by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) (see below). Henceforth, environmental protection was pursued within the norms and values that promote and sustain the post-liberal economic order of market monopolies, economic oligarchies, and policy hegemony. It is this understanding of sustainable development that was consecrated as the new master trope of universal application, and especially as the meta-narrative of the international development regime for the Global South. To elucidate the ramifications of the application of this master trope to Soqotra, the chapter undertakes the following analytical tasks: (a) situates its epistemic foundation within the evolving UN discourse of sustainable development and its current incarnation into a “green economy”

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paradigm; (b) examines the pivotal role of the GEF in establishing a global multi-stakeholders environmental governance network that exercised influence at multiple scales (global, national, and local); (c) identifies the specific local ramifications of the GEF in Soqotra through the process of ecological gentrification; (d) highlights the motivations of Yemen’s national government in participating in the CBD-based global conservation regime and their multiple ramifications in Soqotra; (e) explores the role of international enablers of the GEF global conservation regime in installing a communal version that I call Trojan environmentalism as a premature environmental adjustment regime based on conjecturally anticipated environmental threats; (f) shows how the exclusive reliance of imported ideas and mechanisms led to the formulation of a Zoning Plan that estranged Soqotrans from their communal commons; and (g) explains how international consultants’ ignorance of the historically contingent and thus constantly evolving community-environment relations led to the false premise of the conservation strategy imposed on Soqotra. In performing these analytical tasks, this chapter and the next provide the underpinnings of a model of institutional analysis that the editors of the book The Anthropology of Sustainability claim to be necessary but not available (Brightman and Lewis 2017). As they explain: An anthropology of sustainability will need to engage more systematically with international institutions and the policy-making bodies they spawn, so we will have to find effective ways to describe bureaucratic contexts, decode the discourses of different interest groups, map ambiguities and contradictions, and assess claims. (Brightman and Lewis 2017: 23–24)

Indeed, this chapter and the next one describe, decode, map, and assess the internal policy contradictions of international institutions, the selfserving discourses of interested groups, the arbitrary imposition of alien policy templates by conservation agencies, and their gentrification and misanthropic effects on the Soqotran community. 6.1.1

Sustainable Development Financialized: Green Economy Paradigm

In 1995, only three years after the Earth Summit, the World Trade Organization (WTO) was established to provide the multilateral institutional mechanism for enabling and enforcing globalization in all domains.

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Henceforth, the norms of post-liberal environmentalism, as prescribed by the WTO-sanctioned rules for the conduct of global trade, production and finance, have not only constrained the policy-making processes and outcomes of global institutions for environmental governance but also determined the horizon of possibilities of global environmental negotiations (cf. Newell 2008: 514). Subsequently, the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD), called “Rio + 20,” was held in Rio in June 2012 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the 1992 Earth Summit. Its aim was to assess the progress made in achieving the three pillars of sustainable development: economic development, social equity, and environmental protection. However, its “underlying goal [was] to advance the transition to a “green economy” that would create a new global “political ecology of development” (Haas 2012: 94). Indeed, the conference manifesto, “The World We Want,” heralds in clause 56 the “green economy” as the panacea of sustainable development: It will “contribute to eradicating poverty as well as sustained economic growth, enhancing social inclusion, improving human welfare and creating opportunities for employment and decent work for all, while maintaining the healthy functioning of the Earth’s ecosystems.” In effect, the Rio + 20 manifesto not only prioritized the sustainability of capitalism over that of the resources of the earth’s ecosystem, but also heralded a historical shift in the ultimate aim of environmental conservation in the Global South: from the emergence in the late eighteenth century of state-led environmentalism to prevent capitalism’s slavery-based plantation economies from despoiling the environment in colonial territories (Grove 2017), to the hegemony of corporation-led post-liberal environmentalism’s drive to financialize the exploitation of ecological resources in the Global South. The green economy paradigm seeks to appropriate the earth’s ecosystems as its foundational pillars: ecosystems’ resources (e.g., forests, freshwaters, soils, and plants) and their services (i.e., provisioning, regulating, supporting, and cultural) become its “invisible engines of sustainability” through their integration within the transactional logic of the market economy as tradable commodities (see UNEP 2011; World Bank 2012; Sullivan 2013). As the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report on the green economy affirms, “Valuing ecosystem goods and services… is fundamental to ensuring the sustainability of global economic development” (UNEP 2011: 19). In effect, the green economy perversely and falsely affirms a natural symbiosis between the perpetuity of economic growth and environmental sustainability. Consequently, it has

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consolidated the internal contradiction within, if not fatal incommensurability between, the ends and means of pursuing sustainable development: Utopian ends (sustaining the future viability of societies’ ecological, social, economic, and cultural well-being) vs. utilitarian means (economic growth, free trade, privatization of public institutions and deregulation of corporations). Advocates of the green economy see no incompatibility between perpetual growth and environmental sustainability. Indeed, the UNEP report declares that “the most prevalent myth is that there is an inescapable trade-off between environmental sustainability and economic progress” (2011: 15). This is the consolidating hegemonic epistemic regime that will guide the conservation projects implemented in the Global South in the foreseeable future—at least, until another status quo sustaining conceptual euphemism is coined. In the meanwhile, the political economy and ecology of the prevailing global order will function according to the canonical practices of post-liberal environmentalism: the sanctification of the paradigm of unlimited growth (i.e., “growing cleaner without growing slower”); the financial valorization of the crisis in ecological resource availability as opportunities for profit-making (i.e., “prices should tell the ecological truth”); the transformation of nature into an economic asset (i.e., “selling nature to save it”); the mediation of social and ecological (or human-environment) relations through “payment for ecosystem services”; the protection of the environment through market-based regulatory mechanism with externally prescribed government function; and the management of national environmental commons under the shared sovereignty of international organizations and national states based on asymmetric power relations between donor and recipient countries. These practices are subordinated to the absolute hegemony of post-liberal environmentalism’s value trinity: extractive efficiency, economic profitability, and corporate sovereignty. Moreover, they are evocative of the conditionalities associated with the World Bank and IMF’s structural adjustment regime imposed on the Global South with its requisite policy uniformity and rigidity in its implementation across the planet. Therefore, internationally-funded environmental conservation projects in the Global South can be seen as the implementation of a global environmental adjustment regime based on resource-use austerity measures for communities without adequate substitutes. This regime transformed environmental conservation into an “epistemology of external intervention” (Sachs 1999: 65), which authorized “the transmutation of national

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[environmental] resources into transnational [conservation] interests” (Appadurai 2003: 344). The end result is the obligatory mediation of the ensemble of livelihood practices that support a community’s lifeworld by international organizations’ conservation interests. The quest for a green economy has led to the revision of the initial definition of sustainable development: from ensuring the permanent availability of natural resources for the use of future generations, to one that prioritizes the pervasive financialization of natural processes and ecological resources. This financialization objective is pursued through bio-prospecting for “green sectors” that will provide “significant opportunities for investment, growth, and jobs” in perpetuity (UNEP 2011: 15). This has given rise to the phenomenon of environmental philanthrocapitalism (i.e., saving the planet through the market), in which UN agencies are increasingly playing the role of conservation venture capitalists as they advance seed money in the form of grants to governments in the Global South to initiate experimental projects in converting their ecosystems’ goods and services into tradable commodities. Since the 1992 Rio Conference, the GEF as the official funding agency for the six UN Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs)—biodiversity, climate change, international waters, ozone layer depletion, land degradation, and persistent organic pollutants—has become an important source of environmental venture capital in its mandated quest for “global environmental benefits” (GEBs). The nature and scope of the GEF’s global role and national/local effects are inventoried in Box 6.1. The table is based on my engagement with a diversity of resources: first, GEF’s reports, which contain plenty of revealing information about the problematic nature of its operations. In particular, the 2006 evaluation report on a sample of GEF’s global project portfolio from 1996 to 2004 whose findings confirm many of the practices and the effects identified in Box 6.1 (GEF Evaluation Office 2006). More importantly, it is a partial distillation of my experience in Soqotra observing the implementation of conservation projects and reading the related project documents. This was complemented initially by Brockington and Duffy (2011) and Young (2004), and subsequently by the academic works cited throughout this chapter.

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Box 6.1 GEF: Environmental Governance Leviathan Genealogy: Northern States-Corporate Interests Nexus The GEF was initially established in March 1991 as the funding arm of the World Bank’s environment-related activities. Since the 1992 Earth Summit, it has evolved into the organizational parody of a “Marshall Plan for the Earth” for funding the implementation of the UN environmental conventions in Southern and Transition countries. It has cartelized the major environmental NGOs into a surrogate epistemic community within a disciplinary environmental governance regime encompassing a transnational financial-scientific-political network of regional development banks, UN agencies and 183 states. Its funding covers the “incremental costs” of projects in six “focal areas” organized into 15 “operational programmes” that pursue global objectives primarily, and national ones collaterally, through “enabling activities” that regiment policy-making in recipient countries into conformity with market mechanisms. Its operational logic is tethered to post-liberal environmentalism’s (PLE) epistemic imperialism, which is dissimulated through the benevolent discourse of “protecting” the global commons and “promoting” sustainable development. The sustainable development of the global commons is fated to remain an aspirational platitude as long as the GEF’s economic model is based on PLE’s “mercenary reason”: permanent growth imperative, asymmetric transactional ethos, and extractive logic of profitability. Raison D’e “tre: Institutionalizing Post-Liberal Environmentalism • To execute a global propitiation campaign for the “ecological debt” imposed by the North’s colonial plunder and industrial exploitation of social formations in the Global South through philanthrocapitalist conservation projects, while the North deploys semantic subterfuge to veil its unsustainable economic model (“green economy”). • To entice Global South governments to surrender to PLE’s market permeation strategy through the intensification of commodification of national ecological resources and to accept the disproportionate environmental constraints on their national development as part of the North’s externalization of its environmental costs. • To sustain the unrestricted dominion of corporate interests and the uncontested primacy of unfettered capitalism as the sacrosanct tenets of conservation through the structural centralization, territorial appropriation, discursive annexation, financial cooptation, institutional incorporation, and managerial subordination of recipient countries into a global environmental adjustment regime.

• To co-opt scores of altruistically opportunistic environmentalists into designing conservation projects according to the GEF’s prescriptive protocols that focus exclusively on its focal areas and privilege the delivery of Global Environmental Benefits (GEBs) at the expense of Local Environmental Benefits (LEBs). • To institutionalize PLE’s utilitarian political ecology as a moral imperative to foist the alienating dogma of “entrepreneurial strategies” for “mainstreaming” the livelihood practices associated with noncommoditized nature-based ways of life; thus disrupting the communal solidarity economy. • To manage the differentiated impacts of the global ecological crisis generated by the North’s hegemonic political economy of growth-led production and hyper consumption by adopting the “benevolent mask” of the failed development aid regime and its tactical repertoire: North-South transfer of compensatory capital, modern technology, and management fixes.

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Practices: Regimenting Global Conservation • To configure the environmental sciences into a “nature as capital” conservation framework by recruiting northern environmental scientists as enabling knowledge producers, chartering northern conservation NGOs and UN agencies as framework enforcers and enlisting northern states and corporate lobbies as primary sponsors.

• To pay lip service to sustainable development while its operational directives do not allow direct funding of related activities and prioritize global “green” (e.g., biodiversity) over local “brown” (e.g., livelihoods) objectives, hence the chronic policy-induced project failure to synergize social and ecological concerns.

• To promote an ambiguous greenwash lexicon (sustainability, resilience) legitimated by a repertoire of politically comforting mantras (country-driven, national priorities-based) that are invoked to cloak the fact that local interventions are determined by GEF’s “Instrument,” “Operational Strategy,” and shifting “strategic priorities.”

• To establish the Global North’s epistemic hegemony over science-driven, marketbased, and management-led conservation policies and practices through the GEF’s transcendent knowledge domains, selected operational programmes, prescribed project templates, and preferred intervention modalities.

• To induce governments in the Global South, in the name of a global public good, to surrender sovereignty over environmental resources within their territory to neocolonizing commando units of consultants (i.e., environmental researchers and project administrators) in search of PLE-friendly GEBs.

• To propagate globally the myth about solving environmental problems through deceptive labeling of profit-enabling “green production” and “ethical consumption” schemes, as a means to achieve full spectrum dominance of environmental conservation through “green market” enclosure of nature as capital.

6.1.2

Local Ramifications: Conservation as Transnational Gentrification

The focus on the GEF is partly due to the fact that it is the primary global agency with a universal membership dedicated to environmental conservation, although it is not the only funding source for such activity. More importantly, however, is that the GEF funded the inaugural project on biodiversity conservation in Soqotra in 1996, which established enduring constraints on the vision and practice of conservation on the island (see below). Moreover, its conservation management practices are inexorably embedded within Northern interests that obligatorily entail a powerasymmetric North-South epistemic transfer in the form of an implicit conservation ideology. I call this ideology “Trojan environmentalism,” which refers to a situation in which the territorial compass, the environmental assets or ecological endowments, and the spatial configuration of a social formation are turned over to the stewardship of international agencies. This leads to the subsumption of every societal sector

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under either the elective or binding jurisdiction of a global regulatory framework with its prescriptive policy regime. The end result is the obligatory mediation, if not determination, of local/national policy options and institutional structures by the priorities and preferences of international institutions. Furthermore, using the words of MacDonald (2005: 260), Trojan environmentalism “repositions community resources within a new system of meaning, alters the material realities of social relations within the community, modifies human-ecological interactions” under the aegis of transnational institutions of conservation (UN, WWF, IUCN, GEF, UNEP, UNDP, etc.). Trojan environmentalism is conceived as an ideological effect of the bio-prospecting imperative of post-liberal environmentalism, and ecological gentrification is considered Trojan environmentalism’s implementation effect in Soqotra. However, ecological gentrification is usually applied as an analytical framework to the study of urban contexts that emphasizes the displacement of working class or racial minority residents by upper-middle-class ones in urban centers under the banner of ecological modernization of cities. This is captured in the following definition: “the implementation of an environmental planning agenda related to public green spaces that leads to the displacement or exclusion of the most economically vulnerable human population … while espousing an environmental ethic” (Dooling 2009: 621). In contrast to the prevailing use of ecological gentrification, I use it in elucidating the nature of a transnational conservation strategy animated by the edicts of post-liberal environmentalism, which is being implemented by global agencies and their retinue of itinerant consultants in the context of an island community whose demographic distribution is overwhelmingly rural. Accordingly, I define it in terms of its actual practices and unintended effects: (a) the substitution of the state as local environmental “governance provider” and policy broker over communal environmental resource use by a transnational managerial class of ecocrats; (b) the exclusion or displacement of marginalized residents of a targeted ecological space; (c) the conservation of the excluded space for the recreational and research use of outsiders; (d) the invocation of sustainable development as an environmental conservation ethic that rationalizes the demographic exclusion of locals and the managerial intrusion of foreign environmentalists; (e) the commodification of environmental assets (e.g., scenic vistas, wilderness areas) through ecotourism as an economic development strategy that caters to the recreational whims of foreign visitors; (f) the relegation of indigenous knowledge and customary practices in

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favor of exogenous knowledge production templates; (g) the transformation of environmental conservationists into transnational agents of gentrification as they deploy all of the means of conservation (e.g., PAs, ICDPs, zoning ordinances, etc.) into enabling tools for the territorial displacement of native dwellers from their homestead; and (h) ultimately the consecration of the entire Soqotra Archipelago as a territorial set-aside as Yemen’s contribution to the GEF’s ledger of global environmental benefits and to the disadvantage of Soqotrans’ local environmental benefits. In Soqotra, the critical markers of ecological gentrification are (i) the fact that the Government of Yemen has formally ceded its managerial sovereignty over Soqotra’s environment to international institutions; and (ii) that 98.6% of Soqotra Island’s total land mass is to be preserved as a protected area. Moreover, the island is segmented into ecotouristic enclaves and biotic sanctuaries in which the original human inhabitants are to be excluded while tourists on their reverential pilgrimage to nature and environmentalists on their research expeditions are welcomed. This is the external supervision covenant that the Yemeni government entered into in 1996 when it belatedly ratified the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and opportunistically consigned the entirety of the Soqotra Archipelago as Yemen’s first protected area under GEF-UN management. In light of the UN central role not only in global environmental governance and in promoting the emerging green economy paradigm, but more importantly in inaugurating Soqotra’s conservation experiment, the analytical focus here is on the communal ramifications of UN agencies’ local conservation policies and practices informed by post-liberal environmentalism’s tenets (as already described above). Accordingly, in the sections below, I discuss the multiple ramifications of Soqotra’s incorporation into a UN-sponsored Trojan environmentalism: (i) the Yemeni government’s motivation, the UN agencies’ mode of operation and the conflicting interests of stakeholders in making Soqotra into a protected area and their lasting consequences; (ii) the arbitrary ascription of agency to Soqotrans, as a prelude to their incorporation into imported managerial templates; (iii) the anatomy of the Conservation Zoning Plan (ZP) and its virtual compartmentalization of the island’s landscape into a series of discreet managerial domains; (iv) the historical contextualization of the human-environment nexus in Soqotra, which was ignored by the island’s eco-conservers, to illustrate the environmental impact of government policies; and (v) I conclude by outlining the remedial steps that would recalibrate conservation policy in Soqotra.

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6.2 Making Yemen’s First Protected Area: Soqotra’s Environmental Enclosure Soqotra is a dilemma-inducing economic case, as the government’s search for an economically viable strategy that could put the island on a locally generated sustainable development path remained elusive. In fact, the subject has preoccupied governmental officials responsible for deciding the island’s economic fate. As the Minister of Planning and International Cooperation in the early 2000s explained: “Every one of my predecessors entertained a different idea about what to do with the island: From offshore international casino for the rich in the Gulf to a mass tourism destination.” His immediate predecessor opted for the least lucrative path of biodiversity conservation and ecotourism as a second best choice arrived at by default. Given the lack of local natural resources that could attract foreign direct investments, the government sought to share the burden of finding an optimal economic strategy for Soqotra with the assistance of the United Nations. This was officialized with the government’s ratification of the CBD in February 1996. This gesture made Yemen eligible for funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) as the official funding agency for the CBD. Prior to the signing of the CBD, the Yemeni government adopted the country’s first National Environmental Action Plan, and issued Cabinet Decree No. 4 in January 1996 to designate Soqotra a special natural area in need of urgent protection that simultaneously called for international assistance to formulate a master plan for the development of the Soqotra Archipelago. In this section, I highlight how (a) this default strategy was adopted and the enduring ambivalence it imparted to the state actions in Soqotra; (b) the central government culture of decision-making and the UN agencies’ thematic and procedural exigencies have bequeathed a permanent set of structural impediments in the implementation of Soqotra’s experiment with conservation and development; and (c) the strategy’s three main stakeholders never cohered into shared expectations. 6.2.1

Conflicting Motivations: Chronic State Ambivalence

The Government of Yemen betrayed an opportunistic disposition in its designation of Soqotra as an environmental conservation enclosure. As they sought to monetize Soqotra’s ecological mystique, which was already the object of speculation since the fourth century BCE as a cornucopia

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of aromatic flora and fabulous fauna and as the possible location of the Garden of Eden (Elie 2006a). In the twentieth century, it was the travelling discourse of “sustainable development” and the global interest in biodiversity conservation, which provided the opportunity the Yemeni state was looking for. The decision to adopt the environmental conservation strategy occurred soon after the failed mineral prospecting venture by the Meneren Corporation, which was hired by the Deputy Prime Minister/Minister of Planning during the mid-1990s. This decision was an important catalyst to the making of Soqotra into a conservation outpost under UN management. Accordingly, a brief background on this company is apropos: This US-based firm is an “international project development and project management company” according to its selfpresentation on its website (www.meneren.com). There is no reference to mineral prospecting in its portfolio, thus it is not clear how and why it was selected. This information is based on my knowledge as the responsible officer at the UNDP office in Yemen (1996–2000), who facilitated the payment for its prospecting services, post facto, based on a special request from the Government of Yemen, and not from direct hiring by the UNDP. The result of the mineral prospecting work has remained the confidential property of the Yemeni Government. Prior to paying the $70,000 bill for their services (mostly travel expenses to Yemen and Soqotra for their teams of prospectors) the UNDP Resident Representative was allowed to peruse the files in the office of the Minister of Planning. In view of the non-availability of an economy based on mineral extraction, or carbon rent from oil exploration and from the leasing of the island as a military base to foreign powers with geo-strategic interest in the region (frequently rumored in the local press), the Yemeni government resigned itself to the GEF-UN conservation experiment as a consolation option with its comparatively paltry sums from external funding for conservation projects and incidental revenues from ecotourism. However, the Yemeni state did not abandoned its search for more remunerative alternative strategies that would emulate the economic model of the United Arab Emirates as a mass tourism destination, or Qatar as a military base for the USA. In fact, such aspiration continued to inform the state’s actions in Soqotra, as was evident in the local airport with one of the longest runways (3000 m) that exceeds the requirement of landing civilian airplanes with tourists, the environmentally-unfriendly roads building project that was partly justified on the ease of military

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convoy movement and in the rumored purchase of coastal lands by the former President’s relatives for future luxury hotels. These activities were initiated in the aftermath of the government’s declaration of Soqotra as a biodiversity reserve. As the subsequent international interest in Soqotra catalyzed the state and its associated crony capitalists’ quest for rentseeking opportunities on the island. This explains why the state remained a passive enabler of the conservation strategy as it opportunistically adopted and perfunctorily supported it through an expedient mode of environmental policy-making—issuing decrees from the central government—in which the local government was never an active participant; therefore, such decrees were haphazardly and temporarily enforced. 6.2.2

Fateful Decisions: Malignant Managerial Synergies

The government’s opportunistic conscription of Soqotra into this global conservation regime was pursued through an expeditious mobilization of central government institutions that led to a flurry of decisions. The decisions that were made during the inaugural year of 1996 extended the governance culture of the mainland to Soqotra and laid the foundation for a path-dependent trajectory that engendered malignant synergies in the operational modality of local institutions and in the management practices of conservation projects. These malignant synergies are briefly illustrated below. The first is the subordination of Soqotra’s local government political sovereignty over the communal commons to the state politics of external supervision and the resulting administrative hegemony of the central government. This was initiated by the Presidential decree of January 1996 that established the High Committee for the Development of Soqotra (HCDS) encompassing five ministries under the chairmanship of the Minister of Planning & Development. A subsequent Presidential decree in September designated the Environmental Protection Council (EPC) that was established in 1991, as the Secretariat of the HCDS. The latter was replaced by the EPC, which was renamed in 2005 the Environment Protection Authority (EPA). These initial decrees, in effect, established the “governance by decree syndrome.” This decision-making modality was an efficient means of launching the strategy in the short-term but not as a long-term management culture. As it established (a) a lasting pattern of top-down decision-making and (b) a culture of local environmental

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governance through mainland-issued decrees. Henceforth, the management of Soqotra’s conservation was based on negotiations between UN agencies’ staff and central government ministers in Sana‘a’, while Soqotra’s local government and population were consulted subsequently for approval of decisions already taken. The exclusive prerogative of the mainland government over environmental policy-making in Soqotra has excluded the Local Council (LC) from the management of the communal environmental commons. As a result, the LC has never issued any environmental decree, as its legislative role in environmental matters was supplanted by the local branch of the EPA, which became the exclusive provider of local environmental governance autonomous from local government. Consequently, conservation projects never developed a broad supportive constituency both within the local administration or the general public, beyond the EPA staff and GEF-UN projects’ employees. The second is the marginalization of the local population’s socioeconomic preferences by the primacy of funding agency’s (a) thematic priorities in the selection of project activities and (b) procedural strictures against funding local development. In the case of GEF’s thematic priorities, project design obligatorily reflects the evolving “strategic priorities” that are identified at each of GEF’s funding replenishment cycle, which takes place every four years. Also, the project document must refer to its pertinent “operational programmes” and employ their lexicon in identifying project titles, components, objectives, and activities. Indeed, project formulation is a prescriptive exercise in institutionally mandated conceptual plagiarism: that is, consultants formulating GEF project documents are constrained to borrow the ideas and key concepts in GEF policy documents. The principal aim is to ensure a project’s “GEFability” and not its relevance to the local population. This is exemplified in the first project funded by GEF in Soqotra, as part of the title is an oft-used phrase in the CBD: “conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity” of Soqotra Archipelago. In addition, local environmental problems tend to reflect the GEF’s focal areas and operational programmes and their solution is invariably ascribed an imported management fix (see Chapter 7 for details). In the case of the procedural strictures, GEF financing (as specified in Appendix D of the GEF’s Instrument) is limited to covering exclusively the costs of operations that deliver global environmental benefits (GEBs). Therefore, projects must rely on other donors’ financing of components

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that promote local environmental and development benefits. This requirement led to the relegation of development as an incidental objective, if not an inconvenient appendage, to the core tasks of environmental protection. The fatal consequence is the permanent prioritization of conservation over development. This is exactly what happened in Soqotra as the first biodiversity conservation project had a five million dollar budget, while a totally unrelated project entitled “Basic Needs Assistance for the People of Soqotra” was misleadingly referred to as the supporting development component of the biodiversity project. Its budget was a mere $750,000 (from which the $70,000 were taken to pay for the Minister of Planning’s mineral prospecting venture), which established a permanent pattern of unequal resource allocation between Soqotra’s environmental conservation and its residents’ development aspiration. This is a widely use subterfuge in GEF projects globally, as an evaluation report noted: “projects referred to policy linkages to poverty reduction plans. However, it was noted that not all of these projects then targeted the poor actively through project interventions” (GEF Evaluation Office 2006: 62). A conservation strategy, which is driven by state-dominated and community-excluded environmental policy-making and is placed under international management that prioritizes global environmental benefits, and which is further regimented by its funding agencies’ programme priorities and organizational prerogatives, will neither achieved its local conservation nor development goals, as Soqotra’s case exemplifies. 6.2.3

Divergent Expectations: Incompatible Stakeholders

In offering the entire Archipelago as an internationally supervised protected area, the Government of Yemen consigned Soqotra to an environmental adjustment regime in which the conservation strategy’s goals did not equally benefit the three main stakeholders given their divergent expectations. The goals of this strategy are to establish the following: (1) a biodiversity reserve embodying existential values to be preserved as a global commons; (2) the sustainable use of biodiversity through the small-scale commercialization of selective local natural resources (aloes, and tree-bearing resins) as an income-generating livelihood; (3) an international scientific research station and field school for researchers and students; (4) a niche destination for ecotourism as a conservation-sustaining funding stream; and (5) ultimately a replicable

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model of sustainable development that straddles environmental protection and economic development, and that nurtures a symbiosis between cultural tradition and social modernity. These five goals are correlated to their primary beneficiaries among the three stakeholders: international consultants, the Yemeni mainland government, and indigenous Soqotrans. • First, the border-crossing consultants, who constitute Soqotra’s epistemic community of experts: They conduct the environmental surveys that certify Soqotra’s eligibility as a territory of high value endemism; they write the project documents and manage the projects’ implementation; and they act as the self-appointed ombudsmen on behalf of the UN Multilateral Environmental Agreements and monitor Soqotra’s adherence to its responsibilities as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. They perceive the environment primarily as a source of existential values to be preserved. For them environmental conservation and development constitute two mutually exclusive alternatives. • Second, the national government authorities, who relish the national prestige resulting from the formal recognition of international organizations accorded to Soqotra, and who opportunistically showcase the island as a unique ecological and cultural sub-national community. However, they would prefer to see the island’s environmental assets as resources to be exploited through resort construction and greater tourist traffic. Their main preoccupation seems to be to generate external revenues in order to minimize the state’s financial obligations toward the island. • Third, the Soqotrans who have the most at stake, as residents of the island. They situate themselves somewhere in-between the development-wary conservers of the international community, and the rent-seeking developers among the state’s crony capitalist clients. They welcome the international attention to the island’s environment, but insist that it should not be at their expense. They aspire to a decent existence that entails their full integration into modernity, which enables them to envision a better future. They reject any conservation strategy that reconstitutes their homeland into an imaginary nineteenth century ecologically pristine idyllic abode. Ultimately, they hope to avoid undue external interference, which could

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lead to the loss of their communal stewardship over the island’s environmental assets and to their socio-cultural marginalization through population invasion whether from tourists or mainlanders. The incompatibility between these three stakeholders is due to the nature of the goals identified above, which entail a series of boutique activities for a niche clientele and thus cannot accommodate the conflicting expectations of all stakeholders fairly, thereby generating winners and losers that I briefly categorize as follows: In the case of the Soqotrans, only a relatively small segment of the local population is targeted: primarily those located next to the protected areas (goal 2), while the modern economic aspiration of urban youths (as tourists guides) is incidentally addressed (goal 4) and the pastoralists’ concerns are not even considered due to the “graze phobia” of environmentalists. As to the national government, its expectations are largely neglected as the legitimate economic and fiscal interests of the state are not taken into account, as the current conservation strategy does not contribute to diminishing its expenditures (e.g., the wage bill) or to raising its revenues from the island and thus none of the goals applies. Finally, the globe-trotting ecoconservers are the overwhelming winners as the goals primarily cater to their aspirations as environmental researchers, conservation agencies staff/consultants, and ecotourists (goals: 1, 3, 4, and 5). The case of Soqotra belies the delusional faith of conservationists in the availability of “win-win solutions” between indigenous peoples’ economic aspirations, government’s fiscal needs and conservationists’ concerns about biodiversity (Christensen 2004).

6.3 Premature Environmental Adjustment Regime: Establishing a Conservation Outpost Soqotra’s enclosure within a transnational conservation management regime was the result of a state-enabled and internationally-led process inaugurated through the “production of a conservation spectacle” (Brockington and Duffy 2011). The aim of this spectacle was to generate a “frenzied alarmism” to “save Soqotra” as a tactical means of advancing international jurisdictional claim over its territorial domain, and to incorporate it as an externally managed dominion. This entailed the performance by international conservation NGOs in association with UN

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agencies of the following functions: (a) the preparatory and/or confirmatory branding through providing an “environmental stamp of approval” of a place targeted for annexation into the ever expanding global ledger of protected areas; (b) the launching of a publicity campaign that seeks to dramatize the conservation worthiness of the targeted place through the evocation of a “relentlessly positive rhetoric” about it as a means of increasing its symbolic value as a candidate for appropriation as a conservation enclosure; (c) the conduct of a parallel campaign that deploys a “heuristics of fear” through conjuring “urgent problems in desperate need of the timely solutions” that only external environmental agencies can provide; (d) the scientific rationalization and policy authorization to identify the global significance, categorize the threatened status, and recommend the enclosure, of local ecological zones with their endemic faunal and floral species; (e) the inventory of the status of local fauna and flora that more often than not are assessed as being afflicted with some degree of endangerment; (f) the selection of local areas to be protected on the basis of external criteria not shared by local residents; and (g) most importantly, the diagnosis of local environmental problems that not only invariably reflect the priorities of the sponsoring agency, but also systematically exaggerate the actual state of endangerment of the local environment. These tactics have led to the premature imposition of a virtual environmental adjustment regime on Soqotra. The performance of the above functions in Soqotra, prior to and especially since 1996, has confirmed its endowment with a high percentage of floral and faunal endemism that ranked it at the top among the world’s oceanic islands that are distinguished by their rich biodiversity. This cemented Soqotra’s stature as a worthy conscript of the global conservation enclosure movement and encouraged the perception of its landmass as valuable ecological capital in need of external ministration. Soqotra has since been branded, hyperbolically, the “Galapagos of the Indian Ocean” and has garnered an impressive list of accolades, which include the following: WWF has included it on its list of the Globe 200 Ecoregions; IUCN considered it as an important center of endemism; Birdlife International has recognized 22 Important Bird Areas on the island; Conservation International has included it in the global network of “Biodiversity Hotspots”; and UNESCO designated it a Man and the Biosphere Reserve (MAB) in recognition of the island’s well established natural equilibrium between people and environment, and subsequently it was included as part of the world’s network of biodiversity

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reserves. Belonging to this network entails, according to the certificate officializing Soqotra’s membership status, the following responsibilities: “conserving biological diversity, promoting research and monitoring as well as seeking to provide models of sustainable development in the service of humankind.” And finally in July 2008 the crowning accolade was conferred on Soqotra when UNESCO selected it as a Natural World Heritage Site. Indeed, environmental conservation in Soqotra is an experiment imagined by “green Orientalists” consultants at UN agencies (GEF, UNEP, UNDP and their bilateral funders) who were imbued with a romantic vision of Soqotra as “a modernity-free cultural reserve to be fenced off and kept pure for future use” (Lohmann 1993). They promised Soqotrans “biodiversity conservation and its sustainable use” as their pathway to development through the appropriation and demarcation of their communal homeland into transnationally regulated zones under imported managerial and commercial schemes. In the three sub-sections below, I show how this premature environmental adjustment regime imagined by external actors animated by locally dissonant environmental sensibilities and values was initially pursued through (a) the selective conscription of local community members and the reconstitution of their agency as stewards of nature on behalf of an externally conceived vision of their homeland; (b) the “generification” of Soqotrans’ understandings of their island’s environmental problems and the solutions to them through their discursive annexation into imported knowledge production templates; and (c) the establishment of an environmental policy support network in the form of an international NGO, the Friends of Soqotra (FoS), which supplies knowledge resources and consultancies that promote the GEF-UN conservation experiment in Soqotra. 6.3.1

Invented Ecological Agents: Pastoralists as Indigenous Conservationists

With the official designation of Soqotra as a special, natural area in urgent need of protection in 1996, a new narrative was needed to mark the island’s discursive and territorial incorporation into the UN virtual universe of environmental conservation, and to herald Soqotra’s crossing into an emergent ecotopia through the redemptive discourse of sustainable development. The production of this new conservation spectacle necessitated the discursive repackaging of Soqotrans. This entailed the

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symbolic ascription of environmental agency to Soqotrans who could be conscripted as eco-guards of their island’s “pristine” environment on behalf of international agencies’ conservation interests. The ultimate aim, paraphrasing Lohmann (1995), was to recruit the potential agents as subcontractors to build Soqotra as an imagined ecocratic social order, and “to justify the need for the benevolent influence of Western administration” over this social order. This led to the selective conscription of Soqotrans according to their topographical habitat and the presumed nature of their environmental agency. 6.3.1.1

Recruiting Sub-Contractors: Practitioners of Sustainable Livelihoods This self-serving exercise in ascribing identity and attributing agency to Soqotrans was endowed with a millennia old pedigree. The modern frame of reference of this agency ascription exercise, however, was established with the first scientific expedition in 1834, which conducted a wideranging empirical survey of Soqotra. It was undertaken by James Wellsted, a Lieutenant in the British Indian Army, who was commissioned by the East India Company. The purpose of his mission was to determine, among other topics, whether there was a harbor that could be used as a coaling station and to prospect for minerals (see the mission’s terms of reference in Haines et al. 1993: Vol. 1: 618; Elie 2006: 147–148). Wellsted’s mission was expected to provide the rationale for colonization; instead, his report dashed the hopes of the East India Company for establishing a coaling depot, or for undertaking any other commercially viable activity. Subsequently, Soqotra’s purpose was demoted from potential extractive colony to that of field laboratory for the scientific investigation of the human–nature dialectic in the nineteenth century, which is now its permanent legacy. Indeed, the published account of the mission (Wellsted 1835) led to the first comprehensive botanical survey of Soqotra. One observer confirms this: “as a result of their preliminary reports on matters of extraordinary interest to science, the British Association [for the Advancement of Science] and The Royal [Geographical] Society dispatched Professor Isaac Bayley Balfour to carry out botanical investigations there in 1880” (Botting 1958b: 200).1 Beyond botanical research, Balfour and his team engaged in the ethnological exploration of the island’s population. This led to a hierarchical ranking of the social groups on the island in terms of their relative interest to science. As a result, they prioritized “The inhabitants of the hills, ‘Bedouins,’ as they

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are called are very different people. They are regarded as the aborigines of the island, the true Socotrans, and alone possess any great interest ethnologically” (1888: xxviii). Wellsted, before him, had categorized the inhabitants into two groups: “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 on the coasts who are a “mongrel race” (1835: 206–207). This focus on the “Bedouins” was to crystallize into a romance with this social category and to engender the allegory of the pastoral as a lasting refrain in the representation of Soqotrans (see Vol. 1: Chapter 4). The “rediscovery” of Soqotra at the dawn of the twenty-first century rekindled this Bedouin-philia through fetishizing the noble simplicity of the pastoralists’ life-style and of its benign environmental impact and thus their promotion as the island’s ecological noble savages. Back in the 1880s, Balfour lamented the Bedouins’ deplorable absence of civilization and their degenerated human agency. In the 1990s, this lament was replaced by praise for their exemplary environmental stewardship and for their contribution toward preserving the ecological heritage of humankind. This assumption is axiomatically formulated as follows: “For hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, the people of Soqotra [i.e., Bedouins] have lived with and used the biological resources in a sustainable manner, even long before the world had invented the word ‘sustainability’” (Yucer 1998: 9). 6.3.1.2 Alarmist Diagnostics: Crisis Mongers The virtuous ethos of these exemplary practitioners of sustainable living was not seen as benign by all observers. As environmentalists diverged over two contentious issues: The first is the endemic tendency among conservationists to invoke the “heuristics of fear” through exaggerated claims about biodiversity loss in the absence of field assessment. The second is the reflexive “graze phobia” of most environmentalists, who consider livestock to be an anthropogenic nuisance that poses a threat to the island’s biodiversity through land degradation from “over grazing” (see Vol. 1: Chapter 5). Both issues are invoked simultaneously: one as inexorable effect (biodiversity loss), the other as primary cause (livestock). And both are standard alibis in the repertoire of conservation science that have turned its practitioners into a class of premature “professional

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grievers” for planet Earth and made them into reflexive Cassandras prophesizing impending ecological crises everywhere (Redford and Sanjayan 2003; Chapter 7 below). This is briefly illustrated in the discussion below. From 1967 until the mid-1980s, Soqotra was relatively inaccessible due to the political restrictions imposed on it by the Marxist regime in South Yemen. As a result, empirically based knowledge of the status of Soqotra’s biodiversity could not be updated. However, the last botanical surveys conducted in 1967 left the impression that “the vegetation had been ‘decimated by unrestrained cutting of trees and the vast, uncontrolled flocks of goats which were being allowed to roam freely over the island’” (Miller and Bazara’a 1998: 16). This “impression” mutated into a conviction that allowed some international conservation organizations to make alarmist prognostications. For example, Lucas and Synge, the compilers of the 1978 edition of the IUCN Red Plant Data Book declared, on the basis of outdated surveys, that “the flora of Soqotra is critically threatened … This drastic situation is the result of excessive grazing by excessive numbers of introduced livestock” (quoted in Miller et al. 2003: 75, emphasis added). In 1983, Koopowitz and Kaye in their book, Plant Extinction: A Global Crisis, regurgitate the above claim with greater apocalyptic resonance, again without the benefit of an actual field assessment: Many of the islands plants are now listed in the Red Data Book… 85 species are on the verge of extinction. In most cases poor husbandry is responsible. The natives have let grazing animals roam uncontrolled. There is no conservation effort made on the island and most if not all of these species will be lost. (Koopowitz and Kaye 1983: 61–62, emphasis added)

This apocalyptic eco-speak exemplifies conservationists’ abusive invocation of the precautionary principle: If the evidence is lacking, assume the worst case scenario. However, in situ botanical surveys conducted from the late 1980s onwards offered corrective assessments about the state of Soqotra’s environment. The island botanist Quentin Crook, who was among the first to survey Soqotra in the 1980s, made the following observation: “I was staggered to come across a place which was in all probability substantially the same now as 1000 years ago” (quoted in Government of Yemen 2006: 39). He credits “The Socotran bedouin, although grazing their introduced cattle and goats, have been the guardians, users and interpreters of

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this diversity for the last two millennia.” As a result, he affirmed: “Socotra is remarkable for the comparative benevolence of the human interaction with its ecosystems” (Cronk 1997: 480, 478). This is confirmed by the following synopsis of Soqotra’s conservation status: “Of the 281 species and sub-species taxa believed to be endemic to the archipelago breaks down as follows: extinct zero; endangered 35; vulnerable 18; rare 59; of indeterminate status 29; insufficiently known 113; and not-threatened 81” (Miller and Bazara’a 1998: 15). Another corrective assessment worth noting is by a two-member team, an ethnographer-linguist and ethnobotanist, and a botanical taxonomist who were dispatched in 1989 by two leading international conservation organizations, namely the World Wide Fund for Nature and the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute, to conduct a preliminary biodiversity field assessment. Their 1990 assessment report noted: Although some areas show signs of over-exploitation … the overall impression was one of a balance between man, livestock and the natural vegetation. Traditional land-use management practices are still adhered to and play a vital role in protecting against the over-exploitation of natural resources and the diminution of biodiversity”. (Miller et al. 2003: 75)

These corrective assessments had the following entailments: First, they deflated the hyperbolic assertions of the above-cited virtual environmental assessors while taking them to task for scapegoating the Soqotran herders and their livestock for an imagined biodiversity loss. Second, they legitimated an alternative assumption about the pastoralists as conscientious environmental conservationists as exemplified in their environmentally benign, and thus biodiversity-preserving, land-use management practices. Third, they rejected the reflexive “graze phobia” shared by most environmentalists. There is, however, a caveat: The subsistence practices of Soqotran pastoralists were most probably aimed at consumption optimization instead of environmental resource or habitat conservation. Moreover, these livelihood practices were adapted to a small population, with low technological capacity, and very limited consumption needs. Nonetheless, these practices were assumed by these observers to represent an innate disposition that was not only operational in the past but also viable in the present and future regardless of the changing context. What was initially a reasonable corrective to unsubstantiated assertions about “excessive grazing” and the natives’ “poor husbandry” skills gradually crystallized into

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a professional mantra. This mantra—i.e., Soqotran pastoralists as innate eco-conservationists—became the axiomatic assumption, which underpinned the formulation of environmental and development management plans for Soqotra with adverse consequences for the social and economic emancipation of these pastoralists (see below). In sum, while there was unanimity bout the nature of the local agency to be promoted (pastoralists as conservationists, preferably without their herds), there was no such unanimity regarding the conservation ethos that should guide the implementation of Soqotra’s conservation experiment. Indeed, there emerged, at least two, opposing visions based on the divergent environmental sensibilities among some of the international actors: • Arcadian ethos: Advocates a reverential ethic toward nature. Its vision of conservation is animated by a research-oriented impulse, which prefers to anchor Soqotra’s future into its past through the prioritization of the agency of the traditional pastoralist as ecoconservationist. This entails the selective demarcation of the island’s landscape into experimental research plots in order to monitor the fate of its biodiversity without interfering with the locals’ livelihood (Miller and Morris 2000). • Imperialist ethos: Promotes total control of the environment through the use of simplifying categories to incorporate the organic complexity of local human-environment relations into imported instrumentalizing templates (see below). The first phase of the GEF biodiversity project institutionalized this ethic through the formulation and approval of the UN-sponsored “Conservation Zoning Plan of Socotra Islands” (ZP) through Presidential Decree No. 275 of September 2000 (see Sect. 6.4), which was its major output. The end result was the virtual appropriation of Soqotra’s entire territorial domain into protected areas under UN supervision. These two orientations regarding the scope and scale of conservation were integrated, more by default than by design, into the ZP in the following manner: The Arcadian ethos became the ideal societal vision for Soqotra and was adopted by default as its development model (see below), while the imperialist ethos guided the formulation of a comprehensive ZP with a totalizing scope. This resulted in a situation described

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as “the ecological imperative’s ambiguity”: Once nature is incorporated within the administrative apparatus of power (the UN agencies in Soqotra’s case), “it becomes a pretext and a means for tightening their grip on daily life and the social environment” (Gorz 1993: 57). 6.3.2

Imported Knowledge Templates: Epistemic Generification

“Will the backbone of Soqotra’s fragile ecosystem break under the weight of a sudden invasion of twentieth century technology and consumerism?” (Dumont 1998: 11). This was not merely a rhetorical question, but a diagnosis of the potential environmental threat to be prevented. Moreover, it signaled a significant shift in identifying the source of environmental threats to the island’s biodiversity: from being within the island and among the Soqotran pastoralists and their herds during the pre-1990s, to coming from the outside in the form of externally induced development and cultural change in the post-1990s. The GEFfunded project—“Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity of Socotra Archipelago” (1997–2001)—that launched Soqotra’s conservation experiment was initially designed to justify the need for biodiversity conservation. Accordingly, assessments of threats reflected the funding agency’s programmatic priorities as well as the professional interests of its international consultants who formulated and managed the conservation experiment. Furthermore, the determining principle in assessing threats is that they only need to be potential, not actual threats. Indeed, the CBD advised that “lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to avoid or minimize such a threat.” Therefore, the inaugural project document identified a number of threats to terrestrial and marine biodiversity, which were mostly anticipated: cutting and over-collection of trees, overgrazing, over-exploitation of marine resources, excessive coastal development, and transmigration between mainland and the island and population pressure (see GEF-UNDP 1997: 8–11). 6.3.2.1 Policy Narrative: Rationalizing Annexation Since the inauguration of Soqotra’s conservation experiment, it has been saddled with the chronic absence of systematically conducted environmental assessments of the actual impact of the local population’ socioeconomic activities: such as herding practices, pastoral herds’ composition and distribution around the island, natural resource use, the islanders’

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demographic distribution, and their internal migration patterns. Instead, it is the GEF’s ever evolving strategic priorities that have determined the nature of local threats. Accordingly, the threats in Soqotra have expanded into the following: (i) immigration from the mainland; (ii) uncontrolled infrastructure development; (iii) poor national and local governance due to inadequate policy frameworks and weak coordination; (iv) desertification, soil erosion, and land degradation; (v) loss of traditional land management practices; (vi) over-use of natural resources (e.g., over-fishing and over grazing); and (vii) invasive alien species. These threats are listed in the inaugural project’s fifth and latest incarnation, which was formulated in 2014. Indeed, the latest GEF-funded and UNEP-implemented project in Soqotra—Support to the Integrated Programme for the Conservation and Sustainable Development of the Socotra Archipelago—consolidates the policy narrative of external annexation, as it promises to experiment with all of the green economy-related initiatives (see Chapter 7: phase 5). Moreover, it acknowledges that substantive evidence is still not available for these threats after twenty years of conservation activities. Nevertheless, it asserts that these factors are “jeopardizing the basis for the nature-based sustainable economic development and the very future of the archipelago and its people” (GEF-UNEP 2014: 2). This persistent disposition to make unsubstantiated claims betrays their agents’ affliction with the “virtualism syndrome”: They are trapped within “a social process by which people [or organizations] who are guided by a vision of the world act to try to shape that world to bring it into conformity with their vision” (Carrier and West 2009: 7). This leads to the imposition on the targeted “world” of “virtualizing projects,” which entail the identification of social and natural aspects of local communities as well as the reshaping of their institutional structures and livelihood practices so that they may conform to the virtual reality defined by Western imaginings of what are desirable models of society and nature (West and Carrier 2004: 485). Soqotra, since 1996, is under the tutelage of a succession of phases of one such virtualizing project. This project has sustained a situation in which the values and assumptions that underlie the international agencies’ involvement and their perception of the population needs, have little in common with the aspirations of local communities. The design of this project relied almost exclusively on a process of “epistemic generification”: that is, fitting a community into imported conceptual categories and whose life-world is re-oriented toward externally

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imagined ends. Moreover, its implementation employed template mechanisms, which produce “self-serving realities” on the ground through the use of “pre-constructed frameworks which are used to simplify and control complex environments” as a means of intervening into them. These templates—e.g., policy narratives, project documents, environmental conservation maps, and development management plans—are used to structure options, define relevant data, and rule out alternatives. These purposes are not necessarily motivated by political design with the intent to dominate, but are driven primarily by a practical need to simplify a complex reality in order to justify an entry point and a course of action (cf. Cooper and Packard 1997: 24). Indeed, this entails a process of “decomplexification” through “simplifying people’s social practices and beliefs so that they fit within certain policy structures” (West et al. 2006: 261). The policy narrative that emerged from this contrived diagnosis about impending environmental threats and the need for international managerial ministration was a preemptive environmental conservation strategy with a socio-culturally preservationist ethos as a morality tale that implicitly evokes the discredited “tragedy of the commons” thesis with a streak of Malthusian phobia (see Hardin 1968; Cox 1985; Berkes et al. 1990): Let us prevent a tragedy of the Soqotran commons, which is under threat due its open access to “unscrupulous international developers” and uncontrolled mainland-island transmigration letting in economic interlopers and purveyors of a consumer culture with its communally destabilizing value configuration (i.e., pecuniary motivation, individualistic ethos, and consumption driven). These “invasive human species” will throw out of kilter the established harmony between population, traditional economy and the local ecosystem. Indeed, the Zoning Plan—which became the law of the land and subordinated every aspect of life on the island to its strictures, at least in principle—stipulates in article 8 that: “Travel to and from the Socotra islands should be regulated according to the capacity of these islands.” Preventing this “tragedy” was to be pursued through the preservation of the island as a pastoral idyll and a pristine environmental domain, by reclaiming its idealized communal past and rehabilitating the natural resources management “practices of eons” and the traditional livelihood they afforded. Accordingly, this policy narrative logically leads to the adoption of a “sustainable underdevelopment” strategy for Soqotra (see Chapter 7). Indeed, the protagonists of this strategy warn against the pursuit of a modern development path: “The

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benefits of development and new industries come at the cost of losing much of its natural and cultural heritage and consequent loss of identity” (Van Damme and Banfield 2011: 78). Ultimately, the outcome of this policy narrative is to reclaim and sustain the “conserving community” of the imagined past as a means of preventing the emergence of the “consumer community” with its potentially negative ecological effects. This narrative entailed the perpetuation of a “frugal society” through the promotion of a “green neo-asceticism” inspired by a misanthropic eco-centrism. In effect, this policy narrative seeks to perpetuate the ecological self-restraint imposed on Soqotrans by recurring seasonal scarcities during the Sultanate, which was known as “hungry times” they endured under their neglectful political overlords. It is a period that is seared into the memory of the generation of Soqotrans born before the 1980s, and that continues to shadow the daily lives of those who dwell in the hinterland. This “frugal society” is a social situation from which all islanders fervently aspire to be fully emancipated. However, the conservation experiment as initially conceived and implemented for nearly two decades failed to contribute to this aspiration. In the two sub-sections below I discuss the enabling factors in the implementation of this policy narrative and their communal effects: (a) the UNCBD, which is the justificatory global framework that prescribed the objectives of Soqotra’s conservation projects; and (b) the fraught consultation process that resulted in the formulation of the Zoning Plan, which is the framework document for all present and future conservation and development activities in Soqotra. 6.3.2.2 The CBD: From Local to Global Commons The mandate of Soqotra’s conservation experiment was conferred upon it by the CBD’s quid pro quo arrangement in which signatory states obligatorily share managerial sovereignty over national territory and resources with UN agencies (GEF, UNEP and UNDP) and their proxy international conservation institutions. As Swanson explained: “The CBD is… a global management regime that is concerned with wholly domestic resources. That is, the subjects of the CBD are primarily terrestrial life forms that… lie firmly and clearly within the boundaries of individual countries” (1999: 308). This leads to the extension of a global regulatory regime into local ecological domains, which are managed as global property. This arrangement inevitably engenders what is referred to as “eco-colonialism”: Where people’s pursuit of their livelihoods

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and the resources, they rely upon are placed under external managerial supervision. The local entailments of the CBD’s managerial regime were as follows: Bestowed incontestable legitimacy and authority upon international actors’ environmental protection prerogative over Soqotra; constrained the action of national government in the scope and domain of local development; imposed strictures on environmental practices that Soqotrans were obligated to conform to; and thereby consecrated the local hegemony of a global environmental regime whose global preoccupations were not pertinent to local priorities. The global environmental benefits to be generated by GEF-funded biodiversity projects are based on Article 1 of the CBD: “[1] the conservation of biological diversity, [2] the sustainable use of its components and [3] the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources.” These goals became the project’s mantras through a local form of “compulsive mimicry,” or what I called above “conceptual plagiarism,” as the UN project animated by an “imperialist ethic” attempted to replicate the full breadth of the CBD regulatory prerogatives over Soqotra’s territorial totality. These global goals were converted into aspirational local objectives: to carve out all of the Soqotra Archipelago’s terrestrial landmass (3730 km2 ) and a significant proportion of its marine area (17,720 km2 ) into protected areas to mitigate planetary ecological degradation; and to manage these protected areas in a manner that will generate important lessons for the conservation of other islands as World Heritage Sites (WHS) through the replication of a Soqotra model of community-based conservation. These local objectives, however, have remained unfulfilled aspirations. There are colorful maps of protected areas, but their existence on the ground and actual management are largely imaginary. Also, no community-based conservation model has yet to emerge and Soqotrans have yet to benefit from the sustainable use of local biodiversity. Indeed, subsequent phases of the project have had to continuously revise downward its self-arrogated management mandate for the total oversight of the island (see Chapter 7). In the pursuit of these goals Soqotra was supposed to exemplify “a pilot demonstration case” of how they can be achieved through a local project. However, the low carbon footprint of Soqotrans’ livelihood practices and consumption habits never posed any threat to the island’s biodiversity. Therefore, the attempt to articulate local with global concerns turned out to be one of foisting global priorities upon local realities. For example, at the core of the CBD was

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a concern with addressing the inequities of bio-prospecting, an issue that was of marginal relevance to Soqotra, as it has not attracted the interest of bio-prospecting companies. Nevertheless, as an enthusiastic advocate of saving the planet through the market, the first GEF project expanded a lot of resources on costly international consultants merely to customize templates already used elsewhere about regulating access to indigenous peoples’ biodiversity. The result was a document entitled “Agreement Concerning Access to Biological Materials of Yemen for Scientific and Commercial Research.” However, the expected commercial bio-prospectors never showed up. Instead, the island has attracted mainly natural and a few social scientists with ostensibly academic interest. This “Agreement” placed them under a veil of suspicion as potential bio-prospectors, and the Environmental Protection Authority in San‘a’ required that they sign it, and I dutifully did so. This virtualizing project has been caught up in a Sisyphusian endeavor of pursuing global goals locally by trying to convince itself that more local workshops for Soqotrans in environmental consciousness raising and better management plans will provide the elusive panacea (as the most recent project—GEF-UNEP 2014—is proposing). Yet, it has failed to heed the basic axioms of environmental conservation: The protection of biodiversity is first and foremost related to the well-being of local communities. Accordingly, community-driven project design should be based on local demands and priorities. Ultimately, as the GEF evaluation report confirms, “Local support for improved environmental management [can only be] built upon the achievement of benefits at the community level” (GEF Evaluation Office 2006: 26). 6.3.2.3 “Public Consultation”: Conscripted Audience The formulation of the Zoning Plan was through a passive functional participation process, in which participants were “seen by external agencies as a means to achieve their goals, and people form groups to meet predetermined objectives” (Pretty and Smith 2004: 637). As the driving objective of the “public consultation” process launched by the UN project in the formulation of the Zoning Plan was not to discover whether such a plan was needed, but to inform and convince local people of the need for it. This was confirmed subsequently by Article 19 of the Zoning Plan: “The Conservation Zoning Plan is the prerequisite for the declaration of Socotra Island as a biosphere reserve.” These consultation sessions

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sought to induce fear about the gravity of the island’s externally imagined environmental problems and the urgent need for imported solutions to them. As Soqotrans were told about a phenomenally abstract problem they did not know they had—biodiversity loss—and the need to impose restrictions on their communal commons through its demarcation into protected areas and to draw maps that indicate their emplacement and regulate their use. These instrumentalized interactions with Soqotrans were conducted through “a total of 12 large meetings, which involved approximately 500 local sheikhs and muqaddams and all local government representatives” (EPC 1999: 5). These “large meetings” induced spectatorship on the part of the audience and were inadequate forums for gathering inputs to policy formulation. This passive spectatorship was perhaps the preferred disposition, given that these meetings were about “engineering consent” for a pre-defined plan to map out the entire island based on criteria that Soqotrans could not understand. Therefore, Soqotran participants could not, even marginally, influence its content or scope, as these were already determined. This consultation process seemed to have induced in its managers a delusive optimism about consensus building that led them to imagine local interlocutors with a shared environmental sensibility. This is evident in their preliminary, and misleading, assessment of the community’s response, which invokes the key idioms that confirm the ZP’s designers self-serving profiling of Soqotrans as innate eco-conservationists: The draft zoning plan proposed by the project team obtained strong support from all community leaders… It should be noted that changes were mostly towards a more conservative approach [… as] new strictly protected areas (Nature Sanctuary) were requested…, and less infrastructure development areas (General Use Zone) were deemed necessary. (EPC 1999: 5, emphasis in original)

The source of what turned out to be exaggerated, if not deliberately misleading, claims about Soqotrans’ desire for “a more conservative approach” was a misunderstanding of the obligatory courtesy of hosts (Soqotran community leaders) toward their guests (international consultants) during the consultation process and who acted as acquiescent consumers of an alien and locally illegible discourse. This courteous

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decorum momentarily dissimulated the intrinsic fault lines in this communicative context fraught with power asymmetries and conflicting expectations. These were revealed during the actual implementation process when the assumption about shared environmental sensibility and aspiration were shown to be not only entirely imagined but also ethically dubious exaggerations of local support for the ZP. As the veracity of the “request” for more protected areas was challenged by local resistance to the project’s attempt at demarcating these areas. Ultimately, the project was able to co-opt the collaboration of a few communities for an insignificant fraction of the total number of protected areas, only to put up signs without border demarcation (see Chapter 7). The fault lines of this consultation process were initially engendered by the different locations and divergent motivations of the three participating groups: First, were the planners as expatriate personnel (i.e., international staff of UN agencies) of temporary residence on the island and under contractual obligations to operationalize a global covenant, and who unilaterally initiated the “public consultation.” Accordingly, they assumed the roles of environmental lobbyists driven by international exigencies to convert the local landscape into protected areas. Second, were the natural scientists as hired consultants of limited duration and local project staff as converted environmentalists—“a total of 31 Yemenis and 29 international experts from a wide range of regional and European institutions” (EPC 1999: 3)—who were primarily driven by professional considerations and who acted as scientific knowledge brokers and local enablers for the planners. Third, and last, were the locals, resident for life on the island, represented by their selected or appointed leaders, who were primarily motivated by ordinary hopes and expectations of improving their socioeconomic lives on their land, and whose preoccupation was not with the conservation of the island’s biodiversity but with the erratic nature of the seasons’ weather pattern and the under-productivity of vegetal life and the adverse effects on their livelihoods. They became conscripted listeners in forums organized by others with predetermined agendas, to which they were being asked to give their assent whether as active supporters or passive accommodators. These three groups of interlocutors in this staged consultation process not only shared divergent conceptions of Soqotra’s environment but also derived unequal benefits from it: The planners imagined the island as their territorial management mandate and got their Zoning Plan approved by the Yemeni government; the scientists saw it as an ensemble of research

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sites and got their data and publications; and Soqotrans knew it as their livelihood domain and have been disappointed by the failed promises to improve it. 6.3.3

Friends of Soqotra: An Epistemic Community

Beyond the systemic constraints imposed by the prevailing global environmental epistemic and governance regime, there are also individual enabling agents motivated by their scientific interests to “articulate the prevailing regimes’ principles, norms, and rules and disseminate them” locally (Cross 2013). This is exemplified by the Friends of Soqotra (FoS), a group of mostly natural scientists and researchers that has evolved into an epistemic community of policy mediators in the GEF-UN-led conservation experiment in Soqotra. Indeed, its establishment is based, according to its first Chairperson, on a suggestion made by the GEF in 1997: To establish “a non-profit making society of scientists, conservationists and students of both local and foreign origin, to strengthen exchange of scientific findings and conservation experiences, and coordination of activities of the islanders through newsletters, correspondence and functions” (Morris 2003: 2). This “suggestion” exemplifies GEF’s strategy, as discussed in Box 6.1, of recruiting NGOs as surrogate epistemic community to act as a lobby on behalf of its conservation vision in its local domains of intervention. Five years later—after enduring a gauntlet of “misrepresentations and misunderstandings that have beset our efforts” and acknowledging their naïveté in failing to recognize the political stakes among competing claimants to pioneer status in bringing Soqotra into the international limelight and for the exclusive rights to raise funds for its conservation and development2 —the FoS was formally established in March 2001 as a charity NGO registered in the UK. The founding members were researchers in a variety of scientific disciplines who have been practicing their craft in the West Asia region for decades and were consultants in Soqotra’s first biodiversity project. They were joined by a younger generation of altruistically opportunistic environmental researchers with a budding interest in Soqotra. FoS members were initially animated by a shared idealism that could be characterized as a kind of humanitarian environmentalism, as the membership application explains: “Friends of Soqotra has been formed in an effort to work with those who live there toward a sustainable future for the islands.” In addition, FoS’ stated objectives were symbiotic with the GEF’s objectives for

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its Soqotra experiment: “to promote the sustainable use and conservation of the natural environment; to raise awareness of the Archipelago’s biodiversity; and to help improve the quality of life of the island communities.” From hindsight, the FoS turned out to be the only sustainable entity from the GEF’s experiment in Soqotra. As it has persevered as an organization in spite of the relative failure of the experiment it was supposed to help nurture. Indeed, FoS members have played a consistently supportive role in furnishing acquiescent consultants in the GEF-UN projects and in its members’ idealized representations and spirited defense of Soqotra’s environment in its newsletter. The concept of “epistemic community” was coined by Peter Haas to designate “A network of professionals with recognized expertise and competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policyrelevant knowledge within that domain or issue area” (Haas 1992: 3). From its early days as an advocacy network, FoS has evolved into a fullfledged epistemic community that meets and exceeds Haas’ criteria. They have incrementally constituted themselves into an organized but loose network of transnational knowledge-based non-state actors who are for the most part natural science practitioners in European institutions. FoS members are united by an overarching vision of Soqotra as a “frontier area” for scientific research in all domains of the natural sciences based on the perception of the island as an under-explored reservoir of scientific discoveries. This vision has induced a set of shared aspirations animated by (a) self-interest to promote Soqotra as a scientific research station and (b) a permanent agenda to maintain Soqotra’s total enclosure within the Zoning Plan as it is the best guarantee of pursuing their research projects. FoS has been regularly holding annual meetings since its inception. In the words of its own members: It provides “the main platform for the Socotra science and development community, publishing ‘Tayf - the Soqotra Newsletter’ and organising annual meetings and scientific symposia also involving local stakeholders, experts and practitioners, which have been crucial to the preparation of this [GEF latest] project” (GEF-UNEP 2014: 33–34). The proceedings of their meetings are published in the FoS newsletter. Unwittingly, the contents of the yearly issues consistently affirm the prevailing view of Soqotra as their research lab. Worthy of note, is the absence of any critical discussion in the newsletter about local environmental politics and the lack of debate over the exaggerated claims about

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environmental degradation made by fellow members. This reflects a deliberate apolitical attitude that betrays a collective self-serving motto: “Let’s not rock the boat that is enabling our professional aspirations.” I illustrate this shared aversion to dissent with a brief account of my experience: I was invited to contribute a piece to the newsletter in which I took issue with the unsubstantiated claims about environmental degradation in Soqotra among other misleading assumptions shared by members. The editor felt compelled to issue a disclaimer that disassociated my views from the newsletter. My article was the only one with such a caveat (see Elie 2011: 20–21).3 However, FoS members willingly become political activists when their research domain was threatened. As was manifested in some of its members leading role in the campaign against the Yemeni central government’s construction of the asphalted roads network around the island, which traversed protected areas (e.g., Miller and Christie 2004). Members of FoS, at least some of them, have unwittingly entangled themselves within a web of multiple allegiances and accountabilities as they straddle multiple roles that conflict with the interests and aspirations of ordinary Soqotrans. The performance of the roles identified below have made them non-state local rule-makers in, and defenders of, the GEF-initiated environmental regime in Soqotra: (a) supporters of the implementation of Soqotra’s ZP; (b) contributors to setting the environmental conservation agenda for the entire Archipelago; (c) mediators of the Yemeni state environmental policy and action toward Soqotra; (d) protectors of the island against what they perceive as the state’s environmentally damaging activities; (e) advocates of a minimalist development strategy for the island that is restricted to the traditional economic sectors; and (f) designers of environmental projects and initiatives that prioritize scientific research and neglect the livelihood concerns of the local population. These roles are performed in a social context characterized by endemic deficiencies of modern life’s amenities. Moreover, none of their official activities cater to those deficiencies—except for the occasional collective expiatory acts of charity sponsored by FoS toward small segments of the population. FoS members’ primary commitment to the practice of their scientific profession have imparted a number of shared dispositions with problematic ramifications in Soqotra’s context: (a) the reflexive transposition to Soqotra of the prevailing assumptions about human-environment relations from their Western developed milieu of origin (i.e., negative

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correlation between development and biodiversity); (b) a phobia of local social change as vector of ecological degradation; (c) a chronic deficiency in knowledge of the historical trajectory of local human-ecosystem relations and the current status of the associated conservation practices and environmental values, which are the foundations of conservation policy and projects; (d) political acquiescence to the benevolent “save the planet” schemes proclaimed by mainstream environmental agencies that blind them to alternative possibilities; (e) scrupulously compliant collaborators with UN conservation initiatives that may have unintended local consequences; (f) apolitical practitioners of their respective sciences that obviate a socio-political awareness of the communal context of their research; (g) endemic obliviousness to the negative local ramifications of adopted conservation policy (e.g., the Zoning Plan’s population displacement potential); and (h) a collectivity of premature “professional grievers” for a local environment that is being threatened by their uncritical support for a flawed conservation policy for Soqotra. These propensities are complemented by a shared naïve belief in the trickle-down effects of their scientific activities on the enhancement of Soqotrans’ well-being. Finally, in the case of FoS members who combine their research interests and advisory roles in Soqotra’s conservation projects, there is a high risk of violating the ethical obligation of an epistemic community: The ultimate purpose of members’ activities is the improvement of the communities where they intervened, not the career advancement of its members. The cumulative effects of these entanglements have been the appreciation deficit of the local prevalence of materialist social aspirations, the viability of indigenous knowledge repertoire and the non-convergent nature of Soqotrans’ environmental values and sensibilities and theirs. This led to inappropriate policy choices due to consultants’ exclusive reliance on imported ideas and their insistence on “global best practices,” which in turn have engendered a local “refusal of conservation” among Soqotrans. This endemic sentiment of conservation fatigue is manifested in the population non-collaborative disposition, which is misunderstood as a lack of environmental awareness, and whose “raising” became a mandatory component of all conservation projects (see Chapter 7 for a review of these projects).

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6.4 Virtual Cartographic Exclosures: Misanthropic Map-Making The GEF-UN conservation experiment in Soqotra, as noted in the Prologue, has inherited the ancient view of the island as a paradise, indeed, a Noah’s Ark, which led its designers and managers on a quixotic quest to recuperate and sustain the island as an Eden-like botanic garden. This quixotic quest encouraged the nostalgic yearnings of Soqotra’s eco-consultants who betrayed an impulse to idealize, or more aptly to exoticize, the island’s environmental conditions and ecological status. Imbued with the virtualism syndrome discussed above, Soqotra’s conservationists acted as the purveyors of an invasive transcultural subjectivity that conjured a virtual utopianism: the transformation of Soqotrans into live specimens in a museum display of an idyllic pastoral community on a remote island worthy of preserving in that state during the third millennium. These are the sources of inspiration that eventually led to the formulation of the Zoning Plan, whose ultimate purpose was to garner international approval to incorporate Soqotra into the managerial jurisdiction of a global environmental conservation regime, which would monitor its transition into an eco-friendly but ascetic modernity. As the Presidential Decree announcing the Yemeni government’s approval of the ZP clearly stipulates: “The official endorsement of this plan has met the last remaining condition for the declaration of Socotra Archipelago as a Man and Biosphere Reserve and World Heritage Site by UNESCO” (Government of Yemen 2000: 2). This suggests that the interests of external stakeholders were the primary drivers of the ZP’s formulation. The ZP proposed a total virtual cartographic enclosure of Soqotra’s landscape, in which not a single square kilometer of the island is not under some kind of regulatory edict. It partially excludes land dwellers from their native homestead and encourages the total exclosure of their herds from the protected areas. There is no assessment of the demographic ramifications of the ZP. Indeed, the zoning maps are drawn as if the land was unoccupied. Perhaps that was an intentional strategy to get them approved. As the decree explains: The “zoning maps have been reviewed and approved by all community leaders in Socotra prior to submission to the Government of Yemen” (Government of Yemen 2000: 2). It seemed that none of the conscripted listeners to the public consultation monologues asked the crucial question: What will happen to us and our herds? The absence of a genuinely deliberative process led

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to the virtual reconfiguration of the island’s landscape into demarcated exclusion zones that interfered with Soqotrans’ normal pursuit of their transhumant pastoralist practices and the associated human-environment relations. The ZP is a proscriptive conservation blueprint that exemplifies the imperialist ethos of its international designers who were given carte blanche by the national government. This encouraged an opportunistic space appropriation in formulating the ZP, which was unrelated to an ecological imperative based on empirically substantiated analyses of the threats to the island’s biodiversity. As a result, the vernacular landscapes of Soqotra were re-envisioned as a series of biotic reserves. These reserves are conceived primarily for scientific investigation by biodiversity researchers, the visual consumption of ecotourists, and as ecological capital preserve for prospecting biomarketers. This prioritization of external stakeholders’ interests, accounts for the ZP’s excessive use of the idiom of exclusion, protection and control toward Soqotrans’ access and use of their environment. In sum, the ZP is an incongruous combination of nature-preservation edicts, pastoral livelihood dis-incentivization decrees and a development prevention bias. In the following two sections, I discuss how the ZP was constructed, and highlight the potential consequences for Soqotrans. 6.4.1

Segmented Landscape: Conservation vs. Livelihoods

The demarcation of the protected areas of the ZP was based on the particular “environmental imaginary” of its designers who seemed convinced of Soqotra’s Arcadian pristineness. This led to the total annexation of Soqotra into a contrived geography of managerially impracticable and financially unaffordable exclosure zones categorized into a variety of protected areas. Environmental imaginary refers to “a way of imagining nature, including visions of those forms of social and individual practice which are ethically proper and morally right with regard to nature” (Peet and Watts 1996: 23). Such an imaginary can be fashioned either (a) from material and social practices in natural settings, and are subject to incremental change and transformation as the interaction with natural settings change; or (b) from knowledge-producing practices in virtual settings that generate conservation blueprints that are more responsive to external concerns about the state of the global environment than to the lived experience of communities within their local environment. The ZP is the product of the latter environmental imaginary as it is based on

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foreign consultants’ virtual appropriation of Soqotra’s environment as a relic of Arcadia, which is oblivious to Soqotrans’ lived experience of their environment. The resultant dysfunctional ZP is anatomized below. The ZP is the culmination of all the processes discussed above: (a) the recourse to a virtualism syndrome through the cartographic representation of an imported vision of Soqotra; (b) the subordination of local knowledge to an epistemic generification process based on exogenous idioms of environmental assessment and conservation; and (c) the use of imported template mechanisms to manage local human-environment relations. The CBD prescribed the preferred modality of biodiversity conservation as Article 8 enjoins signatories to “establish a system of protected areas.” Accordingly, the Protected Areas (PAs) become the primary unit of demarcation and object of managerial intervention, and were given an official definition by the IUCN: A PA is “A clearly defined geographical space, recognised, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long-term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values” (Dudley 2008: 8). Also, the IUCN provided the different categorization schemes for the PAs (see below). The end product of this exercise in virtual spatial reconfiguration is that the Soqotrans’ livelihood domains that they have invested with primordial attachments are converted into an alienated physical environment arbitrarily demarcated into five categories of PAs mediated by legally-binding rules, which prescribe mode of use, degree of access, extent of external management, and nature of conservation category. Furthermore, the ZP betrays a totalitarian streak in its environmental management oversight, as the entire land area of Soqotra Island constitutes a seamless protected area, demarcated into five categories of conservation zones (see Fig. 6.1). As a result of this “totalitarian” enclosure, Soqotra is one of the larger insular Natural World Heritage Sites in the world (Van Damme 2012). The brief critical anatomy of the designated zones that follows focuses exclusively on the ZP’s terrestrial dimension of Soqotra Island. It is structured according to the classification scheme as described in the Presidential Decree establishing the ZP (see Government of Yemen 2000). This scheme is based exclusively on IUCN guidelines and terminology (i.e., “management categories” and “governance types”), which are described as “the world’s authoritative resource for protected area managers” (see Dudley 2008).

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Fig. 6.1 Zoning Plan Map (Source Government of Yemen [2000: 8])

• National Park: This is management category II , which encompasses 2748 km2 or 72.6% of Soqotra Island’s total landmass. It is dedicated “to perpetuate in as natural a state as possible” large areas in order to protect the ecological integrity of the island’s unique ecosystems by excluding exploitation or human occupation that are inimical to biodiversity conservation. Its ultimate purpose seems to recreate wilderness areas on the island, which would serve as exclusive reserve for scientific, educational, and recreational opportunities for ecotourists and environmentalists. What is paradoxical about this category is that it overlaps with the residential location of about 80% of the island’s inhabitants; yet it advocates an exclusionary conservation approach (see Vol. 1: Chapter 5 for population distribution). This misanthropic ramification is partly alleviated with the following conditional concession to human access: “to support the needs of the local community, and subsistence resource users in particular, insofar as this will not adversely affect the objectives of biodiversity conservation” (EPC 1999: 8, emphasis added). Hence, resources for local use are appropriated as “reservoirs of value” of ecological capital for future exploitation. • Special Areas for Botanical Interest: This is management category Ib. There are four such areas on the map and they are located

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within the national park zone; however, the land area covered has not been calculated. These areas constitute a “unique heritage” as they “contain the highest concentration of rare and endemic plants of the archipelago,” where human occupation is inimical to their conservation. The location of these special area presents a major managerial dilemma in terms of conservation over human livelihoods. For example, the special area located in the high mountains of the north-central region (“Skent”) is the homestead of Soqotra’s transhumant pastoralist herders where cows are the dominant animal among a diverse herd composition. In 2008 the Yemeni government issued a decree restricting livestock herding in these areas at the behest of UNESCO due to its concern about the effects of grazing on biodiversity (see Vol. 1: Chapter 5; Scholte et al. 2008). • Nature Sanctuary: This is management category Ia. It takes up 95 km2 or 2.5% of the total landmass. There are seven sanctuaries around Soqotra Island (see Fig. 6.1). These sanctuaries are to be strictly protected “in as undisturbed a state as possible.” As they are the “preserve of rare and fragile habitats, ecosystems, species and unique landscapes.” Although human habitation is undesirable, the ZP allows “the existing local community living in low density and in balance with the available resources to maintain their lifestyle.” This rare exemption for human habitation is based on the misleading assumption that Soqotrans derive a livelihood from the “sustainable use of biodiversity,” which is actually not the case. Their primary source of livelihood is their herds, which are considered a curse to conservation. The ultimate purpose of the sanctuaries is as research laboratories and not the maintenance of Soqotrans’ nature-based life-style. • Resource Use Reserve: This is management category IV . It covers 890 km2 or 23.5% of the island’s total landmass. The areas under this category apply to two different topographic domains: (a) the interior plains of the west where aloes grow, and thus could be the basis of a sustainable alternative livelihood. However, this is the most impoverished region of the island due to chronic water deficiency. Yet, it is assumed that making it a protected area would “enhance the traditional management practices” that would ensure “a sustainable flow of natural products and services to meet community needs.” This assertion is not based on actual surveys of the marketable viability of any “natural products.” And (b) the coastal zones, where the

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concern is to prevent “the natural resources from being alienated for other land and resource use purposes” (EPC 1999: 7). The alienation of land is an implicit reference to hotel construction as part of an imagined threat from a mass tourism industry with a string of hotels around the island that has yet to materialize. • General Use Zone: This is a sub-category of the above “resource use reserve.” It is allocated 55 km2 or 1.4% of the total landmass. The areas covered are exclusively located next to the two towns of the island’s two districts: Hadiboh and Qalansiyah. This zone is the only area available for major infrastructure developments such as airport, seaport, and prospective industrial installations. And where any new development must undergo “compulsory environmental impact assessment.” In effect, “development” in the modern sense of the term is confined to these areas and is restricted to “essential infrastructure” such as “roads, power lines, transportation and health facilities.” These two urban areas are the island’s “development ghetto” in order to limit the “damage to the environment to an acceptable level”; and “to regulate and guide infrastructure and commercial development.” By definition “development” is prohibited in the rest of the island—that is, no asphalted roads, no power lines, or modern buildings—since it would constitute a blight on the “pristine” landscape of the hinterland. Finally, there is the issue of “governance types” by which these protected areas are to be managed. The IUCN has identified four types: government, private, shared, and by local communities (see Dudley 2008: Chapter 3). In the case of Soqotra, the oft-used phrased “communitybased management” is a fiction. This is because the key criterion that a PA is to be “declared and run by local communities” was never met. All PAs were selected and managed with the assistance of GEF-UN projects. In fact, in the absence of UN-funded projects no PA would have been established by local communities. Therefore, the actual governance type in Soqotra is “shared governance” in which “authority and responsibility” over the communal commons is shared between UN agencies and the local EPA branch.

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6.4.2

Collateral Damages: Conservation as a Human Threat

Soqotra is emerging as an exemplar of where conservation could potentially pose a threat to people’s livelihoods. As the entire island is designated a national park with the overwhelming majority of its resident population assumed to be an invasive species along with their main livelihood (i.e., pastoralism), and whose modern economic aspirations can only be pursued within a geographically delimited area of their homeland and under strict environmental regulation. This misanthropic vision is the outcome of the ZP’s planning process driven by an “instrumental rationality,” in which imported template mechanisms were used to virtually generate end-goals whose consequences were not examined. Soqotra Island’s total enclosure heralds its potential transformation into a virtual panopticon in which Soqotrans are placed under the surveillance of UN agencies, thereby reducing the ZP into a human exclosure and development prevention blueprint. Some of the ramifications of this excessively disciplinary edict are highlighted below: • The promotion of an archaic exclusionary model of conservation through establishing PAs as depopulated domains. This model is associated with the promotion of alternative livelihoods narrowly focused on areas outside the boundary of the PAs as an ineffective means of inducing their residents’ support for conservation, while neglecting the rest of the population. • The depopulation ramifications of the ZP are, in effect, undermining Soqotran pastoralists’ organic relations with their environment. As it prevents their practice of the customary principle of reciprocal rights between human and nature that engendered their mutual well-being. • The prioritization of conservation over development has prevented the policy mainstreaming of conservation with development. This prioritization favored, by default, the promotion of an enabling framework for conservation and a disabling one for development. Consequently, it relegated Soqotra into an economic development exclusion zone that induced a widespread antipathy toward conservation. • The failure to synergize biodiversity and cultural diversity into an integrated bio-cultural diversity preservation policy that would equally value indigenous knowledge and exogenous knowledge as epistemic resources in all conservation activities in Soqotra.

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• The persistent bias in project documents—since the first phase of the biodiversity project until its latest re-incarnation—for scientific research outputs based on an external agenda and the corresponding neglect of socioeconomic outputs for the local community. • The establishment of a dependence-inducing environmental governance system where local institutions are devoid of locally generated financial resources for conservation and therefore are junior partners of international agencies within an asymmetric power relationship. Both the lack of an independent source of funds and the subordinate managerial status of local institutions have undermined local capacity for autonomous and sustainable initiatives. The ultimate consequence of the above is that residents within or around the PAs have persistently betrayed an indifference, if not utter alienation, toward them. Indeed, they consider the demarcated areas as illegitimate foreign entities as their designation was not done through local demand but external selection—in spite of claims to the contrary by the ZP’s designers. Soqotrans’ initial acquiescence to these PAs was based on a transactional agreement: the promise of money from ecotourism in exchange for allowing the project to demarcate the areas to be conserved. This bequeathed a quid pro quo relationality that was not sustainable given the limited and contingent nature of the income to be generated. As a result, there is no local sense of patrimony attached to these areas. In fact, the affected local residents have contested their creation through outright resistance (public demonstrations, destruction of signs) and lack of cooperation. Moreover, to the extent there was cooperation it was conditionally and provisionally induced through pecuniary incentives: such as sponsored home gardens, financial support for UN-created CBOs, and employment of local environmental guides from the targeted areas. There is, however, a silver lining: The ZP was ineffectually implemented in a few marginalized areas with minimal local cooperation; therefore, its island-wide misanthropic ramifications have not materialized. However, as each successive conservation project insists on pursuing the same failure-laden path and given international stakeholders’ commitment to this path, there is an urgent need to recalibrate conservation policy for Soqotra. Prior to suggesting an alternative path, I provide a brief historical overview of community-environment relations in Soqotra to establish the appropriate context for future conservation policy.

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6.5

Human-Environment Relations: Brief Historical Chronology

It is a truism in the social sciences that “Human history is the continuous product of diverse modes of human-environmental relations” (Descola and Palsson 1996: 13–14). And it is the state’s political economy, which generates the diverse modes of human-environment relations. This is axiomatically formulated as follows: “The political economy of a given social formation generates effects on the biosphere and affects the subsequent historical trajectory of that social formation” (Balée 1998: 22). Indeed, it is the Yemeni state’s historically contingent practices of political incorporation that produced a series of ecological watersheds in Soqotra’s historical trajectory. The twentieth century heralded a period of multiple transitions in the political economy of Soqotra Island through a changing of the island’s political guards from British to Yemeni that engendered the serial adoption of divergent administrative regimes (see Vol. 1: Chapter 7). These regimes introduced shifts in political strategies and economic priorities, which engendered a series of mutations in the manner in which Soqotrans interacted with their environment. The formulators of the island’s environmental policy and strategy did not consider, or were not aware of, the continuous state-induced change, at least since the nineteenth century and more rapidly from the 1970s onwards, in human-environment relations in Soqotra. In the absence of a historical perspective, human-environment relations were assumed to have remained unchanged due to the prevalence on the island of an imagined timeless cultural inertia. Consequently, the GEF-UN “conservation without development” experiment in Soqotra was founded on a false rationale that has persistently informed its interventions ever since 1996: The conflation between an assumed pristine environment with the continued viability of traditional resource use and conservation practices, and thus the promotion of a community-based natural resource management as a socio-culturally organic development strategy that would lead not only to the marketable exploitation of selective biological resources (e.g., aloes, and resins-producing trees) but also contribute simultaneously to biodiversity preservation and environmental protection of the island. This ahistorical assumption about the continued dependence of local livelihoods on the sustainable use of environmental resources still persists, as the GEF and its UN partner agencies never carried out a socioeconomic survey of Soqotrans’ traditional livelihood practices prior to

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the formulation of the ZP (apart from Morris 2002, which was never used by projects’ staff). Consequently, the designers of the ZP were ignorant of the changes engendered by the cumulative histories of human-environment relations that underpinned the existing communal order in Soqotra. This led to their preference for a virtual utopian conception of human-environment relations on the island, which was described above as an Arcadian environmental imaginary. Moreover, this ignorance of change was exacerbated by the tendency among foreign conservation consultants to extrapolate the relative pristineness of geographically delimited ecosystems with that of the entire island. This entailed the denial of the basic axiom: That all terrestrial environments are, for the most part and with varying degrees, human-made and thus constitute a constellation of anthropogenic habitats. This denial explains the alarmist environmental threats discussed above, as the constantly evolving social-environmental dialectic was reflexively associated with environmental degradation. The policies that derived from these assumptions were tantamount to an attempt “to sever the links that bind [a] people to their environment […and thus] to cut them off from the historical [continuum] that has made them who they are” (Ingold 1992: 51). As a corrective to these misleading assumptions, I retrace the incremental transformation of Soqotra’s human-environment relations that was engendered by the communal polity’s incorporation into four out of the six different political economies that were described in Vol. 1: Chapter 7. For each historical period, I highlight the dominant environmental imaginary and the changes engendered in the ensemble of practices associated with the means of subsistence. 6.5.1

Nature as Benevolent: Providential Dependence

The perception of nature as the cradle of benevolence given the availability of its resources and their seasonal reliability prevailed during the Sultanate period. The latter’s formal administrative presence on the island began in the 1890s, after the al-Mahra Sultanate signed a protectorate treaty with the British in 1886. Subsequently, the Sultan of al-Mahra moved to Soqotra along with his entourage and imposed a tax extraction regime based on whatever was produced locally, as the local economy was cashless and barter was the dominant mode of exchange (see Vol. 1: Chapters 5 and 6). This tax regime along with the existing regional trade in butter-oil—the main tradable commodity—served as coercive

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inducements to enhance the productivity of pastoralism and all of the associated traditional resource management practices. Moreover, Soqotrans’ limited technological toolkit was complemented by their extensive repertoire of environmental know-how. This enabled their survival in a context of unmitigated dependence on nature’s whims. Indeed, nature was the sole provider of the resources Soqotrans needed to live on and to survive with: habitat, food, livelihood, work implements, furnishing, and energy. Soqotrans’ dependency on their environment was minimally alleviated by a limited menu of imported items. This was the period when life was an incessant food quest, and which generated an environmental imaginary of nature as a reservoir of resources for survival. These resources’ usefulness and modality of use were meticulously catalogued in a vast indigenous knowledge repertoire (See Miller and Morris 2004). This formed the basis of a communal economy that was exclusively reliant on nature’s seasonal prodigality, which was inexorably followed by its excessive frugality. The latter was accompanied by chronic seasonal food deficits that engendered endemic hunger among the population, especially in the hinterland, and which in turn led to the constitution of a repertoire of starvation food (mikelit ). This chronic ecological scarcity induced a “culture of frugality” based on a preemptive recourse to an ethos of sufficiency in terms of consumption and resource conservation practices. These practices sought to sustain nature’s benevolence through its seasonally contingent offerings as signs of divine generosity (baraka). Moreover, the prevailing eco-friendly natural resources management practices were driven by an ethos of cooperation based on mutual obligation in the sharing of resources as an aid to subsistence security. It was during this period that Soqotrans developed an extensive menu of mutual aid practices that compensated for the human existential necessities generated by living conditions in a marginal ecological milieu (see Vol. 1: Chapter 3). Indeed, social organization was essentially structured around, if not an expression of, communal management of resources that was based on land use practices aimed at ensuring their sustainability through optimum utilization. Conservationists’ frequent references to the viability of livelihoodbased conservation “practices of eons” in Soqotra are in effect romantic evocation of this period of privations to which Soqotrans do not wish to return. As Soqotra was never an exemplar of that mythical “original affluent society” (Sahlins 1972) and Soqotrans never were leisure-basking

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members of it. The gradual demise of this period—with its particular environmental imaginary and associated environmental practices and ways of life—began in the aftermath of the successful 1967 revolution against British colonialism in South Arabia and the formation of an independent and modernizing socialist state, which incorporated Soqotra. 6.5.2

Nature as Obstacle: Taming the Wilderness

Soqotrans’ existential agony caused by their exclusive reliance on nature’s seasonal prodigality was partially mitigated with Soqotra’s incorporation into the newly established state in South Yemen that lasted until 1990. This state was driven by a socialist political economy that was dedicated to the make-over of what it perceived as a feudal society with a traditional economy that had to be totally reconstructed. This period inaugurated the institutional intermediation of Soqotrans relationship to their environment, through the state systematic intervention into it. The prevailing environmental imaginary during this period perceived the island as a wilderness area that had to be tamed and brought into civilization. Indeed, Soqotrans described this period as the dawn of “civilization” (h.ad.¯ ara). In effect, the state substituted itself, albeit selectively, for nature, and thus initiated Soqotrans’ evolving shift from their dependency on the environment to state institutions, which modified the nature of community-environment relations. This in turn engendered changes in environmental practices and a corresponding loss of nature’s sanctity, which Soqotrans have since associated with the island’s loss of baraka. This period heralded irreversible changes in a number of domains: The island’s untamed topography was seen as a major impediment to the state’s modernization project. Thus the mesh of camel tracks that served as the island’s only transportation infrastructure was replaced by a network of car tracks that was more extensive than the grid of asphalted roads established in the 2000s. Also, nature’s seasonal vagaries and its resource deficits were mitigated through the state’s introduction of new consumer goods at subsidized prices. People’s diet, which previously consisted of milk products, maqdere (maize from East Africa), meat (occasionally), and dates, changed, gradually at first, to canned milk, rice, flour, synthetic oil, and tea. Moreover, this period heralded the establishment of a parallel economy based on an urban and coastal-based economy that offered alternative means of livelihoods (e.g., fishing, office jobs, etc.)

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with regular salary. This cash-based economy inaugurated the continuing replacement of the barter-based subsistence pastoral livelihood of the rural economy. This initiated the weaning of Soqotrans away from primary dependency on their herds and the subsequent abandonment of their rigorous animal husbandry system: e.g., regulated breeding system, consistent use of animal pens, and the systematic recourse to the seasonal transhumant pastoral movement of herds as a strategic use of grazing areas (see Vol. 1: Chapter 5). The cumulative effects of the above led to the generational discontinuation in the social reproduction of dedicated pastoralists and their nature conserving livelihood practices. Finally, this period launched Soqotra onto an irreversible path as an anthropogenic habitat. 6.5.3

Nature as Public Sector Outpost: Administrative Conquest

The government that emerged from the unification of the two Yemen in 1990 launched a political economy of selective patronage, as it sought to win the loyalty of a divided polity. This was pursued through a national policy of expanding the public sector through job creation and infrastructure construction. The prevailing environmental imaginary perceived the landscape as a convenient backdrop for the strategic placement of public buildings (e.g., clinics, schools) as occasional acts of benevolence that simultaneously served as icons of state authority. This was part of an administrative incorporation strategy of the rural population. It sought to encourage a shift of allegiance from communal self-reliance to national institutional dependence. This was complemented by an accelerated expansion of public sector jobs that was initiated under the previous government. In Soqotra, this led to the expansion of the police force, which attracted primary school leavers in the hinterland, and in the urban coastal areas who were in quest of an additional, if not a more regular, source of income to herding or seasonal fishing. Also, secondary school graduates were recruited as office clerks. These public sector activities were complemented by the lifting of economic restrictions imposed by the previous administration, which enabled the starting up of private sector activities. The latter were to be intensified when the major infrastructure development activities that were launched in the mid-1990s, which were occasioned, paradoxically, by the inauguration of the GEF-UN conservation project. The intensification

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of these urban-based activities exercised a pull-effect on the hinterland population through the increasing marginalization of subsistence livelihood-making as the dominant occupation. Henceforth, earning a regular salary instead of pursuing a seasonally contingent subsistence occupation became an island-wide desire, indeed an obsession. This created a communal context in which Soqotrans became on the one hand economic straddlers across the rural and urban economy given the seasonal nature of economic activities on the island and the inadequacy of opportunities in both sectors, and on the other, they became environmental stragglers confronting increasingly erratic seasonal patterns and the resulting scarcity of the needed environmental resources (water and grass) and having to struggle to find or purchase alternative feed for their animals. This is the context in which the GEF-UN introduced their strategy of environmental protection, biodiversity conservation, and development deferment. 6.5.4

Nature as Sanctuary: Spatial Annexation

When the GEF inaugurated its conservation experiment in Soqotra in 1996, its advocacy of a vision that seeks to achieve a symbiosis between livelihood domains and biodiversity preserves was already a generation too late. Indeed, this Arcadian vision amounts to a nostalgic recuperation of the reverential attitude that prevailed during the Sultanate period where nature was a source of Baraka (see Vol. 1: Chapter 3). The, then, prevailing mood of optimism toward nature’s prodigality has since been replaced by a pessimistic mood in which nature is seen as having lost its providential powers and therefore alternative to it as a source of livelihood must be found. In this context, the post-liberal environmentalism inspired GEF-UN policy objective of demarcating the entire island as a national park and of pursuing the “controlled commercial use of Soqotra’s unique biodiversity” through a community based natural resources management are incongruous with Soqotrans’ current aspirations. In effect, these aspirations have consecrated the GEF-UN vision as an economically non-viable, and socially retrogressive, vision of life on the island. More significantly, this annexation process, if implemented according to the ZP, would generate an unprecedented involuntary population displacement of pastoralists from their ancestral homestead. Worthy of note, is that the otherwise coercive socialist administration offered alternative employment

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as an inducement to rural-coastal migration, which the GEF-UN experiment has failed thus far to offer to pastoralists to induce their commitment to its sustainable development vision. Finally, the above summary of the cumulative effects of the changes in human-environment relations in Soqotra has rendered obsolete the current GEF-UN approach. These changes have obviated the economic feasibility of the proposed community based natural resources management. In fact, the only resource of value on the land that is neglected, indeed maligned, by the GEF-UN experiment, is the pastoral herds. While the natural resources (e.g., aloes and resin-producing trees) that have been the target of marketable exploitation by this experiment are seasonally harvested mostly by women and are seen neither as economically rewarding nor as necessitating a communal undertaking. In sum, the GEF-UN experiment has thus far failed to prove Soqotrans wrong in their negative evaluation of the economic potential of the island’s biodiversity. Until it establishes a viable link between conservation and development and demonstrates the local value-added of biodiversity conservation, the spatial annexation of Soqotra Island and the consecration of its environment into (human-less) sanctuaries will remain an obstacle not only to achieving its conservation objectives, but more importantly to enabling Soqotrans’ socioeconomic emancipation.

6.6 A Modest Proposal: Recalibrating a Preemptive Conservation Strategy The chapter offered a retrospective analysis and genealogy of the GEF-UN-led inauguration of an environmental conservation regime in Soqotra. In this section, I highlight the contours of an exit strategy from the impasse of biodiversity conservation in Soqotra and the associated conservation fatigue of Soqotrans. There is a fundamental paradox at the core of environmental conservation and the non-appreciation of its existence led to the tendency among environmentalists of leapfrogging realities on the ground in pursuit of conservation objectives that are not adapted to the local context. This paradox is based on the contingent relation between social context, socio-economic situation, and environmental values of the residents of the place targeted for conservation: It is the relative affluence of the population that is conducive to, if not generative of, its environmental awareness. As Nordhaus and Shellenberger put it: “The satisfaction of the [basic] material needs of food, water and shelter

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is … the precondition for the modern appreciation of the non-human world” (2009: 27). The failure to appreciate this basic insight has led to an erroneous conclusion on the part of Western environmentalists who extrapolate from their situation back home—where capitalism’s production excesses coupled with Westerners’ hyper consumerist ethos have despoiled the environment—“to understand material prosperity as the cause of, but not the solution to,” environmental problems (Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2009: 37). While this paradox may not be universally applicable, it is most pertinent to Soqotra’s case where the GEF-UN conservation experiment seeks to induce post-materialist values prior to the community’s fulfillment of its basic needs (see Scholte et al. 2011). As a social formation with an already very low carbon footprint that is confronted with urgent basic needs, the advocacy of a conservation strategy that betrays an asymmetrical prioritization of conservation over development—as is consistently reflected in a succession of conservation projects—is a morally delinquent undertaking. The designers of the ZP and the formulators of the conservation project documents have betrayed a moral hazard: They have engaged in self-serving decision-making in preparing their plans and projects while not having to suffer their unintended consequences. This is evident in the fact that the ZP has inaugurated a path-dependent process that institutionalized a spatially unjust and egregious gerrymandering of Soqotra’s landscape in favor of international stakeholders’ conservation interests. Moreover, the ZP’s designers have ignored the local ecological knowledge base, and were indifferent to the spatial requirements and land use practices associated with livelihood making on the island. As a result, the promised future of the GEF-UN conservation experiment in Soqotra is characterized by Soqotrans’ exclusion and that of their herds from most of the island’s hinterland given its designation as a national park and a persistent neglect of their socioeconomic concerns. It is this future of indefinitely postponed modernization and prevented development that is cloaked under the partially deserved but exoticizing monikers: “Treasure Island of Yemen,” “Jewel of Arabia,” and the “Galapagos of the Indian Ocean.” In effect, the ZP is hindering the conservation of Soqotra’s biodiversity and the enhancement of Soqotrans’ socioeconomic mobility. This GEF-UN ill-conceived conservation experiment has made Soqotra into a sacrificial lamb at the altar of the earth’s ecological health. The catalytic step in recalibrating this preemptive conservation experiment

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is the de-scaling of the ZP from its current unmanageable total encompassment of Soqotra to a manageable scale that strategically targets the biodiversity areas in need of protection. This entails the formulation of a strategically focused terrestrial ZP that prioritizes biodiversity conservation as follows: The four areas designated “Special Areas for Botanical Interest,” and the seven “Nature Sanctuaries” should be the core zones. In addition, the “National Park” areas should be revised drastically downward to include areas that truly meet the criteria for such a classification and not the virtual fantasy of landscape designers, and the category “Resource Use Reserve” should be based on detailed baseline studies of local resource use and demarcated accordingly. Finally, the “General Use Zone” must reflect the economic aspiration of Soqotra’s emerging generation and not the non-development vision of foreign conservation consultants. This revised ZP would constitute the appropriate planning framework for the articulation of a communal development strategy based on a bio-cultural diversity protection strategy, which would (a) end the threat of displacement of pastoralists and their herds from their livelihood domains, and (b) restore the Soqotran public’s loss of faith in the relevance of the GEF-UN environmental conservation regime to their daily lives.

Notes 1. The mission lasted seven weeks (forty-eight days) during which it collected between 500 and 600 plant species out of which 200 species and twenty genera were new to science. This established the importance of Soqotra’s endemic flora. He was later named the Regis Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh (RBGE), which became the holder of the specimens collected in Soqotra. This was to initiate the relationship of the RBGE with Soqotra that has continued ever since. 2. The “misrepresentations and misunderstandings” being referred to above is to a cyber war that had broken out between two camps split along a local/foreign divide. This war began in early 2002 with an email entitled “An Open Letter to FoS” that articulated the grievances of a committee of four Yemeni mainlanders who were speaking on behalf of the GEF project and in defense of the NGO the Socotra Conservation Fund (SCF) that was to be established by the project. Accordingly, they felt that they represented “the views of most Yemeni private citizens concerned with the future of Socotra and in particular the people of Socotra.” They had “become increasingly concerned about the lack of genuine Yemeni and/or Socotri

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participation in the initial setup of FOS.” They noted that “the objectives, methodology and source of funding for the two organizations (FOS and SCF) are very similar if not identical.” And suggested that “there is no place at this time for two competing organisations working towards the same goal.” Their recommendation was “To merge the FOS and SCF so that they can work as one organization,” as their ultimate aim was the subsumption of FoS into SCF and not a “collaborative partnership.” A rejoinder letter from FoS, contested the bad faith narrative of the SCF protagonists, insisted on “partnership” not “merger” and offered the resignation of the FoS’ Chairperson as an olive branch. Ultimately, the FoS maintained its independence and remained active, while the SCF was established in 2002 as a still born entity (see Chapter 7). However, both NGOs had little impact on “the people of Socotra.” 3. Of course, the editor would furiously deny any attempt at the epistemic quarantine of a status quo dissenting viewpoint but would vouch that she was merely expressing her disapproval of my failure to heed the pedantic injunctions about the proper mono-cultural use of English by her famous compatriot—George Orwell (1946).

CHAPTER 7

“Saving Soqotra”: Biography of a Conservation and Development Experiment

This chapter presents a comprehensive biography of the actual implementation process of Soqotra’s conservation experiment that was launched in 1997 with funding from the Global Environment Facility and its partner agencies at the United Nations. This chapter builds on the previous one, which offered a retrospective analysis of the formulation process of this conservation experiment. This experiment was pursued for the next two decades through multiple reincarnations of that inaugural project to conserve Soqotra’s endemic biodiversity and to institutionalize its sustainable development. This biography explores the evolving articulation of development and conservation that has led to an impasse where conservation is ineffectually being pursued through a preventive environmental management regime. This chapter chronicles the implementation process by UN agencies of this virtually conceived conservation and development vision for Soqotra. Accordingly, it highlights this conservation experiment’s animating vision and the constraints it imposed on the islanders’ local pursuit of socioeconomic mobility. It describes the formulation of the “Socotra Archipelago Master Plan,” which engendered by default the strategy of sustainable underdevelopment for Soqotra: the maximal conservation of Soqotra’s ecological endowments and the minimal development of both its physical environment and human population. It explores the ramifications of this strategy through a systematic analysis of the implementation of the five major biodiversity conservation projects

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that were supposed to transform Soqotra into an ecocentric community and evaluate their effects on the island and its inhabitants.

7.1 Conservation, Management, and Development: Panoptic Nexus The question raised in the following quote aptly captures the challenging quest for an “equilibrium paradigm” between conservation and development to address the existential challenge confronting Soqotrans and their island: At the verge of the third millennium, Soqotra still enjoys the rare status of being one of the world’s most remote and inaccessible places … What can be done to end the isolation of the island and offer its human inhabitants their right share of modern commodities while ensuring that its unique landscapes, their flora and their fauna, remain as intact as possible? (Dumont 1998: 11)

The local implementation of this “equilibrium paradigm” entails the socioeconomic development of a human population characterized by a high level of material deprivation that must be remedied; and the preservation of the ecological heritage of a place endowed with a unique biodiversity of global significance. The GEF-UN experiment in biodiversity conservation with sustainable development in Soqotra was launched with the aim of establishing such a paradigm through an exemplary demonstration “that environmental management and social development are interdependent rather than mutually exclusive options.” Indeed, from the inception stage, GEF in collaboration with its UN-implementing agencies (UNDP and UNEP) sought a “framework foundation to safeguard the natural assets of the island amidst a search for future development.” This “framework” would provide the enabling conditions (i) “to strike a balance between socio-economic development of the island and conserving its valuable biological resources”; and (ii) to show “how to conserve and protect the culture and the indigenous knowledge of its people from modern development pressure for economic growth” (Yucer 1998: 9). The Zoning Plan (ZP), discussed in Chapter 6, is the “framework foundation” and the legal basis of the GEF-UN conservation experiment in Soqotra. As such, it is “the paramount strategic planning tool guiding all socio-economic development and conservation

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actions on Soqotra.” However, the ZP bequeathed major dilemmas in the conservation, management, and development of Soqotra: • First, the conservation framework, which was incorporated in the ZP, betrayed an imperialist ethic, as it proposed the transformation of Soqotra Island into a national park and imposed on its inhabitants a regime of restricted use of their spatial endowment, territorial homestead, and environmental resources. Moreover, the conservation framework was formulated through an environmental planning process that was perfunctory and ritualistic in its interaction with local stakeholders, as it was advocating an imported and non-adapted environmental regime that pursued prescriptive and proscriptive “eco-regulatory” policies. • Second, the management strategy adopted for Soqotra’s conservation experiment was subordinated to the imperialist edicts of the ZP. Accordingly, managerial practices betrayed neo-colonial tendencies, as the different incarnations of the “virtualizing project” that inaugurated Soqotra’s conservation experiment back in 1997 have sought to create an island-wide “single strategic planning entity” that would reflect a hierarchical chain of command: International stakeholders would devise Soqotra’s conservation policies, the mainland central government would minimally vet and approve them, and the local administration would implement them. • Third, the development paradigm was anachronistic, as it sought to recuperate and sustain what are imagined to be still viable traditional livelihoods based on the sustainable use of environmental resources. This assumption is actually an unproven hypothesis that is frequently repeated as a truism: The biodiversity of Soqotra provides the main “basis for the long-term sustainable livelihood of the local population.” This unsubstantiated hypothesis became the guiding principle in the formulation of Soqotra’s development strategy that is best described as “sustainable underdevelopment”: To reclaim and sustain the “ecotopian commune” that is believed to have existed in the past—a quixotic quest for the restoration of Arcadia—that would cater to post-modern pilgrims in quest of self-enchantment through the visual consumption of the island’s “pristine” landscape, while merely complementing Soqotrans’ traditional livelihoods with regulated access to basic modern amenities in the two main towns of the island. Indeed, the aim of development, as expressed in the

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ten-year development plan for Soqotra (see below) is: To stabilize and marginally improve local “good practices” without changing Soqotrans’ ways of life that prevail in the hinterland. The end result of this conservation experiment is the malignant synergy between the imperialist ethos of the ZP, the development prevention strategy required by the ZP as exemplified in the Soqotra Archipelago Master Plan and the hierarchical managerial structures that have conscripted Soqotrans into a virtually imagined ecocratic communal formation. These have encompassed the Soqotran community within an externally supervised panopticon under the following edicts: (a) the prioritized recuperation of Soqotrans’ traditional socio-economic practices, which are the subsistence modes of livelihood, and indigenous conservation practices whose economic viability was initially undermined by socialist economic policies during the 1970s and are being further marginalized by the current exigencies of an increasingly monetized economy; (b) the relative marginalization of their occupational preference for non-traditional economic activities that generate salaried jobs instead of subsistence occupations; and (c) the arbitrary subordination of their modern aspirations to the exigencies of an excessively preventive and needlessly punitive conservation policy. To situate the specific contributions of this chapter, let me briefly summarized the tasks performed by Chapter 6: (a) it established the genealogy and evolution of the concept of “sustainable development” that served as the justificatory discourse for Soqotra’s incorporation within a global conservation regime; (b) it identified the preeminent role of the GEF at the global level as well as its local ramifications; (c) it explained the dominant role and motivations of national and international actors in configuring the conservation regime imposed on Soqotra; and (d) it highlighted the actual and potential ramifications of one key output of this regime namely, the Zoning Plan or ZP. In contrast, this chapter offers a biography of the actual implementation process of this experiment through a descriptive analysis of the development plans and conservation projects that sought to realize this externally imposed vision on Soqotra and its indigenous inhabitants. Accordingly, the chapter undertakes the following analytical tasks: First, it highlights the nature of that vision and the constraints imposed on the local pursuit of socioeconomic mobility; second, it describes the formulation of the “Socotra Archipelago Master Plan,” which recommended a “medium-growth” development model for

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Soqotra; third, it explores the ramifications of this development model; and fourth, it analyzes the five conservation projects and their changing rationales through which the realization of the above-discussed vision was pursued and assesses their impacts on the Soqotran community. These analytical tasks are performed through a review of all the projects documents, their evaluation reports and complemented by my initial fieldwork and over a decade of subsequent field visits and reflections. Worthy of note is that these evaluation reports convey a picture that contests the cheerleading narrative about the GEF-UN experiment that prevails among members of Soqotra’s community of environmental researchers; thereby suggesting a conflict of interests given their role in designing and implementing these projects. Also noteworthy is the complicit silence among members at large of Soqotra’s epistemic community of environmentalists in the face of this floundering experiment and the collective reluctance to call for its recalibration. This is due to their exclusively scientific interest that blinkers their perception of Soqotra as primarily a research domain and the resulting lack of genuine empathy with Soqotrans’ legitimate socioeconomic aspirations. This chapter is an attempt to catalyze the call to re-think this experiment. Accordingly, it concludes with an appeal to re-establish conservation and development into a joint pursuit, given the uneven prioritization, if not complete neglect, of development in all of the conservation projects reviewed below.

7.2

Ecotopia Envisioned: Sacrosanct Landscape and Primeval People

Ecotopia, ideally, refers to a future-oriented social order that promotes symbiotic ecological and sociocultural relations between community members and their environment. Accordingly, it recognizes simultaneously and equally the rights and responsibilities of community members as stewards of the earth as well as the natural rights of the environment for protection. In Soqotra, ecotopia takes on a contrary meaning: It is envisioned as a past-oriented communal order, which fetishizes the premodern past, abhors the modern present and anticipates a catastrophic future if modernity is locally embraced. This is exemplified in the idealized communal state depicted in the report nominating Soqotra as a UNESCO World Heritage Site: “They live by fishing, herding livestock, date cultivation and gathering plant products – a lifestyle that has changed little since the first settlers arrived 2000 years ago” (Government of Yemen

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2006: 40). Worthy of note, is that this statement was written when all of the changes discussed throughout this book were already ongoing. This epitomizes one of the requirements of “the production of a conservation spectacle” discussed in the previous chapter: The dramatization of the conservation worthiness of a targeted domain. In doing so, the statement, perhaps inadvertently, engaged in the ontological essentialization of Soqotrans by portraying them as non-coeval residents of the planet and thus consigning them beyond the pale of modernity. This fetishism of the primeval seeks to promote the continued viability of a communal formation that emerged over a thousand years ago when Soqotra was initially settled: At the time the South Arabian kingdoms became ascendant due to the frankincense trade, around 500 BC [when] the origin of the balance between man and the environment [was] achieved in Socotra… [The] result was that over a significant period of time traditional land management prevented over-exploitation of natural resources. (Cronk 1997: 480)

This is the original frame of reference underlying Soqotra’s conservation and development experiment, which led to the imagined Arcadian pristineness of the entire island and to the imaginary geography configured in the ZP, as discussed in the previous chapter. This frame of reference presumes the existence of an “ecologically optimal scale” at which the local economy should operate and thus essentializes the function of traditional livelihood practices as regulators of environmental stability and biodiversity conservation. Accordingly, conservation and development are articulated through a process of enhancing, stabilizing, and valorizing economically marginal subsistence practices into sustainable livelihoods. This eco-development regime entails a locally-led process that relies primarily on existing infrastructural and currently available human productive capacities that could be enhanced gradually. It is a minimalist modernization approach, which seeks to conserve and protect the culture and the indigenous knowledge of Soqotrans from modern development pressures. Ideally, it is an eco-development process that is strictly based on the reproductive capacity of the island’s natural ecosystem as well as the adaptive capacity of the local cultural context. Therefore, the introduction of modern ways of life is to be strictly regulated, if not entirely prevented, in order to ensure their culturally appropriate integration. The solution is

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to find a mechanism that permanently preserves the separate coexistence of nature and society in “a mythical past in which nature and society lived happily together ‘in equilibrium’ in ‘small face to-face communities’” (Latour 2009: 144). In Soqotra, the ZP embodies the assumption about the intrinsic separateness of nature and community and articulates the mechanism that will keep the two separate. This is the self-serving vision that the GEF-UN, bilateral donors, and the Soqotra dedicated epistemic community insist on operationalizing on behalf of the Government of Yemen and in spite of the lack of local receptivity since the launching of the ZP in 2000. This vision is being offered to the islanders as a new understanding of their island as well as their new identity as the international community’s appointed stewards of their annexed territorial homestead. In effect, the ZP, as discussed in the previous chapter, signified a radical annexation of Soqotra’s physical environment into experimental enclosures. This represents Soqotrans’ dispossession, at least symbolically, of their local commons and its inscription into an alienating conservation framework that imposed a disciplinary regulation on their use of the island’s environmental resources. Moreover, it necessitated the cultivation of a new ecological consciousness on the part of Soqotrans, as a means of re-socializing their interaction with the environment. These are the constraining parameters that were to guide the formulation of a sustainable development and conservation strategy that would use the ZP as the authorizing geographic grid. The resulting development plan was supposed to optimally harmonize the conservation requirements of Soqotra’s ecosystems with the socio-economic needs of Soqotrans. As such, it would launch Soqotrans on a path that was socio-culturally appropriate to, and viably integrated into, a sustainable development process. Ironically, members of Soqotra’s epistemic community of conservationists have remained oblivious to the false premises of the ecotopia they wish to build on the basis of locally maladapted plans and strategies. Instead, they have engaged in a superfluous debate about whether or not it is too late to “save Soqotra” for its rendezvous with the Arcadian eco-development regime they envisioned for it. In the following section, I describe the divergent crisis narratives about the potential for conservation on the island imagined by these self-appointed “green missionaries.”

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7.2.1

Ecotopia Debated: Pollyanna vs. Cassandra Narratives

As was noted in the Prologue, while Soqotra was spared a “resource curse” given its lack of mineral resources and the economic depredation that this usually entails, it has had the mixed blessing of a “symbolic curse” given its legendary reputation as an aromatic cornucopia from antiquity onward based on its endemic biodiversity. This made the island into a coveted object for symbolic appropriation among those who came in contact with it over millennia (see Elie 2006a). Indeed, the island became the pillar of an Occidentalist imaginary that was used in the objectification of the natural endowments and cultural otherness of non-Western places. Accordingly, the island epitomized the symbolic form in the epistemology underpinning the West’s physical interaction with, and symbolic appropriation of, the natural world. This gave rise to a symbolic ecology as the embodiment of ideational fantasies in which the island was seen as offering “the possibility of redemption, a realm in which Paradise might be recreated or realized on earth, thereby implying a structure for a moral world in which interactions between people and nature could be morally defined and circumscribed” (Grove 1995: 13). In the case of Soqotra, this symbolic ecology informed the practice of representing it as a sacrosanct geography and primeval community, embodying the professional desiderata of conservationists. These conservationists have adopted an exogenous environmental sensibility that imagined Soqotra as a bucolic community enjoying a lifestyle based on conservation “practices of eons” and to promote it as a (contrived) exemplar of the realization of the holistic pursuit of conservation and development. This is evident in the inexorable consistency with which Edenic clichés (e.g., abode of the blest, island of tranquility, island of the Phoenix, unique natural monument, etc.) have adorned the titles and informed the contents of books, audiovisual materials, newspapers and journal articles, as well as UN reports on Soqotra—especially since 1996. These Edenic tropes framed the debate among conservationists who constitute the Soqotra-dedicated epistemic community about the feasibility of sustaining the island as an ecotopia that epitomizes a “unique living museum and a masterpiece of evolution.” The shared concern among these premature “professional grievers” for the island’s environment was about the consequences of crossing the threshold from Soqotra’s imagined pre-modern pristineness to its anticipated adulteration

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by modernity. The UNESCO nomination dossier expressed the concern as follows: Socotra is at a critical point in its history: a crossroads between becoming a well-managed and preserved prime ecotourism destination at international level, or becoming just another biodiversity-impoverished island like many others, dependent on external and government help, due to irreversible loss of its main assets: its uniquely preserved nature and culture. (Government of Yemen 2006: 63)

In response to this concern, there emerged two divergent crisis narratives about whether or not the window of opportunity to “save Soqotra” from the “anthropogenic tsunami… [that] seems to be sweeping over” it (Van Damme and Banfield 2011: 35). This kind of hyperbolic claim is a defining feature of crisis narratives, as they “are the primary means whereby conservation and development experts… assert their rights as ‘stakeholders’ in the land and resources they say are under crisis” (Sutton 1999: 27–28). I highlight below the main arguments of the advocates of these two crisis narratives that I categorize as follows: The protagonists, the majority view, who marshal a Pollyanna narrative that an ecotopia is within reach with more environmental awareness among the islanders and more science-based demarcation of PAs. The other camp of antagonists, the minority view, who deploy a Cassandra narrative to argue that it is already too late as the locals have damaged their environment beyond restoration. Prior to summarizing the main arguments of the two camps, I outline the shared features of their divergent orientations. First and foremost, the advocates of both perspectives betray a commitment, perhaps unwittingly, to a nature vs. society binary opposition, according to which nature and society coexist in their (divinely?) separated and bounded spaces and territories. Society (especially in its modern incarnation) is outside of nature and should be kept that way. Also, they share a change-resistant reflex that is manifested in a low tolerance threshold toward environmental change, which is instinctively associated with ecological degradation. This sentiment is further animated by a peculiar amalgamation of biophilia (love of nature) and anthropophobia (fear of humans). This combination informs their premature comparative predictions about Soqotra’s future based on the present state of other biodiversity-rich islands (e.g., Galapagos is their favorite comparison) that they consider to have been despoiled by

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modern forces (especially economic migrants and mass tourism). Noteworthy, is that this comparison is devoid of any contextualization within Soqotra’s environmental history and socioeconomic forces. This lack of contextualization is the product of a professional deformation that disinclines natural scientists from engaging the work of social scientists due to their perceived scientific deficit. Hence their knowledge gaps about historical and social forces are filled with logical extrapolations and contrived assertions. Finally, both camps’ arguments are framed within a preventive perspective and not a restorative one, as Soqotra does not suffer from the environmental threats they are imagining and warning about. As a result, their discourse is saddled with rhetorical prognostications that betray an apocalyptic sensibility that has perdurably influenced the interventions sponsored by the GEF-UN experiment in Soqotra. 7.2.1.1 Pollyanna: Ecotopia Is Possible if… The Pollyanna narrative warns about the potential dangers of modernity and the urgent need to regulate, if not prevent, Soqotra’s encounter with it. The best exemplification of this camp is the book Socotra: A Natural History of the Islands and their People (Cheung and DeVantier 2006). The book is both a retrospective reconstruction of what a pristine Soqotra was liked and a prospective diagnostic of what it might become if left in its pristine condition without the natural and cultural pollution of modernity. The choice of “natural history” in the title is significant as the term is the conceptual legacy of the eighteenth-century fascination with primitive exoticism and its fawning exuberance over pristine nature. As an approach to history, it entails the quest for the underlying forces that sustained the natural economy and aboriginal community in its primal state, or pristine condition, prior to its alteration by exposure to external forces alien to its original constitution (Nisbet 1969). Soqotra is depicted as an aggregation of small groups (i.e., “tribes”) constituted around the use of locally evolved norms to manage their resources sustainably and equitably based on conservation practices of eons. It is a community ideally and indelibly characterized by small size, territorial fixity, social homogeneity, shared norms, and identities (cf. Agrawal and Gibson 1999: 640). It is this “mythic community” populated by nature dwellers practicing subsistence livelihoods through the use of convivial tools that exploit environmental resources with a benign congeniality, which is now threatened by the “strong disruptive force of modern development.” The latter is Soqotra’s

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primary bane according to the Pollyanna’s camp, which is characteristically expressed in the following hyperbolic assertion: “development … will inevitably lead to ecosystem decline and ultimately, to the loss of Socotra’s unique position as one of the most remarkable islands in the world” (Van Damme and Banfield 2011: 79). In sum, the Pollyanna narrative is a cautious one as it is predicated on the need for urgent preventive measures in the absence of which ecological disaster will be inevitable (see details in Van Damme and Banfield 2011; Scholte et al. 2011; Van Damme 2012; and all the five main conservation projects discussed below). 7.2.1.2 Cassandra: Apocalypse Is Inevitable Despite… The Cassandra apocalyptic eco-speak has little actual or potential resemblance to the state of Soqotra’s environment, as it asserts that ecological degradation is already endemic in Soqotra. Its advocates peddle an implausible narrative that argues Soqotra’s environmental afflictions are beyond redemption. The Cassandra sensibility is best exemplified in the work of Garry Brown and Bruno Mies (2012: Chapter 7), who contest the tendency of their Pollyanna colleagues to exculpate the pastoralists and their livestock in ecological degradation. According to them, the main culprits are “anthropogenic stressors,” which are mainly Soqotrans and their livelihood practices to whom they ascribed an inherent destructive ecological agency. Their Cassandra prognostics are offered on the basis of a rather cursory survey of Soqotra’s environmental problems that repeats the familiar litany (e.g., land degradation, over-use of natural resources, loss of traditional pastoral practices, etc.) without the benefit of any new empirical studies. Indeed, their prognostics are based on largely anecdotal surveys of the island and in total ignorance of the island’s environmental history. Moreover, they invoked comparative inferences from other places in the region to affirm hasty generalizations from unsystematic observations. They adopt a reflexive skepticism toward any claim of adverse environmental impact related to climate change (e.g., De Geest et al. 2013) and insist on blaming exclusively Soqotrans and their livestock. As they explain: “the potential effects of climate fluctuations or change are likely to be trivial compared with the past and ongoing impacts of humans and their livestock” (283). This assertion relies exclusively on deductive thinking and impressionistic extrapolation that is expressed as follows: “the experience from adjacent arid regions of Africa supports this bleak outlook” (277). Their gratuitous recourse to apocalyptic prophesies based on comparative inferences from other places and their convenient

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use of proxy indicators reveal a chronic intellectual indolence, as they insist on making assertions without empirical investigation. For example, ignorance of local practices is substituted by lamentable guesswork and the use of a discredited notion: “the worst forms of soil and vegetation degradation have probably taken place on lands where access is free and unregulated, resulting in what is frequently referred to as the ‘tragedy of the commons’” (269). Indeed, their Cassandra sensibility was not induced by an empirical encounter with Soqotra’s environmental realities, but reflected an intrinsic intellectual orientation they travel with. Predictably, their survey of the viability of “environmental management” in Soqotra concludes with a Cassandra lament: [I]t is to be feared that despite the valiant efforts and best intentions of numerous individuals and organisations, Socotra is destined to suffer the same demise as another biodiversity hotspot in the region, namely Dhofar in southern Oman: green and pleasant to the casual tourist, but ecologically seriously degraded. (Brown and Mies 2012: 304)

Both narratives betray a reticence to remedy their knowledge deficit about the historical background and empirical context of local humanenvironment relations, which is the foundation of conservation policy. In the absence of an empirical engagement with local social realities, the environmental policy discourse about Soqotra will remain encumbered by a “rhetorical intoxication” either with a virtual ecotopianism or with an environmental apocalypticism that blurs the distinction between “legitimate warning” and “frenzied alarmism” (Bruckner 2013: 43). More crucially, the local knowledge deficit of these narratives has led to coercive policy proposals as in the creation of “exclosure zones” that require the removal of pastoralists and their herds from their livelihood domains (see Vol. 1: Chapter 5), and in the misanthropic ramifications of “sustainable underdevelopment” discussed below.

7.3

Development Modeling: Ten-Year Master Plan

The quest to formulate a vision for Soqotra’s sustainable development was initiated through a series of catalytic policy decisions. In January 1996, prior to the signing of the CBD in February of that year, the Government of Yemen approved Cabinet Decree No. 4 that announced three

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major objectives: (a) it declared Soqotra a protected area; (b) it established the High Committee for the Development of Soqotra (HCDS); and (c) it requested the UNDP, GEF and the EU to assist in the preparation of a long-term Master Plan for the Development of the Soqotra Archipelago. Subsequently, in April of 1996, the UNDP launched a project formulation mission that led to the first GEF-funded biodiversity conservation project. This was followed by the seventh meeting of the European Union Commission-Yemen Joint Cooperation Committee in September of 1996, during which the Government reiterated its request for, and the EU agreed to, funding a feasibility study for the preparation of this development master plan. However, the mission to formulate this plan was fielded only after a draft of the ZP was provisionally approved at a workshop in July 1999 and prior to its formal approval by the Yemeni government in September 2000. This particular sequencing was deliberate, as the master plan was to carry out its tasks according to the following arrangement: The Zoning Plan would delimit the domains in which “development” would be allowed, while the formulation of the master plan would undertake a thorough assessment of the potential economic sectors and propose an economic development strategy for Soqotra Island within the strictures of the prescriptive and proscriptive parameters of the ZP—especially the fact that development can only take place within the “General Use Zone” located within the vicinity of the island’s two towns. The symbiotic implementation of the ZP and the finalized master plan was to constitute the “sustainable development” path that would achieve what the UN suggested as the ideal fate of Soqotra and its people: To offer Soqotrans their “right share” of modern amenities and to protect their island’s biodiversity. Alas, this did not happen, as I explain below. 7.3.1

Formulating the Master Plan: Institutionalizing Non-Development

The formulation mission for the preparation of the document that would be formally entitled the “Socotra Archipelago Master Plan” (hereafter referred to as SAMP or MP) was launched in October 1999 after that fateful “technical workshop” held in July 1999 at the UNDP office in Sana‘a’, during which the final configuration of the ZP was agreed upon by the participants (see below). The mission was made up of a

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consortium of four Yemeni and foreign firms led by the UK-based environmental consultancy firm WS Atkins International. The main objective of the MP’s formulation mission was to provide a ten-year strategy for the socio-economic development of Soqotra. As the terms of reference for the MP explained: The “basic principle” that should guide Soqotra’s development is: “to utilize, as far as possible, local institutions already in place and to give the Socotra people the time and a realistic chance to choose a development path based on their traditional way of living.” This was a pious wish, as not only the ZP had already decided Soqotra’s development path, given its insistence on a geographically limited and on an exclusively environment-first focus of all activities on the island, but also the MP was to be formulated within this ecocentric development strategy. Indeed, the same terms of reference were quite positive about this strategy, as it repeated the anachronistic assumption: “Fortunately, the development of such a strategy will find a most receptive environment in Socotra as indigenous conservation practices have helped maintain the island biodiversity in the first place.” The mission to formulate the MP was obligated to accept the assumption about a pre-existing ecotopia that only needs to be minimally upgraded to facilitate regulated access, in the words of the mission’s terms of reference, to “the amenities of modernity.” The MP was supposed to provide the blueprint for a new ecocentric economy in Soqotra. Within this limited purview, the mission undertook a “systematic evaluation of all human and natural resources of the archipelago,” in light of government policy preferences, basic needs of Soqotra’s communities, different population scenarios, and especially as per the ZP-imposed geographic constraints. Furthermore, in performing this evaluation the mission was to do so only within the existing socio-economic conditions, available local capacity and the prospects for projects’ sustainability in light of these existing conditions. The resulting MP covered thirteen sectors, for which sectoral development plans were formulated in light of the existing institutional capacity and opportunities for community participation. On the basis of the above, a portfolio of sixty-nine projects was proposed to address six main priorities for Soqotrans, which were identified as follows: (1) community-led environmental management; (2) guaranteed food security; (3) provision of basic needs in the areas of health, education, water, housing, and energy; (4) reduction of population growth; (5) improvement in economic performance; and (6) strengthening of district local governance institutions. The total cost of these projects

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was estimated at nearly 210 million Euros, covering all of the sectors and categorized into two types of projects: large sectoral projects aimed at catalyzing development, and immediate impact projects that would urgently address the basic needs of the population. The consultants who formulated the MP betrayed an absence of conviction both in the ultimate viability of the GEF-UN experiment, and toward the approach of the ZP’s designers. The latter were unreservedly complicit with the universally incorporative and rationalizing logic of the CBD and the GEF’s preference for “science-based” activities, which focused exclusively on inventorying the island’s endemic flora and fauna and neglected local human needs. In contrast, the designers of the MP affected a skeptical attitude toward the totalizing purview of the ZP and adopted a subtly critical accommodative disposition toward its environment-first approach. Indeed, the MP designers admonished the stakeholders in this communal experiment that they have agreed to a Faustian covenant and rhetorically questioned whether this covenant is acceptable to locals: “It is axiomatic that development superimposed upon the underlying principle that the environment is sacrosanct will be limited in nature and pace: Once environment is prioritized, as it has been, then there are constraints upon development. Is this realization acceptable to Socotrans, and to others?” (EU 2000: 5–5). Moreover, the MP is replete with caveats about the potentially problematic aspects of the ZP and of the GEF-UN project’s strategy. For example, in a muted criticism of the ZP’s inventive design and the over-optimistic expectation about its implementability, the MP pointed out that “until communities, especially livestock herders, manage their domain within the confines of the zoning plan it is arguable whether they can fully appreciate its impact” and abide by its constraints (EU 2000: 5–5). In addition, it warned that too exclusive a focus on ecotourism “as the main economic element can leave an indigenous people worse off than before.” And it doubted the practicability of inter-clan collaboration involving the use of cost-recovery mechanism as part of proposed community-based resources management. However, the MP was not devoid of its own policy blinkers, two of which are noteworthy: (a) its project proposals could not overcome the consultants-heavy budget that usually served as employment generation for expatriate “experts”; and (b) the adoption of a cost-recovery mechanism for the funds allocated by Western donors. The MP’s formulation was based on the EU-mandated market-based approach in evaluating

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Soqotra’s economic prospects and in recommending an economic development strategy. This led to premature suggestions about establishment of a chamber of trade and commerce, and to neglect the potential economic role of certain actors (e.g., the Soqotran diaspora). Moreover, the MP stipulates that EU funds will be allocated if certain conditionalities are met: (i) “Acceptance that the role of the Government of Yemen public sector should shift from service provider to facilitator”; (ii) “People’s acceptance that sustained development will incur a greater cost to them [i.e., the application of cost-recovery mechanism]”; and (iii) that the “Social and political climate in Yemen is acceptable to donor aid policies” (EU 2000: 5–2). The proposed use of cost-recovery schemes in the MP’s planned interventions, especially in the rural areas, is an apt exemplification of transcultural annexation. As it represents a culturally alien valuation scheme, since the principle of allocating a monetary value, based on a cost and benefit calculation, in resource utilization is beyond Soqotrans’ imagination and aspiration. However, these conditionalities do not detract from the reasonableness of the MP’s proposed economic scenarios, which I highlight below. 7.3.2

Economic Growth Scenarios: Low, Medium, and High

The key purpose of the MP was to provide a prognosis on the feasible economic futures of Soqotra. This is provided in Chapter 8 of the MP under “economic development.” In effect, this chapter sought to induce a measure of realism regarding the economic potential of the island that could be envisioned—whether by locals desirous of cash earning jobs and not subsistence livelihoods, national policy-makers impatient with the UN floundering efforts, or prospective international investors. It formulated a number of economic growth scenarios using a comprehensive set of 18 criteria categorized into “supply side,” “demand side,” and “sustainability” in conjunction with local human and natural resource endowments of the island, within the environmental constraints established by the ZP, and in terms of employment generation potential. The result was three economic growth scenarios: low, medium, and high, which the MP suggested were not mutually exclusive, but their sequenced realization would require a period beyond the ten-year plan. I briefly highlight the contents of the low and high growth scenarios and elaborate on the medium growth strategy, which was recommended by the MP.

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• The “low growth” scenario was, perhaps unwittingly, the preferred scenario of the GEF-UN experiment. As it entailed the continued reliance on traditional subsistence livelihoods supplemented by fishing as a seasonal cash earning activity, coupled with low-scale tourism with low level of related services provision, and occasional micro-scale development projects. All of which have a negligible employment generation potential and will not generate pressure on the island’s ecosystems. • The “high growth” scenario lacks plausibility as Soqotra would have to attract “footloose” international capital seeking to establish taxfree export processing zone and offshore banking operation among other related activities. Given Soqotra’s existing pool of human resource capital, this scenario would have to rely on imported labor; thereby annulling its local employment generation potential. Moreover, the massive infrastructure investment required would not be attractive to a global network of “footloose” investors. Even if all of these conditions were satisfied in a very distant future, the main obstacle would remain the seasonal economic shutdown of the island due to the monsoon winds. • The “medium growth” economic development scenario is the one recommended by the MP’s designers. It is based on an optimum diversification of local economic activities that would entail assisting the emergence of commercially viable activities as part of an urbanbased economy. Its predominantly urban focus is partly due to the restricted spatial boundaries of the “General Use Zone” allocated to such economic activities by the ZP. This scenario encompasses the following activities: The gradual sectoral development of fishing, agriculture, livestock, and ecotourism, accompanied by the introduction of small and micro-industrial activity in the service sectors (e.g., construction materials, metal workshop, handicrafts, etc.); taking advantage of small-scale, high-value, low-volume export-orientated activities (e.g., horticulture, environmental products such as aloes and frankincense); and incorporating import substitution activities through increased local production of selected food items (e.g., poultry, vegetables, and dates). This strategy would make prudent use of natural resources by remaining within the existing rate of resource exploitation; generate a higher level of employment for locals as it would be in harmony with current level of human resource development; and its demand on infrastructure would be

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commensurate with Soqotra’s existing capacity. Finally, this medium growth scenario could be pursued within the existing level of agricultural, fishing, and commercial activities. Thus, it can be locally led, as it would not require extensive external input. Ultimately, this strategy seeks to develop a class of micro-entrepreneurs operating in economic sectors organically linked to local needs and resources and with some export potential as well as generative not only of employment but also of skills with upgradeable potential in the long term. However reasonable this scenario seemed, it remains unclear if Soqotra’s urban youth are willing and able to undertake the necessary apprenticeship to acquire those skills and thus play a leading role in the operationalization of this medium growth scenario. Since the formulation of the MP, some of these activities have been undertaken by mainlanders (e.g., metal workshop); while handicrafts and agriculture remain a women-led subsistence occupation and the exploitation of environmental products remain an occasional undertaking as no external market demand has been established that could incentivize local production. 7.3.3

Development Abandoned: Shelving the MP

However, none of the scenarios was actively pursued by the state or its international donors, as the MP was literally allowed to die in its nest by the obscure politics of intentional procrastination regarding the timing of certain key decisions employed by the Minister of Planning during the early 2000s. He was lukewarm toward the UN and the EU’s enthusiasm for Soqotra. He is reported to have questioned the rationale for spending so much money on so small a place. The preparation of the MP followed a two-phase process, which made it vulnerable to the politics of strategic postponement and that led ultimately to its stillbirth without any government official ever having to officially reject it. First, following the submission of the MP a workshop was to be held with the participation of all local and national stakeholders to review its findings and approve a list of priority projects to launch the MP’s implementation. This workshop was held in June 2000 and a list of projects was recommended to the Ministry of Planning for approval, which was granted in July. Subsequently, ten project documents were formulated, and they were to be presented in a similar workshop for approval by the government and to

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be submitted to the EU for funding. This was the crucial step that would have enabled the allocation of funds for the MP’s operationalization. And it is this workshop that was never held due to the Minister of Planning’s calendar politics in which successive postponements of the meeting date became a means of buying time until donor interest waned and availability of funds expired. Meanwhile, the staff at the local EU office in Sana ‘a’ waited expectantly and were dumbfounded by the delays, as their boss the head of the EU regional office in Amman, Jordan had a special fondness for Soqotra and thus was favorably disposed to recommend approval of funds. The affirmative decision from the Yemeni government never came. The funds earmarked for the workshop and projects start-up activity that were allocated in the previous fiscal period were subsequently reallocated to other activities in Yemen as part of a new budget cycle. By the mid-2000s, the MP was effectively shelved and further consideration was postponed indefinitely. A key factor in the MP’s demise may be related to the disaffection of the crony capitalists within the state’s inner circle. Interestingly, the evaluation report of the first GEF project noted that the ZP, which was the foundation of the MP “was strongly challenged in 2002–2003 by powerful political and economic interests within the GOY [Government of Yemen] but enforced with the personal involvement of the President of Yemen” (Infield and Al-Din 2003: 17). Relatedly, the Minister of Planning at the time was a major public works contractor with the state and may have had a conflict of interest given the environmental restrictions on the island’s development. Therefore, his refusal to approve the portfolio of projects was perhaps an act of intentional sabotage of the MP. The MP’s demise, however, was not entirely regrettable, as it may have been a blessing in disguise. For the strategy in some of the proposed projects might have engendered more problems than solutions. Nevertheless, its assessment of the island’s sectoral problems retains some of their initial validity, some projects among its repertoire of project ideas could still be updated and elaborated into full project documents, and its medium growth scenario presents the most adaptable economic strategy to the conditions of the island. Indeed, if any planned development is ever to take place and if the six main, and still relevant, objectives identified in the MP (listed above) are ever to be achieved in Soqotra, the mediumterm economic strategy must inevitably be implemented. Furthermore, the non-implementation of the MP generated a number of consequences:

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(a) it led to the abandonment of development on the island, as no “development” activity that approximates what was proposed in the medium growth scenario was actively promoted in Soqotra ever since; (b) it was the first and last comprehensive preparatory socioeconomic assessment of Soqotra and all subsequent conservation projects have intervened without the benefit of an updated assessment; (c) it placed conservation and development on divergent paths in all subsequent phases of the GEF-UN experiment; and (d) it established the low-growth, indeed no-growth, scenario as the prevailing strategy by default. The next section elaborates on the ramifications of this default strategy.

7.4

Sustainable Underdevelopment: Preserving Wilderness

The MP’s abandonment contributed to consecrating the transformation of Soqotra into an ecocratic utopia, or ecotopia, in which the environment is sacrosanct and sovereign and therefore takes precedence over the livelihood concerns of the inhabitants. This became the hegemonic vision among the interested international institutions and actors, and their few national sympathizers, and local passive accommodators. Indeed, the MP foregrounded the dubious platitude about “practice of eons” that can be maintained eternally: “Since the archipelago’s high environmental quality has developed and is maintained by traditional practices, then it is only logical that these should continue with few or no amendments imposed on them” (EU 2000: 6–5). Moreover, it reified this assumption into Soqotra’s development vision: “Development is the identification of areas where current good practices can be enhanced and stabilised, and made more rewarding… without detracting from their [traditional] lifestyle” (EU 2000: 5–4). In effect, Soqotra’s self-appointed conservationists made this ecotopia into the island’s compulsory development path under the guise of the slogan “conservation before development” (Scholte et al. 2011). The resulting model that was adopted by default is a form of “communalist ecocentrism”: A cultural preservation and environmental conservation approach that privileges macro-environmental constraints on economic objectives and development activities in a given community (Peet and Watts 1996). Moreover, it seeks “to recover and sustain the communal advantages of pre-modern society” in a modernizing context (Daly and Cobb 1989: 16). This model entails a strategy of managed non-development that would preserve Soqotra as a wilderness area.

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Soqotra’s development potential was constrained by the arbitrary preferences of development Orientalists promoting sustainable underdevelopment through a default non-development strategy, and green Orientalists advocating environmental sustainability through the transformation of communally-owned non-capitalized territorial homesteads of pastoralists into transnationally regulated property (cf. Igoe et al. 2011: 22). Indeed, the GEF-UN experiment is, in effect, pursuing a strategy of the permanent postponement of modernization. This entails the practice of a form of cultural preservation dictated by externally determined environmental priorities that merely allow for a creeping gradualism in the pace of change in the quest for a minimal level of social progress that is solely dictated by the extreme criterion of “zero extinction” of its endemic species, as articulated in the GEF-UNEP latest project (see below). In effect, this is not merely a passive non-development strategy, but an actively anti-development scheme. It seems that the primary justification for this approach is “biocultural preservation”: The protection of both endemic species and the enabling indigenous culture. The only commendable aspect of this approach is that it advocates the preservation of local cultural authenticity, although imagined by external actors. In contrast, the mainstream model of development advocates the acculturation of traditional societies into modernity. As it assumes that it is these societies’ local cultural traditions that impede development given their “regressive attachments which prevent [them] from entering upon [their] citizenship of the world” (Eagleton 2000: 30). In spite of its good intention, the prevailing development vision for Soqotra ultimately prevents the realization of local socioeconomic aspirations. In theory, the operationalization of the sustainable development concept was to be achieved through an indigenized modernization process based on a symbiosis between Soqotra’s traditional management institutions of livelihood practices and its pastoral ways of life with modern ones. In practice, however, its implementation resulted in the substitution of indigenous practices of environmental regulation and exploitation of their commons with imported models. In effect, the imported vision of sustainable development in Soqotra became an albatross as it transformed the island into an environmental research colony and an experimental station for micro-scale projects that were neither sustainable nor entailed development. The resulting non-development model based on micro-projects is discussed below.

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7.4.1

Micro-Development: Philanthropic Gestures

The philanthropic intention of this default non-development model is actually preventing the realization of the new generation of Soqotrans’ socio-economic preferences. As its pursuit is based on the enclosure of the majority of Soqotrans, even if they are unaware of it, as custodians of a national park; an occupation they do not aspire to. While this does not, at least not yet, affect Soqotrans in their daily lives, because the operationalization of the ZP has been ineffective at best, it determines the approach of the GEF-UN experiment and its international supporters that use it as their intervention template. For both—the UN and international donors—the ZP is the “paramount strategic planning tool,” which must be scrupulously adhered to in all activities that they fund. This approach betrays an insouciance toward the potentially deleterious local effects of externally imposed policies that are partly based on exaggerated environmental threats to justify stringent conditionalities on the development prospects of a community with an already low environmental footprint. This disposition, which is animated by a nostalgic quest to reproduce a local Arcadia, epitomizes a vice common to policies formulated by expatriate consultants who are shielded from the consequences of their policy decisions, which is called moral hazard. In the case of Soqotra, this led the designers of the ZP to impose a strict socioeconomic apartheid between the urban and rural domains, and to enforce a development embargo in the latter. To be fair, however, to these designers it was not their personal choice but one partly imposed by the GEF’s procedural strictures. For example, GEF funding is strictly for achieving global environmental benefits, while funding for local environmental and development benefits is the responsibility of the government and/or its international partners. The initial responsibility for funding local development was allocated to the EU-funded MP through the “medium growth” scenario with its repertoire of projects to address Soqotra’s development needs. Given the abandonment of the MP, there was no UN-planned or state-assisted development in Soqotra’s urban and rural areas. The void was haphazardly filled by the livelihood initiatives of Soqotrans (fishing, bee-keeping, home-gardening, and herding), the real estate investments of members from the diaspora, and the trading and micro-industrial activities of mainlanders (see Chapter 5). In effect, the GEF-UN experiment has abandoned the urban areas and claimed the rural domain as its exclusive managerial jurisdiction, which it

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conceived as a national park and its inhabitants as conscripted rangers and not as native residents in their ancestral homestead. However, because of the GEF-mandated separation between funding sources for conservation and development (see below), the absence of the designated donors for development left a vacuum regarding the development needs of Soqotrans both in the rural and urban sectors. Accordingly, the GEF-UN interventions in the rural domain are exclusively basic needs subvention and are conceived as “community mobilization” activities. That is, they are designed to build the social capital of the GEF-UN experiment in the local communities around the location of protected areas. The endemic neglect of the population at large led to the adoption of a default micro-development model, which is being pursued through the uncoordinated implementation of a plethora of micro-projects that are supposed to enhance or complement the traditional livelihood practices. These micro-scale interventions are merely philanthropic gestures that deliver narrowly targeted assistance to communities. They serve as provisional palliatives to the intrinsic neglect of the community’s socio-economic needs that are not related to environmental conservation in the GEFUN’s large-scale projects. Indeed, this rather disingenuous engagement with “development” betrays the practice of “diplomatic bribing,” which entails the affective manipulation of the community’s allegiances through charitable benefactions that produce dependency, or induce loyalty, as part of a strategy of incremental socioeconomic meliorism. This practice is sadly the operational norm and ultimate objective of the international development regime, which conservation projects are parodying. Paradoxically, it seems that the establishment by the GEF in 1992 of its Small Grants Programme (GEF-SGP), which is managed by the UNDP globally (see Yemen UNDP-SGP website for details), was designed to address the contradiction of its sister agency’s funding restrictions that prioritize global conservation over local development needs. Yet, its incongruous slogan—“thinking globally acting locally”—betrays the GEF’s obsession with global environmental benefits, as it implies that local grantees are recruits in its army of planet saviors. In fact, its projects, at least in Soqotra, are mostly related to basic needs. The SGP, which began its interventions in Soqotra in 2006, sought to remedy the neglect of Soqotrans’ socioeconomic needs by the main conservation projects. Its mode of operation mimics the GEF’s in one key aspect, namely its domains of interventions are limited to the focal areas based on the global Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs): Biodiversity

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Protection, Climate Change Mitigation, Land Degradation, Sustainable Forest Management, International Waters and Persistent Organic Pollutants. However, in contrast to the GEF’s prioritizing of international stakeholders’ conservation interests, the SGP’s primary stakeholders are local CBOs, CSOs, and NGOs in the poorest and most vulnerable communities. Its main objective, according to its website, is to “provide financial and technical support to projects that conserve and restore the environment while enhancing people’s well-being and livelihoods… [in order to] demonstrate that community action can maintain the fine balance between human needs and environmental imperatives.” This is pursued through the provision of grants of up to $50,000 directly to local communities through the UNDP country office. While local interventions must be justified according to the MEAs’ “focal areas,” this is merely a fig leaf, as all of the SGP’s micro-projects in Soqotra address local basic needs. To cite a few examples: a flood protection project is slotted under “Land Degradation”; a women’s vegetable garden is placed under “Biodiversity Protection”; and an experimental use of solar energy for home electrification is hyperbolically claimed to be a contribution toward “Climate Change Mitigation” (see GEF-UNEP 2014: 36–38). The sum total of the SGP’s interventions in Soqotra from 2006 until 2018 amounts to 54 micro-projects for a total of $1,749,734 in mainly three focal areas: (i) biodiversity protection: twenty projects; (ii) land degradation: seventeen projects; and (iii) climate change mitigation: sixteen projects; and one more project was in the domain of invasive species. In spite of the contrived claims about the SGP’s lofty aims, it addressed concrete local socio-environmental needs that have left some physical evidence behind. For example, some of the vegetable gardens can be seen, as well as the water harvesting works among others. This much cannot be said about the GEF’s interventions though its large-scale projects that received a total of $19,105,243, which does not include the “leveraged funds” from other donors (see below). Prior to and since the intervention of the GEF-SGP, Soqotra bilateral donors have contributed directly to its projects or initiated independently, and rather haphazardly, a series of similar micro-scale experimental schemes that seem primarily motivated by “let’s help the poor” moral condescension. Here is a sample of micro-scale project initiatives: vegetable gardens, beekeeping, water reservoirs, solar lamps for night lighting in the hinterland, mist nesting for water collection, small-scale tourism, pilot-scale production, and commercialization of resin producing plants (e.g., aloes, frankincense,

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Dragon Blood), assistance to local nurseries for the collection, storage, and cultivation for sale of endemic plants seedlings. The point about micro-projects is that they might be adequate for addressing basic needs for the community’ short-term welfare but are not an effective longterm development strategy for Soqotra. Moreover, for these projects to be successful as income-generating activities (IGAs), they must be “community demand-driven and are coordinated with existing livelihoods” (GEF Evaluation Office 2006: 52). This explains the success of vegetable gardens only in the locations where they were traditionally undertaken. Also, bee-keeping is a new endeavor, but it builds on the endemic practice of honey harvesting from natural beehives (see Vol. 1: Chapter 6). In addition to these micro-scale development projects, the Social Fund for Development (SFD) a quasi-governmental entity established by the World Bank with international donor funding that is supposed to operate as an alternative to the government’s subvention of economic activities from the public treasury has built a number of public buildings (clinics and schools) on the island. However, some of these buildings have remained vacant or partially used due to lack of adequate personnel. The end result is that Soqotra is the tramping ground of development Samaritans and a dumping ground for their ephemeral charitable works. These types of activities betray a “preservational” approach to “development” that is conceived as a morally expiating philanthropic endeavor undertaken by external agencies to enhance the quality of life of a community within a pre-modern social context. Ultimately, this “development” is devoid of any socially transformational objective, as its aim is not emancipation from local conditions of relative socio-economic deprivation, but adjustment to it through a series of palliative microscale interventions as exemplified above. Indeed, this approach conforms ideally to the ZP, which is essentially a development prevention blueprint. The end state of this micro-scale and non-development strategy is a community in which, [I]t is no longer necessary to ‘develop’ all aspects of the ‘economy’ and indeed sections of the population are now required to remain permanently in less ‘developed’ strata… for the new productive economies of culture and exotica, the tourist appeal of third world reservations, natural habitats and ethnic museums. (Hutnyk 2002: 23)

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Finally, what should have been a biocultural diversity preserving and development promoting process “designed to protect and promote, and further the culture of [a] distinct non-dominant [ethno-cultural] group within the wider society and within the framework of the [Yemeni] nation-state” (Stavenhagen 1998: 16), mutated into a transcultural ecofundamentalist vision in which Soqotrans were conscripted as national park custodians to protect the biodiversity heritage of humankind. This vision is framed within a conservation-led sustainable underdevelopment strategy, which is unable to fulfill Soqotrans’ contemporary economic aspirations: To be full-time participants in the modern economic sector holding a non-traditional job with a regular salary that is not contingent on the seasons. Moreover, these aspirations cannot be met under the current economic configuration of the island: A state-dependent communal economy with the local bureaucracy as main employer and social service provider in the main urban centers; while the rest of the coastal population is engaged in fishing under market conditions in which buyers dictate the price of the catch (see Chapter 5). For the population of the hinterland, they eke out a subsistence livelihood from a pastoralism of diminishing economic value (Vol. 1: Chapters 5 and 6). This is complemented by the haphazard assistance of international agencies implementing micro-scale projects of limited duration, scope and sustainability, and an embryonic private sector with limited employment generation prospects. Lastly, for the lucky few with relatives in the Gulf diaspora they participate in a supplemental economy of in-kind remittance dependency (Chapter 5).

7.5 Implementing Conservation: Shifting Objectives and Eluding Results The principle of maximum conservation with minimum development is the paramount objective of the GEF-UN experiment in Soqotra. Its implementation was pursued through a series of conservation projects that were essentially replications of the unachieved objectives of the 1997 inaugural “virtualizing project.” As they sought, in vain, to reproduce on the ground the ZP’s cartographic annexation of Soqotra into a “paper park” composed of phantom Protected Areas (PAs) identified by signs that are “false advertising” (see Barnes et al. 2018: 760; Conniff 2018). This experiment opportunistically and fatally over-extended its reach with the total enclosure of Soqotra Island as a national park segmented

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into protected zones according to IUCN criteria. It expediently straddled biodiversity conservation through the arbitrary establishment of PAs and sought to monetize these PAs as ecotouristic enclaves as well as promised poverty alleviation with neither genuine intention nor financial capacity to deliver. Moreover, all of these objectives, among others, were pursued with uneven commitment, fumbling expertise, and inconsistent funding. These chronic deficiencies ultimately undermined Soqotrans’ appreciation of this conservation experiment and confirmed its irrelevance to their socio-economic priorities. This set of factors affected the pace and direction of the change process on the island and induced a negative attitude among Soqotrans toward conservation in general. As a result, the management of the island’s ecological endowments lapsed into a floundering experiment that was initially conceived by, remains managerially accountable to, and is financially dependent on, international organizations and actors. This experiment’s implementation was riven by a persistent chasm between its rhetorical promises and its actual contributions to Soqotra’s environmental conservation and to Soqotrans’ livelihood improvement. In this section, which is the core of this chapter, first I explain how the “standard operating procedures” of two locally influential global institutions generated and sustained the chronic disconnect between objectives and results in Soqotra’s conservation without development experiment. Second, I undertake a systematic analytical review of the implementation of the five main conservation projects that relies on the documents produced by the implementing agencies and is supplemented by my fieldwork experience of these projects. 7.5.1

Institutional Dysfunctions: The CBD and the GEF

These multiple external determinations and dependencies have prevented the conservation experiment’s local adaptation. However, these external exigencies cannot be ascribed to the usual litany of sins committed by the “neo-liberalization of nature.” Instead, they are intrinsic to the operational modality of the two major institutions, which are responsible for determining the goals and establishing the management modality for conservation projects worldwide. These two institutions are (1) the CBD, which frames the ultimate objectives of conservation projects, and (2) the GEF, whose funding of conservation projects are constrained by its internal procedures. These two institutions have introduced, through their procedural exigencies, permanent structural dysfunctions in the

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management of Soqotra’s conservation experiment, which have hindered the successful pursuit of their objectives locally. I highlight briefly the key impediments associated with each of those two institutions: The CBD main, indeed sole, criterion for success in biodiversity conservation is the number of square kilometers of land placed under the Protected Area category. This criterion is consecrated in the “Aichi Biodiversity Target 11,” which is from a list of twenty global objectives that set the implementation framework for the CBD (see website for details). Target 11 sets the goals for the establishment of Protected Areas world-wide. The goal for the period of 2011–2020, which is set by the CBD’s governing body the Conference of Parties (COP), is for 17% of the global terrestrial landmass to be conscripted into PAs. Alarmingly, this “acreage monomania” strategy is being amplified with the “Half-Earth” movement calling for setting aside half of the planet as depopulated PAs (Nature Needs Half 2016; Wilson 2016). It turns out that this numeric goal and its prioritization of quantity over quality is not only misanthropic but also grossly misleading. As this goal leads to “exaggerated perception of progress due to the establishment of ‘paper parks’” that merely maximize areas covered without adequately targeting biodiversity conservation. Indeed, this “acreage monomania” approach to biodiversity conservation allows conservationists to claim success by establishing “large PAs with low opportunity costs, rather than maximizing the marginal gain for biodiversity” (Barnes et al. 2018: 760; Conniff 2018). Soqotra is a casualty of this “acreage monomania” as its entire landmass is a protected area enclosure (see Chapter 6). Barnes and fellow researchers captured the prevailing global reality about PA establishment in an analogy to a dysfunctional health care system: “to monitor healthcare provision based on available beds (quantity) irrespective of the presence of trained medical staff (quality) or whether patients live or die (outcome)” (2018: 759). Alas, this analogy epitomized the nature of the “management” of established PAs in Soqotra (see below). In addition to this fetishism of numeric goals that produces locally irrelevant conservation projects, there are two additional impediments: The first is that the CBD’s prescription of its preferred mechanism for the implementation of management projects for established PAs, namely the Integrated Conservation and Development Programmes (ICDPs). The term ICDP was coined by the authors of the World Bank report entitled People and Parks: Linking Protected Area Management with Local Communities published in the same year as the 1992 Rio Conference

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(Wells and Brandon 1992). They were specifically designed to address local problem of resource over-exploitation based on the assumption that the local population’s resource use practices threaten biodiversity; thus, the need to diversify locally available livelihood options (Hughes and Flintan 2001). In such a context, “The only hope for breaking the destructive patterns of resource use is to reduce rural poverty, and improve income levels, nutrition, health care and education” through ICDPs (Brandon and Wells 1992: 561). They became global travelling templates for the implementation of biodiversity conservation. However, doubts about the ICDPs’ founding assumptions were raised and they have since been criticized for their chronic failure to deliver on their promises (Brandon et al. 1998; McShane and Wells 2004). The adoption of the ICDP model in Soqotra seemed oblivious to the global debate about their conditional effectiveness. As it was done without the empirical corroboration of the ICDP’s founding assumption local resource overuse, but on the basis of imagined environmental threats that were discussed in Chapter 6. The second impediment to a locally successful implementation of the CBD is that it favors a “shared governance” regime for territorial domains under its jurisdiction. In Soqotra, this governance regime has led to the persistent, but futile, quest for a hierarchical and centralized island-wide managerial panopticon as a means of permanently establishing and managing an ecocratic polity, which is euphemistically described as “mainstreaming biodiversity in local governance” (see below). The GEF, on the other hand, seems hopelessly entangled in its disabling internal procedural rules and regulations that sustain a structural contradiction between its budgetary allocations and the objectives it prioritizes. As a result, it undermines the realization of its own strategic priorities due to their inadaptability to local contexts. Two such procedural dysfunctions are noteworthy: The first is the segregated budgetary allocations for conservation and development, which invokes a muddling nomenclature about “incremental costs” vs. “leveraging resources.” The former are the “costs necessary to transform a project with national benefits into one with global environmental benefits”; and the latter are “the additional resources — beyond those committed to the project itself — that are mobilized later as a direct result of the [GEF-funded] project,” which can be allocated to local environmental benefits or development activities (World Bank 2013: xvi). Ironically, the use of “leveraging resources” as a key indicator of GEFs catalytic effect has led to perverted practices, such as encouraging

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project designers to inflate the co-financing figures in project budget. Soqotra projects were no exception. Even the World Bank, which is an implementing agency for the GEF, expressed skepticism regarding the cofinancing reported in GEF’s project budgets. One report observed: “This unreliability [of co-financing figures in project budget] is exacerbated by the interpretational freedom in defining co-financing and by the fact that the GEF Secretariat does not verify co-financing figures reported by the [implementing] Agencies” (World Bank 2013: xxv). This flawed fund allocation rationale skewed project design, as it generated “Uncertainty over what the GEF would be willing to fund […which] influenced project designers to limit the scope of proposed activities to those they felt were unequivocally within the GEF sphere.” Moreover, this constrained project designers “to define new activities in terms of what had been successfully funded in the past” (GEF Evaluation Office 2006: 34). More significantly, it was shown that because of this segregation of funding streams “the GEF’s environmental objectives cannot be achieved and sustained independently of broader development processes that lie outside the GEF mandate and funding capacity” (GEF Evaluation Office 2006: 9). The second procedural dysfunction is the prescribed standardization of project design through what I call conceptual plagiarism: This practice is the direct consequence of the constraining lexical parameters imposed by the GEF’s tacit requirement that consultants should exclusively mirror its policy guidelines when formulating conservation projects. This turns the process of formulating a GEF project into a compulsory template filling exercise. The GEF has 15 Operational Programmes (OPs) that provide specific guidance for the development of projects across five focal areas that reflect the Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), and which constitute the exclusive frame of reference in project formulation. Indeed, the GEF is unapologetic about its preference for Global Environmental Benefits (GEBs) over Local Environmental Benefits (LEBs), as it affirms that: Ultimately, what matters for the GEF is the achievement of global environmental benefits. That is the measure of success for the Conventions (MEAs) [Multilateral Environmental Agreements] for which the GEF serves as a financial mechanism, for the donors that provide the funding, and for recipient countries. (GEF 2015: 31)

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In pursuing these GEBs through its OPs, it imposes a totalizing uniformity on the projects that it funds, as a GEF document explains: “The OPs follow a common structure, laying out key programme objectives (based on convention guidance where necessary and appropriate), expected outcomes, assumptions and risks, outputs, ‘typical’ project activities, and public involvement guidelines” (GEF Evaluation Office 2006: 23). Following these guidelines entails filling the blanks in a GEF-prescribed project template according to GEF-adopted “strategic priorities” as contained in its OPs and related “focal areas.” These “strategic priorities” are modified every four years at the GEF replenishment conference, which publishes a prescriptive policy blueprint—“Focal Area Strategies and Strategic Programming”—containing the conservation doxas applicable to all GEF-funded projects around the globe. In addition to the perverse effects of the GEF’ segregated budgetary practices and its exclusive pursuit of GEBs, it restricts the projects’ modality of intervention to five prescribed “influencing models”: “(1) transforming policy and regulatory environments; (2) strengthening institutional capacity and decision-making processes; (3) convening multi-stakeholder alliances; (4) demonstrating innovative approaches; (5) deploying innovative financial instruments” (GEF 2015). Worthy of note, is that these “models” are prosaic management practices whose hyperbolic conceptualization as “models” betrays a vacuous corporate speak. Nevertheless, project activities are compulsorily structured around these five “models” as key project management components. The end result of this project formulation process is a discursive product that is a compendium of agency-prescribed project objectives that emphasize exclusively the GEF strategic priorities and operational programme domains and which prioritize science-based experimentation on how to maximize global environmental benefits of minimal local relevance. Predictably, the GEFsponsored conservation experiment in Soqotra confirmed the disabling effect of its institutionally mandated conditionalities that its own evaluation office warned about: “The emphasis placed by the GEF mandate on the global environmental ends to be achieved often translates into a marginalization of the [local] social means that may be necessary to attain them” (GEF Evaluation Office 2006: 33). In sum, the malignant synergy between the CBDs’ acreage monomania and its preference for ICDPs, and the GEF’s preferred procedural rules, conceptual repertoire, managerial models, and strategic priorities have conceptually excluded indigenous knowledge and practically undermined

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local collaboration in their experiment with Soqotra’s environmental annexation. 7.5.2

Virtual Environmental Management: Recreating Arcadia

This section retraces the implementation trajectory of a suite of projects that constitute the integral components of a singular GEF-UN conservation experiment in Soqotra. This experiment is largely a figment of foreign consultants’ environmental imaginary driven by the quest to transform Soqotra into a virtual Arcadia. This is done through an analytical inventory of the objectives, and a processual analysis of the implementation, of the five major projects that are phases in the successive re-invention of the first project and their ramifications for Soqotra and its people. More specifically, it undertakes an evaluative analysis of the five projects by focusing on (a) the chronic gaps between the objectives they claimed to pursue and the actual results obtained, and (b) the consistent failure to articulate a conservation with development strategy. I summarize each of the five projects’ predominant objective as follows: (1) the first project launched the transformation of the entire island into an archipelago of PAs through the formulation and operationalization of the ZP and the initiation of the commercial exploitation of local environmental resources as a sustainable livelihood strategy; (2) the second project undertook the actual operationalization of the ZP, which the first project failed to do, through a PA demarcation exercise that revealed the unfeasibility of the comprehensive ZP as a conservation strategy; (3) the third project was a frantic attempt to activate the development component of the conservation-development experiment through the operationalization of the PAs as ecotouristic enclaves; (4) the fourth project sought to establish an Island-Wide Authority as a trans-local managerial agency that would subordinate all local governmental entities within an externally controlled hierarchical apparatus to “mainstream biodiversity governance”; and (5) the fifth project sought to operationalize components of the green economy paradigm through mostly research activities that would consecrate Soqotra as research colony (see Table 7.1). Collectively, these projects sought, unsuccessfully, to actualize the ZP’s virtual reconfiguration of Soqotra into a seamless national park. However, they were more successful in institutionalizing by default the non-development model for

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Table 7.1 Main conservation projects in Soqotra Project title

Operational dates

Funding agency

Implementing agency

Project budget

1. Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity of Soqotra Archipelago (CSB) 2. Soqotra Conservation and Development Programme (SCDP-1) 3. Sustainable Development and Biodiversity Conservation for the People of Soqotra (SCDP-2) 4. Soqotra Governance and Biodiversity Project (SGBP) 5. Support to the Integrated Program for the Conservation and Sustainable Development of the Soqotra Archipelago (IPCSD)

1997–2001

GEF

UNDP

$4,944,700

2001–2003

UNDP, Netherlands

UNDP

$1,855,977

2003–2008

UNDP, Italy

UNDP

$5,500,000

2008–2013

GEF-UNDP

UNDP

$1,950,000

2016–2021

GEF

UNEP

$4,854,566

Soqotra, in stimulating a widespread conservation fatigue among Soqotrans, and in promoting a pervasive local aversion toward the projects’ development-prevention conservation practices. Worthy of note is that neither the formulation exercise for, nor the implementation of, the five projects was based on detailed and actionable baseline assessments of Soqotrans’ socioeconomic status, local resource use, indigenous environmental knowledge, and associated cultural practices.1 Therefore, project interventions were devoid of an understanding of the Soqotran community’ socioeconomic aspirations, political dynamics, environmental sensibilities, and the emergent vectors of its transformation. Indeed, out of two potential conservation approaches that could have been adopted—(a) conservation as a vehicle for the transfer of external “macro cultural values”; or (b) conservation

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as an opportunity to valorize, thus preserve, indigenous environmental knowledge—Soqotra’s conservation experiment was exclusively guided by option (a), which led to the trans-cultural annexation of the island’s environmental assets. As a result, all of the projects remained faithful to the imported vision of Soqotra as an ecocentric social order virtually imagined by foreign consultants’ cartographic reconstruction of its natural topography based on an IUCN-prescribed reconfiguration of its physical geography that was discussed in Chapter 6. This reconstruction exercise sought to transform Soqotrans’ rural homesteads and their livelihood domains into regulated biodiversity enclosures as the island’s contribution to GEF-mandated global environmental benefits. The following discussion performs a processual analysis and an outcome assessment of the implementation of the GEF-UN environmental annexation of Soqotra. 7.5.2.1

Phase 1. Eco-Management Overreach: Inaugurating a Conservation Experiment The inauguration of the GEF-UN Soqotra experiment began in April 1996 with the fielding of a four-member team for a three-week project formulation mission in mainland Yemen and in Soqotra. This mission resulted in a project document entitled Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity of Soqotra Archipelago (CSB-1997–2001). It was funded by the GEF and its implementation was launched in May 1997 and ended in June 2001. The project was locally managed by the Environment Protection Council (EPC), the Yemeni government main environmental agency, but under the tutelage of the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) a project executing agency under the UNDP. The project’s long-term strategic objective was: To conserve the endemic and globally significant biodiversity of the Socotra Archipelago, through community-based resource management, and implementation of a zoning system which will integrate biodiversity conservation, environmental management and development objectives in a holistic manner. (GEF-UNDP 1997: 14)

This long-term objective with its privileging of the global relevance of Soqotra’s biodiversity was to remain the prescriptive charter and elusive goal of the project’s management through all of its subsequent phases. This objective was pursued through six immediate objectives: “(1) to strengthen institutional and human resource capacity; (2) to establish

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and implement a zoning system for the Soqotra Archipelago Master Plan; (3) to promote sustainable land resource management; (4) to promote sustainable marine resource management; (5) to promote environmental education and awareness; and (6) to develop and implement an ecotourism management strategy” (GEF-UNDP 1997). These immediate objectives are associated with a list of thirty-two outputs, which collectively constitute the results that the project was supposed to achieve by the end of its operational period. This rather excessive accumulation of objectives to be pursued simultaneously within a challenging operating environment (i.e., lack of social infrastructure, capacity deficit of human resources, and difficult living condition) betrayed an unrealistic, self-arrogated, and totalistic remit over Soqotra. This imperious remit, which was initially a fund-raising strategy, remained a permanent feature of the GEF-UN experiment, which saddled it with a high sustainability risk. The initial condition of possibility of this experiment as articulated in the project document was set by external agencies’ prerequisites, both in its formulation and implementation stages. At the formulation stage, the project was constrained by what I called above institution-mandated conceptual plagiarism, as the first draft of the project formulation mission was revised to adhere to the GEF’s institutional preferences and priorities. As the evaluation report noted: “the project’s original intention to focus on grass-roots community approaches to conservation, underwent modifications to a more topdown scientific/technical approach during development of the proposal by GEF” (Infield and Al-Din 2001: 6). In effect, the first project document established the epistemic imperialism of the GEF, as described in Box 6.1 in Chapter 6, as an obligatory operational modality of Soqotra’s conservation experiment that would be replicated in all subsequent phases: Its exclusive attentiveness to the scientific priorities of GEF and the policy preferences of other international agencies, which were primarily interested in, and willing to provide funds for, the conservation of Soqotra’s biodiversity. This led to the chronic neglect of Soqotrans’ indigenous traditional knowledge and their socioeconomic aspirations. Consequently, the GEF-UN experiment was permanently subordinated to external policy exigencies that prevented the adoption of a social learning approach in the project’s management culture, which would have enabled it to bridge the gap between external and communal priorities and environmental sensibilities. The resulting persistent hegemony of global priorities over local ones was fatefully manifested in the project’s

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first major output, the ZP. This is illustrated in a brief account of the “Zoning Plan Technical Workshop” held at the UNDP country office in Sana‘a’ on July 17–19, 1999. At this three-day workshop, the draft ZP was presented to “Over 40 participants, including high representatives of the local community from Socotra, the local project team, representatives of some relevant ministries, key national and international scientists involved in the surveys, the EU representative, national tour operators working in Socotra, the project international ecotourism expert” (EPC 1999: 4). The aim was to review, discuss, and approve the draft ZP. The planners were faced with a crucial choice: whether the Zoning Plan’ scope should be comprehensive or strategically selective. The planners betrayed the “acreage monomania” encouraged by the CBD and chose the comprehensive approach. The GEF project Chief Technical Advisor (CTA) offered the following politically expedient reasons for preferring the comprehensive ZP: (i) it was to be the foundation of the MP, which was supposed to be comprehensive; (ii) it was seen as a potential fundraising instrument based on the assumption that exaggerating the scale of the required conservation tasks might enhance the prospects, and justify the request, for higher level of funding; and (iii) it would justify further extension of the project. The comprehensive choice for the ZP did not meet universal approval. As it ignored the recommendation of the terrestrial survey team from the Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh (RBGE) who were hired to survey the areas of high biodiversity concentration across the island. The team identified 18 such areas that was supposed to serve as the basis for demarcating the boundaries of a strategically selective ZP (Miller and Morris 2000). In a corridor tête-à-tête between the terrestrial survey team leader and the project CTA, the former threatened to withdraw his support for the comprehensive ZP. He justified his objection on the following grounds: (a) the boundaries of the different zones made no sense; (b) the proposed sanctuaries were not feasible as they would entail the exclusion of human population; and (c) the uses that were specified for some of the zones were arbitrary. The project CTA reassured him that the comprehensive version was a politically expedient model that would be modified soon after it was approved. No modifications were formally introduced in the aftermath of the ZP’s approval by the Yemeni government, and the project was made to carry the burden of a logistically impossible and scientifically unjustified conservation task.2

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The combination of claiming an imperious mandate, engaging in opportunistic decision-making and relying on political expediency while being subservient to external stakeholders’ interests, turned out to be an intrinsic aspect of the project’s managerial culture. This is a consequence of a project management imbued with an environmental imaginary entrenched in an imported paradigm that made them oblivious to local environmental particularities and stunted their receptivity to local concerns. This resulted in an exclusive and obsessive focus on biodiversity survey research at the expanse of the project’s other immediate objectives. This established a permanent disjuncture between stated objectives, actual activities and outputs achieved. Indeed, all of the six immediate objectives were only partially undertaken and some were entirely neglected by end of the project. For example, the ZP was formulated and approved but not implemented. As the evaluation report noted: “the project has developed the zoning plan… However, sustainable community management of the island’s resources and protected areas remains to be achieved” (Infield and Al-Din 2001: 41). The same verdict was pronounced for ecotourism (immediate objective 6): “No ecotourism strategy has been developed” and “No progress has been made towards the realization of ecotourism in Socotra” (Infield and Al-Din 2001: 56). Moreover, despite the project’s adoption of the strategic objective to “integrate biodiversity conservation, environmental management and development objectives in a holistic manner,” none of the six main objectives mentioned development. This relative neglect of development was partly a consequence of the GEF’s proscription against using its funding for activities unrelated to conservation, which led the project managers to expediently relegate all “development” activities to other donors. In this case, it was a UNDPfunded project entitled Basic Needs Assistance for the People of Socotra. As the title suggests, the project had nothing to do with development. This neglect of the island’s development was exacerbated by the fact that this conservation project, and all of the subsequent ones, were entirely staffed with people with natural sciences/conservation background. The evaluation report was compelled to remind project managers that “more emphasis could have been laid on addressing community needs and resource management issues directly to demonstrate the links between conservation and development.” And to point out the elementary principle that seemed to have escaped their attention that “future community support for conservation might be conditional on greater funding for

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development and meeting basic human needs” (Infield and Al-Din 2001: vii). Worthy of note, is that in spite of the project’s prioritization of scientific research there was no linkage between scientific surveys, conservation policy formulation and implementation, which led to the misuse of the project’s local staff. For example, the project had a network of thirtyseven part-time community-based Environmental Extension Officers (EEOs) that was supported by the project’s Awareness and Education Unit with six full-time staff members. The EEOs were supposed to “act as guards, guides and scouts to enforce protection, lead tourist groups and monitor status of the environment using simple methods.” The creation of these posts, however, was part of a quid pro quo arrangement that informed the logic of the GEF-UN conservation experiment in Soqotra ever since its inauguration: The cooptation of the participation of targeted segments of the local population through financial incentives. In the case of the EEOs, they were hired as mediators between the project and local communities to facilitate entry by survey teams. They were made partly redundant by the finalization of the ZP. They were subsequently used as data collectors to fill “weekly fishery records from coastal areas and bi-monthly reports on the status of territorial habitats” (EPC 1999: 4). No database was ever set up and thus no data analysis was ever performed as input to conservation policy. Indeed, monitoring data collection became a desultory routine to keep busy the under-used, if not misused, EEOs in order to justify paying them a salary. In spite of the subsequent prioritization of the development-conservation nexus, the project did not initiate a corresponding modification of these EEOs functions from assistant biodiversity surveyors to sustainable development animators. In the words of the evaluation report, the result was that “the fundamental vision developed by the project has not been sufficiently well articulated to local communities and local partners” (Infield and Al-Din 2003: 18). The misuse of staff and failure in communication suggest that the project managers’ Arcadian environmental imaginary disabled their capacity for social learning and adaptability to the local context; or as stated in the evaluation report, they “lacked responsiveness to local perspectives” (Infield and Al-Din 2003: 15). These failures can be attributed to the following factors: (a) the comprehensive scale of the ZP overwhelmed the already inadequate competence of local and foreign staff to manage it; (b) excessive prioritization of biodiversity monitoring by the project staff who could have been

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employed differently; (c) the adoption of a “stick no carrot” approach, which has alienated local communities due to “community members being asked to stop using certain resources but not being assisted with any alternative, [and that has] influenced perceptions of the project” (EPC 1999: vii); and (d) most importantly the assumption that underpins the project’s raison d’être namely that community-based natural resource management with conservation objectives would engender both alternative income and improved livelihood was never demonstrated by the project. These chronic discrepancies between objectives and achievements on the ground have led to the deployment of an opportunistic “mission creep” strategy, in order to justify the project’s continued relevance and thus its extension by incorporating new factors. This was done through grandstanding assertions about the project’s potential contribution to Soqotra’s sustainable development (see below). These hyperbolic assertions and their empty promises could not remedy the chronic lack of integration in the pursuit of the first phase project objectives, activities, and outputs, which was to be reproduced in all the subsequent phases of the project. 7.5.2.2 Phase 2. Protected Area Fetishism: “False Advertising” The operationalization of the demarcation of the PAs and the implementation of ecotourism activities were delayed by the first project’s exclusive prioritization of biodiversity survey research and monitoring. This was noted in the final evaluation report on the first phase: “in its design and implementation, the project over-emphasized the collection of scientific data, largely concerning biodiversity, and paid insufficient attention to economic and social issues” (Infield and Al-Din 2003: 16). Only with the launch of the second project—Soqotra Conservation and Development Programme (SCDP-1, 2001–2003)—that such activities were initiated. In effect, this project was an emergency extension of the first one given the fragility of its “achievements” and “without which the probability of sustaining… [them] was questionable” (Infield and Al-Din 2003: 10). Its title reflected the formal adoption of the ICDP model for the local management of the PAs to be operationalized. Noteworthy is that ICDPs entail high “sustainability risks” due to their dependence on unpredictable external funding from international agencies and their permanent managerial subordination to these external entities in quest of objectives unrelated to local priorities (Hughes and Flintan 2001: 5). Moreover,

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SCDP-1 made two misleading claims: The first concerned its adoption of the “programme approach” to conform to the requirement of its primary donor (UNDP) preferred modality of intervention: A programme “consists of a set of projects that are strategically linked through a common goal, which can be implemented at the country, regional, or global levels” (World Bank 2013: xvi). In fact, SCDP-1 and its subsequent reincarnations were and remained a project with a set of uncoordinated objectives. The second claim was the insertion in the title of “conservation and development” to advertise falsely the project’s equal commitment to both. This was in response to local perception, indeed conviction, that conservation was an impediment to development. However, both terms turned out to be mere terminological conveniences not a functional reality during implementation of the project’ strategic and immediate objectives. In essence, the strategic objective of the second phase project was merely a re-statement of that of the first phase project: The conservation of “the unique biological diversity of the Socotra Archipelago” through the implementation of a “zoning system based on community resource management, integrating biodiversity conservation, environmental management and development objectives.” The immediate objectives were as follows: (1) to initiate the implementation of the Zoning Plan, which was supposed to have been started in the previous phase, and to operationalize six pilot Protected Areas as well as launch pilot ecotourism activities; (2) to establish and operationalize the Socotra Conservation Fund (SCF), which in essence is a local replica of the GEF as it sought to act as the financial intermediary between Soqotra and international donors for conservation and development micro-projects; and (3) to establish and operationalize the Socotra Conservation and Development Programme Coordination Unit (SCDP-CU) that would integrate the management of current and future projects on the island within the government’s administrative institutions (UNDP-Netherlands 2001). Prior to discussing the project’s performance on its objectives, I highlight briefly the ramifications of the “programme approach” and the nature of the link between conservation and development. In practice, the programme approach was a discursive subterfuge, which tried to link two unrelated projects in order to falsely claim to pursue conservation while addressing local human needs. This is a situation created by the GEF’s refusal “to articulate the relationship between environment and development within its mandate” (GEF Evaluation Office 2006: 9). This led to the implementation of a one year project allocated $1,114,880 by

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the Polish and Italian governments entitled: “The Environment, Natural Resources and Poverty Alleviation for the Populations of Socotra Island.” Its unattainable strategic objective was implausibly stated as: “Environmentally sound and sustainable development fostered and poverty among the population of Socotra Island alleviated in a sustainable way.” Predictably, no such objective was achieved. The Italian contribution was spent on a meteorological data collection network, the preparation of GIS maps among other consultancies. The Polish contribution was in the form of generators that produced more communal tension than electricity for the five clinics that were arbitrarily selected by the mainland Ministry of Health to be rehabilitated by the project, but were never opened due to the lack of medical staff. As the evaluation report noted: “many of the project’s activities were process activities rather than activities designed to have a direct impact on poverty.” Therefore, “it made little impact on its stated immediate objective or purpose.” Moreover, regarding the programme approach: it was “not always evident in the wording or design of the projects, the linking of development activities with planning for and implementation of conservation activities” (Infield and Al-Din 2003: 33, 15, 4, 11). The first objective, namely the actual operationalization of the ZP through the demarcation of the specific location of PAs, began in the second half of 2001. This demarcation was articulated with pilot activities in ecotourism. However, the primary function of ecotourism activities was to provide the economic incentive to local populations around the targeted Protected Areas with high touristic value to entice their consent in the physical demarcation of their land and the conditional transfer of its managerial oversight to the UNDP project. Indeed, ecotourism was opportunistically deployed as a potentially effective inducement to local collaboration. As the project document stated, ecotourism “represents one of the most immediate ways of ensuring increased revenues for local people, [and] supports the management of the Protected Areas” (UNDP-Netherlands 2001: 13). In fact, this was the first attempt at matching the virtual zones of the ZP and its imaginative geography with the vernacular landscape of the Soqotrans and their environmental realities. The uncertainty about Soqotrans’ untested willingness to abide by the new regime of the ZP for the use of the island’s natural resources coupled with the unresolved complexities of the island’s land tenure arrangements came to the surface and impeded the project’s progress. Indeed, the project’s Annual Programme Report for 2002 noted: “It was

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our understanding that establishing protected areas will start by marking the borders of these protected areas. After beginning dialogue with local communities living around protected areas, we discovered that the issue is more complex than we thought… [as] marking the borders opened the thorny issue of land tenure” (p. 29). The end result was that the eleven terrestrial Protected Areas initially targeted for management agreement with local communities were reduced to six. The choice of these sites was determined by a combination of factors in which biodiversity conservation was no longer the decisive element but rather their high touristic value and greater accessibility. However, by end of the project in May 2003 only two of the six communities selected (Homhil and Di Hamri) had concluded reluctantly, after difficult negotiations, a management agreement with the project subsequent to financial inducement and a promise of continuing support. It was this experience that led the project CTA to confess later that his imperious land-grabbing gamble had failed: PA demarcation on the ground was abandoned as a concept due to the complexity of land tenure issues. All boundary demarcation was completed in the GIS, but actual land demarcation was deemed inappropriate to the situation in Socotra as it resulted in conflicts between communities over land-ownership rights. (quoted in Infield and Al-Din 2003: 49)

The realization that the comprehensive ZP will never materialize led the project to adopt the strategy of demarcating “paper parks” through “a policy of marking only key entry points to PAs with informative signs located along main roads and tracks” (Infield and Al-Din 2003: 49). Ultimately, the terrestrial survey team’s warnings discussed in the previous phase were vindicated. Nonetheless, all subsequent projects never considered a de-scaling of the ZP and continued to call for the management of Soqotra’s entire landmass as a seamless PA. The second immediate objective was to establish the SCF, which was done in 2002, after the failed attempt by the first project’s CTA to take over the NGO Friends of Soqotra discussed in Chapter 6 as a readymade SCF. Both shared the same humanitarian environmentalism as the SCF expressed in its brochure: “to help local people enjoy a better life by making them full partners in developing the islands.” The one distinction was that the SCF was to be “the primary mechanism for promoting sustainability of project outcomes.” However, it could not ensure its own sustainability given its paltry collection of funds (only $11,000 in 2003)

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due to erratic, if not non-existent, fund mobilization campaigns. This was supplemented by the voluntary fund collection efforts of its titular Chairman, a former Prime Minister of Yemen, who resorted to what I call the “s.adaqa strategy”: This entails the voluntary performance of an Islammandated act of charity that brings the donor closer to God. The SCF’s Chairman employed it by bringing along with him a rich Yemeni donor on his annual two-day trip to the island to make a donation (usually goods not cash) toward a micro-project. I witnessed his arrival with Yemen’s major arms dealer who donated bags of cement for the building of water reservoirs in rural villages. In terms of local impact, the GEF’ Small Grants Programme (discussed above) was more effective and eclipsed the SCF as funder of micro-projects. The third immediate objective was the creation of the SCDP-CU within the Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation. This entity was to be “responsible for the coordination of all investments, both national and international as well as to coordinate all donor interventions concerning environment and development in the Soqotra Archipelago.” In fact, its establishment was “a pre-condition by the Royal Netherlands Embassy for its funding” and not based on the situation in Soqotra. As there was never—prior to, during and since the second phase—a critical mass of projects on the island that would justify the CU’s raison d’être. There was an ulterior motive to the CU, which would remain a persistent aspiration of the GEF-UN experiment: “to establish a High Committee for Socotra, with ministerial level membership to function as a coordinating framework for the conservation and development of the islands” (Infield and Al-Din 2003: 14). It lapsed into a “proxy institution for donor interests and activities,” which turned out to be insignificant. It seemed that the creators of the CU never considered the question: Why would the Government of Yemen submit to being coordinated by an office created by donors that have not made any significant investments in Soqotra’s development? In fact, the Government of Yemen was the largest single investor in Soqotra since the launch of the GEF-UN experiment in 1997 until the Arab Spring in 2011 led to the downfall in 2012 of the former President who was Soqotra’s development patron. Ultimately, the Coordination Unit failed in its primary task of integrating an investment coordinating function within the administrative apparatus of the state. Instead, it remained a marginalized office within the Ministry of Planning and without a meaningful portfolio of projects to coordinate beside the poverty alleviation project and the SCDP-1 project in Soqotra.

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The evaluation report noted the CU’s “unnecessary and cost-inefficient ‘second-tier’” nature, which arrogated management control from the projects in Soqotra and prevented the local EPA staff from being managerially proactive (Infield and Al-Din 2003: 25). In sum, the CU replicated the institutional inertia established under the first phase by retaining some of the same international staff saturated with the initial unworkable Arcadian conservation vision, and even more crucially it carried on with the same imperious mandate, opportunistic decision-making and political expediency that were much in evidence in the previous phase. The final verdict on the second phase project was damning: The “SCDP has not conveyed its vision of development based on sustainable natural resource management to most partners. The ZP is thus viewed as an impediment to development rather than a plan for development.” To confirm that fact the evaluators noted that “On the requirement of providing benefits to local people and protected areas, the evaluation team has to conclude that little has been achieved.” To enhance the project’s future prospects, they recommended that “SCDP interventions should be re-branded as development… with less emphasis placed on conservation” (Infield and Al-Din 2003: 44, 32, 35). 7.5.2.3 Phase 3. Marketing Nature: “Engines of Growth” The strategic objective of the third phase project—Sustainable Development and Biodiversity Conservation for the People of Soqotra (SCDP-2, 2003–2008)—remained essentially the same as that of the first project, but was articulated more economically: “To promote human development and biodiversity conservation in the Soqotra Archipelago.” This rather terse formulation perhaps reflected the diminishing conviction in its eventual achievability given the failures of the preceding phases. However, there was one notable distinction, namely the project’s title foregrounds “development” as recommended by the last evaluation: “Sustainable Development and Biodiversity Conservation for the People of Socotra Islands.” The title betrays an act of “false labelling” as it incorporates the very nexus it has failed thus far to demonstrate. Also, its immediate objectives suggest that the chronic disconnect between promises and their fulfillment in the previous phases would be reproduced in the third phase. Worthy of note, is that contrary to the established protocol that “project developers and project implementers should comprise separate teams,” it was the CTA of the SCDP-1 Coordination Unit (who was previously the CTA of the first phase project) who drafted the third phase project

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document. This is something that the evaluators of the second project counseled against, and that was ignored and with the effects that it had warned about: “The strong attachment to the original design likely to be felt by members of the design team can impose a powerful constraint on project implementation, if the designer is also a member of the implementation team. This can discourage or prevent the necessary level of critical analysis of a project’s document that is a necessary part of the strategic planning that should be part of the process of project implementation” (Infield and Al-Din 2001: 45). The end result was the continuation of the second project in the third phase. In fact, this project is commonly referred to as “SCDP-2,” a convention that is adopted here. It is a project that insists in pursuing the vision of Soqotra as ecotopia. This is evident in the alarmist tone and hyperbolic claim in the statement justifying the third phase: “In the context of Socotra islands, the environmental conservation represents the only viable basis for any future economic development and it therefore has even higher importance as a means to sustain – directly and indirectly – the human development of the inhabitants of the archipelago” (UNDP-Italy 2003: 4). This hyperbole was utterly oblivious to the previous project’s failure to attract donors, given the relative paucity of funds raised by the SCF, the Netherlands’ withdrawal of their funding pledge and the disappointing number of associated development partners which the project has always relied on to justify its claim about “development.” Moreover, the project designers betrayed a certain delusion of relevance about their floundering experiment, given its very modest accomplishments, and yet had the temerity to advocate that SCDP-2 should be considered as the indispensable tool for the national government to implement all of its activities in Soqotra. As the project document declares: “The consolidated SCDP is advocated as the main vehicle for supporting the channeling of most additional assistance to the island, in an integrated fashion, and consistent with the Government of Yemen’s vision for a sustainable development in the archipelago” (UNDP-Italy 2003: 21). The immediate objectives of the third phase are not only a continuation of activities identified in the previous phases but also betrayed the same non sequitur between objectives, activities, and results. Each immediate objective is identified and discussed in turn: The first immediate objective is to support the “engines of growth” of the local economy. The term is an opportunistic recourse to a market lexicon through the appropriation of a World Bank idiom, in spite of

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the fact that the project is focusing exclusively on “pressing community needs” (see below). Two “engines of growth” are identified: The first is “nature-based tourism,” which is an umbrella term encompassing outdoor recreational activities based on marine and terrestrial ecotourism. This type of tourism is the primary economic objective of the project and the indispensable pillar of the operationalization of the Zoning Plan and the community-based management of PAs since the inception of the GEF-UN experiment. To that effect, a report entitled “Eco-Tourism Development Plan for the Socotra Archipelago” was prepared during the first phase of the UN project (Ceballos-Lascurain 1999). It envisioned the construction of one “hub hotel” in Hadiboh and of fifteen “eco-lodges” that were architecturally organic to local conditions to be placed around selected PAs and in nature sanctuaries that could be used as ideal camping sites to be operated on a community-based management system, and pastoralists would be trained in hosting tourists. The aim was to create a capacity of 240 rooms to serve a niche clientele of a low-scale and high-end ecotourism. This grand vision, which was primarily committed “not to the preservation of valued ecosystems but to the creation of landscapes that conform to Western idealizations of nature through a market-oriented nature politics” (West and Carrier 2004: 485), found no investors. Instead of modern eco-lodges providing tourists with an enchanting gaze over a pristine landscape, primitive “eco-sheds” were built out of the palm-ribs of date trees in the costal PAs funded by the SCF and GEF-SGP. In spite of the PAs’ importance as pillars of “naturebased tourism,” the number to be operationalized was reduced from six in the second phase to four in the third phase and still success remained elusive. The second “engine of growth” was “sustainable fisheries,” as marine life since the first project was considered as “the only biological resource that remains to be developed for the islanders of this poor arid land of extremely low agricultural potential” (GEF-UNDP 1997: 11). Yet the focus of the project from the first phase onwards was on preserving marine life for contemplative purposes more than ensuring its sustainable use, as a few desultory initiatives were undertaken (e.g., distribution of lobster traps to replace nets to protect females and juveniles). Therefore, no major intervention was planned for the third phase beyond promising that “the programme will support resource mobilization efforts” for unspecified ends. The second objective sought to promote community mobilization and development through the selective provision of the “most pressing

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community needs” of the population in the “proximity of Protected Areas” by investing in “five safe water harvesting systems,” distributing an unspecified number of home gardens, and a few visits from a mobile clinic for the next five years. These basic needs palliatives flout the notion of development, as they served as crude quid pro quos: Transactional exchanges of favors with local communities to induce their cooperation in allowing their livelihood domains to be turned into experimental enclosures. As in the previous projects, the servicing of these community needs was sub-contracted to other agencies. Some of the water harvesting systems as well as the home gardens were built independently by the GEF’ Small Grants Programme and four home gardens were built by Triangle, a French NGO, as part of a two-year project in association with SCDP2. The key issue about the home gardens, as pointed out in a report by Triangle is “the necessity to take into account the priorities of the populations” as “most people had other priorities” (Triangle 2006: 11, 6). The end result was that most of the gardens fell into disuse as soon as project support ended with the exception of the village of Ma‘nefo in Hadiboh’s suburb, which is a traditional location for the cultivation of vegetables. Nevertheless, none of the above activities can be considered as development nor can they be directly linked to conservation. The third objective was to promote capacity development at the local and central levels of government, in order “to steer the sustainable development path for the archipelago.” This was to be achieved through the distribution of sixty thousand dollars annually to each of Soqotra’s two districts for the next five years to finance local development expenditures. This money was, in actuality, a form of patronage distribution to assuage the negative sentiments of the local political class, many among whom have wondered about the project’s utility to the island. There was one important outcome: Official development plans were prepared for both districts in 2006 and 2007, which were well-presented and contained substantive information. However, the funding was not sustainable as it was a grant from the project, which lasted only during its duration. Again, making a mockery of the term “sustainable.” The fourth objective was to “mobilize additional resources to support an integrated conservation and development programme,” as the project warns that “this will be a long term effort, and the present five-year initiative [conveniently discounting the first five] represents the outset of a twenty-five year programme, which the GOY will implement in collaboration with UNDP” (UNDP-Italy 2003: 6). This was partly to ensure

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another phase of the project. More importantly, it was a subtle admission that the GEF-UN experiment was abandoning its impossible ideal of operationalizing the comprehensive ZP under the guise of a quarter century’s postponement of its realization. Thereby acknowledging that this experiment had fallen into an operational cul-de-sac characterized by an implementation impasse. This was engendered by the absence of local cooperation due to the advocacy of a vision of Soqotrans’ future that is based on a virtual environmental imaginary and which is divorced from that of the majority of the islanders. A terminal evaluation for the project was conducted in November 2007 and made available in 2009. Project evaluations tend to be an obligatory ritual in the “praise culture” and thus are expected to be “balanced” and constructively critical with the emphasis on constructive at the expense of critical (Phillips and Edwards 2007). However, the third phase’s evaluation abandoned any semblance of being critical and blundered into an egregious whitewashing exercise. The fact that the international evaluator was handpicked by the project CTA does not necessarily reflect collusion; however, the resulting document betrayed an embarrassing duplicity as the evaluators assigned blame for failures exclusively to others. For example, “It is our feeling that appropriate and realistic efforts by the SCDP to practice adaptive management were in fact hindered rather than helped by the donors.” When a donor pointed out: “The main project was to set up the protected areas according to the zoning plan. They only did four protected areas: One is not working well…, so they just did three in five years, which is not much.” The evaluators sprang to the project’s defense: “In any project there are bound to be disappointments and the SCDP is no exception.” In spite of the paucity of operating PAs, they concluded: “Socotra could serve as a model for community-based protected area management” (Gawler and Mashoor 2009: 37, 31, iv). Finally, they complained that the Italian government never made available the mid-term evaluation of the project “despite our formal request.” However, the two available evaluations of the project’s precursors were inexplicably not included in the list of “Documents Reviewed” and never referred to in their report to compare lessons learned, as is the norm. A mere coincidence, perhaps? Ultimately, by the end of the third phase conservation and development were never pursued in a “holistic manner” and generated few, if any, sustainable local or global benefits. Moreover, ecotourism was neither an “engine of growth” nor an economic development strategy, but an

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income generation opportunity for some locals who, because of personal means (e.g., cars, English speaking, or business owner), or by virtue of the location of their communities (e.g., as prioritized ecotouristic enclaves) could benefit from visiting tourists. Unbeknown to the project designers, is that based on lessons learned from the recourse to ecotourism as a standard practice in PA conservation projects, ecotourism is not a substitutional income-generating activity (IGA) that replaces traditional livelihoods, but merely a supplemental IGA that is pursued in addition to traditional ones (see GEF Evaluation Office 2006: 79). Finally, as was discussed in Chapter 5, the traffic of visitors to Soqotra does not justify claim about it being an “engine of growth,” as the total “guesstimated” local revenues generated during the peak year of 2008 amounted to less than $1,500,000. Alas, the project’s lofty vision of a planned and sustainable ecotourism for a niche of ecologe-hopping clientele in Soqotra lapsed into an un-managed tent-dwelling mass “ecotourism” destination. After eight years since the approval of the ZP, and eleven years since the launch of the first GEF project, the justification for SCDP-2’ successor was based on the fact that “Socotra’s spatial planning process and decision-making is not effectively internalizing biodiversity considerations.” This assessment of failure launched the fourth phase of this experiment in minimum development and maximum conservation on another round of Sisyphean labor in an impulsive quest for a virtually conceived ecotopia: Soqotra as a comprehensively managed seamless national park. 7.5.2.4

Phase 4. Mainstreaming Biodiversity: Quest for a Managerial Panopticon As with all the previous projects whose raison d’être was to respond to external stakeholders’ expectations, the fourth project continued with this tradition. It is formally entitled “Strengthening Socotra’s Policy and Regulatory Framework for Mainstreaming Biodiversity.” However, it is known under the acronym of SGBP for Soqotra Governance and Biodiversity Project (SGBP, 2008–2013). Its primary aim was to meet UNESCO’s demand for an integrated environmental management structure for the entire island as a pre-requisite for being considered a World Heritage Site (WHS). As the government decree mandating its establishment put it: To establish a national entity responsible to plan and coordinate all developments, investments and economic activities … aim at ensuring the

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achievement of the sustainable development of the Socotra Archipelago, while conserving its unique environment, biodiversity, and natural landscapes that are the basis for its WHS nomination.

This statement exemplifies what I called in Chapter 6 the “governance by decree syndrome,” as it is from Ministerial Decree 49 entitled “Mobilizing the necessary funding for setting up an effective institutional and management structure for the archipelago.” It was enacted in February 2008 as part of the Government of Yemen’s quest to have Soqotra nominated as a WHS. Subsequently, the SCDP-2 was asked by the government to prepare the terms of reference to undertake a feasibility study for “an island wide system for participatory integrated planning process for service delivery and economic development, with the zoning plan as guiding foundation.” The perceived need for a “single strategic planning entity” to mainstream biodiversity in local government is a direct consequence of the “acreage monomania” of the comprehensive ZP and its corresponding need for an Island-Wide Authority (IWA) as a managerial panopticon. This Authority’s ultimate purpose was the make-over of the island’s governance institutions for the mass mobilization of the communal polity in the creation of an ecocentric social order. Funding for the feasibility study was made available through a GEF-UNDP co-funded Medium Size Project.3 The project sought to engineer “a transformation of the current governance reality and more effective advocacy of the importance of biodiversity in the Socotra Local Authorities.” This would make the local authorities more “responsive to international commitments in the event of Socotra’s designation as a World Heritage Site” (GEF-UNDP 2008: 4, 11). To establish the need for this project the document highlighted the failures of the previous phases in a series of damning observations that belied the conclusions of the evaluation report for the third phase. Three observations are noteworthy: The first addressed the generation of local benefits: “Although SCDP and SCF have been working with local communities for nearly 10 years, perceptions of local benefits that can be derived from biodiversity remained tentative at best.” The second addressed community participation: “local communities only cooperate with the project because they hope to benefit directly from the project rather from the outcomes of the project.” The third observation referred to the strategy of linking conservation to development: “The SCDP’s

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community mobilization and development component does not sufficiently assess the link between its community assistance and biodiversity outcomes… This strategy struggles to achieve sustainability as it becomes increasingly difficult to ‘buy-off’ local communities as they move along their development trajectories” (GEF-UNDP 2008: 9–10). These diagnostic observations confirmed the inadequacy of both the conservation vision and the strategy being pursued in Soqotra. The problem that the project sought to address, however, was not the recalibration of vision and strategy but the absence of an eco-friendly managerial superstructure. Paradoxically, this institutional void is a legacy from the first phase, which developed the ZP outside the structures and jurisdiction of the local government through a parallel structure composed of a large contingent of international consultants and local EPA staff. Ultimately, this prevented the project’s local institutional integration, alienated the community, and thus compromised its social and political sustainability (Infield and Al-Din 2003: 8, 41). Given the focus on a belated managerial fix, the project’ strategic objective was to mainstream “biodiversity management considerations into the current process of ‘decentralizing governance for development’ on the Socotra Archipelago” (GEF-UNDP 2008: 10). To achieve this, the project pursued three immediate objectives: The first was “to support local governance” through the establishment and operationalization of a “New Island Wide local governance structure” that will disseminate throughout the “consolidated local governance” system unspecified “mainstreaming tools” through a new “Strategic Planning Unit.” The second was “to empower the local population to participate in the planning process for the archipelago and in the management of its biodiversity.” This was to be achieved through the development of the SCF into an “Intermediary Support Organisation to provide services catalyzing the start-up of new environment and livelihood-related NGOs and CBOs.” Twenty such organizations should be functioning independently by the fourth year of the project. The third objective was to “strengthen the link between biodiversity local benefits and conservation outcomes.” This objective was the most ambitious, if not unrealistic, as it eluded the previous projects. The aim was to generate “sustainable private initiatives including SMEs [small medium size enterprises]” in the “regulated commercialization based on proper certification … for the marketing of plants and other natural products, presently prohibited

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because of export regulations that do not foster Access Benefit Sharing (ABS)” (GEF-UNDP 2008: 17, 12, 20, 21, 13). The very structure of the project document betrayed the incoherence of its implementation strategy, which partly contributed to the failure to achieve its objectives. As the Mid-Term Review (MTR) of the project put it: “The project document has only provided guiding principles and frameworks for action, rather than specific interventions and technical procedures for implementation.” The critical effect of the document’s lack of specifics was that “the project staff and counterparts do not have a strategic vision or an operational understanding of the project” (Mansour and Noaman 2011: 6–7, 21). The pursuit of the three immediate objectives listed above suffered from the project’s strategy deficit, which was exacerbated by the recycling of staff from previous phases and their legacy of non-transparent managerial practices, as I explain below. The establishment of an Island-Wide Authority called for in the first objective, turned into a vain exercise in managerial hubris that mimicked the ZP’s imperialist ethic of total control of the island, as it arrogated all of the mandates of local government institutions in order to enforce the ZP. This is evident in the consultant report, which proposed the creation of the “Socotra Archipelago Sustainable Development and Environmental Management Authority” (SASDEMA). The latter’s aim was “to replace the current fragmented ineffective administrative system” through the “take over [of] all public institutions, in particular those under the executive arm of government” (Ministry of Water and Environment 2010: 22). What the report proposed was an undemocratic and centralizing hybrid of the Higher Committee for the Development of Socotra (HCDS) that successfully launched the GEF-UN conservation experiment back in 1996 and the SCDP-2’s Coordination Unit established during the third phase, which was a premature entity as there were no projects to coordinate. This hybrid IWA was to be headquartered in Sana‘a’ in the Ministry of Water & Environment (MoW&E) and chaired by the Minister (a former staff of SCDP-2). The proposed organigram suggests that it would usurp the role of the Local Authority, marginalize the Local Council of elected representatives, subordinate all local government institutions and centralize all decision-making authority over the fate of the island within the MoW&E. This would have made the Minister the de facto “Governor” of the Soqotra Archipelago, which violates the premise of decentralization that the IWA is supposed to promote. Remarkably, this house of cards was conceived without the benefit of an “in-depth

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assessment of the [local] institutional context” (Mansour and Noaman 2011: 15). Its local “approval” used the same mechanism as the ZP: The holding of large public consultation meetings, which “didn’t allow a clear and a transparent presentation of the proposed administrative reform.” As a result, the MTR recommended its rejection as it did not provide “an informed basis on the status of the local administration in Socotra” (Mansour and Noaman 2011: 24). Consequently, no “strategic planning unit” was ever established and thus no “mainstreaming tools” were disseminated. The second objective was to enhance the capacity of local NGOs and CBOs to participate in governance and conservation decision-making. This led to one useful outcome in the form of an island-wide survey and capacity assessment of local NGOs and CBOs. The resulting report was the first and only available baseline study of the local civil society sector, which was discussed in Vol. 1: Chapter 8. However, the study was not followed by the operationalization of the unrealistic number of twenty civil society organizations, as the envisioned role of the SCF as capacity developer of these organizations never materialized. Indeed, the MTR stated that “the SCF cannot be entrusted at this point [with] the capacity development activities of NGOs,” as it does not have “professional trainers” (Mansour and Noaman 2011: 26). Actually, the SCF had already terminated its operation in 2010 without formal announcement due to its irrelevance and insolvency. Finally, the third objective, namely the regulated commercial exploitation of Soqotra’s unique biodiversity as the foundation of its sustainable economic development was the Holy Grail of the GEF-UN experiment from its inception. This goal was touted in the evaluation report of the first phase: “Controlled commercial use of Soqotra’s unique biodiversity could provide significant financial returns to the island” (Infield and Al-Din 2001: 59). To catalyze the pursuit of this objective, the project launched a consultancy for establishing a regulatory framework for the commercialization of local biodiversity-based products. Unbeknown to the project managers is that the first project formulated such a framework prior to ascertaining the commercial potential of the sector in Soqotra: The “Agreement Concerning Access to Biological Materials of Yemen for Scientific and Commercial Research” that I discussed briefly in Chapter 6. This project repeated the same mistake, as was noted by the MTR: “This is a striking example in the deployment of an expert without conducting prior technical assessment of the areas of intervention… [As] the technical

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context related to each productive sector in which biodiversity is meant to be mainstreamed is not clear” (Mansour and Noaman 2011: 27). Putting the “cart before the horse” is a signature move of the GEF-UN experiment, as the requisite technical assessments of all local “green production sectors” as well as socio-economic surveys have yet to be conducted by any of the projects thus far. In the absence of an assessment of the production sectors to be commercialized, no SME was launched by the project. In sum, the fourth phase project failed to achieve its main objectives: First, its pretentious quest to establish an Island-Wide Authority that would improve the policy-making structure and decision-making processes on the island was marred by opportunistic personal agendas of mainland actors and was rejected by local stakeholders. Second, its unrealistic goal of launching independently run CSOs was undermined by a weak SCF as a capacity building intermediary. And finally, its objective to support the exploitation of natural resources was hampered by the lack of market analysis, and thus poor understanding, of local livelihoods. In a rather rare exception to the “culture of praise” associated with project evaluation, the MTR assigned the highest failing grade to the project: “a General rating of ‘Highly Unsatisfactory (HU): severe’ regarding the achievement of the project objective” (Mansour and Noaman 2011: 8). Subsequently, the project lapsed into a comatose state. Undaunted by the failure-laden path of the previous four projects, a new project document for the next phase was already formulated by consultants associated with the previous projects and submitted to the GEF. To distance itself from the legacy of failure, the GEF Project Identification Form of the new project hyperbolically proclaimed: “The achievements, lessons learned and challenges faced by all of the above projects, and other non-GEF funded initiatives, have all been carefully reviewed and considered in the initial design of this proposed GEF project.” This claim’s veracity will be assessed in the section below. 7.5.2.5

Phase 5. Green Economy Lab: Institutionalizing a Research Colony The emergence of the “green economy” paradigm, discussed in Chapter 6, seems to have given the GEF-UN experiment in Soqotra a new lease on life. As its new conceptual repertoire was used to justify another phase. Indeed, the fifth project document—Support to the Integrated Program for the Conservation and Sustainable Development of the

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Soqotra Archipelago (IPCSD, 2016–2021)—confirms this rationale, as it explains: The prevailing conservation framework embodied in the “ageing spirit” of the ZP failed “to capture modern concepts in the global environmental debate and thus does not provide opportunities to link and to tap in potentially beneficial schemes (analytically and practically) such as REDD+, Ecosystem Services and Payments thereof, Carbon Credits and micro-grants. (GEF-UNEP 2014: 34–35).

Interestingly, all of these “beneficial schemes” are the green economy’s key mechanisms for the financialization of ecological processes through the prioritization of the financial use of environmental resources over their social use. The discussion that follows is not a critical review of the implementation process of the fifth phase project, which was delayed by the UAE’s imposition of a protectorate regime over Soqotra since 2015 that has dissuaded the presence of foreigners on the island. Instead, it is a content analysis of the project in comparison with the previous four phases discussed above. This analysis relies on a set of key GEF documents available on its website: (1) the Project Identification Form (PIF); (2) the Project Document; and (3) the GEF’s CEO Endorsement Letter that contains the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) comments on the project and project designers’ responses. This fifth phase project represents a new quest to resuscitate the floundering GEF-UN experiment. What is striking about this project is that, contrary to the claim that it incorporates “lessons learned” from the previous phases, it continues on the same unadjusted path. A key illustration of this is the project’s total embrace of an exclusively research orientation. An approach that was faulted by the evaluators of the first project who noted that “in its design and implementation, the project over-emphasized the collection of scientific data, largely concerning biodiversity, and paid insufficient attention to economic and social issues” (Infield and Al-Din 2003: 16). In response to this observation, the project managers protested that this emphasis was imposed on them by GEF as was noted in the above discussion of the first phase. In contrast, this project does not consider a research-exclusive approach an error to be corrected; instead, it is intentionally designed as an exclusively researchoriented venture. The end result of this design approach is the complete embrace of the GEF’s epistemic imperialism noted in Chapter 6, which

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entails the malignant synergy of donor-expert hegemony that excludes the local population’s socioeconomic concerns and in full ignorance of the potential usefulness of their indigenous traditional knowledge. Moreover, this leads to the convenient adoption of an exaggerated narrative of risks to the local environment to enable the operationalization of this epistemic imperialism. The project designers’ approach is partly the result of the “revolving door” system in the selection of staff for the GEF-UN experiment that has been the norm since the second phase, as the consultants chosen to formulate the project were associated with the previous phases and remained committed to an anachronistic conservation strategy. Of critical relevance, is the fact that the first project’s CTA is the officer responsible for the project in UNEP, the project’s implementing agency. This “coincidental” synergy of external interests is unwittingly “conspiring” to transform Soqotra’s into a research colony dedicated to testing the local feasibility of “entrepreneurial strategies” in the commodification of the island’s ecological resources. In effect, the fifth phase project exemplifies one of the GEF’s global functions that was listed in Box 6.1 of Chapter 6: To co-opt a cohort of passively complicit and naively apolitical natural scientists motivated by an opportunistic pursuit of their research interests and career-building prospects into designing conservation projects according to the GEF’s prescriptive protocols that focus exclusively on its focal areas and privilege the delivery of GEBs at the expense of LEBs. Indeed, this project takes the practice of “conceptual plagiarism” to an extreme level. As it exceeds by far all of the previous projects in its obsequious conformity to the GEF’s policy guidelines for the fifth replenishment cycle (2010–2014): “Focal Area Strategies and Strategic Programming for GEF-5.” It is as if the main stakeholder of the project is not the people of Soqotra but the GEF, thus the project designers dedicated themselves to convincing the GEF of the need for it. This is exemplified in “Section 3” of the project document, which is sub-titled “Project rationale, policy conformity and expected global environmental benefits” that was not included in the previous project documents. It contains a tabular presentation of how the four components, nine outcomes, and twenty-three outputs that constitute the “programme” conform scrupulously to the strategic objectives of the GEF’s focal areas: biodiversity, land degradation, climate change mitigation, and sustainable forest management (although there are no forests in Soqotra). In fact, the “programme” merely takes the five major objectives of the

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GEF-5 biodiversity strategy as its programme components: “Improve the sustainability of protected area systems; mainstream biodiversity conservation and sustainable use into production landscapes; build capacity to implement the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety; build capacity on access to genetic resources and benefit-sharing; and integrate the CBD obligations into national planning processes through enabling activities.” Accordingly, the programme’s ultimate objective merely echoes the GEF’s global strategy: “To strengthen governmental and non-governmental capacities sustainably to manage and protect the Socotra Archipelago WHS through biodiversity conservation, invasive alien species management and sustainable land management.” Similarly, the programme’s four components are all based on GEF’s focal areas: “(1) Biodiversity Conservation and Protected Area Management (BD/PAM), (2) Invasive Alien Species Management (IAS), (3) Sustainable Land Management/Land Degradation (SLM/LD), and (4) Enabling Environment (related to the institutional framework, capacity development and sustainable financing)” (GEF-UNEP 2014: 45). The main outputs of the project are the formulation of management strategies for each of the four components that will “lift the management of the network of protected areas in the 21st century,” but not the population. In fact, the project has abandoned the pretense of pursuing conservation and development in a “holistic manner,” which was the familiar refrain of all the previous projects. In the discussion that follows, I highlight the key problematic aspects of this “programme” under each of its four components. Prior to doing this, however, I take note of a series of contradictory claims: First, the title invites skepticism for there is no existing “programme” to support. The only justification for using the term is that it conforms to the GEF’s prerequisite that the “programme approach” be adopted as a modality of intervention, as was discussed in phase 2. Accordingly, the term “programme” is invoked as a mere semantic convenience and does not entail a functional strategy. Indeed, the project designers were concerned that “the Project must appear as an entity, and not as a ‘buffet’ of unrelated activities,” which is what it is. Second, the project asserts that “The main problem this GEF project will address is to prevent the irreversible loss of the unique ecosystems, biodiversity and natural resources of the Socotra WHS” (GEF-UNEP 2014: 2). Yet, it affirms that “Socotra is exceptional among islands worldwide for having virtually no extinctions among plants, reptiles, birds and molluscs in the last century” (GEF-UNEP 2014: 10). Third, most of the project’s outputs are consultant-intensive as

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they are based on process-oriented activities that will result in documents (e.g., plans, frameworks, strategies) and not on outcome-based activities that will generate local benefits. In effect, the project seems specifically tailored to the capacity of the research institute that was sub-contracted as “international coordination” agency to assist in the project’s implementation: The Senckenberg Society for Nature Research. It seems that the project was conceived as an academic research venture to suit the professional interests of its designers. The reader of the project document should be forgiven for suspecting that it is essentially subsidizing the research interests of the foreign consultants who designed it and who will be hired to implement it. The fact that 20% of the project budget ($990,000) is allocated to consultants’ salaries validates the suspicion. Fourth, and finally, after twenty years of project intervention in Soqotra, the project document declares that “no coherent conservation and development framework for Yemeni islands or explicitly the Socotra WHS exists to date which could serve as a benchmark and guideline for the Project” (GEF-UNEP 2014: 19). It is noteworthy that these words were written by consultants who were associated with the previous projects and bear responsibility for this vision deficit. Yet the best solution that they could muster is the formulation of a plethora of “management strategies,” many of them were already tried (and failed) by the previous projects as I will show below. The outputs of each of the four components are invariably consultantintensive activities that produce “planning tools” in the form of “management strategies” that exceed the organizational capacity of an institutionally underdeveloped local administration system. Indeed, the project document acknowledges that “the administrative capacity of EPA is limited and that of most other key authorities on the island is even lower” (GEF-UNEP 2014: 71). In addition to these management strategies, there are a series of hypotheses testing experiments based on the “green economy” paradigm that are exclusively aimed at finding sustainable funding streams for conservation activities and not for the development of the local population. Let me briefly review what each component promises to deliver. The first component is dedicated to the development of a “Biodiversity-Protected Area Management Strategy” that will lead to the revision of the current ZP and the establishment of new science-based PAs. It is worth recalling the confession by the first project CTA (now UNEP backstopping officer for the fifth project) quoted in Phase 2 that

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“actual land demarcation [of PAs] was deemed inappropriate to the situation in Socotra.” There is no discussion of how the project is going to address that issue, yet the demarcation of more PAs is planned. This is a perfect example of how this project failed to “carefully review and consider” the lessons learned from all previous projects. The second component will formulate a “Community-Based Management Strategy to Control Invasive Alien Species” (IAS). This will entail the development of an “overarching policy” document on IAS: The “Socotra Invasive Species Strategy and Action Plan” (SISSAP). A “Biosecurity Act” will be drafted that will invest police powers in a “multistakeholder team” to develop protocols for the movement of goods between the mainland and Soqotra and who will be authorized to establish “quarantine facilities,” use “fumigation systems” at the airport and seaport of the island. In addition, a battery of IAS-related studies will be conducted by “research communities,” which are research opportunities for mostly foreign scientists and training ground for their students. This biosecurity overkill is the equivalent of the war on terror conducted by the US permanent drone surveillance over the mainland. This excessive surveillance regime is justified on the basis of a potential not actual threat that evokes the “heuristics of fear”: “IAS are ‘biological pollutants’, posing a significant threat to native species, food security, water resources and sustainable development. Their impact is notoriously highest on island biomes” (PIF 2013: 26). The dubious connection to the last three aspects is a disingenuous claim that the project is actually contributing to Soqotrans’ well-being, and not primarily concerned with protecting “native species.” Indeed, this rather exaggerated phobia of IAS (in addition to the “graze phobia” toward livestock) is part of the repertoire of shared assumptions among members of Soqotra’s epistemic community of conservationists, which is expressed in the following dubious claim: “exotics may increase poverty through the dangers they pose for local resources and human health” (Van Damme and Banfield 2011: 63). The third component is supposed to provide an “overall vision and plan for conservation and sustainable development on Socotra” through the formulation (again) of a “Community-Based Strategy for Sustainable Land Management” that would tackle the problem of land degradation. However, the nature of the problem remains unclear: “While hard evidence is limited, it is clear and agreed by all stakeholders that the island suffers from land degradation, and the problem is worsening with an increasing population of inhabitants and livestock” (GEF-UNEP 2014:

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59). This phobia of land degradation and the reflexive blaming of people and livestock in the absence of evidence is justified on the basis of an unsubstantiated “tragedy of the commons” assumption that prevailed since the first phase: “At the heart of the land degradation problem on Socotra is the breakdown of traditional grazing rules and regulations, leading to a free-for-all regime” GEF-UNEP (2014: 62). Conveniently, the project claims that “An existing database on land use, [is] understood to be maintained by the EPA, will be drawn upon.” There is no such database and the project formulators did not even bother to ascertain its existence, as this provides them plausible deniability in case this component’s implementation fails. Accordingly, there is no research activity dedicated to updating the demographic distribution of both people and herds, or to survey the livelihood practices of rural dwellers to understand their impact on land degradation, if any. Instead, another paper product is proposed: The “Socotra Sustainable Land Management Strategy and Action Plan.” Its purpose is to serve primarily as a donor coordination tool and is accompanied by a plethora of desultory activities based on imported knowledge templates that will use Soqotra as testing grounds for “environmentally-friendly subsistence rural production sectors” as part of a “nature-based sustainable economic development.” However, as in previous projects, the task of achieving the latter is relegated to the German development agency, GIZ, which is involved, since 2011, in the piloting of micro-scale commercial production of endemic plants (GIZ 2011). The fourth component “Enabling Environment” is a “buffet” of unrelated activities that seek to “leave a sustainable legacy” regarding the management of Soqotra as a WHS. The excessive number and disparate assemblage of outputs makes it a programme by itself: A “Capacity Development Plan” (CDP), an “Ecosystem Services Framework” (ESSF), an “Integrated Conservation Mechanism Framework” (ICMF), an “Information Management Strategy” (IMS), a “Communication and Awareness Strategy” (CAS), a “Socotra Trust Fund” (STF). In addition, “Field Schools” that “combine environmental and vocational learning with tangible and local socio-economic and social benefits” will be established. Also, an “age and gender friendly” website will be established to “serve as a major knowledge hub and platform for local communities,” which seems unaware that electricity is solely available in two coastal towns and only a minority of urban-educated locals have access to the Internet. Worthy of note is the ramifications of the development of an “Ecosystem

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Services Framework.” This new emphasis on “ecosystem services” represents an expansion of biodiversity investment opportunities in Soqotra. More importantly, it is slated to replace ecotourism, which was formerly touted as an “engine of growth” for the island’s economic development and is now seen as a source of environmental stress. Accordingly, the commodification of “ecosystem services” is the new source that will ensure the funding sustainability of Soqotra’s environmental conservation but not its population’s economic development. Indeed, the new focus on “ecosystem services” is primarily due to the fact that it will provide ample research opportunities to Soqotra’s epistemic community of foreign conservationists. Also, the ICMF is another attempt at establishing the Island-Wide Authority that failed in phase 4, as is the case with the STF that seeks to resuscitate the defunct SCF. The project document does not explain how and why these two entities will succeed where the previous ones have failed. Alas, the fifth phase repeats the mistakes of the first project: The excessive accumulation of objectives impossible to achieve and the persistent failure to incentivize the support of the local population through concrete benefits, which have deprived the GEF-UN experiment of communal solidarity and reduced it into a locally ostracized quixotic endeavor. This project seems to launch a new cycle of endless extensions, yet without the benefit of a locally adapted conservation-development vision for Soqotra. The impression conveyed by the project document is that its designers, who have been around since the first phase, have given up hope of ever earning the support of the Soqotran population (notwithstanding their perfunctory gestures toward seeking it) beyond the EPA staff, and have decided to turn the project into a researchers’ utopia: Natural scientists are being subsidized to engage in hypotheses testing, trial application of imported concepts and ideas (e.g., carbon sequestration), inventive formulation of frameworks and field school experiment, etc. All of which are of minimal relevance to the local population’s wellbeing. The project’s self-serving grandiose aspirations are belied by its tiny geographic and population target: “The GEF project will specifically focus on the improved design and management of the network of Nature Sanctuaries (NSs) within the WHS…, as these areas are at the core repositories of GEBs in the WHS” (PIF 2013: 1). These NSs are useful only as research laboratories for scientists and are not the source of nature-based livelihoods for Soqotrans (see Chapter 6). This green economy-promoting “programme” is exclusively dedicated to the delivery

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of paper products in the form of management plans and strategies that will produce GEBs in an imagined future, while neglecting again the LEBs for the Soqotran community. The formulation of conservation projects that systematically prioritize GEBs over LEBs is an ethically-challenged practice. And its justification by GEF on the basis of the availability of fictitious “leveraged funds” to remedy its institutionally mandated neglect of local development benefits is morally indefensible.

7.6 Exit Strategy: Conservation with Development The GEF-UN experiment in all of its implementation phases was unable to adapt its management style to the sociocultural context of Soqotra, or to contribute to the economic aspirations of Soqotrans. Instead, it consistently sought to engineer Soqotrans’ accommodation to its objectives, but never succeeded. The cumulative impression conveyed by these projects— in light of their desperate pandering to external stakeholders and to a skeptical local audience, coupled with the mendacious invocation of the term “sustainable”—is that they were instrumentalized by their designers to primarily accommodate the global objectives of the GEF and to cater to their professional self-interests. Given the revolving door employment policy among a clique of professionals migrating from consultants to project staff and to UN agencies there has emerged an informal lobby that was entrapped in the rut of a self-serving environmental advocacy on behalf of a conservation vision that is not adequate for Soqotra and its residents. In the end, the experiment failed to convert Soqotrans into environmental cosmopolitan members of a virtual polity regimented by internationally vetted policy prescriptions that were unmoored from local sociocultural realities and livelihood exigencies. In effect, the fumbling implementation of locally mal-adapted objectives has engendered among most Soqotrans a deep skepticism about the relevance of this experiment’s goals, and a chronic uncooperativeness toward its activities. The initial commitment to an “acreage monomania” through the formulation of a comprehensive ZP that annexed the entire island into a protected national park was the foundational blunder of the GEF-UN conservation experiment in Soqotra. And its abandonment is the starting point of any exit strategy from this experiment’s chronic failures in the quest for the biodiversity conservation and economic development of Soqotra. This imperiously conceived experiment in total community-makeover is in

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critical need of a total conceptual-makeover, in light of its chronic failure to reconcile its conservation objectives with the community’s aspirations. Indeed, this experiment’s current configuration is characterized by three untenable practices: (1) An imperialist ethic of conservation exemplified in the total enclosure of Soqotra’s landmass, which imposes restriction on Soqotrans’ access and use of their homestead and resources. (2) A neo-colonialist mode of shared environmental management regime that is primarily responsive to external stakeholders’ interests. And (3) a sustainable underdevelopment strategy that simulates a social engineering project for the selective socioeconomic atrophy of the communal hinterland through the imposition of a minimalist repertoire of livelihood activities and of an ascetic ethos on local consumption aspirations. These practices informed the management of the five major conservation projects along with the plethora of micro-projects that were haphazardly implemented and ineffectively addressed the basic needs of groups in the vicinity of PAs while the majority of Soqotrans were neglected. The end result is that Soqotra Island’s total landmass is under some form of restrictive environmental regulatory edicts that betray (a) a peremptory territorial enclosure, (b) an impulsive phobia of pastoral herds, and (c) an insensibility toward their misanthropic ramifications. Moreover, this experiment, since its inauguration, has catered to the expectations of globe-trotting consultants and ecotourists who are the active agents of the dawning Anthropocene, while it neglected the existential priorities of the islanders who are the preserving agents of their territorial relic from the waning Holocene. The comprehensive ZP’s imperious mandate bequeathed a paradox in the GEF-UN experiment in Soqotra that is manifested in its default strategy of maximum conservation and minimum development. This led to the violation of the basic definition of sustainable development established by the UN World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), while repeatedly claiming to be pursuing it: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1987: 43). Moreover, the mandatory adherence to the GEF budgetary segregation of funding streams between environmental conservation and economic development has driven a wedge between the two in all of the projects reviewed above. This segregation of funding streams for conservation and development interventions violated a fundamental truism: “the ‘environment’ is where we live; and ‘development’ is what

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we all do in attempting to improve our lot within that abode. The two are inseparable” (WCED 1987: xi). Consequently, the GEF-UN experiment’s persistent inability to fulfill its own goal of pursuing conservation and its deliberate neglect of development has led to their permanent reification into binary opposites. A significant factor in the failure to integrate conservation and development is the systematic exclusion of social scientists among the projects’ staff, which led to the chronic neglect of social research and to the lack of genuine pursuit of social policy objectives. The absence of social scientific competence is evident in the fact that project design was not based on a social science-informed understanding of the structure and dynamics of local communities and livelihood processes. This led to an endemic failure to integrate viable and locally relevant livelihood enhancement activities into projects. For example, the fifth phase project could have incorporated the IUCN-UNEP initiative on “Pastoralism and the Green Economy” (McGahey et al. 2014), and its exclusive emphasis on “ecosystem services framework” could have been complemented by local experimentation with the “sustainable livelihoods framework” (Carney 2002). The recurrent disjuncture between projects’ promises and results on the ground seems to have necessitated the deployment of semantically deceptive assertions about the project’s potential contribution to Soqotra’ sustainable development. In effect, the pervasive and tedious rhetorical invocation of “sustainable” or “sustainability” in all project documents has degraded the term into a lexical fig leaf to conceal the fact that all of the projects have consistently failed to achieve it in any of their domains of intervention. As a result, the term “sustainable” has been drained of its emancipatory charisma by the vacuous promises made on its behalf by the projects. This led to the withdrawal of the social license initially granted to the GEF-UN experiment by local communities who manifested for nearly two decades a widely shared lack of communal solidarity toward its interventions. To remedy this untenable situation, a reconfigured GEFUN experiment will have (a) to reduce the scope of the ZP to core zones of high biodiversity concentration in order to lift its development prevention veil over the rest of the island; (b) to recuperate the medium growth scenario of the MP, however with a differently conceived set of projects, not as means of transfer of non-adapted imported knowledge but rooted in local knowledge, and oriented toward the economic empowerment of Soqotrans and not as employment generation for external consultants; and (c) to formulate a biodiversity conservation strategy

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with an actionable socio-economically emancipatory vision that promotes simultaneously and equally the preservation of biological and cultural diversity and the wellbeing of the island’s people and environment. In the absence of such modifications, the GEF-UN experiment as currently configured by its exclusively ecocentric priorities and subservience to the research interests and “acreage monomania” of external stakeholders is merely enabling the territorial annexation, natural resources dispossession, economic deprivation, and culturecide of the indigenous people of Soqotra.

Notes 1. The only document that sought to provide the socioeconomic context for the project’s activities was the “Manual of Traditional Land Use Practices”: A 600-page compendium of Soqotrans’ indigenous knowledge and traditional practices related to their pastoralist way of life (Morris 2002). This Manual was supposed to provide the requisite local knowledge with which to operationalize the strategy of community-based natural resource management. However, its prodigious documentation of indigenous local knowledge was overshadowed by its presentation flaws. As the report lacked the customary executive summary, an analytical framework, a historical contextualization of the practices described, and provided no recommendation as to follow up steps. This gave an excuse to its audience of natural scientists, already disinclined to read such material, to neglect it. Indeed, the Manual was not taken into consideration in any of the projects’ activities. 2. In my interview with Tony Miller, leader of terrestrial survey team, conducted in Hadiboh on 2 October 2002, during which he recounted the above incident, he distanced himself from the choice made by the planners: “We have stressed the numbers regarding the endemic species of Soqotra as part of the politics of funding. After all, the GEF project was based on Soqotra’s high ranking as a place with endemic species. However, we have made no claims beyond establishing what was there on the island in terms of endemic flora and fauna. We simply listed them for others to decide how they want to conserve them.” Their dissent was later criticized through the evaluation report, which quoted unidentified project staff: “RBGE put their own interests before those of the project, focusing their attention on areas of study that they were most interested in and ignoring or down-playing others” (Infield and Al-Din 2001: 40). 3. The GEF funds two types of project based on budget ceiling: Medium-Size Project (MSP) is less than one million dollars, while a Full-Size Project (FSP) is over a million dollars.

Epilogue: A Community in Permanent Transition

This final chapter highlights the fact that Soqotra is caught up in a continuous transition process toward an uncertain destination, which has indefinitely postponed Soqotrans’ quest for indigenous self-determination. This is due to the perennial burden of being subjected to chronic exogenous mediations through symbolic appropriation and political subordination. These exogenous mediations have made Soqotra into an ideal playground for external actors’ fantasist experiments: First, through its symbolic misrecognition as Noah’s Ark that led to the island’s permanent enclosure within an antiquarian paradigm as a frame of reference for its future; and second through its external political supervision that has led to Soqotrans’ chronic condition of political heteronomy. Also, the chapter recaps the challenges facing the practice of anthropology within the post-exotic historical conjuncture and calls for a return to the basics of doing anthropology by highlighting the steps toward an alternative anthropological practice.

Summation: Prospects of a “Community of Fate” The central problematique of this two-volume integrated work about an indigenous community in transition was the imperative of responding to a broader contemporary agenda driven by the human predicaments of an emerging post-exotic conjuncture heralding new vectors of societal transformation. The quest for an optimum research method to elucidate the © 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 II, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45646-7

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trajectory of communities in transition within this post-exotic conjuncture requires the reconfiguration of the geopolitics of knowledge production through the delinking of disciplinary practice from the prevailing Euro-American epistemological hegemony. The two volumes represent an attempt at effectuating this delinking process in the investigation of Soqotra’s entanglement with this post-exotic conjuncture. Accordingly, I have inventoried in both volumes the communal effects of the processes of national political subordination and global environmental encapsulation through four externally introduced vectors of transformation: economic disarticulation, political incorporation, cultural modernization, and environmental annexation. This last chapter will serve as a summation of the two overarching thematic preoccupations that framed the analytical explanation of the critical domains of Soqotra’s transition process. The first was the emergence of a post-exotic historical conjuncture that spawned a global awakening among the former dwellers in the “underside of modernity” as they migrated to the center of an emergent pluriversal civilizational order. The second was the ramifications of this emerging post-universal global order for the production of knowledge within the social sciences in general and in anthropology in particular. Soqotra Island exemplified a transitional social formation caught up in this global awakening as community members collectively sought to accommodate this new conjuncture as willing participants under resented national and international supervision. Soqotra’s external supervision was, and remains, a chronic condition of its past and present. This condition is partly a product of the island’s geostrategic location on the threshold of continents (Africa and Arabia), and on a cardinal node on the strategic sea-lanes linking the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and beyond. This location animated the strategic desiderata of states, and its physical isolation as an island made it a coveted haven for a mosaic of human ideational fantasies. The pursuit of states actors’ strategic interests and the quest by individual and institutional actors’ to locally reify their “idealized landscapes” subjected Soqotra’s communal context to the ever-shifting whims of these external actors. Hence my labeling of Soqotra as a “community of fate” (see Vol. 1: Chapter 2). As such, Soqotra’s communal polity has remained captive of the external political supervision of Yemen’s mainland regimes among other foreign usurpers of its sovereignty, and its local resources-based barter economy was appropriated into the divergent political economies of a succession of external actors. Consequently, the island and its residents have remained ever since tacitly opposed but

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manifestly deferential to the changing geopolitical and economic schemes imposed on their community by regionally and globally dominant states and other institutional actors. The two sections below provide an overview of the local ramifications of the two overarching themes described above. The first section is a synthesis of the external vectors that structured Soqotra’s historical trajectory as a “community of fate” and constituted it into a permanent transitional social formation. The second section recapitulates the nature of the emerging global context for disciplinary practice and the ramifications for the study of communities of research subjects within a post-exotic historical conjuncture.

External Actors’ Playground: Burdens of Exogenous Mediations These mediations were inaugurated by the symbolic appropriation of Soqotra through the ideational fantasies of globe-trotting exotica-hunting pilgrims, and the islanders’ political incorporation by states animated by geostrategic designs. The brief overview provided below of these two types of mediations—the symbolic and the political—emphasizes the continuing relevance of these mediations as the determining vectors in Soqotra’s future trajectory of emergence as a self-determining indigenous community. Symbolic Appropriation: Myth of Origin Soqotra’s encounter with outsiders led to its perception as a historical and cultural enigma, which transformed the island into a hypothesis-testing domain par excellence. The aim was to fathom the origin of its people and their language, the nature of their religious beliefs, customs, and livelihood practices, the history still buried beneath its landscape, and the diversity and use-value of its fauna and flora. These interests have animated the curiosity of the island’s visitors since the era of Antiquity to the present as was summarized in the Prologue. The nature of these interests is emblematically formulated by a naturalist who visited the island in 1880, and whose words capture what I call the myth of origin: There dwells a people whose origin is still involved in myth, and of whose speech the true relations are undetermined, who, according to received

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records, having attained to some degree of civilization and embraced Christianity, have gone back from their advanced position to the lower state in which we now find them, and thus present to us a feature of exceptional interest in the history of mankind. (Balfour 1888: xviii)

This quote contains a perplexing hypothesis about the islanders’ civilizational collapse from what was assumed to be an advanced state of sociocultural evolution. It is this assumption that has animated the “exceptional interest” of generations of modern researchers of Soqotra who have collectively fashioned a retrospective antiquarian standpoint as a paradigmatic frame of reference for the study of the island and its inhabitants. This antiquarian standpoint found its inaugural vision in Antiquity’s utopian-aesthetic discourse, which launched Soqotra’s career as an imagined paradisial abode, a repository of exotic vistas for travelers and a fount of discoveries of the remains of classical antiquity for scientists in various disciplines. As one nineteenth-century observer presciently put it, this obsession with the discovery of a past European presence on Soqotra became a persistent “romantic daydreams among the more fanciful antiquaries of the nineteenth century” and beyond (King 1890). The Portuguese brief historical interlude seemed to have opened a Pandora’s Box of speculations. As it renewed interest in the Greeks’ legacy on the island through the presumed infusion of Portuguese blood and culture in the local population. The search for traces of European ethnicity and civilization was the primary motivation for archaeological research (Bent and Bent 1899; Botting 1958b; Shinnie 1960) and for the search of the local inhabitants’ racial pedigree (Hunter 1878; Schweinfurth 1897; Lister et al. 1966). This quest for the demographic and architectural remnants of Greeks has influenced ever since archaeological research on the island (Doe 1992; Naumkin 1993) and the ˇ biological anthropology of the islanders (Cern` y et al. 2009, 2011). The British, in the process of deploying science as a means to the economic valorization of natural resources, contributed by default in making Soqotra safe for scientific research (Wellsted 1835). As a result, Soqotra became an outpost for a nascent British colonial environmentalism (Balfour 1888). The Soviet period persisted with the search for the archaeological remnants of Greek settlements, which led to the discovery of a few shards of pottery in the suburb of Hadiboh, on the basis of which it was conjecturally and unconvincingly claimed to be “probably

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made in the Mediterranean region in the early centuries of this millennium” (Naumkin 1993: 120). Beyond this antiquarian fixation, the Soviet researchers redressed the imbalance in the production of knowledge about Soqotra, which previously prioritized botanical and zoological surveys, by focusing on the people. However, the people were portrayed as living fossils of a teleological evolutionary process anchored to a nineteenthcentury intellectual sensibility. Also, they focused on the change process in Soqotra, which was neglected by the next cohort of researchers. And finally, at the dawn of the twenty-first century the launch of the GEF-UN conservation and development experiment exemplifies this antiquarian standpoint, which assumed that Soqotrans were still existing in a precontact social state that was environmentally and culturally pristine. This erroneous assumption has led to Soqotra’s enshrinement into an environmental, cultural, and scientific experimental sanctuary to prevent its despoliation by modernity. Paradoxically, the myth of Soqotra as an ecotopia that could not be found in its past is being imposed on its future through the GEF-UN experiment with the enthusiastic participation of an epistemic community of altruistic environmentalists dedicated to resurrecting an imagined ecological community based on “environmental practices of eons.” While Soqotrans’ contemporary socioeconomic aspirations are neglected. Political Incorporation: Congenital Heteronomy The nature of the “recursive relationship” between state and community remains the crucial pivot in the constitution of the nation-state through the state’s polity formation practices, which are aimed at integrating the various regions and communities within its territorial jurisdiction. Soqotra’s integration within Yemen’s mainland political community was, and still is, a chronically unsettling process and a perennially provisional achievement. Hence Soqotra’s protracted condition of political heteronomy, as its communal polity has been under external governance for centuries. This section provides a brief recapitulation of its modern trajectory as an externally governed polity. Soqotra’s career as a politically subordinated communal polity endured the following tortuous path: First as a medieval Sultanate, a feudatory of the British Empire from the nineteenth century, whose local rulers practiced by default the indirect rule of the absentee colonial overlord,

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through devolution of responsibility to a network of clan leaders empowered to maintain order. Second, the catalyst to Soqotra’s modernization was the establishment in 1967 of another Yemeni state in the south, following a guerilla war for independence from Britain, which brought the Sultanate to an end and initiated the island’s entry into modernity through the “revolutionary decolonization” of the society and economy on the basis of a socialist experiment. Third, the unification of North and South Yemen in 1990 led to a hybrid administrative regime, which sought to tribalize the traditional social organization, and introduced patronage as the dominant form of political-economic relations. Fourth, the post-unification regime was launched with the adoption of a Local Authority Law in 2000 that sought to modernize the configuration of state-regional-local administrative relations. This was preceded by Soqotra’s designation in 1996 as a biodiversity reserve to be protected through a United Nations-brokered environmental conservation regime, which heralded the archipelago’s rediscovery as the “Galapagos of the Indian Ocean,” and effectively inaugurated its incorporation into a Global Environment Facility-led regime of environmental conservation at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Fifth, since 2011 Soqotra has crossed another political threshold due to the local reverberations of the Arab Spring. The significant difference with previous sources of change is that it is unrelated to a government policy initiative or to the migration of people, but to the spread of ideas from youth movements in the Arab region about new political possibilities in reconfiguring state-community relations. This ultimately led to a major government decision in December 2013 to grant Soqotra the status of Governorate. And sixth, since 2015 there is another historical conjuncture in the making as Soqotra was placed under a protectorate regime administered by the UAE. This latest phase entrapped Soqotra’s communal polity within a regional contest for their political allegiance between the Yemeni state and the UAE’s geopolitical aspirations. The cumulative effects of Soqotra’s entanglement with externally imposed anachronistic interpretive templates and autonomy-depriving state apparatuses through the two processes discussed above—symbolic appropriation and political incorporation—can be summed up as follows: In the case of Soqotra’s external symbolic appropriation within an antiquarian paradigm, it has led to a chronic incommensurability between Soqotrans’ modern social and economic aspirations and environmentalists’ virtual colonization of the island as a Noah’s Ark. As Soqotra is

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envisioned as a geologic specimen from the late Holocene period and thus ecologically pristine, and as a cultural relic of the late Neolithic era and thus socially primordial to be preserved as such for the foreseeable future. In the case of Soqotra’s political incorporation, it has not only permanently postponed Soqotrans’ political aspiration to exercise indigenous sovereignty over their homeland, but also sundered the communal polity into groups embroiled by dilemmas of political allegiance to the Yemeni state or to external powers. As I write this in early 2020, Soqotra is a community caught-up in a political cul-de-sac of external cooptation and local resistance or accommodation to it. This is a situation that threatens to last into the foreseeable future. In sum, the future of the Soqotran community will depend on the dénouement of this externally imposed ecological and political experiment on the island.

Knowledge Production in an Axial Era: Diagnostics and Prognostics Knowledge production in the human sciences is inexorably embedded within an emerging historical conjuncture subjected to the woes engendered by the three pillars of what I call the Axial era: (1) The awakening of the Global South, which is heralding the demise of the political imperium of neoliberalism and its enabling cultural regime of Occidental cosmopolitanism and the emancipation of the global mosaic of social formations from a waning empire’s panoptic enclosure. (2) The “retrotopia” of national polities in the Global North and their dissemination of an “identity geopolitics,” which is threatening our capacity to live together. And (3) the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene, which is undermining the livability of our planet (see Vol. 1: Chapter 1). These are the determining sources of the exogenous mediations that communities the world over will be contending with for the foreseeable future in pursuing their particular transitional journeys. If we are to take into account all of these exogenous mediations of a community’s lifeworld, we must scaleup from ethnography’s foundational axiom: “social reality is first and foremost created through relationships between persons and the groups they belong to” (Eriksen 2004: 9). What this axiom does not mention is that this social reality is turned into ethnographic knowledge through the exogenous mediation of the anthropologist based on the self-other dialectic framed within interpretive templates derived from the established repertoire of metropolitan travelling theories, which plot the lives

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of research subjects into “good stories to tell” cosmopolitan audiences. In contrast, mesography provides a scaled-up alternative to ethnography, as it is an explanatory mode of knowledge production that inventories the mediation of local and translocal forces and factors that shaped the distinctive historical trajectory of a community. The end product is a case study of a community in transition as a contribution to the alternative practice of a human science, and a biography of a social collectivity as an actionable resource for its members’ emancipatory quest. In the following two sub-sections, I sum up the main macropreoccupations of this two-volume work: First, I briefly analyze how the discipline’s avant-garde insists on sustaining the global practice of anthropology as an intellectual tributary of West-stream travelling theory. And second, I review the misanthropic impasse of the prevailing practice of anthropology as a theory-obsessed endeavor and highlight the essentials of an ethical praxis for a post-exotic anthropology based on mesography as the methodological foundation of a genuine human science. Diagnostics: From Cross-Border Excursions to Trans-Frontier Escapades Anthropology is at the threshold of a remarkable transition from its traditional cross-border excursions into the “Third World” for the study of micro-scale, geographically distant and isolated communities during its colonial and post-colonial phase, to trans-frontier escapades into a virtual geocultural space for the experimental conjoining of knowledge domains into a meta-epistemology for the practice of a synthesizing ontological anthropology with an inclusive conception of species-beings encompassing humans and non-humans coexistence. It is this transition that is briefly described below as a cautionary tale about the discipline’s elusive quest for contemporary relevance through a theory-induced descent into a rabbit hole, again. This time, it is under the spell of the “ontological turn” and its post-humanist critique of the primacy of the Western species of Homo sapiens. Anthropology began its disciplinary career in the humble practice of a “salvage ethnography,” which was animated by “an urgent need to collect all the human experiences that owed nothing to [western culture], knowledge of which was indispensable to an idea of humanity” (LéviStrauss 2013). This quest was driven by the imperative “to cross distinct cultural boundaries and study ordinary people” (Marcus and Okely 2007: 353). Initially, this injunction to cross cultural borders was embedded

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within a geography of “spatial discreteness,” which mapped the planet’s culturally distinct regions into a non-coeval world. This geographic imaginary, which informed anthropology’s colonial phase, was founded on an a priori assumption of sociocultural incommensurability and temporal alterity between the archetypal fieldworker (middle-class Westerner) and her typical research subjects (primordial subalterns in the Global South), which necessitated a research strategy as a mode of wandering into imagined culturally primeval and stateless communities. Skipping over the many intermediary turns in the discipline’s chronically inadequate accommodation to the changing geography of its practice (see Vol. 1: Prologue), I jump to its current accommodation to the post-exotic geography phase in which the quest to salvage “primitive societies” is being replaced by the appropriation of “indigenous ontologies” to salvage the discipline’s relevance in light of the existential challenges of the Anthropocene era. In this new context, avant-garde West-stream practitioners are resorting to what I call “trans-frontier escapades” through “multispecies ethnography” of “co-species life-worlds.” These escapades are heralding a “post-empirical” phase in the practice of West-stream anthropology, as its outputs are becoming mostly epistemological experiments presented in the verbiage of speculative metaphysics, which is the privileged discourse of the post-truth era. These experiments rely occasionally on fieldwork but are primarily theoretical adventures in which the luminaries of the discipline and their epigones indulge their theoretical fancy about the coming post-human future that will be based on “interspecies morality” involving convivial relations between humans and non-humans. These relations are mediated by the romanticization of indigenous ontologies embedded within an animistic cosmology that celebrates “cross-species socialities” as the basis of a new age epistemology for the Anthropocene era (Kohn 2015). Paradoxically, this era has not led to a reckoning among West-stream anthropologists through analytically practical engagements with human predicaments with the aim of contributing toward actionable knowledge. Instead, it has led to the quest for a theoretical synthesis of the relational nexus between nature, society, human, and non-human through the sub-disciplinary formation of “environmental humanities.” As Hornborg correctly noted in a critical review of the contributions of some of the lodestars (Harraway, Latour and Tsing) in this post-human firmament, this sub-discipline is populated by “tentacular thinkers” whose primary aim is “to fashion prose as imaginatively as possible, replete with

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idiosyncratic tropes, evocative allusions, poetic metaphors, and unbridled associations of sensuous flamboyance” (Hornborg 2017: 62). Alas, these “merchants of astonishment” are the new votaries of the postmodern reincarnation of a primordial environmental paganism. As such they are primarily engaged in an ego-centric discursive performance dedicated to accumulating reputational capital among their academic peers, while being oblivious to the existential predicaments of the world beyond academia’s walls. This is the inexorable result of a disciplinary practice animated by a predatory hermeneutics that reduces everything into cognitive fodder for globetrotting cultural interpreters who are the complicit agents of the political and economic status quo. This complicity is manifested in their convenient and premature abandonment of “the idea of humanity as a horizon of moral and political transformation” (Pandian 2019: 11). These epistemically experimental trans-frontier escapades are based on the adoption of a prematurely reductionist standpoint that I call a “consilience epistemology,” which employs an opportunistic interdisciplinarity that amalgamates scientific disciplines and the humanities with human and non-human agents into the co-constitution of contemporary existence (e.g., Brightman and Lewis 2017). In effect, the adoption of this epistemology represents a premature recourse to a “post-human” future, as the disciple has yet to establish an adequate inter-Homo sapiens sociality in its practice. The latter is still afflicted with ethnocentric social imaginaries, cultural hierarchies, hegemonic “one world” theorizing, and relativism-averse conditional recognition of cultural others. Moreover, this “consilience epistemology” and its “post-human” aspirational horizon betray a “frontier’s complex”: It is an expansionist research agenda and fieldwork domain animated by an epistemic cupidity, which substitutes imperialism’s mercantile cupidity and its quest for territorial colonies with the discipline’s own colonizing logic through the opportunistic quest for virtual sociocultural dominions to be symbolically appropriated. This is manifested in the intrinsically consumerist mode of engaging the world through a permanent epistemic hitchhiking for new “anthropology of…”, which extends the discipline’s “fieldwork terrain by annexing border areas and sometimes entire continents of enquiry” (Fardon 2012: 2). This West-stream mode of practicing anthropology is an epistemic legacy of European domination, which violates the basic axiom of anthropology as a human science: “The ‘art of anthropology’… is the art of

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determining the problems posed by each culture, not of finding solutions for the problems posed by our own” (Vivieros de Castro 2013: 477). As such, it epitomizes West-stream anthropology’s indelible allegiance to its inaugural colonial episteme founded on data colonialism, which betrays the discipline’s failure to de-link its theory formation practice from its dependency on the practices and effects of Western capitalism’s predatory global dissemination. Indeed, the present “ontological turn,” which relies on the theoretical instrumentalization of “indigenous ontologies” is a self-serving quest by the discipline’s avant-garde and its bandwagon of followers to use others’ cultural resources to find solutions to the West’s civilizational predicament induced by its epistemic bankruptcy to confront its economic system’s destruction of the planet’s ecosystems, and by its political philosophy’s irrelevance to the dysfunctions of its national polities. This endemic reflexive appropriation of other cultures’ resources to “manure our little academic fields,” as Sahlins puts it, suggests that the “ontological turn” and the related escapades into environmental humanities do not herald a new disciplinary phase. Instead, it is the routine performance of the intrinsic professional ontology of West-stream anthropologists as practitioners of, what Descola calls, “symbolic cannibalism.” Indeed, Haraway suggests that this ontology is an intrinsically and endemically Western cultural predisposition, which she describes as a “cannibalistic Western logic that readily constructs other cultural possibilities as resources for Western needs and actions” (1989: 247). This results in “egographies” that foreground the narcissistic performance of their authors’ interpretive virtuosity, and which betray a congenital aversion to the non-egocentric explanatory discourse of a critical social science. Moreover, the ontological turn, as was the case with the previous “turns,” is characterized by a “schizophrenic reflex”: the cyclical recourse to the retrofitting exercise of adapting the new to the old. As two of its main protagonists confess, it is merely an attempt to sustain the hegemony of the “great national traditions, namely, the American, the British and the French” along with their Elysium of “the greatest exponents of the distinct mode of thinking we call anthropological, including, say, Mauss, Evans- Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss and Schneider” and their contemporary progeny (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017: x). Ultimately, the aim of these “ontologists” is to defend the status quo, as they confessed that the ontological turn is not “a revolutionary rupture from the anthropological past” but a renewed quest for the realization of the above-cited Weststream foundational thinkers’ analytic promise. In spite of their claims to the contrary, their work contributes to ensuring that the future trajectory

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of the discipline remains within the West-stream “trans-Atlantic traffic in anthropological ideas and perspectives” (Holbraad and Pedersen 2017: x). This compulsion toward “symbolic cannibalism” remains the foundational reflexivity of West-stream anthropology as its disciplinary praxis was and is still driven by an assimilationist ethos that subsumes cultural others into its own cultural horizon. This horizon is still tethered to (a) a fundamentalist regionalism that posits the “West” as the universal frame of reference; (b) an epistemic solipsism that merely allows a condescending gaze on the plurality of available founding premises and conceptual categories as the bases of an alternative disciplinary praxis; and (c) a hubristic hermeneutic that entails a totalizing interpretive standpoint, which instrumentalizes human lives and cultures to its own ends. As a result, West-stream anthropology is still caught-up in the perpetual re-enactment of a malignant synergy between its practitioners’ reliance on extractive research practices that mimic Western states’ colonizing endeavors, and their reflexive recourse to epistemological individualism that produces ethno-ego-centric interpretations of research subjects. These practices have prevented the discipline from reckoning with its historical legacy of epistemic annexation of communities of research subjects in the Global South through instrumentalized representations; and with its chronic incapacity to engage these communities with a genuinely altruistic ethos instead of its self-serving purposes. These purposes are inherited from colonial era protocols of engagement as disciplinary norms that presume the continued structural hierarchy between the West as the exclusive domain of theory and the Rest as the primary sites of fieldwork, and that naturalize a relational asymmetry between researchers and their subjects based on an extractive and non-reciprocal knowledge production ethos (see Vol. 1: Prologue). This has led to the discipline’s enduring misanthropy, which was exacerbated by its obsession with theory. Prognostics: Decenter Theory and Recenter Humanity The festering misanthropy within the knowledge production practices of anthropology as a human science is due to its inescapable entanglement with “theory.” Goulimary and Greenway explain this entanglement as follows: “In the Anglo-American world ‘theory’ has proved enormously successful, intellectually, institutionally and pedagogically. It has been a crucial medium of circulation and exchange between academic disciplines, and for the development of new ones” (1993: 5). Ironically, the statement

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captures the inherent contradiction of this cathexis with theory: While it has been beneficial to the academic careers of scholars and the institutional expansion of the discipline within the university, it has neglected the relevance of theory for elucidating human predicaments and societies’ challenges. Anthropology’s entanglement with “theory” promotes an ethos of epistemic entrepreneurialism for its practitioners’ professional advancement. This self-serving intellectual entrepreneurship has reduced the discipline into a branch of the “theoretical humanities,” which is an interdisciplinary practice that privileges experimental writing at the intersection of philosophy, literature, and social and political theory; without, however, enhancing the relevance anthropological knowledge to research subjects’ predicaments. This cathexis with theory is anchored to the hegemony of “metropolitan ways of knowing” and its complicitous coat-tailing of the discipline’s epistemology to Western geography, history, and political supremacy. This empire-embedded epistemology is tacitly committed to the Enlightenment’s Occidental cosmopolitanism as the foundational rationale of West-stream anthropology under the euphemism of “One World Anthropology,” which entails the realization of “the Enlightenment project of supplanting the historic diversity of human cultures with a single, universal civilization” (Gray 1998: 215). Moreover, Weststream anthropology is institutionalized within a series of “national container paradigms” subservient to the nation-state power and prestige politics rooted within a history of imperialism, which has insulated disciplinary practice within what Bourdieu called an “anthropological field”: A state-bounded leviathan encompassing an ensemble of biographical, socio-cultural, epistemic, and institutional predeterminations that constitute the academic anthropologist’s professional universe (2003: 283). These national panopticons circumscribe the anthropologist’s research results almost exclusively to an academic audience back home and serve primarily as a pedagogical resource to reproduce a new generation of practitioners of West-stream anthropology. Thus, anthropology remains the property of an exilic enclave, which confines the relevance of its practice to “the theatre of its own operation.” Ultimately, practitioners’ emancipation from the “imprisoning hegemony” of these institutional panopticons that regiment disciplinary practice is a prerequisite to the practice of a postexotic anthropology within the emerging pluriversal civilizational order constituted by heteromorphic sociocultural formations.

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This emerging historical conjuncture is heralding an existential struggle over the future of a fieldwork-based human science. As the dominant modality of practicing anthropology (i.e., West-stream exotic anthropology) is disqualified by its intrinsic inability to articulate the relations between the diversity of humanity’s sociocultural formations and the unity of the human race without the ethnocentric standpoint of Occidental cosmopolitanism and its repertoire of travelling theories. As a result, it has consistently subordinated human cultural diversity to the hegemony of the Eurocentric “interpretive imperium.” This imperium is reified in the abiding conundrum of “flying theory, grounded method,” which has defined the praxis of West-stream anthropology since its founding. In the post-exotic phase, this axiomatic formulation is morally untenable, as it promotes the despotic hegemony of Western norms and sensibility and their epistemological tyranny over the global practice of the discipline. The attempt to salvage its relevance to this axial era through (a) the self-serving adoption of a travelling theory-mediated “public anthropology” while avoiding the reconfiguration of the prevailing practice of “academic anthropology,” and (b) the opportunistic recourse to premature trans-frontier escapades are transient distractions. As the moral rot and epistemological contradictions at its core remain intact. In contrast to these escapist attempts at sustaining an exhausted disciplinary practice, this axial era demands a return to the basics of doing anthropology through an alternative practice of cross-border excursions without exotica-hunting misanthropic flirtation with the theoretical or environmental humanities. Mesography is the alternative practice, as the underpinning method of a post-exotic anthropology, which insists on getting inter-human relationships right first, before launching into epistemic escapades in quest of a new relational covenant between humans and non-humans. Also, it insists on getting right the local determinations of the transformation of communities prior to invoking external vectors preferred by travelling theory. In addition, mesography abandons the “professional culture of method which operates more by aesthetics than technique” (Marcus and Okeley 2007: 353). As it is based on accountable research procedures that perform a history-embedded and local context-dependent panoramic analysis of the diversity and fullness of a community’s particularities. More importantly, the practitioners of a post-exotic anthropology, as cross-border knowledge workers, abandon their national container paradigms and the associated national identities at the gates of the departing airport on their way to their fieldwork sites.

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While there, they avoid playacting the “fictive native” through an “Oriental masquerade” as an opportunistic data collection means. Instead, they adopt the role of a “practical mediator” committed to the production of knowledge as “relational goods” for the mutual enlightenment of researchers and research subjects. Such a role engenders the permanent interiorization of a field-based anthropological sensibility animated by a conscientious quest for a non-narcissistic understanding of communities. Finally, the practitioners of a post-exotic anthropology’s ethical praxis should consider avoiding the following interpretive misdemeanorgenerating practices: indulging the hubris of the “ontological turn” and its anthropomorphic “cognitive ethology” of human-non-human relations as part of an experiment in comparative epistemology; colonizing (again) indigenous peoples’ ontologies and animistic beliefs as self-serving cognitive resources with which to theorize Western societies’ predicaments in the Anthropocene; employing the escapist monikers of environmental humanities (e.g., post-humanism, inter-species morality) that betray the discipline’s misanthropic quest for “theoretically innovative engagements” as part of its enduring practice of “symbolic cannibalism”; and engaging in the imperious recourse to a consilience epistemology and its frontier theorizing ambition that mimics the colonizing compulsion of liberal imperialism. Abandoning these practices is the minimum prerequisite to emancipating ourselves from the inaugural bad faith that still corrodes the moral core of West-stream anthropology, which is manifested in data colonialism as its methodological norm, and Occidental cosmopolitanism as its epistemological foundation. In doing so, we avoid self-entrapment in the syndrome of “aesthetic spectatorship” of practitioners of an exotic anthropology who use other peoples and cultures as mere semiotic artifacts in their symbolic playgrounds. Furthermore, the knowledge production ethos of a post-exotic anthropology seeks to produce contextually-relevant kinds of knowledge, and not a tradition-sustaining mode of producing knowledge. Accordingly, a postexotic anthropology is not about “we have our traditions too,” which is based on the recuperation of anachronistic cultural antecedents as the contrived foundation for a “new” tradition. Instead, it is a prospective intellectual-practical endeavor to sustain and expand the planet’s cornucopia of experimentation in ways of living that defy the hegemonic ideal of “liberal totalitarianism.” As the latter promotes a post-human future based on a techno-worshipping culture and a human-redundant economy

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along with the generalization of market valuation and robots-substitution in all societal spheres. I conclude this volume as I started the first one, with an appeal to readers who are aspiring or current practitioners of the human sciences. I hope to have convinced some of you that anthropology cannot continue to be practiced on the basis of the travelling theory-obsessed and misanthropy-inducing West-stream exotic anthropology. I have endeavored to present an eminently replicable praxis paradigm for a post-exotic anthropology through the five research procedures of a mesography that were elaborated upon in the first volume and applied in both. More importantly, I hope to have discouraged most of you from the narcissistic practice of foregrounding your personal attributes, either in the form of an opportunistic sympathy-inducing reference to one’s identity as a victim of history (I am a/an: “scholar of color,” “anticolonial academic,” “postcolonial anthropologist,” etc.), or to a respect-commanding allusion to one’s heritage as a victor of history (I am a: “Western ethnographer,” “British anthropologist,” “White scholar,” etc.). As these identity-based references are expressions of a narcissistic individualism that engender self-centric interpretations of research subjects, which serve primarily as a means to your professional identity construction. More importantly, this narcissistic interpretive standpoint is irrelevant to a grounded understanding of our research subjects as it is intrinsically prone to interpretive misdemeanors of their self-understanding. Instead, it is the collective predicaments of research subjects that should be foregrounded. However, not through contrived self-centric vignettes, but within a historical narrative that captures the depth of their communal trajectory and the scope of their collective agency, while elucidating their contemporary challenges and future prospects. More crucially, I hope that my multi-dimensional narrative about the Soqotran community has shown that rudimentarylooking research sites contain a wealth of social complexities for locally grounded theory formation. Therefore, reliance on the formula “flying theory, grounded method” should be seen as authorizing data colonialism, and thus is an embarrassing colonial legacy that should be abandoned. The same advice applies to the conservationists and their GEF-inspired alien templates with which they annexed local landscapes. Finally, I hope that all of you will adopt an ethic of reciprocity, which insists on a mutual exchange of benefits between the community of research subjects and yourselves, which would palliate the chronic unequal

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exchange ignored, indeed fostered, by the discipline. Only then can we claim with moral authority to be “scholars of human diversity” who are “uniquely qualified” to provide “unique insights” into humanity’s predicaments as practitioners of an authentic human science.

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Index

A acreage monomania, 282, 285, 290, 304, 316, 319 Africa, 28, 41, 75, 102, 115, 116, 247, 265, 322 aid diplomacy, 147, 184, 187, 188, 190, 191 alienation, xxx, 46, 61, 74, 89, 99, 241, 243 Anthropocene, 317, 327, 329, 335 anthropologies of Islam, 112 The Anthropology of Sustainability, 202 apocalyptic, 221, 264, 265 Arab Spring, 16, 17, 89, 90, 95, 143, 148, 154, 157, 165, 187, 297, 326 Arcadian, xxviii, 223, 237, 245, 249, 260, 261 assimilation, xlii, 6, 28, 31, 45, 48, 51, 54, 66, 68, 71, 74, 75, 87, 89, 90, 125 Axial Era, 327

B Basic Needs Assistance for the People of Socotra, 291 biodiversity conservation experiment, xxiii, xxviii, xliii C cannibalistic Western logic, 331 car culture, 192 cars, 95, 152, 162, 170, 178, 185, 192, 303 Cassandra, 262, 263, 265 CBOs, 153, 159, 178–180, 243, 278, 305, 307 clientele, 12, 74, 80, 169, 171, 177, 180, 216, 300, 303 clientelistic environmental governance, 201 cognitive ethology, 335 communal modernization, 1–3, 22 community-based, 69, 147, 159, 178, 228, 241, 244, 288, 292, 302, 319 community of fate, 322, 323

© 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 II, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45646-7

363

364

INDEX

conceptual plagiarism, 213, 228, 284, 289, 310 conjunctural narrative, 109 Conservation and Sustainable Use of Biodiversity of Soqotra Archipelago (CSB -1997-2001), 288 consilience epistemology, 330, 335 cooperatives, 147, 153, 159, 160, 163, 165 cooptation, 88, 104, 148, 201, 206, 292, 327 CSOs, 278, 308 cultural anomie, 22, 47, 104 cultural economics, 151, 193 cultural modernization, xxi, xxiii, xxviii, xxix, xxxiv, xliii, 3, 322 cultural protectionism, xxx, 28 cultural renegades, 89, 91, 101 culturecide, 104, 319

D data colonialism, xxxii, 331, 336 data reciprocity ethos, xxxii diaspora, xxix, xxx, 1, 2, 7, 9, 17–19, 22, 30, 46, 54, 71, 74, 101, 113, 149, 153, 154, 169, 175, 177, 178, 183–187, 190–192, 195, 270, 276, 280 diaspora formation, 71, 113 diasporic economy, 147, 154, 183, 184, 191 diplomatic bribing, 277 discursive heterologies, xxxviii Djibouti, 72, 99, 102, 103, 105

E ecocentric, xxx, 199, 201, 256, 268, 288, 304, 319 eco-colonialism, 227 eco-farms, 160, 190, 194

ecological gentrification, 199, 202, 208, 209 economic actors, xxx, 159, 166–168, 172, 175 economic anthropology, 149, 151, 152 economic growth, 201, 203, 256, 270 economic sovereignty, xli, 195 ecosystem services, 204, 238, 315, 318 ecotopia, xxiv, 182, 218, 259, 261–263, 268, 274, 299, 303, 325 ecotourism, 61, 147, 148, 153, 167, 178, 180, 182, 194, 200, 208, 210, 211, 214, 243, 269, 289, 291, 293, 295, 300, 302, 315 ecotourists, xxviii, 167, 178, 192, 216, 237, 239, 317 environmental adjustment regime, xli, xliv, 199, 202, 204, 206, 214, 217, 218 environmental annexation, xxi, xxiii, xxix, xxxiv, xxxvii, xliii, 286, 288, 322 Environmental Extension Officers (EEOs), 292 environmental governance, xxxv, xxxvi, 202, 203, 206, 209, 213, 243 environmental humanities, 329, 331, 334, 335 environmental imaginary, 237, 245–248, 291, 292, 302 epistemic community, xxxv, 69, 99, 101, 206, 215, 232, 233, 235, 259, 261, 262, 313, 315, 325 epistemic generification, 225, 238 epistemic imperialism, 206, 289, 309 ethnocide, xxvi, 57 ethnolinguistic vitality, 28, 31, 63–66 European Union, 267

INDEX

evaluation report, 205, 214, 229, 273, 289, 291–293, 295, 304, 307, 319 exogenous mediations, xxiii, xxiv, xxix, xliii, 321, 327 expiation exercise, 125, 126 F fieldwork, xxix, xxxii, xxxviii–xl, 63, 112, 113, 184, 259, 281, 329, 330, 332, 334 folklorization, 62, 195 Friends of Soqotra, xxv, xxxv, 218, 232, 296 Friends of Soqotra, 232 frontier’s complex, 330 G GEF-UN experiment, 250, 256, 259, 264, 269, 274–276, 280, 289, 297, 300, 302, 307–309, 315–318, 325 GIZ, xxvi, 161, 314 global conservation regime, 202, 212, 258 Global Environmental Benefits (GEBs), 205–207, 209, 213, 214, 228, 276, 277, 283–285, 288, 310, 315 Global South, xxxviii, xl, xlii, 151, 201, 203–207, 327, 332 green economy, xxxv, xxxvi, 199, 201, 203, 205, 206, 225, 286, 308, 309, 312 green missionaries, 261 green Orientalists, 218, 275 H Hadhramawt, 56, 74, 93, 94, 113, 116, 117, 119, 121, 144, 167, 172, 179, 188

365

Half-Earth movement, 282 Holocene, 41, 317, 327 human-environment relations, 199, 223, 234, 237, 238, 244, 245, 250, 266 humanitarian environmentalism, 232, 296 I IMF, xli, 152, 204 imperialist ethos, 223, 237, 258 indigenous ontologies, 329, 331 indigenous traditional knowledge, 289, 310 infrastructure development, 124, 159, 175, 225, 230, 248 Internet café, 17 Is.l¯ah., 52, 110, 123, 126, 127, 129, 130, 132, 133, 138, 139, 142 Islamization, 111, 114, 120, 131 island community, 98, 208 IUCN, 208, 217, 221, 238, 241, 281, 288, 318 J j¯ ahiliyya, 50, 52, 108, 114, 117, 120, 125, 138, 144 K knowledge production, xxii, 209, 218, 322, 328, 332 L land tenure, 295, 296 liberal imperialism, xli, 335 liberal totalitarianism, 335 liberation credo, 114, 121, 123 linguistic dilemmas, 27, 48 Local Environmental Benefits (LEBs), 206, 284, 310, 316

366

INDEX

M marketplace, 153, 168, 169, 174, 176, 186, 193 mass tourism, 180, 183, 194, 210, 211, 241, 264 mercenary reason, 206 merchants of astonishment, 330 Mesography, xxii, xxxi, 334 misanthropy, 332, 336 modern economy, xxiii, 16, 140, 147, 149, 153, 154, 191 modernity, xxv, xxvii, 2, 4, 9, 13, 81, 84, 110, 112, 134, 136, 138, 141, 151, 215, 218, 236, 259, 263, 264, 268, 275, 322, 325, 326 modernization process, xxx, xliii, 2, 3, 59, 153, 275 Modern South Arabian Languages, 57 moral hazard, 251, 276 Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs), 205, 277, 284 multilingualism, 28, 67 municipal economy, 147, 153, 158, 190 muwallad¯ın, 30, 195 N national integration, xliii, 1, 3, 90 NGOs, xxxvi, xxxix–xlii, 7, 179, 206, 207, 216, 232, 253, 278, 305, 307 non-development, 252, 274–276, 286 O Occidental cosmopolitanism, xxxiii, xxxiv, 327, 333, 334 Oman, 32, 55, 115, 144, 158, 167, 169, 170, 183, 186, 188, 266 ontological anthropology, 328

ontological turn, 331, 335 orthopraxy, 107, 108, 111, 126, 136, 138, 139, 141

P pan-Arabism, 9, 16 panopticon, xxx, 9, 83, 242, 258, 283, 304 pastoral economy, xxii, 159, 193 patronage, 88, 103, 109, 142, 148, 149, 248, 301, 326 philanthrocapitalist , 148, 206 philanthropy, xlii, 166 pietization, xxx, 110 political-economic regimes, 148 political heteronomy, xxiii, 321, 325 Pollyanna, 262–265 post-human, 329, 330, 335 post-liberal environmentalism, xxxvi, 201, 203, 204, 206, 208, 209, 249 preemptive conservation, 251 private sector, 155, 156, 159, 166–168, 174, 248, 280 Protected Areas, 161, 167, 178, 238, 280, 282, 294, 295, 301 protectionist ideology, 27–29, 31, 48, 55, 58 public sphere, xxx, 9, 11, 13, 17, 30, 31, 63, 69, 75, 86, 87, 90, 97, 99, 110, 131, 133, 139

Q Qalansiyah, 4, 79, 97, 119, 156, 163, 165, 177, 241 q¯at chewing, xxx, 7, 13, 22, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86–91, 97–101, 105, 133, 173

INDEX

R recursive relationship, xxix, 107, 111, 325 remittance economy, 185, 186 remittances, xxx, 9, 147, 149, 184–187, 191 research colony, 275, 286, 310 resource curse, xxiv, 194, 262 Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh (RBGE), 252, 290, 319 rural economy, 100, 248 S Salaf¯ı, 126, 127, 134 salvage ethnography, 328 secularism, 123, 134 Senckenberg Society for Nature Research, 312 service economy, 147, 148, 153, 166, 190 shari’a, 108, 110, 131, 133, 143 Small Grants Programme (GEF-SGP), 277, 278, 300 smart phone, 18, 191 social mobility, 152, 154, 162, 191 Somalia, 74 Soqotra Conservation and Development Programme (SCDP-1, 2001-2003), 287, 293, 298 Soqotra Governance and Biodiversity Project (SGBP, 2008-2013), 287, 303 Soqotri language, 27, 29–31, 34–39, 41–43, 45–48, 50–54, 56, 57, 60–64, 69, 91 sovereignty, 74, 110, 132, 139, 143, 184, 187, 194, 195, 204, 207, 209, 212, 227, 322, 327 state substitution, 188, 190 status hierarchy, 5, 85, 183 structural anatomy, xxxi, xxxvii, 147, 152

367

Support to the Integrated Program for the Conservation and Sustainable Development of the Soqotra Archipelago (IPCSD, 2016-2021), 309 Sustainable Development and Biodiversity Conservation for the People of Soqotra (SCDP-2, 2003-2008), 287, 298, 299, 301, 303, 304, 306 sustainable livelihood, 165, 257, 286 sustainable underdevelopment, xli, xlii, 193, 226, 255, 257, 266, 275, 280, 317 symbolic appropriation, xxi, xxiv, xxviii, xliv, 199, 262, 321, 323, 326 symbolic cannibalism, 331, 332, 335 symbolic curse, xxiv, 262 syncretism, 115, 116, 119

T Tabl¯ıgh, 122, 126–129, 132, 138 television, 1, 9–15, 17, 19, 59, 67, 82, 186 theoretical humanities, 333 tourists, 7, 9, 17, 158, 168, 179, 180, 186, 209, 211, 216, 300, 303 tragedy of the commons, 226, 266, 314 trans-frontier escapades, 328–330, 334 translocality, 8, 104 travelling policy, xxxix, xli, 199 travelling theory, xxxii, xxxvii, 328, 334, 336 Trojan environmentalism, 199, 202, 207, 209 Trojan forces, xxi, xxiii, xxix, xxx TV cafés, 10–13, 16, 67

368

INDEX

U UAE, 6, 7, 19, 61, 102, 143, 148, 165, 169, 171, 175, 183, 184, 186–190, 193, 194, 196, 309, 326, 327 UNDP, xxxv, xxxviii–xl, 160, 208, 211, 218, 224, 227, 256, 267, 277, 287–291, 294, 295, 299–301, 304, 305 UNEP, xxxv, 203, 205, 208, 218, 225, 227, 229, 233, 256, 275, 278, 287, 309–313, 318 UNESCO, xxxix, 63–66, 70, 166, 180, 215, 217, 236, 240, 259, 263, 303 urban formation, 1, 4, 7 V value entrapment, 87, 89 virtualism syndrome, 225, 236, 238 virtualizing project, 225, 229, 257, 280

W wilderness, 208, 239, 247, 274 witchcraft, 108, 183 World Bank, xxxv, xl, xli, 94, 103, 152, 203, 204, 206, 279, 282, 283, 294, 299 World Heritage Site, xxxix, 180, 215, 218, 236, 259, 303, 304 Z Zoning Plan (ZP), 70, 193, 202, 209, 223, 226, 227, 229–231, 233–240, 242, 243, 245, 249, 251, 252, 256–258, 260, 261, 267–271, 273, 276, 279, 280, 286, 290–292, 294–296, 298, 300, 302–306, 309, 312, 316–318