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

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

Prologue: Soqotra as a Crucible of Exogenous Mediations

Chapter 1: Mediated Urbanization: ?adiboh as an Emergent Translocality

Part 1: Cultural Modernization: National Integration Processes

Chapter 2: Linguistic Dilemmas: Communal Vernacular in Transition

Chapter 4: Religious Re-Conversion: Mediations of Local Islamic Practices

Chapter 5: Economic Reconfiguration: Emergent Social Differentiation

Part 2: Environmental Annexation: Global Governance of Local Conservation

Chapter 6: Trojan Environmentalism: Ecological Gentrification of an Island Community

Chapter 7: “Saving Soqotra”: Biography of a Conservation & Development Experiment

Epilogue: A Community in Permanent Transition

Bibliography

Serge D. Elie holds a D.Phil. in Social Anthropology from the University of Sussex, UK. He is a former policy research consultant and former development professional at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). He is currently an independent scholar engaged in the practice of a post-exotic anthropology that relies on mesography as an alternative method to ethnography. His interests include state-community relations, development and environment articulation, communities in transition, state and polity formation processes, pastoralism, research method development and theory formation practices.