Introduction: The Concept of Tribe in the Anthropology of Yemen (original) (raw)
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Southwest Arabia across History: Essays to the Memory of Walter Dostal (= Denkschriften der phil.-hist. Klasse 472 Sammlung Eduard Glaser 16), pp. 91-116, Vienna 2014
During his fieldwork in Yemen in the early 1970s, Walter Dostal had the opportunity to make observations of the social and economic organization of the Banī Ḥushaysh, a member tribe of the Bakīl confederation. These observations were incorporated into his article 'Sozio-ökonomische Aspekte der Stammesdemokratie in Nordost-Jemen' (1974) and were later elaborated in his monograph 'Egalität und Klassengesellschaft in Südarabien: Anthopologische Untersuchungen zur sozialen Evolution' (1983). 'Egalität und Klassengesellschaft' includes a detailed exploration of the genealogy, religion, social stratification, kinship system, and political and economic organization of the Banī Ḥushaysh and compares it with the tribal societies of the Shiḥūḥ and the Banī Shumaylī of Rās al-Khaymah (UAE). It reflects Dostal’s comprehensive approach to the study of local societies; in other words, his conviction that no understanding of a society is complete without the study of a broad range of its aspects and features. Yet, the evolutionary assumptions Dostal uses in 'Egalität und Klassengesellschaft' may now seem exotic to those not immersed in German-speaking ethnology of that time. The period of his stay with the Banī Ḥushaysh was characterized by the aftershocks of the 1962 revolution and the subsequent eight-year civil war that led to the overthrow of the imāmate and the establishment of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR). The profound changes in the political landscape throughout Upper Yemen had direct repercussions on the tribal society of the Banī Ḥushaysh. The incipient realignment of political positions and alliances in the early YAR triggered reshuffles in tribal power relations among the Banī Ḥushaysh; it is therefore not surprising that one of Dostal’s key observations was related to the rapid changes of tribal leaders and their empowerment and disempowerment through their tribal groups. The frequent changes in the office of the tribal leaders and the absence of a fixed duration of their tenure led Dostal to the formulation of his theory of “uninheritability of political offices” (Unvererbbarkeit der politischen Ämter). Dostal also observed that the higher a tribal leader’s rank in the hierarchy of the tribe, the more obvious the “fluid nature” and “instability” of his position and authority became. With these observations, Dostal covers central points of the complex organization of tribal leadership in Upper Yemen, namely the question of the connection between tribal structure, leadership hierarchies, and fluidity and stability of authority. This chapter is dedicated to an investigation of these connections. In comparison to the beginning of the 1970s, and due to profound ethnological and social anthropological research in that area since then, we have today a far greater knowledge of the tribal societies of Upper Yemen. This makes it possible not only to focus on a single tribe (e.g. the Banī Ḥushaysh), but to evaluate tribes and even tribal confederations in a comparative perspective. For this reason, I have chosen two tribal confederations of Upper Yemen as subjects of this investigation: the large confederation of Hamdān (which consists of the two independent confederations Ḥāshid and Bakīl) and the confederation of Khawlān b. ʿĀmir. Using the empirical example of these confederations, this chapter aims at answering the following research questions: How do tribal structures and leadership hierarchies of tribes and confederations relate to each other? How are power and authority conceptualized and distributed among the tribal leaders? And what are the differences between these confederations in regard to the concept of tribal leadership? Both confederations are made up of similar constituent elements and are structured in a similar hierarchical way. Tribal leaders, entitled shaykh, administer the tribal groups of both confederations. Yet the investigation of two central tasks of these shaykhs, namely representation and jurisprudence (arbitration), reveals that both confederations have developed different models of tribal leadership. Whereas among Hamdān the concept of leadership is reflected in the term shaykh mashāyikh, the specific conceptualization of tribal leadership among Khawlān b. ʿĀmir manifests itself in the leadership model of the shaykh al-shaml. In other words, both confederations have developed different modes to organize and to “inhabit” actually homologous tribal structures. Hence, the structures of tribes and of confederations and the features, which make up their socio-political organization, need to be distinguished. The entities, called tribes and tribal confederations, found throughout rural North Africa and the Middle East are diverse polities and the differences between them are worth further investigation. In the recent past, several ambitious studies have been published which proposed a new reading of “the Arab tribe”, by emphasizing hierarchical status differences. The tribes inhabiting Upper Yemen are in many respects also very different, however, academic awareness of the differences between them is underdeveloped. The following investigation shows that they must not be “lumped together” but rather considered differently, in all their aspects, and that we should indeed talk about the “tribal societies” of Upper Yemen, in the plural.
Anthropology of the Middle East 9/1, pp. 59-82.
Khawlān and Jumā'ah are two out of eight tribes of the Khawlān b. 'Āmir confederation in Southwest Arabia, the territories of five of them being in Yemen and three in Saudi Arabia. Whereas the Yemeni tribes Munabbih, Sahār and Rāzih are well explored, little is known about the tribal structures of Jumā'ah and the homonymous tribe Khawlān. This article provides an overview of the present-day tribal structures of Khawlān and Jumā'ah, and traces their historical formation through comparison with the respective information available in the historical and geographical works of the Yemeni geographer and historian al-Hasan al-Hamdānī, dating back to the tenth century AD. The results of this study show that Jumā'ah and Khawlān were historically open to processes of social, spatial and genealogical changes. Whereas Jumā'ah can trace its lineage directly back to the ancestor Khawlān b. 'Āmir, Khawlān tribe represents a much looser entity of mutual alliances, which corresponds to its lack of genealogical coherence. Among Khawlān and Jumā'ah, the rhetoric of shared 'ancestry' is thus to a greater or a lesser extent a statement of identity and follows the general Middle Eastern practice in conceptualising groups as kin.
Understanding the Yemeni crisis : the transformation of tribal roles in recent decades
2016
Tribes are a fundamental element of Yemen’s social fabric and therefore important in understanding the various levels of conflict in the country. They are vastly misunderstood, the term ‘tribe’ is often used in an anti-historical way, ignoring the changes which have taken place over the decades, within tribes and in their relations with others. Not only misunderstood, but also subject to multiple prejudices which caricature and generalise on the basis of selected characteristics about individual tribes. Disparaging and indeed, insulting statements about tribes can be found with great ease in the media, even in academia and among educated people. Most of us involved in the region will certainly have experienced them on an almost daily basis. In particular urban people tend to despise tribesmen and use the word bedu to disparage both tribespeople and nomads. Among others, Corstange presents an excellent summary of these prejudices: “in the Yemeni context… the tribesmen are often styli...
Tribes in Modern Yemen: An Anthology (OPEN ACCESS)
Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2021
For transcribing Arabic, a slightly modified system of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (iJMes) for both written and spoken words has been used. the arabic tāʾ marbūṭah is rendered ah. initial hamzah is unmarked. lunar and solar letters remain undistinguished when writing the arabic article. Common words, such as shaykh, imam, Quran, al-Qaeda, Yemen, aden, saudi arabia, Jeddah, shiite, Wahhabi, hadith, etc. are rendered in an anglicized version. the arabic bin or ibn ("son of "), where it comes between two names, is often given as simply b. the plural of some arabic words such as shaykh, Zaydī, and Salafī is given in an Anglicized (shaykhs, Zaydīs, Salafīs) version. 9 Matsumoto 1994. 10 on the long-term development of tribal customary law, see Paul dresch's chapter in this volume. 11 the sādah (sg. sayyid) are the putative descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad through ʿAlī and Fāṭimah.
Nouvelles Chroniques du manuscrit au Yémen, 2021
This article investigates the evolution of political systems in North-Eastern Yemen in the course of the last two millennia. By examining the main shifts of political power and their structural elements, it describes a typology of socio-political and economic formation that was particular to the Yemeni Highlands and that has been designated as ‘multi-polity’. The study concludes that a North Yemeni type of tribe is a non-primitive and highly developed political structure, which may be considered in some respects as an alternative to state organization.
Looking beyond the Tribe: Abandoning Paradigms to Write Social History in Yemen during World War I
2000
Explores how conventional studies of "tribes" in mainstream anthropology distorts the dynamic relations between various constituencies both currently and historically. The case of Ottoman-era Yemen (1870s to 1919) is used to challenge this resilient orthodoxy and it equally demonstrates an early phase of author's own reflections on research conducted in 1996 and 1997 while in Yemen and years of archival work in Istanbul/London.