Research Catalog

Title

A post-exotic anthropology of Soqotra. Volume II, Cultural and environmental annexation of an indigenous community / Serge D. Elie.

Author

Elie, Serge D.,

Publication

• Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan, [2020]
• ©2020

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Holdings

Details

Description

xliv, 368 pages : illustrations (some colour); 22 cm

Summary

This two-volume book offers a panoramic explanatory narrative of Soqotra Islands 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 Soqotras 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 Soqotras transformation process is unfolding. The origin of these vectors is situated within Soqotras 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.

Alternative Title

Cultural and environmental annexation of an indigenous community

Subject

• Indigenous peoples > Socotra
• Socotra (Yemen) > Race relations

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 339-361) and index.

Contents

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 3: Consumption as Alienation: Diffusion of the National Pastime -- 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.

ISBN

• 9783030456450
• 3030456455
• 9783030456467 (PDF ebook) (canceled/invalid)

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library