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A Post-Exotic
Anthropology of Soqotra,
Volume I
A Mesography of an Indigenous
Polity in Yemen
Serge D. Elie
A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I
 Serge D. Elie

A Post-Exotic
Anthropology
of Soqotra, Volume I
A Mesography of an Indigenous Polity in Yemen
Serge D. Elie
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

ISBN 978-3-030-45637-5 ISBN 978-3-030-45638-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45638-2

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To a new generation of practitioners of a field-based science
of human emancipation
 Acknowledgments

It is with considerable relish that I acknowledge my financial autonomy as

an independent researcher, and thus my freedom from having to express
(that obligatory) gratitude to a research grant-giving agency. Since the
latter’s magnanimous act for the sake of science leads to one’s involun-
tary conscription into an indentured status. This status is consecrated in a
serial number that must be cited every time one uses the information
collected under its patronage. It is most peculiar that a sign of pecu-
niary dependency, if not intellectual conformity, is made out to be a mark
of academic distinction. Instead, I acknowledge the “assistance” of the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), having worked there
for nearly a decade, in fostering my financial autonomy from the disci-
pline’s conformity-inducing sponsoring agencies. This has allowed me to
assert my intellectual independence from the prevailing conventions of
disciplinary practice, and to avoid reproducing its endemic contradictions
and illiberal practices inventoried in this book. My Soqotrans interlocu-
tors, however, always betrayed a certain incredulity when I told them nafsı̄
(“myself”) in response to their not really innocent query: man yad‘amak
(“who is supporting you”)? Nevertheless, I insist on paying homage to a
community of people who incarnate a set of attributes that induce discom-
fort in the rest of us for being so deficient in them, such as generous
hospitality toward unannounced strangers in spite of the absence of reci-
procity from them, and inexhaustible patience toward those seeking their
assistance and who always disappoint their legitimate expectations.

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Acknowledging those who assisted me in Soqotra is rather risky, since

it is not clear that they want to be identified nominally with a product, the
contents of which might be perceived by some to be somewhat contro-
versial. However, for a researcher who had no salary to distribute or a
project to donate in return for assistance from individuals, saying a heart-
felt “thank you” is the least that can, and must, be done. First and fore-
most, with genuine gratitude and fond memories, I refer to my two
research assistants, mediators, translators, and brokers, whose identities
have been modified in light of the current political tension in Soqotra.
They literally had to soften my local interlocutors’ crystallizing reticence,
after my initial welcoming in their midst, since I was someone who only
had questions and nothing else to offer in return. My first partner, S. Y.
Al-Qalansi, whose social stature seemed to have induced Soqotrans’ will-
ingness to talk to me. My other partner, and pleasantly exasperating trav-
elling companion, S. H. S. Al-Soqotri, had to do some serious convincing
and extensive legwork in order to find interlocutors. As I was around
long enough for people to know that “there is no benefit” (mā fı̄ fā‘ida).
The latter term was invoked not only to suggest that there was no mone-
tary benefit or forthcoming practical aid from talking to me, but also to
express a general disinterest given their previous disappointing experience
with foreigners promising assistance. Indeed, I was ascribed the reputa-
tion of someone with “dry hands” (ı̄dah nāshifah in Arabic). As a result,
he had to resort to some innocuous deception, such as mentioning the
possibility of my bringing back a project someday. Both have conferred
upon me the honorary title of “brother”, which has exempted me from
the obligatory pecuniary relations between foreigners and locals. I take
comfort in the knowledge that those who are not cited here would not
feel slighted as they have more practical preoccupations and expectations,
which this book elucidates.
Also, worthy of special acknowledgement with gratitude is the work of
my predecessors as fieldworkers in Soqotra—Miranda Morris and Vitaly
Naumkin—who bequeathed to the rest of us a corpus of work on multiple
aspects of local life for researchers to build on. Fortunately, they were not
victims of postmodern social science and its preference for “astonishing
interpretations”; thus their work contains enough reliable, even if debat-
able, descriptions to compare the extent of Soqotra’s transformation. In
particular, I wish to convey my indebtedness to Miranda Morris for her
generosity over the years in sharing her incomparable knowledge of the
Soqotri language and for reading and correcting some of the chapters
in their previous incarnations as journal articles. Vladimir Agafonov, who
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix

spent time on the island during the 1970s and 1980s as a Russian-Arabic
interpreter and a Soqotri enthusiast, has been a reliable correspondence
partner for years and has enlightened me on many historical aspects of
local life in Soqotra. Professor, Aaron Rubin was always willing and able
to answer my queries about the linguistic conundrums of the Modern
South Arabian Languages (MSALs) and saved me from embarrassment
in the section on the Soqotri language. I am especially grateful to Mary
Al-Sayed, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, who perceived the book’s
potential contribution to current debates about the future of anthro-
pology. And a special thank you to the two anonymous reviewers of
the book proposal who found it particularly praiseworthy for its agenda-
setting contributions to the emerging field of Soqotran studies from a
social science perspective. I hope readers will confirm their positive assess-
ments. I reserve for last the indispensable role of my wife Lina Al-Eryani,
who has been by my side since I started over a decade ago my foray
into a scholarly life in Yemen. While her contributions during the writing
of this book and the work that preceded it are inextricably weaved into
them, I insist on acknowledging her role as the translator of the Arabic
texts quoted throughout both volumes. In doing so, I spurn the mythic
image of the anthropologist as linguistic hero endowed with full linguistic
mastery (speaking, reading, writing and translating) after a couple of years
of studying the local language. More crucially, she has been my anchor to
local social reality and thus prevented me from engaging in interpretive
misdemeanors associated with premature recourse to travelling theories.
Given the long incubation period of this book, parts of it are already in
the public domain, although in very different versions. I wish to acknowl-
edge with gratitude the permission from a number of publishers to re-use
some of the published articles in extensively revised and updated form in
both volumes. Specific attribution will be made in the chapters concerned.

Notes on Terminology and Transliteration

In this book I will use the term Soqotrans for the people, Soqotra for
the territory, and Soqotri for the language. My spelling of the island’s
name differs from the prevailing one “Socotra”, as the letter “c” has no
equivalent in Arabic or in the MSALs (see discussion of the origin of
the term “Soqotra” in Vol. II: Chapter 2). Also, I use the term West
Asia or West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region as a more accu-
rate geographical location of Yemen. In using this term, I intentionally
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

avoid the prevailing geographical moniker for the region, Middle East
or Middle East and North Africa (MENA). The rationale for this substi-
tute geographical moniker is based on a historical shift: The Middle East
evokes a congeries of tribal fiefdoms as imperial satrapies arbitrarily consti-
tuted into nation-states by a combination of Ottoman, British, French
and American imperial cartographic demarcation exercise in the post-
1919 era. In contrast, WANA symbolizes an emerging reconfiguration
and agonistic emancipation from the legacies of empire in the post-2011
era.
Arabic and Soqotri terms are used throughout both volumes. In the
case of Arabic words, I do not use diacritical marks for the names of
persons, places and for terms familiar in English (e.g., shari’a, instead
of sharı̄’a). However, I use the diacritical marks for both the hamza (’)
and the ayn (‘) as in Sana‘a’, but without long vowels marks (S.ana‘ā’ ).
For the transliteration of all other Arabic terms, I use all of the diacrit-
ical marks based on the guidelines of the International Journal of Middle
East Studies (IJMES), along with its other conventions, such as angli-
cized plurals for Arabic terms: e.g., shaykhs and not shuyūkh. There are
some exceptions, however, in applying the IJMES guidelines. One notable
exception is the term niz.ām (system, order), which approximates Egyp-
tian Arabic, and is replaced with nidhām as a more appropriate rendi-
tion of its pronunciation in Yemeni Arabic; while being fully aware that
the Arabic word is written with a ‫ =( ﻅ‬z.) and not a ‫ =( ﺬ‬dh). In the
case of Soqotri, there is no universally accepted transliteration system
for reasons discussed in Volume II: Chapter 2. Nevertheless, the system
recently proposed by Naumkin et al. (2018: 11–20), which remains
a work in progress, is selectively applied to avoid the proliferation of
spellings for established terms. For example, Soqotra is used but not
Sok.ot.ra, which they suggest is the appropriate transliteration. Accord-
ingly, the prevailing use of “Socotra” is avoided, unless it is included in
quoted texts. The reader is forewarned about the inconsistencies due to
the inevitable oversight or the inherently approximative conventions of
the existing transliteration guidelines.
 Contents

Prologue: An Invitation to Practice Anthropology

Differently xxv

1 Mesography as Paradigm for a Post-Exotic

Anthropology: The Post-Ethnography Turn 1
1.1 An Axial Era: Anthropology in a Post-Universalist
Conjuncture 1
1.1.1 Emergent Pluriverse: Geopolitical Transition 2
1.2 Epochal Transition: From Ethnography to Mesography 5
1.2.1 Epistemological Renewal: Beyond
the Neo-Imperial Vulgate 8
1.2.2 Interpretivism: A Predatory Hermeneutics 12
1.3 Disciplinary Praxis Reimagined: Infrastructural
Makeover 17
1.4 Anthropology’s New Ethical Covenant: Three Pillars 21
1.4.1 Research Ethic: Experiential Authenticity 22
1.4.2 Relational Ethic: Bond of Reciprocity 23
1.4.3 Discursive Ethic: Referential Veracity 24
1.5 Mesography Defined: Genealogy and Primer 27
1.6 Fieldwork as a Recursive Process: From Village
Dwelling to Sites Hopping 32

xi
xii CONTENTS

Part I Eco-Socio-Economic Disarticulation: Waning

Pastoral Community

2 Synoptic Preview: Context, Catalysts, Theory,

and History 39
2.1 Situating Soqotra: Contextual Reconnaissance 40
2.1.1 Noah’s Ark Rediscovered: Arcadian Fixation 41
2.1.2 Clash of Futures: Incommensurable Visions 45
2.2 Catalysts of Transition: Transmigration and State
Policy 49
2.2.1 Migratory Movements: Sociocultural Change
Agents 49
2.2.2 A “Community of Fate”: Policy Mediation
and Communal Formation 54
2.2.3 Domains of Analysis: Symbiotic Nexus 56
2.3 Anthropology of the Political: Beyond Travelling
Theories 58
2.3.1 Travelling Theory: Indefensible Epistemological
Paradox 59
2.3.2 Anthropology and the State: Reframing
the Discourse 62
2.4 Historicizing a Communal Polity: Changing
the Narrative 68

3 A Socio-Ecological Formation: The

Human-Environment Dialectic 73
3.1 An Atomistic Community: Inaugural Setting 74
3.1.1 Ecological Primordialism: A Conceptual
Framework 76
3.2 Vernacular Homestead: Indigenous Lexical
Appropriation 79
3.2.1 Mapping Landscapes: Toponymic Grid 82
3.2.2 Inventorying Resources: Taxonomic Symbiosis 86
3.3 Territorial Organization: Indigenous Clans vs. Settler
Tribes 90
3.3.1 Sultanate Regime: Tributary Political Economy
and Patrimonial Social Order 92
 CONTENTS xiii

3.3.2 Demographic Distribution: Land Occupation

Strategy 96
3.3.3 Communal Social Structure: Clan and Locality
vs. Tribe and Genealogy 99
3.3.4 Self-Governance: Traditional Institutions
of Mediation 102
3.4 Cultural Geography: Space-Mediated Identities 106
3.4.1 Topographic Bifurcation: Domains of Livelihood
Differentiation 107
3.4.2 Geographic Dichotomy: Eco-Cultural Divide 110
3.5 Community-Making: Social Cooperation Over
Biological Affiliation 112
3.6 Socio-Ecological Change: Inherent Condition 115
Annex 3.1: Mutual Aid Institutions of Soqotra 118

4 Communal Identity Mutation: From Status Hierarchy

to Ethnic Ranking 121
4.1 Identity Transformation: State as Vector 122
4.2 Status Hierarchy as Social Geography: Coastal vs.
Hinterland Enclaves 124
4.2.1 Bin ‘Afrār: Hereditary Nobility 127
4.2.2 Al-Ashrāf: Sacerdotal Retinue 129
4.2.3 Śh.arÒ: Sultans’ Protégés 131
4.2.4 Al-‘Arab: Immigrant Merchants 133
4.2.5 Al-Nūbān: Clerical Intermediaries 134
4.2.6 Al-Badū: Aboriginal Tributaries 136
4.2.7 Al-Akhdām: Self-Indentured Laborers 138
4.2.8 Imbu‘ileh: Conscripted Labor 138
4.3 Ethnic Reconfiguration: Centrifugal Paradox 141
4.3.1 ‘Arabı̄: Pan-Ethnic Membership 143
4.3.2 Yamanı̄: Hyphenated National Identity 145
4.3.3 Saqat.r…: Primordial Authenticity 148
4.3.4 Al-Muwalladı̄n: Ethnocultural Minority 150
4.4 Summation: History-Contingent Collective Identities 153
Annex 4.1: Yemen’s Traditional Social Status Stratification 160

5 Island Pastoralism: External Entanglements

and Internal Entailments 163
xiv CONTENTS

5.1 Pastoral Domain’s Annexation: Enclosure Threat 164

5.2 Thematic Contextualization: Pastoralism’s Nomadic
Fixation 166
5.3 Livelihood Practices: Eclectic Subsistence Regime 168
5.3.1 Primary vs. Supplementary Livelihoods:
Repertoire of Subsistence Practices 170
5.4 Spatial Mobility: Seasonal Peripatetics 172
5.4.1 Transhumance: Intra-Territorial Migration 173
5.4.2 Situational Nomadism: Cross-Territorial
Displacement 174
5.4.3 Agropastoral Movement: Food Harvesting
Relocation 175
5.5 Residential Modality: Shifting Economic Geography 179
5.5.1 Geography of Residence: Configuration
of Regions, Villages, and Clans 182
5.6 The Pastoral Fauna: Livestock as a Neglected
“Endemic” Species 186
5.6.1 Herds’ Genealogy: Millennia of Pastoralism 187
5.6.2 Graze Phobia: Policy Consequences 191
5.6.3 Provisional Inventory: Variable Estimations 193
5.7 Coda: Incremental Adaptations 197

6 Pastoral Economy: From Core to Auxiliary Livelihood 199

6.1 Pastoralism in Transition: Economic Disarticulation 200
6.2 Pastoralists as Badū: Mistaken Identity 203
6.3 Parallel Economy: Patching up Ethos 206
6.3.1 Auxiliary Livelihood’s Mechanisms: Production,
Distribution, and Consumption 208
6.3.1.1 Production: Artisanal Bricolage 210
6.3.1.2 Distribution: Self-Delivery
and Provisioning 215
6.3.1.3 Consumption: Ascetic Food
Substitution Strategy 217
6.4 Future Scenarios: Divergent Trajectories 220
 CONTENTS xv

Part II Political Incorporation: Constitution

of a Sub-National Polity

7 State-Community Relations: Political History

Conjunctures 227
7.1 State Politics of Administration: Chronicle
of a Recursive Relationship 228
7.1.1 Soqotra’s Modern Trajectory: A Conjunctural
History 229
7.2 Settler Sultanate: Proxy Colonialism 231
7.2.1 Dynastic Fiefdom: Imperial Outpost 232
7.2.2 Minimalist Apparatus: Invisible State 236
7.2.3 Roving “Parliament”: Order Maintenance
Mechanism 239
7.2.4 Primitive Accumulation: Taxation as Surplus
Generation 241
7.3 Post-Revolution Administration: Socialist
Transformation 245
7.3.1 Undoing Indirect Rule: “Revolutionary
Decolonization” 246
7.3.2 Rural-Urban Nexus: Territorial Remapping
and Population Socialization 249
7.3.3 Local Self-Rule: Hierarchical Committee System 251
7.3.4 Subsidized Consumption: State-Led
Redistribution 253
7.4 National Unity Government: Republican Tribalism 257
7.4.1 State-Fomented Tribalism: From Organic
Clans to Synthetic Tribes 259
7.4.2 Territorial Segmentation: Shaykhdom
Formation 262
7.4.3 Shaykh Rule: Rural Periphery over Urban
Center 263
7.4.4 State as Economic Driver: Public Sector Growth 264
7.5 Post-Unification Regime: Administrative State 266
7.5.1 Path-Dependent State-Community Governance:
The Primordial-Modern Continuum 267
7.5.2 Election-Mediated Geography: Subsidiarity
Principle Modernized 270
xvi CONTENTS

7.5.3 Simulated Decentralization: External

Supervision Entrenched 272
7.5.4 Eco-Conservationism: Spectacle Economy 275
7.6 Arab Spring Awakening: Communal Sovereignty 277
7.6.1 History’s Agents: Annexation Syndrome
Renounced 279
7.6.2 Indigenous Sovereignty: Political Agency
Asserted 281
7.6.3 Nominal Transformation: From District
to Governorate 283
7.7 UAE’s Humanitarian Protectorate: Compassionate
Guardianship 286
7.7.1 Territorial Annexation: Natural Disaster
as Pretext 287
7.7.2 Parallel Rule: Resident Advisory System 290
7.7.3 Nidhām Mashāyikh Restored: Competitive
Patrimonial Politics 292
7.7.4 Philanthropic Ministrations: Polity
Mobilization 295
7.8 Postscript: From Protectorate to Colony? 298
7.8.1 “Act of Aggression”: UAE’s Military
Intervention 299
7.8.2 Sovereignty Compromised: Foreign Supervision
Reinstated 300

8 Politics of Redistribution: Governance Culture

and Public Ethos 307
8.1 Amoral Communalism: Local Political Grammar 308
8.1.1 Public Values: Locally Emergent not Globally
Disseminated 309
8.2 State, Nation, and Community: Failed Symbiosis 312
8.2.1 Public Sphere Formation: Institution
over Discourse 314
8.3 Resenting Power: Contexts of Muted Activism 318
8.3.1 Local Governance: Power Deprivation Scheme 320
8.3.2 Administrative Disorder: Corrosion of the Work
Ethic 323
8.3.3 Infrapolitical Practices: A Partial Inventory 327
8.4 Communal Civic Deficit: Dysfunctional Sociality 330
 CONTENTS xvii

8.4.1 Obstacles to Participation: Tutelary Public

Sphere and Surrogate Civil Society 331
8.4.2 State Paranoia of Hegemony: Authoritarian
Reflex 335
8.4.3 Communal Anxiety of Autonomy: Collective
Acquiescence 337
8.5 New Dawn: Evolving Transitions 338
8.5.1 Vectors of Political Transition: Translocal
Events 340
8.5.2 Political Community in Formation: Contested
Institutional Reconfiguration 341

Epilogue: Soqotrans as an Indigenous Polity 347

Bibliography 375

Index 401
 List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Geography of livelihoods 81

Fig. 3.2 A Sulh assembly 105
Fig. 7.1 Protesting government decision 285

xix
 List of Tables

Table 3.1 Historical data on Soqotra’s population 98

Table 5.1 Soqotra’s seasonal calendar 176
Table 5.2 Geography of residence in Soqotra 184
Table 5.3 Historical data on Soqotra’s pastoral herds 194
Table 5.4 Pastoral herds’ distribution 195
Table 7.1 Historical conjunctures in Soqotra’s political supervision 230

xxi
 Acronyms

BCE Before the Common Era

CBD Convention on Biodiversity
CBOs Community Based Organizations
CE Common Era
ERC Emirates Red Crescent
GEF Global Environment Facility
GoY Government of Yemen
GPC General People’s Congress
IUCN International Union for Conservation of Nature
KBZ Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan Foundation
LA Local Authority
LAL Local Authority Law
LC Local Council
NGOs Non Governmental Organizations
PDRY People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen
PRSY People’s Republic of South Yemen
UAE United Arab Emirates
UN United Nations
UNDP United Nations Development Programme
UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
WANA West Asia and North Africa
WB World Bank
WHS World Heritage Site
YAR Yemen Arab Republic
ZP Conservation Zoning Plan

xxiii
 Prologue: An Invitation to Practice
Anthropology Differently

The purpose of this prologue is to outline the broad set of concerns

that constitute the context in which this book intervenes. Accordingly,
it summarizes the nature of the research project that resulted in this two-
volume total community study of Soqotra; it identifies the initial vector
that launched my quest for an alternative to the prevailing practice of
anthropology; it invites the global audience of established and aspiring
social scientists, to whom the book is addressed, to consider a different
modality of doing anthropology; it highlights the pitfalls of the narcissistic
foundation of ethnography and calls for its abandonment; it explains my
oppositional attitude toward the transactional nature of fieldwork and its
bathos; it situates Soqotra within an interstitial geo-cultural space that
exempts it from the prevailing assumptions and themes associated with
neighboring regional social formations; it proposes the re-centering of
research subjects as audience of our research results as part of a discur-
sive ethic of reciprocity; it laments the intellectual impasse engendered
by the discipline’s anachronistic commitment to a Eurocentric geopoli-
tics of knowledge production that insists on a West-Rest antinomy and
suggests an exit strategy; and finally, it confronts the endemic dumbing-
down campaign for the use of “plain English” in academic social science
that promotes the use of language as “mental popcorn.”

xxv
xxvi PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY …

A Mesogaphy of Soqotra: A Total Community Study

This book is the first volume of a two-volume work that emerged from
a research project entitled “A Mesography of Soqotra: A Total Commu-
nity Study.” Cumulatively, the two volumes offer a panoramic explana-
tory narrative of the “rediscovery” of Soqotra Island, straddling the
entrance to the Red Sea in the Indian Ocean, at the dawn of the third
millennium based on the global significance of its endemic biodiversity.
This rediscovery engendered Soqotra’s protective conscription into, and
panoptic supervision by, the global environmental enclosure regime, and
the intensification of its bureaucratic incorporation and political subor-
dination by Yemen’s mainland national government. Together, the two
volumes perform a comprehensive and integrated—i.e., “total”—commu-
nity study, as they provide a historically contextualized and analytically
detailed portrait of the Soqotran community. This portrait is assem-
bled through a processual narrative of the multi-layered interactions
and agonistic relations between Soqotrans as an indigenous sub-national
community and the Yemeni state, members of the national society, and
international benefactors. As an indigenous community, Soqotra straddles
the margins of the dominant regional cultural formations (African and
Arabian), given its mixed ethnic composition and its endowment with
a non-Arabic mother tongue, whose use is neither formally encouraged
nor officially recognized by the state. The study presents a historically
embedded biography of a communal collectivity that strategically alter-
nates between the micro, meso and macro levels in elucidating the impacts
of trans-local forces on the transformation of Soqotra. This biography not
only establishes the genealogy of the modern period in Soqotra, but also
documents the transition process that has taken Soqotrans through a series
of social mutations along a historical continuum.
This multi-layered narrative is what I call a mesography, which is a
research strategy that focuses on the vectors of change engendered by
state institutions and their policies as well as non-state individual and
institutional actors, at the local, national, and international levels, in struc-
turing the existential context of the Soqotran community. Mesography is
a new research procedure with the following practices: privileges evolving
processes over bounded spaces; focuses on collective instead of individual
actors; synthesizes the diachronic and the synchronic into a past, present
and future analytical continuum; and triangulates the micro local life-
worlds, the meso societal structures, and the macro structural trans-local
 PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY … xxvii

processes in an explanatory narrative about the transformation trajectory

of the social formation under study. In effect, mesography is the under-
pinning method for the practice of a post-exotic anthropology. As such,
it entails a critique of the hegemonic West-stream approach to the prac-
tice of anthropology as an exoticizing endeavor. Accordingly, it argues for
the abandonment of ethnography as the discipline’s prevailing research
and representation procedure given its widely recognized deficiencies. To
cite just a few examples: its anachronistic preference for micro relational
settings within bounded social formations, its obsessive privileging of indi-
vidual actors or the lone informant as data source, its cursory engagement
with history, and its perverting fondness for the self-centric interpretation
of cultural others.
The two volumes exemplify the application of the mesographic method
through a holistic study of Soqotra as an indigenous community in tran-
sition. They serve as a reference work on the historical trajectory and
contemporary dynamics of Soqotra. Moreover, they provide a baseline
analysis with which to compare the island’s evolution in the future. In
sum, the two volumes inaugurate a comprehensive and generative social
science research agenda for Soqotra by identifying the key processes that
are the inexorable vectors of its transition trajectory, and by unveiling the
critical domains in which the transition process will continue to mani-
fest itself in the foreseeable future. As such, they lay the foundation for
the social science field of Soqotran studies as an island-based indigenous
communal polity.
In quest of the above, this book presents a countervailing model
of practicing anthropology that renounces the discipline’s commit-
ment to ethnography and its predilection for telling stories instead of
explaining processes. In its inaugural incarnation, ethnography was an
epistemically promising social discovery method, but it has since sedi-
mented into a professionalized convention as a transactional academic
ritual, which instrumentalizes research contexts into “sites of subor-
dination” and research subjects into objects of cultural appropriation
through their interpretive exoticization authorized by travelling theories.
Instead, the book proposes the adoption of mesography, which pursues
a genuine cross-cultural quest for understanding that is committed to
locally plausible descriptive explanation of, and contextually emergent
theory formation about, communities’ entanglement within processes
of transformation triggered by shifts in historical conjunctures. In its
current practice, ethnography is still beholden to a colonial model of
xxviii PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY …

field research within a geography of hierarchically categorized regions

and peoples as reservoirs for data colonialism and as symbolic play-
grounds for metropolitan theorizing. As one practitioner confesses: “Our
ethnography is now too easily regarded as data, evidence or information
for the support, or not, of theories constituted independently of it”
(Kapferer 2018: 1). Moreover, the aim of ethnography’s knowledge
production practices is to formulate travelling theory-mediated inter-
pretations that are packaged into “ethnographies that everyone can
read” (Ghodsee 2016) as infotainment for metropolitan audiences of
cultural flâneurs engaged in armchair intellectual tourism. In contrast,
mesography abandons these practices by situating its domain of inquiry
within a polycentric geography emancipated from idioms of abjection
(peripheral, marginal, subaltern), and by adopting a retrospective and
prospective temporal spectrum that articulates a multi-scales analysis.
Accordingly, mesography’s quest for knowledge is to generate histori-
cally grounded explanations that elucidate the internal logic of a social
formation and that provide cognitive resources with political significance,
explanatory relevance and emancipatory potential for audiences in the
fieldwork site, in the academy and beyond. Furthermore, mesography
selectively employs the conceptual and theoretical resources of the social
sciences (laundered of their inaugural Eurocentric connotations) to
retrace the historical trajectory of emergence of a communal formation
and to produce a comprehensive biography of a social collectivity. This
biography is constructed through an onion-peeling anatomy of this
collectivity’s “dialectically structured and historically determined unity
that exists in and through the diverse interpenetrations, connections, and
contradictions that join its constituent parts” (Balée 1998: 22).
This book demonstrates an approach to the re-visioning of an exotic
anthropology, which routinely constructs travelling theory-mediated alle-
gorical tales about foreign research subjects that misrepresent their socio-
cultural predicaments; into a post-exotic anthropology, which entails
a non-ethnocentric disciplinary practice that has sundered its histor-
ical umbilical cord to the “savage slot” and emancipated itself from
the dominant identity of anthropology as the exclusive brainchild of a
colonialism-enabled Western Enlightenment. Paradoxically, the Enlight-
enment version embraced by anthropologists is that of European excep-
tionalism (Stocking 1987), not that of European anti-imperialism (see
 PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY … xxix

Muthu 2003). Consequently, the confounding irony of the still domi-

nant mode of practicing anthropology, which I call “West-stream anthro-
pology” (see below), is its self-entrapment within an epistemological
aporia that has sedimented into a constitutive paradox: Its tacit theo-
retical fidelity to the core assumptions of the Enlightenment’s univer-
salistic philosophical anthropology—namely that particularistic allegiances
are evanescent, that cultural differences are convergent, and especially
that Occidental cosmopolitanism is humanity’s “primal premise”—while
its practice has shown the patent falsity of these assumptions (Gray 1995).
This commitment to a universal standpoint informed by a particular canon
has permanently established the foundational contradiction of West-
stream anthropology in the form of an intrinsic incompatibility between
its epistemology and method, which Fardon (2012) flippantly described
as “flying theory, grounded method.” This flippant reference betrays the
endemic practice of data colonialism, according to which anthropological
knowledge production practices have always been informed by theoretical
frameworks that were historically, culturally and conceptually alien to its
fieldwork domains, which served exclusively as data reservoirs.
The emancipation of anthropology from this debilitating aporia entails
abandoning its commitment to an Occidental cosmopolitanism—the
muse of these flying theories—that posits itself as a universal compara-
tive standpoint based on the ethnocentric fantasy that global modernity
is an “immaculate Western conception.” Noteworthy, is that data colo-
nialism and Occidental cosmopolitanism constitute the enduring pillars of
West-stream anthropology’s congenital bad faith at the core of its practice.
Only their categorical renunciation would enable the discipline’s practi-
tioners to pursue a genuine understanding of the incommensurable partic-
ularisms, modern localisms and value pluralism that animate the global
mosaic of human communities without their hierarchical categorization,
incommensurate comparison and without invoking the pejorative epithet
of “relativism.” This would end the “wispy moralizings about universal
values or dim banalities about underlying oneness” (Geertz 2000: 226).
In this light, the book is an invitation to, indeed a provocation of, fellow
practitioners of the human sciences, especially to the loyal practitioners
of “West-stream anthropology”, to consider a countervailing mode of
engaging in knowledge production about our contemporary world.
A caveat: My use of the prefix “West-stream” to qualify the dominant
mode of anthropological practice is a substitute for the term “main-
stream.” It designates the initial provenance in northern institutional
xxx PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY …

locations of a specific kind of disciplinary practice with inherently illiberal

epistemic effects (see below). However, its professional practitioners are
no longer bound to their northern location, as emulators have spawned in
other regions within enclaves of “epistemological little Europes” (Santos
2018: 1). As such, they are fellow subscribers to a knowledge produc-
tion ethos based on a “epistemo-political matrix” constituted by a shared
commitment to the contingent combination of the following three discur-
sive resources, which are the proxies of its universalistic pretensions: (a)
neoliberalism, a fraudulent elixir peddled through a panoptic liberal inter-
nationalism (a euphemism for the prevailing regime of liberal imperialism
with its racially hierarchic global configuration of power, and arrogated
entitlement to universal cultural assimilation, political domination and
economic extraction) deceptively asserting the moral prestige of progres-
sivism, is embraced as the discipline’s theoretical alibi and “inevitabilist
grand narrative”, which reduces the world’s peoples and societies into
the playthings of a regional commercial oligarchy’s global market share
expansion strategy; (b) postmodernism as its preferred fount for lexical
resources and epistemological assumptions, which privilege a cynical
disposition that is emblematized into a truism about social reality: “there
is no truth about the world, there are only interpretations of the world”
(Todorov 1995: 88); and (c) interpretivism as its principal representation
strategy, which encapsulates others on the basis of local social facts
constructed through interpretation mediated by exogenous conceptual
and theoretical idioms that epitomizes the definition of epistemological
imperialism (see Chapter 1). This leads to a congenital disciplinary
syndrome where the theoretical, indeed the speculative, consistently over-
whelms, if not erases, the empirical. As the guiding tenets of the practice
of West-stream anthropology, these three discursive resources enact social
realities that conform to a status quo enforcing “one world anthro-
pology” (Ingold 2018). This leads to representations as semantic erasures
that conjure up a universe of meanings disconnected from the lived
experiences and self-understandings of field interlocutors who inhabit a
pluriverse of marginally overlapping but ultimately non-converging life-
worlds. Hence the need to practice anthropology differently, as “different
practices enact different realities” (Law 2015: 129).
 PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY … xxxi

The Catalyst: Arcadian Epistemology Fatigue

My quest for a countervailing mode of practicing anthropology was made
imperative by the context of my fieldwork on Soqotra Island, which exem-
plified a post-exotic conjuncture: The socio-political topology of the field-
work context was already under the influence of the economic policies
of the Yemeni state, the environmental regime of the United Nations
supported by a plethora of bilateral agencies, and the cultural politics of,
and remittance dependency on, the Soqotran Diaspora in the Emirates of
the Persian Gulf. In effect, Soqotra was already encompassed within the
geography of spatial imbrication of the post-exotic pluriverse (see Kothari
et al. 2019). As it was part of a geographically connected, economically
interdependent, state organized, globally integrated, and electronically
mediated transcultural world. However, this complex community-state-
diaspora-world relations mediated by the palliative micro-interventions of
international aid agencies, and the process of change they had partially
initiated were largely absent from the literature about the island, which
was, and still is, permeated with a nineteenth century sensibility. This
sensibility was expressed through an Arcadian epistemology that imag-
ined Soqotrans as cultural remnants of a bygone century and that advo-
cated for their island’s environmental preservation while neglecting their
contemporary aspirations.
This anachronistic epistemology and its phobia of modernity presumed
a “natural environment” that is largely undisturbed by anthropogenic
changes and is unmediated by trans-local meso and macro structural
forces. This widely shared epistemological standpoint among scholars
attracted to Soqotra has led to the reductive portrayal of Soqotrans
as hapless victims of, and reluctant participants in, an imported and
imposed modernity. Consequently, the existing sociocultural knowledge
about Soqotra is represented through faded images of a pastoral idyll
evocative of the sacralizing discourse of environmentalists that mimics the
crass voyeurism of travel brochures, and the fantasist interpretive gaze of
their authors. Accordingly the island is invariably described in a series of
exoticizing metaphors: “Abode of the Blest”, “Island of the Phoenix”,
“Isle of Bliss”, “Lost World”, “Islands of Heritage” and “Noah’s Ark.”
Alternatively, the discourse is couched in a patronizing philanthropic gaze
informed by a contrived urgency about an impending threat that betrays
an eco-fundamentalist vision and its apocalyptic lexicon: “Saving Socotra”,
xxxii PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY …

“Threatened Paradise.” These characterizations of Soqotra and Soqo-

trans are egregious exemplifications of a metropolitan discourse’s endemic
Occidentalist fondness for primitivist allegories about primordial others.
To avoid these chimerical idioms and their implausible interpretations
in which Soqotrans and their island were exoticized, I abandoned the still
prevalent notion of the anthropological project as “a spatial journey into
Otherness” animated by a redemptive xenophilia. In contrast, I adopted
an anthropological practice that insists on the full contemporaneity of
Soqotrans, as the majority had already made the virtual exit from their
ascribed Arcadia. Indeed, in Soqotra the geography of spatial discreteness
of an exotic anthropology, and its corollary research strategy, ethnography,
conceived as a serendipitous errand into a pristine cultural wilderness,
were already anachronistic. It was the epistemic challenge of explaining
this transitional process of change in a post-exotic fieldwork site in as
comprehensive a framework as possible that engendered my quest for
an alternative to the conventional ethnographic appropriation of cultural
others through an identity-mediated research protocol and self-centric
interpretive practice, which confer a license to (mis-)represent the social
reality of research subjects.
Beyond my deep antipathy toward this illiberal practice of interpre-
tation and its idle curiosity about, and “unburdened spectatorship” of,
others’ predicaments, I was goaded by my Soqotran interlocutors not to
follow the traditional anthropological practice of exotica hunting. First,
through the constant refrain of āysh al fā‘ida (“what is the benefit?”) that
greeted my inquiries, and which forced my self-interrogation about the
intended use of the information I was collecting. Second, I was admon-
ished to “tell the truth” (qul al-h.aqı̄qah) in my writing about them, and
to avoid the ethnographic malpractice of one of my precursor anthropolo-
gists who was unfairly maligned for giving the impression that Soqotrans
were obsessed with magic, and for being perceived as giving priority to
the cultural traditions of Soqotrans of African descent (al-muwalladı̄n)
while neglecting those who consider themselves of Arab descent. Third, I
was advised to do something “useful” (mufı̄d) with my research—that is,
to produce knowledge that others could use to guide their assistance to
Soqotra. I have endeavored throughout both volumes to “tell the truth”
and to be “useful.” I fear, however, that I may have heeded their advice
about truth telling rather excessively to the chagrin of many.
 PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY … xxxiii

Targeted Audience: Status Quo Dissenters

This book is an invitation, or more aptly a provocation, to fellow practi-
tioners of the human sciences, especially those who prefer to call them-
selves anthropologists, to consider an alternative mode of engaging in the
production of anthropological knowledge about our contemporary world.
For the current practice of anthropology has lapsed into an academic disci-
pline that seems overly preoccupied with putting out institutional brush-
fires generated by a growing skepticism about its raison d’être both within
the academy and society at large. Moreover, too many disciplinary practi-
tioners have resigned themselves to the endemic inadequacy between their
professional identity-endowing method (ethnography) and contemporary
reality. This resulted in the production of knowledge that is circumscribed
to an intramural soliloquy among its academic practitioners who are
imbued with “instinctual conservatism and brand protection” loyalties.
Consequently, it has consecrated anthropology as a “completely academi-
cized profession”, as Geertz (1988: 130) acknowledged a generation ago.
This status is still lamented a generation later: “A discipline confined
to the theatre of its own operations” [i.e., academia], which “turns the
project of anthropology into the study of its own ways of working”
(Ingold 2014: 383). The institutionalization of the discipline as an exclu-
sively “academicized profession” has engendered a malignant symbiosis
between the discipline’s purpose and its practitioners’ academic career
animated by a gregarious disposition and a sterile quest to retrofit the
disciplinary status quo. Indeed, anthropology’s academy-centric preoc-
cupations are exemplified in discussions about the need to update its
“legendary method of engagement in the world”—ethnography—in a
quest to find a “surrogate for the traditional affinity for the exotic.” Such
a quest seems permanently tethered to a “schizophrenic modernization”
through the selective adaptation of the new on the same old foundation
(Westbrook 2008: 87).
The discipline’s insulation within the academy as its exilic enclave
engendered what I call Galileo’s dilemma among West-stream practi-
tioners: Embrace the emerging historical conjuncture and face an inex-
orable loss of the discipline’s “traditional” identity by abandoning the
discipline’s “classical field practice”; or deny its existence and ensure
academic self-preservation by defensively reaffirming the contemporary
relevance of the anachronistic method of ethnography. This dilemma is
confirmed by the confession of one of the gurus of the ethnographic
xxxiv PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY …

method, George Marcus, in a book dedicated to the remodeling of “the

pedagogy of training” in ethnography: “I do not argue for a revolution
in or reformation of pedagogy, but rather a morphing of it to catch up”
with the “problems of the contemporary” (Marcus 2009: 16). In effect,
training to practice ethnography has become an induction ritual, in which
students are cloned into advocates of a disciplinary tradition rooted in a
defunct world order, and not as adaptable practitioners of a field science
in a permanently evolving world.
Readers who are aspiring disciplinary renegades and are averse to this
permanent retrofitting exercise in the guise of an incremental method-
ological “morphing”, and thus are willing to abandon West-stream
anthropology’s ethically indifferent theorizing and morally ambiguous
relational protocols (see below) are the preferred interlocutors. However,
status quo practitioners who dare to spurn the discipline’s prestige
economy obsessed with the accumulation of reputational capital predi-
cated on strict conformity to the dominant Eurocentric theoretical reper-
toire, procedural ethical norms, and extractive research practices; and
therefore, who are keen to reconsider their enthrallment to defection-
prevention conformist anxieties and who can overcome their epistemic
panic toward abandoning the conventional disciplinary bandwagon are
most welcomed. Perhaps their engagement might relieve them of their
endemic “sacrificial sentinel” syndrome given their “deliberate act of
loyalty to the arbitrary limits” of their discipline (Robbins 1992: 180).
This syndrome is exacerbated by an existential panic toward an imag-
ined horde of invasive subalterns at the gates threatening to dispossess
the discipline of its Western ownership. Abandoning these sentiments
could rid these practitioners of their insular anxiety animated by a perma-
nent urgency to re-affirm and sustain the distinctiveness of anthropology’s
ethnographic method. Also, it would obviate the necessity of policing
disciplinary boundaries in order “to preserve a unique scholarly patri-
mony from the encroachment of an ever more generic social science”
(Comaroff and Comaroff 2003: 155). I should interject at this point
that beyond practicing and aspiring anthropologists, this two-volume
work avoids any disciplinary provincialism by catering to the interests of
apprentices or practitioners in the following fields: Island studies, regional
studies, indigenous societies, environmental conservation, development,
pastoralism, and cultural geography.
The new ethos of anthropological inquiry is being offered as a “modest
proposal” toward fulfilling the quest for an alternative disciplinary praxis
 PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY … xxxv

that has eluded numerous reformist attempts by practitioners who feared

the loss of professional identity. For example, Gupta and Ferguson (1997)
felt the need to overthrow the “tyranny of ethnography” as the method-
ological dynasty and pillar of anthropological traditionalism, but incon-
gruously subordinated their aspiration to academia’s ethnic quota system
by calling for reforming its norms of inclusion to accommodate postcolo-
nial scholars and their “subjugated knowledges” (see Elie 2006); Ingold
(2014) merely suggested a moniker switch from ethnography, which he
labeled a “treasonable activity”, in favor of “participant observation” that
enables the “fictive native” and the inauthentic experiencing of local
lifestyles; and da Col and Graeber (2011) appropriated ethnography into
an exclusive and mystifying intramural dialogue between the Elysium of
Western philosophy and anthropology and the discipline’s one percent
contemporary avant-garde in quest of an ethnographic theory that entails
a mystifying “generation of a disjunctive homonimity, that destruction
of any firm sense of place that can only be resolved by the imaginative
formulation of novel worldviews” (2011: vii–viii)—go figure.
In contrast, mesography abandons these “manacles of the mind” and
advocates an insurgent post-Western epistemic practice and not an anti-
Western one. As such, it promotes an alternative disciplinary ecosystem
for an insurgent community of practitioners of a post-exotic anthropology
that eschews both ethno- and ego-centrism in all their guises. There is no
cheerleading on behalf of a Sino-, Indo-, Afro-, Arabo-, Latino- or Asian-
centrism to replace the current Euro-centric world order. The guiding
motto is “let a hundred regions bloom in a hegemon-free world.” Indeed,
a post-exotic anthropology, borrowing Viveiros de Castro’s phrase, is “an
anthropology [that] would make multiplicities proliferate” (2009: 45).
Therefore, I invite scholars everywhere—especially the new generation of
graduate students and their professors on all continents as producers of
de-colonizing knowledge for a new historical conjuncture—who reject the
prevailing misanthropy-inducing obsession with travelling theories that
serve primarily as opportunistic means for the self-centric interpretation,
the spectatorial critique, and the instrumentalized theorization, of cultural
others’ existential predicaments. And who are committed to the collective
quest for, and ethical practice of, an authentically human science from an
epistemological standpoint that transcends the chronic provincialism and
ethnocentrism sustained by the hegemony of West-stream anthropology’s
epistemic ministrations.
xxxvi PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY …

Marshall Sahlins warned us about the consequences of West-stream

anthropology’s epistemic ministrations, when he observed that:

Ours is the only culture that has escaped deconstruction by the changing of
the avant garde as it retains its essentialized and monolithic character as a
system of domination. So anthropologists can do nothing but to reproduce
it … in the stereotypic expression of a totalized system of power. (Sahlins
1999: 16)

In fact, Sahlins was merely paraphrasing an observation that Montaigne

made about his fellow Europeans in the sixteenth century:

[W]e seem to have no other criterion of truth and reason than the type
and kind of opinions and customs current in the land where we live. There
we always see the perfect religion, the perfect political system, the perfect
and most accomplished way of doing everything. (1993 [1580]: 108–109)

This festering ethnocentric reflex after a half millennium of history should

have inspired a moral revulsion among its practitioners (Etinson 2013).
Instead, it has led to its permanent reification in West-stream anthro-
pology through an updated lexical repertoire, which allows it to sustain its
ethno/ego-centric practice. Indeed, its trinity of guiding tenets—neolib-
eralism, postmodernism and interpretivism—are the updated lexical fig
leaves that cloak its practice of this gangrenous ethnocentricity as the
“stereotypic expression” of that imperial “system of power”, which instru-
mentalizes others’ lifeworlds, in Sahlins’ words, “to manure our little
academic fields.”
This reflexive ethnocentricity, which seems to be a prerequisite of
membership in an “imperial system of power”, is not an ontological
fatality. As this disposition is not the inescapable legacy of researchers’
inherited ethnocultural identity that pre-determines their membership in
a particular “interpretive community” bounded by what Gingrich (2010)
called “national container paradigms.” Instead, it is a discursive strategy
that betrays an intellectual choice about the kind of agency one prefers to
embody as a practitioner of anthropology. Indeed, there is a spectrum of
such agencies (see Todorov 1993: 342–352; Katz 2004), two of which
are highlighted below:
 PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY … xxxvii

• The “bourgeois professional” who interprets the meaning of field-

work within pre-established framework of travelling theories in
order to animate intramural debates about theoretical problems of
exclusive interest to inmates of academic institutions.
• The “cross-cultural fieldworker” who seeks policy relevance and
political significance in documenting “social life… within local terms
as its central contribution” (Katz 2004: 286), and generates knowl-
edge as actionable cognitive resources for the community of research
subjects.

The first agential disposition prevails among practitioners of West-stream

anthropology. The second, is the kind of agency that is conducive to the
practice of a post-exotic anthropology.

Anthropology Without Narcissus:

Abandoning the Self-Other Dialectic
While this book claims the disciplinary mantle of anthropology, it seeks to
free its practice from the discipline’s narrow vocational identity and ego-
ethno-centric tendencies. As Viveiros de Castro noted, “Narcissus […
is the] tutelary spirit of anthropology” given its practitioners’ obsession
with “asking what distinguishes us from the others” (2009: 43). This
Narcissus-mediated anthropology authorizes the practice of perceiving
the other as a reflection of its practitioners’ own imaginings embodied
in socially inoculated selves against “going-native.” Indeed, it promotes
an egocentric conception of the world, which smuggles in the liberal
vulgate of autonomous individualism, and the capitalist credo of the
primacy of self-interest. This malignant synergy has bequeathed to the
discipline a fetishism of epistemological individualism, according to which
the idiosyncratic travails of the self during fieldwork is the exclusive basis
of ethnographic knowledge. Consequently, it has sanctioned the ethno-
grapher’s egotistic academic quest, which breeds aloofness towards the
existential concerns of cultural others encountered in the field. This dispo-
sition is cloaked under the euphemism of “scholarly detachment” and is
promoted by the discipline’s code of ethics, which privileges procedural
accountability to professional bureaucracies over social accountability
to research subjects. In contrast, this book proposes an approach (see
Chapter 1 for details) that emancipates human scientists/anthropologists
xxxviii PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY …

from the excessive foregrounding of their individuality as constituted

through epistemic entanglements with competing national intellectual
traditions and their region-bound repertoire of travelling theories as an
obligatory matrix of anthropological knowledge production (Bourdieu
2003). The metropolitan academy’s promotion of the enclosure of disci-
plinary practitioners within the epistemic provincialism of their national
anthropological fields, or “national container paradigms” (see Barth et al.
2005), has led to these practitioners’ subjection to the tyranny of their
biosocial inheritance or ethnocultural particularities as the ineluctable
filtering prisms for their knowledge production practices.
The end result of this malignant narcissism is a self-centric form of
knowledge production that is existentially dependent on hierarchical and
asymmetric relations between researchers and research subjects. This self-
centrism of a Narcissus-inspired anthropology has blurred the bound-
aries between ethnography and “ego-graphy”, which prioritizes the cogni-
tive preferences, interpretive predilections and professional ambition of
the anthropologist-ethnographer as the determining motivation and the
primary frame of reference for the study of communities. These ego-
graphic practices constitute the discipline’s prevailing norms, which sanc-
tion the amalgamation of self-contemplation with description of the
world. This orientation toward ego-graphy is manifested, for example,
in the use of the conventional mise-en-scène vignettes that foreground
the anthropologist’s encounter with field natives as a means of estab-
lishing experiential authenticity and authorial authority. The latter tend
to mutate into an arrogant “ethical obligation” to give voice to those
natives. An anthropological practice emancipated from a narcissistic muse
would replace these vignettes with the historical contextualization of the
community’s experience.
A more significant obstacle to a non-narcissistic practice of anthro-
pology is the permanent identification of the conventional practice of
anthropology with ethnography as its signature method. That method
was founded on a self-other dialectic that is ineradicably tethered to
a notion of “otherness” based on “difference” as a pejorative epithet
inscribed within a hierarchical scale. This dialectic was the microcosmic
instantiation of the “us-them” dialectic that served as one of the foun-
dational premises of imperialism and its ethnocultural hierarchies (cf.
Coronil 1996: 73). Ingold, however, correctly noted that “anthropology
and ethnography are endeavours of different kinds”: Anthropology “is
an inquiry in the conditions and possibilities of human life in the world”;
 PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY … xxxix

while ethnography’s objective “is to describe the lives of people other

than ourselves” (2008: 88–89, 69). Ingold’s sundering of the presumed
indelible umbilical cord between ethnography and anthropology is crucial
to the discipline’s emancipation from its self-centric and identity-driven
research protocol. His definition of ethnography, however, re-affirms
the acceptability of a number of troubling doxa about its practice: (a)
it upholds that the condition of possibility for ethnographic practice is
exclusively between a foreign self and a native other, which suggests
that it is methodologically illegitimate for a “native” to study other
natives; (b) it naturalizes its accommodation to a non-reciprocal project
of knowledge production through data colonialism; (c) it confirms its
existential dependence on an unbridgeable ethnocultural dichotomy and
hierarchy, between ethnographers and their research subjects; and (d) it
normalizes the un-achievability of a reciprocity of understanding between
foreign researchers and native research subjects.
Ingold’s definition betrays a disqualifying rule of engagement when
it comes to the non-Western disciplinary practitioner: “The conditions
for participating in the making of an anthropological discourse is, for
the non-Western anthropologist, an act of renunciation of the contem-
porary possibilities within her own culture” (Das 1995: 33). This illiberal
conditionality re-affirms West-stream anthropology’s archetypal aporias of
relationality: (a) a structural hierarchy, which was anchored to an impe-
rialist cartography of praxis in non-Western social formations and that
authorized the persistent hierarchical ranking of the West over the Rest;
and (b) a relational asymmetry, which was based on a supremacist socio-
interactional protocol toward ethno-culturally different research subjects
and that perpetuated the ethnic sorting and ranking of the discipline’s
practitioners and their segregation from research subjects. This segrega-
tionist ethic, which is still practiced, was classically formulated by Geertz
as follows: Anthropology’s “subjects and its audience were not only sepa-
rable but morally disconnected, that the first were to be described and
not addressed, the second informed but not implicated” (1988: 132). In
effect, the practice of West-stream anthropology is predicated on a rela-
tionship of non-reciprocity. In contrast, mesography disembeds anthro-
pology from its relational and structural legacies of empire, as it situates its
practice within an emergent polycentric world order without a center or
periphery, and does not impose exclusionary ethnocultural prerequisites
on its practitioners (see Chapter 1).
xl PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY …

These relational aporias are exacerbated by the intrinsic narcissism

of anthropological discourse, which reifies disciplinary practice into “a
mandarin culture maintained by a sophisticated minority in a superior
language” (Mishra 2017: 174). This is formulated as an ineluctable axiom:
“anthropological analysis achieves its proximity to and replication of its
subjects’ comprehension through a form of… knowledge that belongs
distinctly to itself” and is unavailable to its research subjects (Strathern
1988: xi). Thirty years later, Strathern confirms that this axiom is an
intrinsic feature of West-stream anthropology and is thus generative of
its segregationist ethic, data colonialism and non-reciprocity ethos. As
she confesses that this axiom reflects “two deep-seated Euro-American
assumptions: first, that knowledge can be detached from those who
produce it and can be circulated or exchanged without reference to them;
second, that its effect is dependent not on such persons (interpersonal
relations), but on the correctness of its correlation with apparently inde-
pendently occurring phenomena (epistemic relations)” (Strathern 2018:
34). These assumptions are integral to the hegemonic consensus about
the nature of West-stream anthropological knowledge that it is inescapably
“the result of applying concepts that are extrinsic to their object” (Viveiros
de Castro 2013: 477). This rationalization of the chronic cognitive disso-
nance and semantic distance between the discipline’s knowledge claims
and its subjects’ self-understandings into an epistemic fatality for anthro-
pologists, not only makes a mockery of their self-description as “scholars
of human diversity”, but also saddles their knowledge claims with an
intrinsic trust deficit. This axiom not only betrays the imperious stand-
point of detached metropolitan observers wielding an expropriating meta-
language, but also confirms the extractive and non-reciprocal nature
of the prevailing mode of anthropological knowledge production as a
disciplinary norm.
In effect, these relational aporias have sustained practitioners’ morally
deplorable dispositions toward research subjects: (a) a paternalist intellec-
tual sensibility that prioritizes an instrumental “emotional empathy” (i.e.,
condescending identification with their personal circumstances) while
neglecting an ethical “cognitive empathy” (i.e., non-self-centric under-
standing of their collective social realities); and (b) a colonialist ethic
of interpretation trough the discursive expropriation of local symbolic
capital, which exemplifies the absence of cognitive empathy (Bloom
2016). These two dispositions have sustained West-stream anthropology’s
entanglement with an endemic exoticism: The misrecognition of others
 PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY … xli

due to the appropriation of their indigenous self-conception into travel-

ling theories’ exogenous idioms of interpretation (see Kapferer and Theo-
dossopoulos 2016). Consequently, research subjects are dispossessed of
any sovereignty over their own meaning-making practices. As a result,
West-stream anthropology and its underpinning method—ethno/ego-
graphy—have lapsed into a regime of praxis that authorizes a form of
“symbolic cannibalism”: “the dissolution of the other’s point of view on
him- or herself in our point of view on ourselves” (Descola 2014).
Furthermore, the above described practices have relied on an “episte-
mology of ignorance”: A knowledge production practice that is histori-
cally embedded within a political economy of Western domination, which
has bequeathed certain norms of cognition (e.g., exclusive reliance on
self-centered templates of cultural appropriation) that engender a chronic
pattern of cognitive dysfunctions (e.g., ethno-centric interpretivism) that
disable the capacity of the knowing agent to understand the cultural
otherness of research subjects (cf. Mills 1997: 18). Moreover, anthro-
pologists have instrumentalized the discipline for largely self-serving ends
through their quest for disciplinary preservation through institutional
niche-building, and their pursuit of professional distinction for career
enhancement (see Chapter 1). Consequently, West-stream anthropology
has lapsed into a modality of research and a practice of representation that
thrive on the “dialectic of distance and indifference.” The privileging of
these self-serving ends has relegated the primary task of anthropology—
namely, the elucidation of the human condition for emancipatory action—
to the status of an incidental by-product. Finally, there is the pandemic
failure of disciplinary practitioners to heed Kant’s injunction towards
self-enlightenment as a “departure from self-imposed immaturity” due
to their obsessive commitment to an anachronistic tradition-sustaining
mode of producing knowledge, instead of focusing on the production
of contextually-relevant kinds of knowledge (cf. Comaroff and Comaroff
2012b: xxix).

Oppositional Standpoint: Constructive Iconoclasm

I claim exemption from this “self-imposed immaturity” due to my pecu-
liar occupational itinerary, which was marked by a shift in vocational
allegiance: From the disabling self-indoctrination with “development”
as a United Nations staff, which turned out to promote social change
as the local parody of an imported societal model; to my intellectual
xlii PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY …

re-incarnation in the discipline of anthropology. However, I resolved that

I would not relapse into my previous state of intellectual intoxication
with, or in Bourdieu’s term “doxic submission” to, any discipline’s
established repertoire of assumptions, concepts and theories, and thus
would be vigilant against premature disciplinary co-optation—especially
of anthropology’s theology of otherness. Moreover, I was deprived of
a deference-inducing flag to follow, or of a distinguished compatriot
maître-penseur as precursor to emulate, at least, not in the region where
I metamorphosed from development missionary into anthropologist-
in-residence. Indeed, to facilitate recognition of my place of origin I
was introduced to my conscripted hosts in the field as coming from the
country of my university, as my own “was not known.” The silver lining
under this litany of disenfranchisements is that I had no imperialist guilt
to assuage, no fealty to a national disciplinary tradition except to my own
intellectual sovereignty constrained by local realities, no “us vs. them”
rampart to climb over, and no ethnic superiority or inferiority complex
to dissimulate under some contrived “fellow feelings” for the locals.
I was animated by the credo of autonomous epistemic agency, which
requires a truth-seeking ethos. This entailed the abandonment of the
pursuit of interpretive virtuosity through travelling theory-testing, for
the practice of a genuinely human-centric science (see below). Animated
by this credo, I resorted to travelling between distant places and spaces
empowered by an old fashion belief in the availability of a truth (see
Blackburn 2018) that would resonate with the local realities of those I
was studying. To uncover such a truth as a fieldworker, I was guided
by a practical ethos that entails the following practices: The adoption
of a research orientation that is fashioned through a prior familiarization
with the history of the selected domain of study, and then through field
contingencies engendered by the research context and process; the rejec-
tion of an a priory submission to disciplinary conventions that privilege
the validation of anthropology’s ancestral legacies, or of its more recent
fads, through demonstrating the pertinence of the received suppositions
of its methodological and theoretical repertoire; the avoidance of the still
prevalent extractive relations between researcher and research subjects that
is dissimulated under a patronizing ethical obligation of “giving voice”
to cultural others, which has saddled the discipline with an intellectual
philanthropy syndrome (i.e., a philanthropology); and, ultimately, the
generation of useful cognitive resources to our (researcher and research
subjects) collective emancipatory aspirations.
 PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY … xliii

My oppositional attitude towards the conventional practice of anthro-

pology was not a biographic compulsion, but a cultivated attitude that
is available to conscientious practitioners who feel that the human
condition is too important to be left captive of the discipline’s lingering
accommodation to a colonial mode of knowledge production under
the aegis of Occidental cosmopolitanism; or as the plaything of an
academic apparatchik consumed by the quest for “theoretically inno-
vative engagements.” This epistemic obsession led the discipline into a
misanthropic cul-de-sac: The fetishism of the everyday life of ordinary
people while producing knowledge that is irrelevant to its amelioration or
indifferent about its fate. An additional enabling condition in developing
my oppositional attitude was the financial independence afforded me
by my decade-long occupation as a development professional at the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in four field stations
(Mauritania, Somalia, Kenya and Yemen). This allowed me not to follow
through on my initial aspiration to join academia’s practices of “elite”
patronage, adjunctocracy employment regime, and quantity over quality
“audit culture” after obtaining my D.Phil. degree. I was free to pursue
a socio-intellectual vocation instead of chasing a career niche. Therefore,
I avoided the professional deformation induced by the obligatory task
of teaching the conventional anthropological literature and its thought-
colonizing and groupthink syndrome-producing effects. Accordingly, this
book is not motivated by academic career-building or tenure track-riding
objectives and thus is free of the associated conformist exigencies to the
discipline’s traditional knowledge production practices.
This oppositional attitude is best described as a constructive iconoclasm
animated by an indomitable quest for alternatives to travelling “regimes
of truth” that are reified into a set menu of thematic entry points and
interpretive frameworks promoted by epistemic communities constituted
around shared assumptions and “networked facts” with which research
domains are colonized. Accordingly, this oppositional attitude entails the
following set of combative epistemic practices that could stimulate a “pro-
ductive dissensus” within West-stream anthropology: An ideational insur-
gency against established disciplinary diktats; a critical engagement with
the existing knowledge repertoire relevant to the social formation under
study; a skeptical demeanor toward the interpretations of fellow observers;
a contestatory disposition toward the premature enclosure of communi-
ties within region-specific theoretical frameworks and vis-à-vis the hege-
monic consensus on the knowledge production protocols for their “social
xliv PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY …

construction”; an avoidance of the premature comparative practice of

extensive referencing of the theoretical literature, which tends to serve
as a local knowledge gap-filling exercise; an uncompromising break with
the discipline’s founding, and still defining, refusal to be categorized as a
social science; and ultimately a rejection of the prevailing epistemolog-
ical malpractice of appropriating fieldwork data into travelling theory-
mediated interpretive parodies of local life. The fieldwork that followed
from this oppositional attitude sought to carve a different path from
the idealized mode of ethnographic immersion—namely, the self-serving
quest for rapport as a “participant-observer” fetishized by the discipline.
This opportunistic rapport-seeking entails the ritualistic performance of
an “Oriental masquerade” during fieldwork: “to want to become, and
not only to master, the Other” (Shatz 2019). Moreover, beyond its use
as a rapport-seeking means, this “Oriental masquerade” is deployed as a
discursive strategy through the representational practice of “ethnographic
ventriloquism” discussed above. I refused to impersonate the “fictive
native” role in my quest for communion with Soqotrans or to mimic the
ventriloquist in representing them. The end result was that my experience
unaided by the discipline’s orthodoxies allowed me to formulate an alter-
native conception of fieldwork as a research process disassociated from the
notion of ethnography, and to abandon the latter in favor of mesography
as a new ethos of inquiry for a post-exotic anthropology (see Chapter 1).
My voluntary confinement as a resident scholar in Yemen in a state
of permanent fieldwork—a form of lived praxis that blurs the boundary
between living and researching, or work and life—free of funding grant-
dependent time limitation was instrumental in formulating and sustaining
my oppositional attitude towards conventional disciplinary practices and
which enabled my emancipation from “self-imposed immaturity.” This
situation afforded me an “experiential thoroughness” that removed the
home-field dichotomy of the relatively short one-year grant-driven dura-
tion of conventional anthropology’s “ethnographic immersion”, which
inexorably engenders an exoticizing reflex due to its inherent bond with
data colonialism. The latter entails the repatriation of field data to an
institutional milieu (e.g., the metropolitan university) alien to the field-
work context, which leads in turn to the interpretive decontextualization
of communities’ lifeworld through filling data gaps with travelling theory-
mediated interpretations. Hann (2009: 131) has called this discursive
practice the “theft of anthropology”: It entails an anarchic eclecticism
informed by an opportunistic theory selection, sophistic interpretation,
 PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY … xlv

and empirically challenged representation. This “theft of anthropology”

syndrome is exacerbated by the “postmodernist skepticism about the
very notion of truth”, which is now seen as a “fugitive and endlessly
contestable” notion (Blackburn 2018: 1). Accordingly, the resulting
ethnography not only simulates the contrived authenticity of a TV reality
show, but also betrays a casualness with the veracity of its representations.
Indeed, one anthropologist embraces the notion of “post-truth” as the
common practice within the discipline: “let us acknowledge that the plane
of the real can tilt far more wildly and profoundly with any good story
of ours” (Pandian 2019: 7). This has saddled ethnography’s knowledge
claims with an authenticity and trust deficit. Moreover, the related prac-
tices are not only circumscribing the discipline’s primary purpose to an
egoistic quest for the professional self-realization of its practitioners, but
also are sustaining the latter’s “symbolic cannibalism” of research subjects’
lifeworld. This semiotic empire-building quest seems to be intrinsic to
the ethnographer’s mandate as exemplified by Malinowski, the “father”
of the ethnographic method, who confessed his “Feeling of ownership”
toward his research subjects on the Trobriand Islands and declared that
“It is I who will describe them or create them”. (Malinowski 1967: 140)
This “pilfering” imperative and its effects threaten to remain a perma-
nent condition, as the time period required for a true immersion in
the local context and thus to free fieldworkers of the socio-intellectual
crutches from their native grounds exceeds the one-year minimum
regarded as a disciplinary norm. The result is the perfunctory performance
of ethnography due to funding-based time constraints, and the practice
of substituting travelling theory-mediated interpretations for the lack of
local insights. This leads to an inherent interpretive unreliability and plau-
sibility deficit of knowledge claims that are based on temporally inade-
quate residence. Moreover, it engenders a permanent dilemma between
the time constraint of grant-funded ethnography, which reduces anthro-
pological research into a data mop-up operation that mimics a commando
mission, and the long-term residence requirement of a mesography and
its deep immersion in the social milieu of the research context, living and
observing in permanence.
xlvi PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY …

Interstitial Zone: Straddling Africa and Arabia

Yemen once occupied the “prestige zone” of anthropology’s regional
paradigm within its division of the world into culture areas. These anthro-
pologically demarcated zones were encapsulated within master concepts
(e.g., tribes and Islam) that claim to represent their sociocultural totality.
This conceptual encapsulation led to the establishment of an enduring
intellectual architecture that structured the way peoples, societies, and
cultures “incarcerated” in those regions were apprehended and rendered
familiar to metropolitan audiences (Abu-Lughod 1989). This familiariza-
tion was done through deeply ingrained biases which privileged certain
objects and the exclusion of others for anthropological attention. The
latter was, and still is, subservient to a metropolitan state-centric nexus
between the politics of research grant-giving agencies, the discipline’s
topical priority, and the region’s geopolitical importance to Western
powers (Deeb and Winegar 2016). In the case of Yemen, prior to the
1980s the thematic focus was on the “stratified mosaic society” of provin-
cial towns, and subsequently the topical priority became the organiza-
tion of its polity around segmentary tribal formations as the indubitable
foundation of state-society-community relations that was impervious to
historical change. Since 9/11, Yemen has fallen into a “danger zone”
that encompasses the entire West Asia and North Africa (WANA) region
and has become a privileged target of the discipline of “security studies.”
In the 2017 Global Terrorism Index Yemen was ranked 6 out 162 coun-
tries and had a score of 7.88 out of a maximum of 10. Accordingly, the
prevailing topical and research focus on Yemen is dictated by the shifting
geopolitical and security concerns of the West and the potential threats
posed by its status as a failing state and its entanglements with externally
fomented radical Islam and internally self-destructive terrorism.
Soqotra, however, occupies a hyphenated geo-cultural space that
resists encapsulation within a pre-configured regional framework and its
imported topical and thematic priorities. Accordingly, there are no a
priori selected thematic or topical entry points dictated by established
regional paradigms with which to dismember the research domain in
order to interpret it within imported theoretical frameworks. Indeed,
my study of Soqotra is devoid of any opportunistic accommodation to
an externally-imposed menu of topical choices and their accompanying
 PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY … xlvii

lexical, conceptual, and theoretical repertoires. As there is no mono-

topical entry point. Instead, the study is primarily informed by an anal-
ysis of the issues “thrown-up” by the transitional process of a communal
social formation driven by agonistic relations between a plethora of
differently positioned actors and their multilayered interactions with the
state’s administrative apparatus, the national society, the regional dias-
pora, and with state-invited or self-appointed international protectors
of the island’s environment. As a sub-national entity within the polit-
ical jurisdiction of the Yemeni state, Soqotra represents a microcosm
of state-nation-society-community relations in Yemen, which affords a
bottom-up perspective on the nature of the Yemeni state and from
which to assess the adequacy of a recent spate of travelling theory-
mediated studies of state-society relations in Yemen (e.g., Day 2012;
Willis 2012; Phillips 2008; Wedeen 2008). Indeed, the book pries open,
and elucidates the empirically-grounded and historically-informed work-
ings (not the theory-prescribed or interpretively-imagined operation) of
state-community relations in Yemen. Accordingly, I avoid travelling theo-
ries with their imported themes and presumption about what is analyti-
cally significant. In doing so, my approach in this book offers a jarring
contrast to the recent application of West-stream anthropology’s ethno-
graphic method to Soqotra (Peutz 2018). That book is based on a mono-
thematic entry point borrowed from the shelf of travelling theories (“per-
forming heritage”). More significantly, the book excessively conforms to
the ethnographic method’s ideal narrative as a potpourri of self-centric
vignettes and self-absorbed descriptions and interpretations. As a result, it
resembles a fieldwork memoir based on an auto-ethnography through a
meandering confessional.
The case of Soqotra offers an intra-national, and inter-regional,
comparative perspective that eschews the conventional disciplinary
recourse to the conceptual albatross of tribalism and the epistemolog-
ical cul-de-sac it has engendered in the historical anthropology of Yemen
(Dresch 1989, 2001, 2009). Beyond the role of tribalism—which is an
epiphenomenon of a contingent configuration of local factors and the
partial effect of historical path-dependence (see Chapter 2)—this study
challenges the archaic presuppositions of the anthropology of the WANA
region as there is no evidence of historical immutability, no endemic resis-
tance to modernity, or the prevalence of cultural inertia that are presumed
to afflict this region’s social formations (e.g., Lindholm 2002; Salzman
2008). In contrast, Soqotra is a transitional social formation that is fully
xlviii PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY …

engaged in this post-exotic conjuncture as its inhabitants cannot be cate-

gorized as unreceptive traditionalists, voluntary isolationists or uncritical
assimilationists, but are discriminating participants in the local fashioning
of the modern influences on their homeland. This discriminating attitude
towards modern influences is also applied to their past, as Soqotrans betray
a deliberate amnesia through the selective disavowal of cultural practices
associated with the Sultanate period, which they dismiss by invoking the
term that represents the pre-Islamic dark age: al-jāhiliyya (the age of
ignorance of Allah).
Soqotrans constitute an aspirational community animated by a practical
imperative: To emancipate themselves from the haunting collective histor-
ical memory, and still contemporary experience, of enduring political
subordination and endemic material and social deprivations. Accordingly,
the fieldwork-generated themes that are addressed in this book not only
reflect Soqotrans’ current engagement with the exigencies of modernity,
but also constitute an inventory of the crucial emerging vectors of change
for future research about Soqotra’s transformation process. These themes
include: Identity formation as a local effect of evolving state polity forma-
tion strategies and not an ontological inheritance informed by genealog-
ical tradition (Chapter 4); communal economy as the outcome of the
historically contingent priorities of the state’s political economy, and not
configured by the inertia of traditional livelihood practices (Chapters 5
and 6); local history emerges out of a series of discontinuous conjunc-
tures of the politics of state-community relations mediated by trans-local
politics across an island-mainland divide and diaspora-homeland nexus
(Chapter 7); state governance culture is the dominant structuring vector
of the communal polity’s political agency and subjectivity, the develop-
ment of its civic structures, and the scope of local democracy (Chapter 8);
and Soqotrans’ self-recognition as an indigenous community in reac-
tion to the shared phenomenon among Arab states, namely the persis-
tent denial of official recognition and thus the structural exclusion of
non-Arab ethno-cultural minorities as fully recognized members of the
national polity (Epilogue).
The cumulative impact of the above is an existential disjuncture and
an affective antinomy between a state-imposed national identity and a
culturally-embedded communal political subjectivity, identity and agency.
These themes constitute the key dimensions of the communal transfor-
mation process that is anatomized in this book.
 PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY … xlix

Engaging Locals: Ethic of Reciprocity

I turn now to another issue concerning one of the prerequisites of the
ethical orientation of a mesographic approach, namely, the inclusion of
members of the researched community as an integral part of the audi-
ence of research results through the ethos of discursive reciprocity (see
Chapter 1 for details). This ethos seeks to remedy the normative practice
of West-stream anthropology of repatriating data about local reality to the
academy through the act of “engaging others where they are and repre-
senting them where they are not” (Geertz 1988: 130). It is precisely this
practice of data extraction and repatriation with its distance-mediated rela-
tionality, and absence-enabled representation of others located elsewhere
that define an exotic anthropology. The adoption of an ethic of reciprocity
not only requires the engagement of research subjects where they are, but
also that they are addressed directly and not only spoken of in absentia.
Accordingly, this book is a belated response to Soqotra’s premiere local
intellectual and autodidact historian, Ahmed al-Anbali, who “honored”
me in his book, History of Soqotra Island, with the following attack:

It was God’s will that I met one of those tourists on some trips, who
claimed (za‘am) [skeptical of my motives] to be doing research in anthro-
pology (‘ilm al-ājnās ) on the island. And following a heated conversation
(h.adı̄th sākhin) about Soqotra, its population, language, religion, and affil-
iation, in which that researcher (dhalik al-bāh.th) [condescending conno-
tation] tried to convince me that all these issues are unrelated to an Arab
heritage. His justification is that the Arabs did not have a language or
presence [in Soqotra] before Islam. However, I asked him to prove that
with tangible evidence if he is right. As he could not, and would not, I
told him that his methodology is inadequate, and that he has committed
unforgivable mistakes, him and people like him [i.e., tourists and/ Orien-
talists], when he carried out a field study and ignored historical refer-
ences and did not benefit from the Arabic library. And as a result, his
kind of research does not deserve the least of attention (ādna ı̄htimām)
[categorical dismissal]. (al-Anbali 2007: 55)

This is not my recollection of the brief and rather calm encounter that
took place in Hadiboh airport awaiting the plane that would take him
back to the United Arab Emirates where he is a permanent resident, while
I was going to Sana‘a’ where I was scholar in residence, on one my recu-
perative excursions from fieldwork’s austere living conditions. The irony
l PROLOGUE: AN INVITATION TO PRACTICE ANTHROPOLOGY …

here is that we were both “tourists on some trips”, given our perma-
nent residential location elsewhere. His vantage point, however, is that
of a native son versus an interloping foreigner preparing to make knowl-
edge claims about his motherland. Al-Anbali’s skeptical demeanor toward
my very presence on the island, is actually an innate proclivity charac-
terized by a deep suspicion of the intellectual honesty, ethnic eligibility,
and scholarly motivation of foreign researchers studying his homeland,
and who are invariably ascribed the denigrating epithet of “Orientalists”
(al-mustashriqı̄n). This is revealed in his response to an interview ques-
tion about such researchers: “The problem lies in ascertaining the veracity
of their information… because most of them depend on myths… I say
for each country and each heritage nobody can truly understand it and
present it as it is, except for its native sons”. (Kafayin 2010:17)
While al-Anbali’s point of view betrays nativist anxieties, I nevertheless
sympathize with it, given foreign researchers’ dependence on hermeneu-
tically ethnocentric travelling theories and the symbolic violence they
authorize on native cultures. Noteworthy, is that al-Anbali’s nativist anxi-
eties are mirrored in, and justified by, the reflexive denial by West-stream
practitioners about the intrinsic anomalies of the dominant practice of
anthropology: (a) the intellectual hubris of pre-figuring the fieldwork
experience within the registers of travelling theories and the subsequent
analytical instrumentalization of research subjects and contexts; (b) the
related interpretive misdemeanors (that is, the ostensibly plausible but
empirically dubious interpretations) that are rationalized as “productive
misunderstandings” of the social reality of communities; (c) the social
accountability deficit of anthropological knowledge toward the existential
predicaments of researched communities; and (d) the lack of reciprocity
epitomized in the exclusion of researched subjects as audience of research
results. Paradoxically, these anomalies are not seen as such by practitioners
of West-stream anthropology. This is because the primary purpose of their
exoticizing ethnographies is to represent and interpret non-Western soci-
eties to mostly, if not exclusively, Western academic audiences. The quest
for an ethos of discursive reciprocity that would establish more equitable
“cultural terms of trade” between anthropologists and research subjects
entails: (a) the recognition and renunciation of the practice of segregating
research subjects from research audiences through their inclusion as inte-
gral members of the research audience; (b) the critical engagement with
the work of local intellectuals by challenging their nativist claim of privi-
leged access to local subjects and knowledge; and (c) the abandonment of
Another random document with
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the only real Canaan of the American bondman, simply as a country
to which the wild goose and the swan repaired at the end of winter to
escape the heat of summer, but not as the home of man. I knew
something of Theology, but nothing of Geography. I really did not
know that there was a state of New York or a state of
Massachusetts. I had heard of Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New
Jersey, and all the southern states, but was utterly ignorant of the
free states. New York City was our northern limit, and to go there and
to be forever harassed with the liability of being hunted down and
returned to slavery, with the certainty of being treated ten times
worse than ever before, was a prospect which might well cause
some hesitation. The case sometimes, to our excited visions, stood
thus: At every gate through which we had to pass we saw a
watchman; at every ferry a guard; on every bridge a sentinel, and in
every wood a patrol or slave-hunter. We were hemmed in on every
side. The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in
the balance and weighed against each other. On the one hand stood
slavery, a stern reality glaring frightfully upon us, with the blood of
millions in its polluted skirts, terrible to behold, greedily devouring our
hard earnings and feeding it upon our flesh. This was the evil from
which to escape. On the other hand, far away, back in the hazy
distance, where all forms seemed but shadows under the flickering
light of the north star, behind some craggy hill or snow-capped
mountain, stood a doubtful freedom, half frozen, beckoning us to her
icy domain. This was the good to be sought. The inequality was as
great as that between certainty and uncertainty. This in itself was
enough to stagger us; but when we came to survey the untrodden
road and conjecture the many possible difficulties we were appalled,
and at times, as I have said, were upon the point of giving over the
struggle altogether. The reader can have little idea of the phantoms
which would flit, in such circumstances, before the uneducated mind
of the slave. Upon either side we saw grim death, assuming a variety
of horrid shapes. Now it was starvation, causing us, in a strange and
friendless land, to eat our own flesh. Now we were contending with
the waves and were drowned. Now we were hunted by dogs and
overtaken, and torn to pieces by their merciless fangs. We were
stung by scorpions, chased by wild beasts, bitten by snakes, and
worst of all, after having succeeded in swimming rivers, encountering
wild beasts, sleeping in the woods, suffering hunger, cold, heat, and
nakedness, overtaken by hired kidnappers, who in the name of law
and for the thrice-cursed reward would, perchance, fire upon us, kill
some, wound others, and capture all. This dark picture, drawn by
ignorance and fear, at times greatly shook our determination, and not
unfrequently caused us to

“Rather bear the ills we had,

Than flee to others which we knew not of.”

I am not disposed to magnify this circumstance in my experience,

and yet I think I shall seem to be so disposed to the reader, but no
man can tell the intense agony which was felt by the slave when
wavering on the point of making his escape. All that he has is at
stake, and even that which he has not is at stake also. The life which
he has may be lost, and the liberty which he seeks may not be
gained.
Patrick Henry, to a listening senate which was thrilled by his
magic eloquence and ready to stand by him in his boldest flights,
could say, “Give me liberty or give me death,” and this saying was a
sublime one, even for a freeman; but incomparably more sublime is
the same sentiment when practically asserted by men accustomed
to the lash and chain, men whose sensibilities must have become
more or less deadened by their bondage. With us it was a doubtful
liberty, at best, that we sought, and a certain lingering death in the
rice swamps and sugar fields if we failed. Life is not lightly regarded
by men of sane minds. It is precious both to the pauper and to the
prince, to the slave and to his master; and yet I believe there was not
one among us who would not rather have been shot down than pass
away life in hopeless bondage.
In the progress of our preparations Sandy (the root man)
became troubled. He began to have distressing dreams. One of
these, which happened on a Friday night, was to him of great
significance, and I am quite ready to confess that I felt somewhat
damped by it myself. He said, “I dreamed last night that I was roused
from sleep by strange noises like the noises of a swarm of angry
birds that caused a roar as they passed, and which fell upon my ear
like a coming gale over the tops of the trees. Looking up to see what
it could mean I saw you, Frederick, in the claws of a huge bird,
surrounded by a large number of birds of all colors and sizes. These
were all pecking at you, while you, with your arms, seemed to be
trying to protect your eyes. Passing over me, the birds flew in a
southwesterly direction, and I watched them until they were clean out
of sight. Now I saw this as plainly as I now see you; and furder,
honey, watch de Friday night dream; dare is sumpon in it shose you
born; dare is indeed, honey.” I did not like the dream, but I showed
no concern, attributing it to the general excitement and perturbation
consequent upon our contemplated plan to escape. I could not,
however, shake off its effect at once. I felt that it boded no good.
Sandy was unusually emphatic and oracular, and his manner had
much to do with the impression made upon me.
The plan which I recommended, and to which my comrades
consented, for our escape, was to take a large canoe owned by Mr.
Hamilton, and on the Saturday night previous to the Easter holidays
launch out into the Chesapeake bay and paddle for its head, a
distance of seventy miles, with all our might. On reaching this point
we were to turn the canoe adrift and bend our steps toward the north
star till we reached a free state.
There were several objections to this plan. In rough weather the
waters of the Chesapeake are much agitated, and there would be
danger, in a canoe, of being swamped by the waves. Another
objection was that the canoe would soon be missed, the absent
slaves would at once be suspected of having taken it, and we should
be pursued by some of the fast-sailing craft out of St. Michaels. Then
again, if we reached the head of the bay and turned the canoe adrift,
she might prove a guide to our track and bring the hunters after us.
These and other objections were set aside by the stronger ones,
which could be urged against every other plan that could then be
suggested. On the water we had a chance of being regarded as
fishermen, in the service of a master. On the other hand, by taking
the land route, through the counties adjoining Delaware, we should
be subjected to all manner of interruptions, and many disagreeable
questions, which might give us serious trouble. Any white man, if he
pleased, was authorized to stop a man of color on any road, and
examine and arrest him. By this arrangement many abuses
(considered such even by slaveholders) occurred. Cases have been
known where freemen, being called upon to show their free papers
by a pack of ruffians, and on the presentation of the papers, the
ruffians have torn them up, and seized the victim and sold him to a
life of endless bondage.
The week before our intended start, I wrote a pass for each of
our party, giving them permission to visit Baltimore during the Easter
holidays. The pass ran after this manner:

“This is to certify that I, the undersigned, have given the

bearer, my servant John, full liberty to go to Baltimore to spend
the Easter holidays.
W. H.
Near St. Michaels, Talbot Co., Md.”

Although we were not going to Baltimore, and were intending to

land east of North Point, in the direction I had seen the Philadelphia
steamers go, these passes might be useful to us in the lower part of
the bay, while steering towards Baltimore. These were not, however,
to be shown by us, until all other answers failed to satisfy the
inquirer. We were all fully alive to the importance of being calm and
self-possessed when accosted, if accosted we should be; and we
more than once rehearsed to each other how we should behave in
the hour of trial.
Those were long, tedious days and nights. The suspense was
painful in the extreme. To balance probabilities, where life and liberty
hang on the result, requires steady nerves. I panted for action, and
was glad when the day, at the close of which we were to start,
dawned upon us. Sleeping the night before was out of the question. I
probably felt more deeply than any of my companions, because I
was the instigator of the movement. The responsibility of the whole
enterprise rested on my shoulders. The glory of success, and the
shame and confusion of failure, could not be matters of indifference
to me. Our food was prepared, our clothes were packed; we were all
ready to go, and impatient for Saturday morning—considering that
the last of our bondage.
I cannot describe the tempest and tumult of my brain that
morning. The reader will please bear in mind that in a slave State an
unsuccessful runaway was not only subjected to cruel torture, and
sold away to the far South, but he was frequently execrated by the
other slaves. He was charged with making the condition of the other
slaves intolerable by laying them all under the suspicion of their
masters—subjecting them to greater vigilance, and imposing greater
limitations on their privileges. I dreaded murmurs from this quarter. It
was difficult, too, for a slave-master to believe that slaves escaping
had not been aided in their flight by some one of their fellow-slaves.
When, therefore, a slave was missing, every slave on the place was
closely examined as to his knowledge of the undertaking.
Our anxiety grew more and more intense, as the time of our
intended departure drew nigh. It was truly felt to be a matter of life
and death with us, and we fully intended to fight, as well as run, if
necessity should occur for that extremity. But the trial hour had not
yet come. It was easy to resolve, but not so easy to act. I expected
there might be some drawing back at the last; it was natural there
should be; therefore, during the intervening time, I lost no opportunity
to explain away difficulties, remove doubts, dispel fears, and inspire
all with firmness. It was too late to look back, and now was the time
to go forward. I appealed to the pride of my comrades by telling them
that if after having solemnly promised to go, as they had done, they
now failed to make the attempt, they would in effect brand
themselves with cowardice, and might well sit down, fold their arms,
and acknowledge themselves fit only to be slaves. This detestable
character all were unwilling to assume. Every man except Sandy
(he, much to our regret, withdrew) stood firm, and at our last meeting
we pledged ourselves afresh, and in the most solemn manner, that
at the time appointed we would certainly start on our long journey for
a free country. This meeting was in the middle of the week, at the
end of which we were to start.
Early on the appointed morning we went as usual to the field, but
with hearts that beat quickly and anxiously. Any one intimately
acquainted with us might have seen that all was not well with us, and
that some monster lingered in our thoughts. Our work that morning
was the same as it had been for several days past—drawing out and
spreading manure. While thus engaged, I had a sudden
presentiment, which flashed upon me like lightning in a dark night,
revealing to the lonely traveler the gulf before and the enemy behind.
I instantly turned to Sandy Jenkins, who was near me, and said:
“Sandy, we are betrayed! something has just told me so.” I felt as
sure of it as if the officers were in sight. Sandy said: “Man, dat is
strange; but I feel just as you do.” If my mother—then long in her
grave—had appeared before me and told me that we were betrayed,
I could not at that moment have felt more certain of the fact.
In a few minutes after this, the long, low, and distant notes of the
horn summoned us from the field to breakfast. I felt as one may be
supposed to feel before being led forth to be executed for some
great offense. I wanted no breakfast, but I went with the other slaves
toward the house for form’s sake. My feelings were not disturbed as
to the right of running away; on that point I had no misgiving
whatever, but from a sense of the consequences of failure.
In thirty minutes after that vivid impression came the
apprehended crash. On reaching the house, and glancing my eye
toward the lane gate, the worst was at once made known. The lane
gate to Mr. Freeland’s house was nearly half a mile from the door,
and much shaded by the heavy wood which bordered the main road.
I was, however, able to descry four white men and two colored men
approaching. The white men were on horseback, and the colored
men were walking behind, and seemed to be tied. “It is indeed all
over with us; we are surely betrayed,” I thought to myself. I became
composed, or at least comparatively so, and calmly awaited the
result. I watched the ill-omened company entering the gate.
Successful flight was impossible, and I made up my mind to stand
and meet the evil, whatever it might be, for I was not altogether
without a slight hope that things might turn differently from what I had
at first feared. In a few moments in came Mr. William Hamilton, riding
very rapidly and evidently much excited. He was in the habit of riding
very slowly, and was seldom known to gallop his horse. This time his
horse was nearly at full speed, causing the dust to roll thick behind
him. Mr. Hamilton, though one of the most resolute men in the whole
neighborhood, was, nevertheless, a remarkably mild-spoken man,
and, even when greatly excited, his language was cool and
circumspect. He came to the door, and inquired if Mr. Freeland was
in? I told him that Mr. Freeland was at the barn. Off the old
gentleman rode toward the barn, with unwonted speed. In a few
moments Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Freeland came down from the barn
to the house, and just as they made their appearance in the front-
yard three men, who proved to be constables, came dashing into the
lane on horseback, as if summoned by a sign requiring quick work. A
few seconds brought them into the front-yard, where they hastily
dismounted and tied their horses. This done, they joined Mr.
Freeland and Mr. Hamilton, who were standing a short distance from
the kitchen. A few moments were spent as if in consulting how to
proceed, and then the whole party walked up to the kitchen door.
There was now no one in the kitchen but myself and John Harris;
Henry and Sandy were yet in the barn. Mr. Freeland came inside the
kitchen door, and with an agitated voice called me by name, and told
me to come forward, that there were some gentlemen who wished to
see me. I stepped toward them at the door, and asked what they
wanted; when the constables grabbed me, and told me that I had
better not resist; that I had been in a scrape, or was said to have
been in one; that they were merely going to take me where I could
be examined; that they would have me brought before my master at
St. Michaels, and if the evidence against me was not proved true I
should be acquitted. I was now firmly tied, and completely at the
mercy of my captors. Resistance was idle. They were five in number,
armed to the teeth. When they had secured me, they turned to John
Harris, and in a few moments succeeded in tying him as firmly as
they had tied me. They next turned toward Henry Harris, who had
now returned from the barn. “Cross your hands,” said the constable
to Henry. “I won’t,” said Henry, in a voice so firm and clear, and in a
manner so determined, as for a moment to arrest all proceedings.
“Won’t you cross your hands?” said Tom Graham, the constable.
“No, I won’t,” said Henry, with increasing emphasis. Mr. Hamilton, Mr.
Freeland, and the officers now came near to Henry. Two of the
constables drew out their shining pistols, and swore, by the name of
God, that he should cross his hands or they would shoot him down.
Each of these hired ruffians now cocked their pistols, and, with
fingers apparently on the triggers, presented their deadly weapons to
the breast of the unarmed slave, saying, if he did not cross his
hands, they would “blow his d——d heart out of him.” “Shoot me,
shoot me,” said Henry; “you can’t kill me but once. Shoot, shoot, and
be damned! I won’t be tied!” This the brave fellow said in a voice as
defiant and heroic in its tone as was the language itself; and at the
moment of saying this, with the pistols at his very breast, he quickly
raised his arms, and dashed them from the puny hands of his
assassins, the weapons flying in all directions. Now came the
struggle. All hands rushed upon the brave fellow, and after beating
him for some time they succeeded in overpowering and tying him.
Henry put me to shame; he fought, and fought bravely. John and I
had made no resistance. The fact is, I never saw much use of
fighting where there was no reasonable probability of whipping
anybody. Yet there was something almost providential in the
resistance made by Henry. But for that resistance every soul of us
would have been hurried off to the far South. Just a moment
previous to the trouble with Henry, Mr. Hamilton mildly said,—and
this gave me the unmistakable clue to the cause of our arrest,
—“Perhaps we had now better make a search for those protections,
which we understand Frederick has written for himself and the rest.”
Had these passes been found, they would have been point-blank
proof against us, and would have confirmed all the statements of our
betrayer. Thanks to the resistance of Henry, the excitement
produced by the scuffle drew all attention in that direction, and I
succeeded in flinging my pass, unobserved, into the fire. The
confusion attendant on the scuffle, and the apprehension of still
further trouble, perhaps, led our captors to forego, for the time, any
search for “those protections which Frederick was said to have
written for his companions;” so we were not yet convicted of the
purpose to run away, and it was evident that there was some doubt
on the part of all whether we had been guilty of such purpose.
Just as we were all completely tied, and about ready to start
toward St. Michaels, and thence to jail, Mrs. Betsey Freeland
(mother to William, who was much attached, after the Southern
fashion, to Henry and John, they having been reared from childhood
in her house) came to the kitchen door with her hands full of biscuits,
for we had not had our breakfast that morning, and divided them
between Henry and John. This done, the lady made the following
parting address to me, pointing her bony finger at me: “You devil!
you yellow devil! It was you who put it into the heads of Henry and
John to run away. But for you, you long-legged, yellow devil, Henry
and John would never have thought of running away.” I gave the lady
a look which called forth from her a scream of mingled wrath and
terror, as she slammed the kitchen door and went in, leaving me,
with the rest, in hands as harsh as her own broken voice.
 Driven to Jail for Running Away.
Could the kind reader have been riding along the main road to or
from Easton that morning, his eye would have met a painful sight. He
would have seen five young men, guilty of no crime save that of
preferring liberty to slavery, drawn along the public highway—firmly
bound together, tramping through dust and heat, bare-footed and
bare-headed—fastened to three strong horses, whose riders were
armed with pistols and daggers, on their way to prison like felons,
and suffering every possible insult from the crowds of idle, vulgar
people, who clustered round, and heartlessly made their failure to
escape the occasion for all manner of ribaldry and sport. As I looked
upon this crowd of vile persons, and saw myself and friends thus
assailed and persecuted, I could not help seeing the fulfilment of
Sandy’s dream. I was in the hands of moral vultures, and held in
their sharp talons, and was being hurried away toward Easton, in a
southeasterly direction, amid the jeers of new birds of the same
feather, through every neighborhood we passed. It seemed to me
that everybody was out, and knew the cause of our arrest, and
awaited our passing in order to feast their vindictive eyes on our
misery.
Some said “I ought to be hanged;” and others, “I ought to be
burned;” others I ought to have the “hide” taken off my back; while no
one gave us a kind word or sympathizing look, except the poor
slaves who were lifting their heavy hoes, and who cautiously glanced
at us through the post-and-rail fences, behind which they were at
work. Our sufferings that morning can be more easily imagined than
described. Our hopes were all blasted at one blow. The cruel
injustice, the victorious crime, and the helplessness of innocence,
led me to ask in my ignorance and weakness: Where is now the God
of justice and mercy? and why have these wicked men the power
thus to trample upon our rights, and to insult our feelings? and yet in
the next moment came the consoling thought, “the day of the
oppressor will come at last.” Of one thing I could be glad: not one of
my dear friends upon whom I had brought this great calamity, either
by word or look, reproached me for having led them into it. We were
a band of brothers, and never dearer to each other than now. The
thought which gave us the most pain was the probable separation
which would now take place in case we were sold off to the far
South, as we were likely to be. While the constables were looking
forward, Henry and I, being fastened together, could occasionally
exchange a word without being observed by the kidnappers who had
us in charge. “What shall I do with my pass?” said Henry. “Eat it with
your biscuit,” said I; “it won’t do to tear it up.” We were now near St.
Michaels. The direction concerning the passes was passed around,
and executed. “Own nothing,” said I. “Own nothing” was passed
round, enjoined, and assented to. Our confidence in each other was
unshaken, and we were quite resolved to succeed or fail together; as
much after the calamity which had befallen us as before.
On reaching St. Michaels we underwent a sort of examination at
my master’s store, and it was evident to my mind that Master
Thomas suspected the truthfulness of the evidence upon which they
had acted in arresting us, and that he only affected, to some extent,
the positiveness with which he asserted our guilt. There was nothing
said by any of our company which could, in any manner, prejudice
our cause, and there was hope yet that we should be able to return
to our homes, if for nothing else, at least to find out the guilty man or
woman who betrayed us.
To this end we all denied that we had been guilty of intended
flight. Master Thomas said that the evidence he had of our intention
to run away was strong, enough to hang us in a case of murder.
“But,” said I, “the cases are not equal; if murder were committed,—
the thing is done! but we have not run away. Where is the evidence
against us? We were quietly at our work.” I talked thus, with unusual
freedom, to bring out the evidence against us, for we all wanted,
above all things, to know who had betrayed us, that we might have
something tangible on which to pour our execrations. From
something which dropped, in the course of the talk, it appeared that
there was but one witness against us, and that that witness could not
be produced. Master Thomas would not tell us who his informant
was, but we suspected, and suspected one person only. Several
circumstances seemed to point Sandy out as our betrayer. His entire
knowledge of our plans, his participation in them, his withdrawal from
us, his dream and his simultaneous presentiment that we were
betrayed, the taking us and the leaving him, were calculated to turn
suspicion toward him, and yet we could not suspect him. We all
loved him too well to think it possible that he could have betrayed us.
So we rolled the guilt on other shoulders.
We were literally dragged, that morning, behind horses, a
distance of fifteen miles, and placed in the Easton jail. We were glad
to reach the end of our journey, for our pathway had been full of
insult and mortification. Such is the power of public opinion that it is
hard, even for the innocent, to feel the happy consolations of
innocence when they fall under the maledictions of this power. How
could we regard ourselves as in the right, when all about us
denounced us as criminals, and had the power and the disposition to
treat us as such.
In jail we were placed under the care of Mr. Joseph Graham, the
sheriff of the county. Henry and John and myself were placed in one
room, and Henry Bailey and Charles Roberts in another by
themselves. This separation was intended to deprive us of the
advantage of concert, and to prevent trouble in jail.
Once shut up, a new set of tormentors came upon us. A swarm
of imps in human shape,—the slave-traders and agents of slave-
traders—who gathered in every country town of the state watching
for chances to buy human flesh (as buzzards watch for carrion),
flocked in upon us to ascertain if our masters had placed us in jail to
be sold. Such a set of debased and villainous creatures I never saw
before and hope never to see again. I felt as if surrounded by a pack
of fiends fresh from perdition. They laughed, leered, and grinned at
us, saying, “Ah, boys, we have got you, haven’t we? So you were
about to make your escape? Where were you going to?” After
taunting us in this way as long as they liked they one by one
subjected us to an examination, with a view to ascertain our value,
feeling our arms and legs and shaking us by the shoulders, to see if
we were sound and healthy, impudently asking us, “how we would
like to have them for masters?” To such questions we were quite
dumb (much to their annoyance). One fellow told me, “if he had me
he would cut the devil out of me pretty quick.”
These negro-buyers were very offensive to the genteel southern
Christian public. They were looked upon in respectable Maryland
society as necessary but detestable characters. As a class, they
were hardened ruffians, made such by nature and by occupation.
Yes, they were the legitimate fruit of slavery, and were second in
villainy only to the slaveholders themselves who made such a class
possible. They were mere hucksters of the slave produce of
Maryland and Virginia—coarse, cruel, and swaggering bullies,
whose very breathing was of blasphemy and blood.
Aside from these slave-buyers who infested the prison from time
to time, our quarters were much more comfortable than we had any
right to expect them to be. Our allowance of food was small and
coarse, but our room was the best in the jail—neat and spacious,
and with nothing about it necessarily reminding us of being in prison
but its heavy locks and bolts and the black iron lattice work at the
windows. We were prisoners of state compared with most slaves
who were put into that Easton jail. But the place was not one of
contentment. Bolts, bars, and grated windows are not acceptable to
freedom-loving people of any color. The suspense, too, was painful.
Every step on the stairway was listened to, in the hope that the
comer would cast a ray of light on our fate. We would have given the
hair of our heads for half a dozen words with one of the waiters in
Sol. Lowe’s hotel. Such waiters were in the way of hearing, at the
table, the probable course of things. We could see them flitting about
in their white jackets in front of this hotel, but could speak to none of
them.
Soon after the holidays were over, contrary to all our
expectations, Messrs. Hamilton and Freeland came up to Easton;
not to make a bargain with the “Georgia traders,” nor to send us up
to Austin Woldfolk, as was usual in the case of runaway-slaves, but
to release Charles, Henry Harris, Henry Bailey, and John Harris from
prison, and this, too, without the infliction of a single blow. I was left
alone in prison. The innocent had been taken and the guilty left. My
friends were separated from me, and apparently forever. This
circumstance caused me more pain than any other incident
connected with our capture and imprisonment. Thirty-nine lashes on
my naked and bleeding back would have been joyfully borne, in
preference to this separation from these, the friends of my youth.
And yet I could not but feel that I was the victim of something like
justice. Why should these young men, who were led into this scheme
by me, suffer as much as the instigator? I felt glad that they were
released from prison, and from the dread prospect of a life (or death
I should rather say) in the rice swamps. It is due to the noble Henry
to say that he was almost as reluctant to leave the prison with me in
it as he had been to be tied and dragged to prison. But he and we all
knew that we should, in all the likelihoods of the case, be separated,
in the event of being sold; and since we were completely in the
hands of our owners they concluded it would be best to go
peaceably home.
Not until this last separation, dear reader, had I touched those
profounder depths of desolation which it is the lot of slaves often to
reach. I was solitary and alone within the walls of a stone prison, left
to a fate of life-long misery. I had hoped and expected much, for
months before, but my hopes and expectations were now withered
and blasted. The ever dreaded slave life in Georgia, Louisiana, and
Alabama,—from which escape was next to impossible—now in my
loneliness stared me in the face. The possibility of ever becoming
anything but an abject slave, a mere machine in the hands of an
owner, had now fled, and it seemed to me it had fled forever. A life of
living death, beset with the innumerable horrors of the cotton field
and the sugar plantation, seemed to be my doom. The fiends who
rushed into the prison when we were first put there continued to visit
me and ply me with questions and tantalizing remarks. I was
insulted, but helpless; keenly alive to the demands of justice and
liberty, but with no means of asserting them. To talk to those imps
about justice or mercy would have been as absurd as to reason with
bears and tigers. Lead and steel were the only arguments that they
were capable of appreciating, as the events of the subsequent years
have proved.
After remaining in this life of misery and despair about a week,
which seemed a month, Master Thomas, very much to my surprise
and greatly to my relief, came to the prison and took me out, for the
purpose, as he said, of sending me to Alabama with a friend of his,
who would emancipate me at the end of eight years. I was glad
enough to get out of prison, but I had no faith in the story that his
friend would emancipate me. Besides, I had never heard of his
having a friend in Alabama, and I took the announcement simply as
an easy and comfortable method of shipping me off to the far south.
There was a little scandal, too, connected with the idea of one
Christian selling another to the Georgia traders, while it was deemed
every way proper for them to sell to others. I thought this friend in
Alabama was an invention to meet this difficulty, for Master Thomas
was quite jealous of his religious reputation, however unconcerned
he might have been about his real Christian character. In these
remarks it is possible I do him injustice. He certainly did not exert his
power over me as he might have done in the case, but acted, upon
the whole, very generously, considering the nature of my offense. He
had the power and the provocation to send me, without reserve, into
the very everglades of Florida, beyond the remotest hope of
emancipation; and his refusal to exercise that power must be set
down to his credit.
After lingering about St. Michaels a few days and no friend from
Alabama appearing, Master Thomas decided to send me back again
to Baltimore, to live with his brother Hugh, with whom he was now at
peace; possibly he became so by his profession of religion at the
camp-meeting in the Bay side. Master Thomas told me he wished
me to go to Baltimore and learn a trade; and that if I behaved myself
properly he would emancipate me at twenty-five. Thanks for this one
beam of hope in the future. The promise had but one fault—it
seemed too good to be true.
 CHAPTER XX.
APPRENTICESHIP LIFE.

Nothing lost in my attempt to run away—Comrades at home—Reasons for

sending me away—Return to Baltimore—Tommy changed—Caulking in
Gardiner’s ship yard—Desperate fight—Its causes—Conflict between
white and black labor—Outrage—Testimony—Master Hugh—Slavery in
Baltimore—My condition improves—New associations—Slaveholder’s
right to the slave’s wages—How to make a discontented slave.

WELL, dear reader, I am not, as you have probably inferred, a loser

by the general upstir described in the foregoing chapter. The little
domestic revolution, notwithstanding the sudden snub it got by the
treachery of somebody, did not, after all, end so disastrously as
when in the iron cage at Easton I conceived it would. The prospect
from that point did look about as dark as any that ever cast its gloom
over the vision of the anxious, out-looking human spirit. “All’s well
that ends well!” My affectionate friends, Henry and John Harris, are
still with Mr. Freeland. Charles Roberts and Henry Bailey are safe at
their homes. I have not, therefore, anything to regret on their
account. Their masters have mercifully forgiven them, probably on
the ground suggested in the spirited little speech of Mrs. Freeland
made to me just before leaving for the jail. My friends had nothing to
regret, either: for while they were watched more closely, they were
doubtless treated more kindly than before, and got new assurances
that they should some day be legally emancipated, provided their
behavior from that time forward should make them deserving. Not a
blow was struck any one of them. As for Master Freeland, good soul,
he did not believe we were intending to run away at all. Having given
—as he thought—no occasion to his boys to leave him, he could not
think it probable that they had entertained a design so grievous.
This, however, was not the view taken of the matter by “Mas’ Billy,”
as we used to call the soft-spoken but crafty and resolute Mr. William
Hamilton. He had no doubt that the crime had been meditated, and
regarding me as the instigator of it, he frankly told Master Thomas
that he must remove me from that neighborhood or he would shoot
me. He would not have one so dangerous as “Frederick” tampering
with his slaves. William Hamilton was not a man whose threat might
be safely disregarded. I have no doubt he would have proved as
good as his word, had the warning given been disregarded. He was
furious at the thought of such a piece of high-handed theft as we
were about to perpetrate—the stealing of our own bodies and souls.
The feasibility of the plan, too, could the first steps have been taken,
was marvelously plain. Besides, this was a new idea, this use of the
Bay. Slaves escaping, until now, had taken to the woods; they had
never dreamed of profaning and abusing the waters of the noble
Chesapeake by making them the highway from slavery to freedom.
Here was a broad road leading to the destruction of slavery, which
had hitherto been looked upon as a wall of security by the
slaveholders. But Master Billy could not get Mr. Freeland to see
matters precisely as he did, nor could he get Master Thomas excited
as he was. The latter, I must say it to his credit, showed much
humane feeling, and atoned for much that had been harsh, cruel,
and unreasonable in his former treatment of me and of others. My
“Cousin Tom” told me that while I was in jail Master Thomas was
very unhappy, and that the night before his going up to release me
he had walked the floor nearly all night, evincing great distress; that
very tempting offers had been made to him by the negro-traders, but
he had rejected them all, saying that money could not tempt him to
sell me to the far south. I can easily believe all this, for he seemed
quite reluctant to send me away at all. He told me that he only
consented to do so because of the very strong prejudice against me
in the neighborhood, and that he feared for my safety if I remained
there.
Thus after three years spent in the country, roughing it in the
field, and experiencing all sorts of hardships, I was again permitted
to return to Baltimore, the very place of all others, short of a free
State, where I most desired to live. The three years spent in the
country had made some difference in me, and in the household of
Master Hugh. “Little Tommy” was no longer little Tommy; and I was
not the slender lad who had left the Eastern Shore just three years
before. The loving relations between Master Tommy and myself were
broken up. He was no longer dependent on me for protection, but felt
himself a man, with other and more suitable associates. In childhood
he had considered me scarcely inferior to himself,—certainly quite as
good as any other boy with whom he played—but the time had come
when his friend must be his slave. So we were cold to each other,
and parted. It was a sad thing to me, that loving each other as we
had done, we must now take different roads. To him a thousand
avenues were open. Education had made him acquainted with all the
treasures of the world, and liberty had flung open the gates
thereunto; but I, who had attended him seven years, had watched
over him with the care of a big brother, fighting his battles in the
street, and shielding him from harm to an extent which induced his
mother to say, “Oh, Tommy is always safe when he is with Freddy”—
I must be confined to a single condition. He had grown and become
a man: I, though grown to the stature of manhood, must all my life
remain a minor—a mere boy. Thomas Auld, junior, obtained a
situation on board the brig Tweed, and went to sea. I have since
heard of his death.
There were few persons to whom I was more sincerely attached
than to him.
Very soon after I went to Baltimore to live, Master Hugh
succeeded in getting me hired to Mr. William Gardiner, an extensive
ship-builder on Fell’s Point. I was placed there to learn to calk, a
trade of which I already had some knowledge, gained while in Mr.
Hugh Auld’s ship-yard. Gardiner’s, however, proved a very
unfavorable place for the accomplishment of the desired object. Mr.
Gardiner was that season engaged in building two large man-of-war
vessels, professedly for the Mexican government. These vessels
were to be launched in the month of July of that year, and in failure
thereof Mr. Gardiner would forfeit a very considerable sum of money.
So when I entered the ship-yard, all was hurry and driving. There
were in the yard about one hundred men; of these, seventy or eighty