Product Details
Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation

Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation
By Steven C. Caton

List Price: $16.00
Price: $10.88 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com

33 new or used available from $4.74

Average customer review:

Product Description

In 1979, Steven C. Caton went to a remote area of Yemen to do fieldwork on the famous oral poetry of its tribes. The recent hostage crisis in Iran made life perilous for a young American in the Middle East; worse, he was soon embroiled in a dangerous local conflict and tribal hostilities simmered for months. Yemen Chronicle is his extraordinary report both on events that ensued and on the many theoretical—let alone practical—difficulties of doing ethnography in such circumstances. Caton also offers a profound meditation on the political, cultural, and sexual components of modern Arab culture.


Steven C. Caton, a professor of anthropology at Harvard University and director of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, is the author of Lawrence of Arabia: A Film's Anthropology. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City.
In 1979, Steven C. Caton went to a remote area of Yemen to do fieldwork on the famous oral poetry of its tribes. The recent hostage crisis in Iran made life perilous for a young American in the Middle East; worse, he was soon embroiled in a dangerous local conflict. Yemen Chronicle is Caton's candid account of the extraordinary events that ensued.

One day a neighboring sheikh came angrily to the sanctuary village where Caton lived, claiming that a man there had abducted his daughter and another girl. This was cause for war, and even though the culprit was captured and mediation efforts launched, tribal hostilities simmered for months. A man who was helping to resolve the dispute befriended Caton, showing him how the poems recited by the belligerents were connected to larger Arab conflicts and giving him refuge when the sanctuary was attacked. Then, unexpectedly, Caton himself was arrested and jailed for being an American spy.

It was 2001 before Caton could return to Yemen to untangle the story of why he had been imprisoned and what had happened to the missing girls. Placing his contradictory experiences in their full context, Yemen Chronicle is not only an assessment of classical ethnographic procedures but also a meditation on the political, cultural, and sexual components of modern Arab culture.
"[Yemen Chronicle] focuses on the themes of violence, honor, and hospitality in Arabic tribal society, and cultural misunderstandings and the efforts of a nonnative to be accepted in another culture . . . I highly recommend [Yemen Chronicle] to students of anthropology, Yemen, the Middle East, and anyone who has tried to live in a foreign culture."—David M. Witty, The Journal of Military History
"[Yemen Chronicle] focuses on the themes of violence, honor, and hospitality in Arabic tribal society, and cultural misunderstandings and the efforts of a nonnative to be accepted in another culture . . . The author captures the complexity of an outsider living in a traditional Arab society, where what is said is not always what is meant . . . [and] concludes with a short critique of the U.S. policy of regime change in the Middle East, conducted without consensus building or negotiation, a type of arrogance he equates with nineteenth-century imperialism . . . I highly recommend [Yemen Chronicle] to students of anthropology, Yemen, the Middle East, and anyone who has tried to live in a foreign culture."—David M. Witty, The Journal of Military History
 
"Yemen Chronicle is a wonderfully paradoxical book: an elegy shot through with comedy, a tale of a recent Arabian past that rings with echoes of the Iliad. Caton modestly describes it as an 'ethno-memoir,' but it is more than that: it is a meditation on the very workings of memory, on the genesis of poetry and the nature of truth itself; it has resonances with a history of conflict that runs from the plain of Troy to present-day Baghdad. And therein is the greatest paradox: that a story as intensely personal as Caton's can be so universal."—Tim Mackintosh-Smith, author of Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land
 
"An extraordinary work—beautifully crafted, deeply subtle, and filled with an astonishing cultural sensibility. Caton's poignant portrait of lost friendships and the social suffering caused by cycles of tribal revenge killings is a triumph both of ethnography and of deeply personal narrative. Far from being a Lawrence of Arabia (about whom he himself has written a book), Caton is a paradigm of postmodern, postcolonial, post-almost-everything irony, contradiction, misunderstandings, and anti-heroism. Longing and regret are as strong in Yemen Chronicle as the wonder and skepticism; the ending of the book balances precariously between grief, frustration, and gathering understanding—as lived experience is and should be. Few ethnographers have shown their research subjects in such subtle, passionate, and vulnerable depth. A brilliant, unforgettable achievement!"—Arthur Kleinman, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University

"Yemen Chronicle is a book of exquisite beauty and depth. Steven Caton weaves an ethnography of life in Yemen—in an accounting of particular events of abduction, imprisonment, and betrayal—that is as delicate as a spider's web. His keen sensibility and his gift for tuning into the poetic dimension of spoken Arabic make the reader part of the sanctuary where he lived, a witness on the roads he traveled. Yet the book is also a theoretical intervention of profound importance on key questions about ethnography and its relation to memory; the relation between what is an event and what is ordinary; who or what the anthropologist is; and, ultimately, the question that haunts the book—what is home?" —Veena Das, Chair, Department of Anthropology, The Johns Hopkins University

"Yemen Chronicle is a talented anthropologist's account of trying to unravel meanings in a society where the rules are not only different from our own, but also fluid. Along the way the reader will learn much about Yemeni culture, poetry, politics, and the difficulty of interpreting what one sees and hears. And, to top it off, there is a mystery that goes unsolved for twenty years—and even now remains elusive."—William B. Quandt, University of Virginia

"[A] thoughtful memoir . . . [Caton] packs in a good deal of information about ordinary Yemeni life, which, he suggests, it would do Americans well to understand, especially inasmuch as Yemen seems to be one of the few countries in the region that has not turned resolutely anti-American."—Kirkus Reviews

"The oral poetry of Yemeni tribesmen would seem an easy subject for a long, placid bout of scholarly research, but a crisis erupted during Caton's fieldwork in North Yemen, where he lived from 1979 to 1981, when a youth in his village abducted two young girls from a neighboring tribe. The kidnapping sparked a brief intertribal war with nationwide repercussions. The Yemenis hashed out the dispute in oral poetry recitations, and the author found in his arcane dissertation topic the perfect window onto the harsh cultural codes and Byzantine politics of this fascinating society. A Harvard anthropologist, Caton provides many poetry samples along with detailed exegeses of the policy implications of their florid metaphors. (Imagine Social Security reform debate conducted in sonnet and haiku.) But his larger theme is the difficulty and danger of unders

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #81862 in Books
  • Published on: 2006-10-03
  • Released on: 2006-10-03
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 352 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The oral poetry of Yemeni tribesmen would seem an easy subject for a long, placid bout of scholarly research, but a crisis erupted during Caton's fieldwork in North Yemen, where he lived from 1979 to 1981, when a youth in his village abducted two young girls from a neighboring tribe. The kidnapping sparked a brief intertribal war with nationwide repercussions. The Yemenis hashed out the dispute in oral poetry recitations, and the author found in his arcane dissertation topic the perfect window onto the harsh cultural codes and byzantine politics of this fascinating society. A Harvard anthropologist, Caton (Lawrence of Arabia: A Film's Anthropology) provides many poetry samples along with detailed exegeses of the policy implications of their florid metaphors. (Imagine Social Security reform debate conducted in sonnet and haiku.) But his larger theme is the difficulty and danger of understanding an alien culture—Caton himself was briefly imprisoned on suspicion of espionage. He ruminates on the feasibility of the anthropological project, but without the pose of scholarly detachment; he writes of his feelings for and relationships with the people around him. The result is a superb study of an Arab nation and an engrossing portrait of a stranger in a strange land. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
A Harvard anthropologist whose wanderlust and complex cultural identity suggest (and were perhaps inspired by) T. E. Lawrence, Caton has already written extensively on the prominence of poetry in Yemeni society, where chanted verse is an integral part of politics and intertribal dispute resolution. Caton's latest work engages the same subject matter in vivid firsthand context. As a graduate student researching oral poetry in a remote Yemeni village in 1979, Caton adopts local dress and chews khat with the locals out of respect for their culture as well as ethnographic legitimacy. But a dispute with a neighboring sheik, angry over the apparent kidnapping of his two young daughters, demonstrates both the strength and the limits of tribal generosity, and Caton is plunged into an anthropological spy thriller of sorts, surrounded by cultural mysteries and inexplicably imprisoned under suspicion of espionage. Despite such intrigues, Caton is not Indiana Jones, and this book's truly exciting focus is an intellectual one: poetry's power to mediate and explicate complex and perhaps intractable disputes. Strongly recommended for robust Middle East collections. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"A book of exquisite beauty and depth. Caton's keen sensibility and his gift for tuning in to the poetic dimension of spoken Arabic make the reader part of the sanctuary where he lived, a witness on the roads he traveled." --Veena Das, Chair, Department of Anthropology, The Johns Hopkins University

"An extraordinary work--beautifully crafted, deeply subtle, filled with an astonishing cultural sensibility. Few ethnographers have shown their research subjects in such subtle, passionate, and vulnerable depth. This is a brilliant, unforgettable achievement." --Arthur Kleinman, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University
 
"A superb study of an Arab nation and an engrossing portrait of a stranger in a strange land." --Publisher’s Weekly (Starred review)

Customer Reviews

The finest ethnomemoir I've ever read.5
Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Eric Hansen, and Kevin Rushby have all written excellent books vividly describing Yemen. They give us exciting travelogues and detailed descriptions of qat. And yet this book is the finest I've ever seen to describe what it's like to actually live there, and what modern Yemeni culture is. I felt like I was actually there, in a remote village to the East of Sana'a. I wanted to go to Yemen and experience more of the life Caton describes.

He shows us the mentality and life of the tribe in ethnography; he makes us part of his life through memoir. This allows us to simultaneously experience the emic and etic and gain the best of all worlds, understanding life through the eyes of ourselves and the observed. I feel for Caton as he frankly confesses his failings or perceived failings. He writes honestly, and at times more honestly than he realizes. Because Caton has such a thirst for poetry this book is an artistic work as well, and the poetry interspersed throughout the war and reconciliation attempts addresses both sides of the mind. It was fascinating to see how the possibility of war rested in large extent on what poems were produced, and how well-crafted the poetry was. I am inspired to learn and hear more Arabic poetry through this book.

Fresh Anthropology full of Pathos5
Caton's work has become more personal over the years. Here he revisits his fieldwork in Yemen via a memoire that reads like a novel with engaging characters (not the least of which is Caton himself), plot, and dramatic action. By briefly dwelling on the anthropology of events, Caton uses his fieldwork experiences to illustrate the importance of this perspective and what can be forgotten in more traditional ethnographies (like his own Peaks of Yemen I Summon). Caton's sophisticated prose is deployed in sensitive descriptions of his friends' lives and how their dialectical interaction with each other and with their cultural milieu drive the dramatic events of his fieldwork. The descriptions of how poetry is composed de novo and performed spontaneously in response to events and other poets is absolutely fascinating and brings a vibrancy to this text too often absent in others. Students of anthropology have a lot to learn from this book not only from this sensitivity, but also from seeing the detailed methods and authentic tribulations of an anthropologist in the field. A refreshing contribution to the genre-- unburdened by theorizing or academicism, this would be a fine text for introductory anthropology courses as well as folks just looking for an enjoyable and engaging read, particularly if they do not know much about cultural anthropology but want to know more.

Wonderfully reflexive ethnography5
I liked the book as a model for what unexpected issues can come up during field work. I especially liked how reflexive the author was in his observations.