Consumption as Alienation: Diffusion of the National Pastime

Abstract

This chapter describes the incorporation of Soqotra as the last frontier in the relentless conquest of a commodity over Yemen’s territorial totality and over the overwhelming majority of the national polity. The island’s geographical distance from the mainland acted as a barrier against the diffusion of the mainland’s national fetish of qāt chewing. The unification of the two Yemeni states in 1990 broke that barrier as northern cultural practices became hegemonic throughout the national territory and the partial prohibition of qāt consumption in the south was abrogated. The spread of qāt to Soqotra as part of a process of diaspora formation among economic migrants from mainland Yemen to the island. The chapter focuses on how the local adoption of qāt chewing is engendering a gradual process of exogenous cultural assimilation and indigenous cultural disaffiliation among an increasing proportion of the island’s urban population. This process is discussed in terms of the main domains in which its local effects are manifested: the urban milieu as a generative matrix of consumption; the rituals of consumption and their ramifications on islanders-mainlanders relations; the transformation of the communal ethos of sociability; and the policy dilemmas of the local government. Finally, the chapter concludes with an assessment of the adequacy of the liberal policy orthodoxy for regulating qāt in Soqotra, and of the likely future of qāt consumption among Soqotran youths through a comparison with Djibouti’s qāt-dependent state and polity.

A different version of this chapter originally appeared under the title of “Qāt Consumption in Soqotra: Diaspora Formation and Cultural Conversion.” Northeast African Studies Journal 13 (1) (2013): 1–42. Reprinted by permission of the publisher Michigan State University Press.