ABSTRACT
As outlined in the previous chapter, lost in much of the social scientific discussion today about the animating factors behind the war in and around Ṣa‘dah, the rise of ‘political Islām’ or the resurgent separatist movement in the former South, is the heavy emphasis on personalities and loyalty to structural hierarchies that draw on analytical tropes of colonial-era origin. It has been argued that relying on certain categories of analysis to answer why events in Yemen are unfolding as they are will obscure any number of possibly crucial explanatory factors. This critique is shared by scholars sensitive to the distortions that mobilizing colonialera ethnographic categories brings to our analysis of events in the world, with some advocating, as here, searching for local anomalies to the dominant narrative (Asad 1973). In this spirit, the underlying concern this book has with looking into the micro-exchanges of Yemeni rural communities is to secure a larger number of analytical perspectives that may help understand in more complicated ways how certain processes evolve over time. To do this, the present chapter, in the process of disaggregating the putative ‘bricks’ of Yemeni society – namely the tribes, confederations, sectarian groups and socio-economic classes that have served as the primary agents of change in the country’s modern history – will begin to chart a transitional process that ultimately accounts for the emergence of modern polities.
