Pars Pro Toto Observation: Historical Anthropology in the Textual Field of Rasulid Yemen

Abstract

This essay addresses the suggestion made over a century ago by F. W. Maitland that anthropology must choose between being history and being nothing. At the time Maitland was correct in criticizing the simplistic unilinear evolutionary schemes of Edward Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan. My own career combines ethnography among Yemeni farmers in the late 1970s with ongoing analysis of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Yemeni agricultural texts, demonstrating the value of drawing on both kinds of research to better understand the history of agriculture in Yemen. Details from the textual corpus are provided to supplement observations made in the field. My approach to agricultural and tax record texts from Yemen's Rasulid period is described as an example of what anthropology and history can contribute to each other. I argue that the choice is not between specific disciplines but rather the application of sound methods that seek to approximate reality rather than dogmatically recreate it. Anthropology and history have much to gain, as Evans-Pritchard once noted, in learning from each other. Anthropology is approached as a research field that has no preconceived borders, but one that necessitates learning from past methodological and theoretical trends, whether from within the formal discipline or from without.

Keywords:

• Yemen
• Agriculture
• Historiography
• Arabic Texts
• F. W. Maitland

Notes

1 Engels' work was not available in English until 1902, but Maitland knew German and was familiar with the evolving Marxist position on this issue.

2 Boas (1896, 904) elaborates:

We cannot say that the occurrence of the same phenomenon is always due to the same causes, and that thus it is proved that the human mind obeys the same laws everywhere. We must demand that the causes from which it developed be investigated and that comparisons be restricted to those phenomena which have been proved to be effects of the same causes. We must insist that this investigation be made a preliminary to all extended comparative studies.

3 Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900) was a Victorian English philosopher most noted for his work on ethics.

4 For my assessment of the value of Tylor's view of “culture” as contrasted with that of his fellow Victorian Edward Arnold, see Varisco (2004).

5 For example, one of the most widely used cultural anthropology textbooks by Haviland (2002, 487) glosses anthropology as “The study of humankind, in all times and places”.

6 For a call to align archeology more squarely with historiography, see Hodder and Hutson (2003).

7 The Human Area Relations File was started at Yale University in 1949 to document the expanding corpus of ethnographic data into a universal set of categories that could be used for statistical comparative analysis. It continues in digital format by subscription.

8 The basic theoretical argument about the ecological factors in water allocation systems in Yemen can be found in Varisco (1983).

9 See, for example, Goldziher (1971, 108–112) on the interpretative differences between sunni and shi'a.

10 For a concise history of historiography, ancient, medieval and modern, Breisach (1994) provides a useful survey, followed by his views on the challenge of postmodernism in the field of history (Breisach 2003).

11 Even published bibliographies can be hard to navigate. When the self-trained Yemeni bibliophile al-Ḥibshī (1977) published his 650-plus page list of known Yemeni manuscripts, the index of names (a rather crucial detail in such a work) did not match the pages because, as he told me, the publisher simply copied his numeration on his submitted hand copy.

12 The third Rasulid sultan al-Malik al-Ashraf (1985) provides the “Arab” connection in his thirteenth-century Turfat al-aṣḥāb fī ma‘rifat al-ansāb.

13 For a description of the source used by al-Afḍal, see my brief biography of the sultan, published at http://filaha.org/author_Al_Malik_Al_Afdal.html.

14 Note that the classification of plants used by al-Malik al-Ashraf and other Arab authors does not translate directly into our English equivalents.

15 Muḥammad Jāzm, Nūr al-Ma‘ārif, I:368–376. Other sections give details for Mikhlāf Ja‘far, ‘Abadān.

16 Muḥammad Jāzm, Nūr al-ma‘arif, I:374, misreads this as Shurayḥī.

17 In his article on Mamluk metrology, Schultz (2003, 60) notes: “When it comes to matters of metrology, however, the Mamlūk chronicles and other texts are of little use. One searches in vain for detailed discussions of metrological units and their real value.” Not all is in vain with the Yemeni sources.

18 This was established by the Atabak Sunqur during the reign of the Ayyubid sultan al-Nāṣir Ayyūb ibn Ṭughtakīn around 598/1202 (Vallet 2010, 337) and equalled 240 dirhams or 750 grams.

19 For an extended critique of Said's “contrapuntal” reading, see Varisco (1994, 202–206).

20 See, for example, the spirited defense of historical methods in Evans (2000).

21 For a critique of those who write against culture, see Varisco (2004). This article has been expanded in a forthcoming book entitled Culture Still Matters: Notes from the Field.