Multiple Histories: Three Journeys through Academic Records, Medieval Yemen, and Current Anthropology's Encounters with the Past

Abstract

This chapter sets out to reconsider the interrelation and non-identity between tribal and kinship relations in South-Western Arabia's history through three cumulative methodological steps that are in part inspired by renewed debates on kinship in anthropology, but also by the École des Annales and other historians such as David Sabaean. A first step identifies different legacies of interactions between history and anthropology in the Euro-American academic record after 1945, and specifies their relevance for today. In a next step, prevailing relations between tribal structures and kinship relations will be assessed through a long-distance comparison between the medieval constellations in the Zaydi highlands of Yemen and elsewhere in Asia for an eleventh century time horizon. Thirdly, the outcome of this comparative analysis should then provide some indicators for a fresh assessment of existing source materials through anthropological perspectives, with special emphasis on gender, kinship and hierarchies. The argument concludes with a discussion of “multiple histories”, and how to approach and write them.

Keywords:

• Multiple Histories
• Medieval Yemen
• Tribal Territories in South Arabian History
• Post-1945 Academic Records of Anthropology and History Interactions

Notes

[1] Such currently active networks of practically cooperating historians and anthropologists, wherever they are engaged in joint research endeavours, constitute the “we” that is repeatedly addressed in this text.

[2] That context is the “VISCOM” cooperation between the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Sciences, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) 2011–2015 through its Special Research Realm (SFB) programme as F-42, “Visions of Community: Comparative Approaches to Ethnicity, Region and Empire”. For inspiring discussions and substantial feedback, I am grateful to my co-editor Christina Lutter, to the editors of History and Anthropology, to Daniel M. Varisco (Hofstra) and the other contributors to this thematic collection, to Regina Bendix (Gőttingen) and to this journal's anonymous reviewers.

[3] Most US anthropology departments continued to pursue the Boasian “four field approach” until at least into the 1980s, if not until today. Ideally, the “four fields” include linguistic anthropology, biological or physical anthropology, socio-cultural anthropology and archaeological anthropology. Basically, this implies that any major department in anthropology would strive to have all of these fields represented among their staff, or at least most of them, and that all of their undergraduate students received at least an introductory training in any of these fields as represented at the department, regardless of their subsequent graduate specialization. Wherever this works well—which is not always the case—this has encouraged a more regular sense of cross-disciplinary cooperation among staff and students in all subfields, and among the more historically oriented subfields and those with a stronger contemporary orientation.

[4] It has to be acknowledged, at least for the formative phase of German-speaking Ethnohistorie, that some of its founding fathers after 1945 continued to be influenced from their earlier socialization by speculative diffusionism and colonial or racist sympathies—see my chapter on this phase in Barth et al. (2005).

[5] The ethnographic present with which I operate here refers to the 1970s and 1980s, i.e. the main period during which the key social anthropologists whose work is discussed in this text (i.e. Dresch, Heiss, Mundy, Weir, my own) did their ethnographic fieldwork in Upper Yemen.

[6] As indicated in earlier publications (Gingrich 1994; Heiss 1998), some of today's westernmost parts of the Northern Khawlan federation's territories were not yet part of the federation in al-Hamdani's times, but seem to have been added to the federation (or entered it) only during the subsequent centuries.

[7] Exceptions to the more common form of abandoning previous land property in the case of “moving out” of given territorial boundaries could nevertheless occur. A village near the given boundary could, for instance, shift its loyalties for good, by “leaving” this tribe and “entering” into the neighbouring tribe: in such a case—whether it was peacefully accepted or only after violent conflict—the “leaving” group might in fact not have to leave their own property. Instead, the territorial boundary could shift while these village residents might have remained holders of the same land.