Details

Subject(s)

• Political participation—Yemen (Republic). [Browse]
• Nationalism—Yemen (Republic). [Browse]
• Yemen (Republic)—Politics and government [Browse]

Series

Chicago studies in practices of meaning [More in this series]

Summary note

The government of Yemen, unified since 1990, remains largely incapable of controlling violence or providing goods and services to its population, but the regime continues to endure despite its fragility and peripheral location in the global political and economic order. Revealing what holds Yemen together in such tenuous circumstances, this book shows how citizens form national attachments even in the absence of strong state institutions. It argues that national solidarity in such weak states tends to arise not from attachments to institutions but through both extraordinary events and the ordinary activities of everyday life. Yemenis, for example, regularly gather to chew qat, a leafy drug similar to caffeine, as they engage in wide-ranging and sometimes influential public discussions of even the most divisive political and social issues. These lively debates exemplify the contention that democratic, national, and pious solidarities work as ongoing, performative practices that enact and reproduce a citizenry's shared points of reference.

Bibliographic references

Includes bibliographical references (p. 263-290) and index.

Contents

• Introduction
• Imagining unity
• Seeing like a citizen, acting like a state
• The politics of deliberation: qāt chews as public spheres
• Practicing piety, summoning groups: disorder as control
• Piety in time: contemporary Islamic movements in national and transnational contexts
• Conclusion: Politics as performative
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index.

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ISBN

• 9780226877907 ((cloth ; : alk. paper))
• 9780226877914 ((pbk. ; : alk. paper))
• 0226877906 ((cloth ; : alk. paper))
• 0226877914 ((pbk. ; : alk. paper))

LCCN

2008005222

OCLC

191865882

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