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Intro -- Acknowledgments -- Notes on Terminology and Transliteration -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Acronyms -- Prologue: An Invitation to Practice Anthropology Differently -- A Mesogaphy of Soqotra: A Total Community Study -- The Catalyst: Arcadian Epistemology Fatigue -- Targeted Audience: Status Quo Dissenters -- Anthropology Without Narcissus: Abandoning the Self-Other Dialectic -- Oppositional Standpoint: Constructive Iconoclasm -- Interstitial Zone: Straddling Africa and Arabia -- Engaging Locals: Ethic of Reciprocity -- Reclaiming Anthropology as a Human Science: Beyond the West-Rest Antinomy -- Caveat About Language: Against Linguistic Populism -- Structure of the Book: Presentation Rationale -- 1 Mesography as Paradigm for a Post-Exotic Anthropology: The Post-Ethnography Turn -- 1.1 An Axial Era: Anthropology in a Post-Universalist Conjuncture -- 1.1.1 Emergent Pluriverse: Geopolitical Transition -- 1.2 Epochal Transition: From Ethnography to Mesography -- 1.2.1 Epistemological Renewal: Beyond the Neo-Imperial Vulgate -- 1.2.2 Interpretivism: A Predatory Hermeneutics -- 1.3 Disciplinary Praxis Reimagined: Infrastructural Makeover -- 1.4 Anthropology's New Ethical Covenant: Three Pillars -- 1.4.1 Research Ethic: Experiential Authenticity -- 1.4.2 Relational Ethic: Bond of Reciprocity -- 1.4.3 Discursive Ethic: Referential Veracity -- 1.5 Mesography Defined: Genealogy and Primer -- 1.6 Fieldwork as a Recursive Process: From Village Dwelling to Sites Hopping -- Part I Eco-Socio-Economic Disarticulation: Waning Pastoral Community -- 2 Synoptic Preview: Context, Catalysts, Theory, and History -- 2.1 Situating Soqotra: Contextual Reconnaissance -- 2.1.1 Noah's Ark Rediscovered: Arcadian Fixation -- 2.1.2 Clash of Futures: Incommensurable Visions -- 2.2 Catalysts of Transition: Transmigration and State Policy.

Prologue: Soqotra as a Crucible of Exogenous Mediations -- Chapter 1: Mediated Urbanization: Ḥadiboh as an Emergent Translocality -- Part 1: Cultural Modernization: National Integration Processes -- Chapter 2: Linguistic Dilemmas: Communal Vernacular in Transition -- Chapter 3: Consumption as Alienation: Diffusion of the National Pastime -- Chapter 4: Religious Re-Conversion: Mediations of Local Islamic Practices.-Chapter 5: Economic Reconfiguration: Emergent Social Differentiation -- Part 2: Environmental Annexation: Global Governance of Local Conservation -- Chapter 6: Trojan Environmentalism: Ecological Gentrification of an Island Community -- Chapter 7: "Saving Soqotra": Biography of a Conservation & Development Experiment -- Epilogue: A Community in Permanent Transition -- Bibliography.

This article offers a synoptic narrative informed by a political anthropology that retraces the historical genesis of modern nation-state formation in Yemen, and describes the mechanisms of its reproduction as an explanatory prelude to the ultimate political implosion of both the Yemeni state and the national polity in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. The article elucidates the trajectory of the state's formation through the following tasks: First, it examines the catalytic factors and forces that structured the relations between the Yemeni state and the national polity, and systematically reviews the institutional and agential consequences in the form of endemic antinomies of governance, which resulted in the permanent structural disarticulation between state and nation. Second, it undertakes a history-embedded analysis of the state's adoption of an existential politics that led to a hybrid political system of elite patronage and mass clientelism. Third, it performs a structural anatomy of the state formation process that culminated in a cabalistic corporatist state exercising a consociational domination over a socio-geographically fragmented polity. And fourth, it assesses the impacts of Yemen's Arab Spring on the likely configuration of the nation-state nexus given the re-emergence of centrifugal forces that are threatening to sunder the nation into multiple regional polities.

Abstract
This article examines the transformation of communal identities and social hierarchies on Soqotra Island. This is done through a "structural anatomy" of Soqotra's changing social organization and a "lexical genealogy" of the collective identities ascribed to, or assumed by, Soqotrans in response to the polity formation strategies of a succession of British and Yemeni political regimes from the late nineteenth century until the present. Following a brief historical and theoretical introduction, Part I outlines the status stratification system that prevailed only a generation ago in the form of an ascriptive hierarchy based on ethno-occupational specializations and territorial segmentation linked to distinct ecological habitats, which continues to mediate the integration of Soqotrans into the emergent modern social formation. Part II describes how communal identities over the past generation have been leveraged by various national and transregional political and cultural forces, leading to an emerging hierarchy of ethnicity-based identities. The concluding section updates the current status of Soqotra's traditional social groups and highlights the dynamic relationality between communal identity transformation and political and historical contingencies.

Yemen is probably unique in the world, as it is a country in which the consumption of a commodity (qāt) – that is considered a drug, and an illegal one, elsewhere – structures the functioning of its social order, and regulates the quotidian existence of its population. This article explains how a plant became the singular object of commodity fetishism on a national scale, and how its mode of consumption came to instantiate a state-enabled social panopticon. It presents a comprehensive narrative that situates the endemic cultural practice of qāt consumption in Yemen within a historical continuum that spans nearly a century of qāt mediated state-society relations. In adopting a historically embedded explanation of this practice, the article provides a corrective to the intrinsically mistaken nature of the ahistorical interpretive framework of metropolitan travelling theories used by most social scientists – especially anthropologists – studying the qāt phenomenon in Yemen. Accordingly, the article retraces the historical trajectory of the gradual sedimentation of the qāt chewing practice into an inexorable state-qāt-society nexus as the constitutive matrix of Yemen's national polity. The article elucidates how qāt consumption was used by the Yemeni state in the political socialization of citizens as part of its polity formation strategy. This is done through a reconstructed genealogy of the state mediation of qāt consumption informed simultaneously by a historical anthropology, a cultural sociology and a political economy of the multiple factors and ensemble of processes that contributed to the societal hegemony of this practice. The article offers a panoramic analysis that integrates the social, cultural, political, economic and institutional ramifications of qāt fetishism through a narrative of four historical conjunctures which illustrate the shifts in state policy vis-à-vis qāt and the capillary effects throughout Yemeni society. The article concludes with a summation of the current configuration of state-society relations in which qāt emblematizes a national social currency, and offers a brief menu of the challenges to be confronted in addressing the multiple dilemmas of Yemen's endemic qāt chewing culture.

Abstract
This article presents the first study of a recently incorporated destination in the diffusion of a qāt chewing culture as part of a process of diaspora formation among economic migrants from mainland Yemen to Soqotra Island. Soqotra as a sub-national entity of Yemen is subject to its sociocultural influences. The article focuses on one particular manifestation of these influences, namely qāt chewing, which is leading to a gradual process of cultural conversion 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 nature of local market politics that regulate supply and demand; the rituals of consumption and their ramifications on islander/mainlander relations; the transformation of the communal ethos of sociability; the policy dilemmas of the local government. Finally, the article 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.