Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen

by Lisa Wedeen

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, Peripheral Visions shows how citizens form national attachments even in the absence of strong state institutions.

Lisa Wedeen, who spent a year and a half in Yemen observing and interviewing its residents, 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 Wedeen’s contention that democratic, national, and pious solidarities work as ongoing, performative practices that enact and reproduce a citizenry’s shared points of reference. Ultimately, her skillful evocations of such practices shift attention away from a narrow focus on government institutions and electoral competition and toward the substantive experience of participatory politics.

Genres: Middle East, History, Politics, Anthropology, Nonfiction, Political Science

320 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

About the author

Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago specializing in comparative politics, the Middle East, political theory, and feminist theory. Wedeen received her Ph.D. in political science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Hanna Pitkin. She has taught courses on nationalism, identity formation, power and resistance, and citizenship. Her work on the Middle East includes Ambiguities of Domination, an ethnographic study of the culture of the spectacle in Syria under Hafez al-Assad. In addition to writing and teaching, Wedeen sits on the Editorial Collective of Public Culture, an interdisciplinary journal of transnational cultural studies.

Reviews

[Hamza · Rating 3 out of 5]

I honestly thought I'd never get through this one, but I made a promise to myself to finish every book I start. It wasn't terrible, but I suppose I'm just not used to reading political science writing outside of a college setting. While some parts - namely those that went into detail about aspects of Yemeni society - were quite interesting, a lot of the long-winded explanations of certain anthropological concepts left my head spinning. I had to reread several passages over and over, and sometimes still did not quite grasp what they were trying to say. I like to think I'm fairly intelligent, but I think this book was just not quite what I expected it to be. The parts where the author expounds upon some overall concept with citations from other political science authors were so dull that I found myself getting frustrated whenever I was stuck on them for a bit. Overall, probably worth a read for anyone who is into this kind of subject AND wants to find out more about pre-"Arab Spring" Yemen. If you're like me and only fit into the latter category, you may want to look for something that focuses more on the actual history. I know I won't be reading this one again.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Best political science writing I've read in awhile.

[Rinke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Superinteresting work of a cultural anthropologist about the difference between legitimatie power in the eyes of a government, and legitimacy in the eyes of its people.