1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910823319403321

Autore

Wedeen Lisa

Titolo

Peripheral visions : publics, power, and performance in Yemen / / Lisa Wedeen

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, c2008

ISBN

9786612240102

1-282-24010-2

0-226-87792-2

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (324 p.)

Collana

Chicago studies in practices of meaning

Disciplina

320.9533

Soggetti

Political participation - Yemen (Republic)

Nationalism - Yemen (Republic)

Yemen (Republic) Politics and government

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

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

Nota di contenuto

Introduction -- Imagining unity -- Seeing like a citizen, acting like a state -- The politics of deliberation: q?t 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.

Sommario/riassunto

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.