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Peripheral Visions
Lisa Wedeen
其他書名
Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen
出版
University of Chicago Press
, 2009-08-01
主題
Social Science / General
Social Science / Anthropology / Cultural & Social
Political Science / General
History / Middle East / General
ISBN
0226877922
9780226877921
URL
http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=vENa-ZYneFYC&hl=&source=gbs_api
EBook
SAMPLE
註釋
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.