The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (California World History Library) Review

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The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (California World History Library) ReviewYou can't get through some books because they are boring. You can't get through others because they are so poorly written. But then, there are a few that take a long time to get through because they are so full of ideas and new currents that constantly join a dense, learned discussion. This is one of the latter. I'm not going to tell you that it's an easy trot through the anthropology and history of Hadramawt and its diaspora. No, if you can't sail through "key site of articulation", "ready apparatus of signs", "two distinct realms of textual circulation", or "dynamics of signification"---plus a lot more---your ship is going to sink. The writing is poetic and lyrical at times, but often hard to pin down. Discussions of geneological texts from a remote Yemeni region are not everybody's cup of tea. So, let's just say that this is a book for scholars, a book that will impress you for sure if you stay the course.
Devout Muslims from the remote region of Hadramawt---today in eastern Yemen---began emigrating abroad some five hundred years ago. At first they served as teachers, judges, religious officials, or holy men, settling in India, East Africa, and Southeast Asia. They maintained ties with their distant homeland, often returning to die there. Their remittances or savings bought date orchards in wadis of Hadramawt, their tombs became places of pilgrimage for their descendants and others. Graves of ancestors and holy men turned into pilgrimage sites, beloved of many, condemned as not Islamic enough by others. As European colonial empires grew in the 18th and 19th centuries, Hadrami Arabs linked up with them economically, becoming ever more prosperous merchants and businessmen. They blended into the societies where their diaspora had settled, but maintained contact over many generations with Hadramawt. As the wider Arab world awoke and currents of pan-Arabism, Islamic revival and nationalism began to run, some segments of the Hadrami community became involved. Geneology played a continuous role in their links to one another, to the rising native elites in such places as Indonesia, Malaysia and Zanzibar through intermarriage. The creoles (Hadrami fathers, local mothers) played important parts in the adoptive societies. Hadramawt's remoteness (and lack of obvious resources) meant that it was not colonized until the late 1930s. It was the last place to fall under European colonial rule. The British ruled it with bombs and bribes, trying to maintain order via treaties with a myriad small rulers. By that time, some 20-30% of the population lived abroad. When the British left, Hadramawt, now absorbed into the Marxist People's Republic of South Yemen, entered at last into the 20th century world of nation states, where everybody had to be a citizen of one or another entity, but not more than one. The creoles faced difficult dilemmas. The new rulers tried to break the bonds of Islam and family built over many centuries. When the two Yemens joined, Marxism got the thumbs down, and the sayyid-tribal complex--bound by Islam--re-emerged. That's the story in a nutshell.

From Malaysia himself, Ho probably came to this subject with unique advantages. It is neither a work totally about Yemen nor a work about the diaspora in Southeast Asia, India, etc. It is a work full of questions about emigration, travel, opportunity, eviction, return, family, religion and graves. For the details, and to know how the author answered many questions, I think you'll have to read this complex, fascinating, and sometimes extremely difficult book.
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