"Moralities and Outcasts: Domination and Allegories of Resentment in Southern Yemen" by Huda A. Seif

Huda A. Seif

Deposited 2003

Abstract
This dissertation deals with practices of social categorization through the deployment of discourses of difference and morality in southern Yemen. It analyzes the ways in which this deployment is experienced as social domination and class inequalities in marginal social spaces. It argues that these discourses and their construction of morally unequal social categories work, not as shared worldviews of castes or an archaic form of social organization, but mainly as class and coercive domination. The construction of the marginal “immoral” as the “Other” of the morally superior and socially dominant “Self” is crucial for the materialization of the moral persona and the delineation of moral spaces. Religious and tribalist moralities further mediate class tensions and legitimate inequality that are born out of the experiences of marginality in a field of struggle for political authority and legitimacy within the purportedly egalitarian Muslim paradigm.

Powerful discourses and domination are questioned within experiences of marginality, which create dissenting voices against the authoritative world. Marginal groups express their resentment towards existing relations of domination through enactments of near thespian character, including devil possession and healing performances. Both the dominant and the marginal groups are constrained to recognize the satanic power of the devil, which is described in the authoritative Holy Text, the Qur'an. Dispossessed collectives utilize this authorization for their own purposes, voicing their resentment through devil possession narratives and healing performances.

The dissertation refers to these narratives and performances as “allegories of resentment” and ethnographically navigates the multiple social sites within which they are staged. It also urges their appreciation as valid and illuminative cultural narratives.

The corporeality of the human body is crucial for the articulation of resentment just as it is instrumental in the deployment of discourses of social difference and morality and in the materialization of unequal social difference. As genealogical bloodlines have been used in the legitimation of domination through history, so the dispositions of human bodies to hunger, disease, torture, and death are invoked as material contexts in which to condemn class inequality.

The dissertation views these relations of domination historically as well as within the context of contemporary politico-economic changes in post-socialist southern Yemen.