Communal Identity Mutation: From Status Hierarchy to Ethnic Ranking

Abstract

This chapter examines the historical mutation of the Soqotran polity’s collective identifications as part of a state-mediated communal identity transformation process. It locates the vector of this transformation of communal identities within a state-community dialectic driven by changes in the state’s adoption of different polity formation strategies. This process is recounted through a description of the initial social structure of Soqotra Island under the Sultanate, and traces its mutation through the emergence of new modes of ethno-political identification under an evolving incorporation process and the influence of trans-regional political and cultural forces. This is done through a structural anatomy of Soqotra’s changing social structure as an indigenous community and a lexical genealogy of the collective identities ascribed to, or assumed by, Soqotrans in the form of a series of discreet ethno-social enclosures produced by the polity formation strategies of a succession of political regimes from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The chapter portrays the Sultanate’s initial ascriptive hierarchy as a system of occupational specialization linked to distinct ecological habitats, and which continues to mediate the integration of Soqotrans into the emergent modern social formation. Also, it shows how communal identity mutated into an ethnicity-based hierarchy of collective identifications in response to externally imposed ethno-political exigencies. Finally, the chapter highlights the dynamic relationality between communal identity transformation and political and historical contingencies, and thus shows that a collective identity is not an ontological fatality but an evolving by-product of changing historical conjunctures.