State Mediation of Qāt Consumption in Yemen: The Political Socialization of the National Polity

Abstract

Yemen is probably unique in the world, as it is a country in which the consumption of a commodity (qÄt) – that is considered a drug, and an illegal one, elsewhere – structures the functioning of its social order, and regulates the quotidian existence of its population. This article explains how a plant became the singular object of commodity fetishism on a national scale, and how its mode of consumption came to instantiate a state-enabled social panopticon. It presents a comprehensive narrative that situates the endemic cultural practice of qÄt consumption in Yemen within a historical continuum that spans nearly a century of qÄt mediated state-society relations. In adopting a historically embedded explanation of this practice, the article provides a corrective to the intrinsically mistaken nature of the ahistorical interpretive framework of metropolitan travelling theories used by most social scientists – especially anthropologists – studying the qÄt phenomenon in Yemen. Accordingly, the article retraces the historical trajectory of the gradual sedimentation of the qÄt chewing practice into an inexorable state-qÄt-society nexus as the constitutive matrix of Yemen’s national polity. The article elucidates how qÄt consumption was used by the Yemeni state in the political socialization of citizens as part of its polity formation strategy. This is done through a reconstructed genealogy of the state mediation of qÄt consumption informed simultaneously by a historical anthropology, a cultural sociology and a political economy of the multiple factors and ensemble of processes that contributed to the societal hegemony of this practice. The article offers a panoramic analysis that integrates the social, cultural, political, economic and institutional ramifications of qÄt fetishism through a narrative of four historical conjunctures which illustrate the shifts in state policy vis-à-vis qÄt and the capillary effects throughout Yemeni society. The article concludes with a summation of the current configuration of state-society relations in which qÄt emblematizes a national social currency, and offers a brief menu of the challenges to be confronted in addressing the multiple dilemmas of Yemen’s endemic qÄt chewing culture.