Peripheral Visions
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A01=Lisa Wedeen
asia
Author_Lisa Wedeen
Category=JHM
Category=JP
citizenry
citizenship
control
crisis
deliberation
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
governing
government
identity
interviews
middle east
nation state
national power
nationalism
order
participation
participatory
performance
political science
politics
public gatherings
republic
social issues
solidarity
south arabia
structures
transnational
unity
violence
yemen
Product details
- ISBN 9780226877914
- Weight: 482g
- Dimensions: 23 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2008
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 at, 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.
Lisa Wedeen is professor in and chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago and the author of Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria.
