This two-volume book offers a panoramic explanatory narrative of Soqotra Island’s rediscovery based on the global significance of its endemic biodiversity. The first volume, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra: A Mesography of an Indigenous Polity in Yemen initiated the analytical inventory of the four key vectors of Soqotra’s transition process through a discussion of the first two: economic disarticulation and political incorporation. This volume, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra: Cultural & Environmental Annexation of an Indigenous Community completes the analytical inventory by exploring the other two pivotal vectors of transition: cultural modernization and environmental annexation. These two vectors encompass the critical sociocultural spheres and environmental domains in which Soqotra’s transformation process is unfolding. The origin of these vectors is situated within Soqotra’s long history of exogenous mediations by external actors and their symbolic appropriation of the island into an imaginative geography. The legacy is a “symbolic curse," which has made Soqotra into an ideal playground for fantasist cultural or environmental experiments. Accordingly, this volume undertakes, first, a systematic inventory of the communal effects engendered within the domains of cultural modernization: dissonant linguistic attitudes, alienating consumption practices, divergent religious affiliations, and differentiating economic aspirations. Second, it anatomizes the process of environmental annexation through the reconstruction of the formulation and implementation process of a biodiversity conservation and sustainable development experiment in which the island and its residents are appropriated into an anachronistic paradigm – a pastoral ecotopia – as a blueprint of their future.

This two-volume book offers a panoramic explanatory narrative of Soqotra Island’s rediscovery based on the global significance of its endemic biodiversity. This rediscovery not only engendered Soqotra’s protective environmental supervision by United Nations agencies, but also the intensification of its bureaucratic incorporation and political subordination by Yemen’s mainland national government. Together, the two volumes provide a “total” community study based on an historically contextualized and analytically detailed portrait of the Soqotran community via a multi-layered narrative the author terms a “mesography.” The first volume, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume I: A Mesography of an Indigenous Polity in Yemen, situates the author’s study within the emergent configuration of the structures of knowledge production in the social sciences before moving onto a systematic identification of the constitutive aspects, pivotal vectors, and historical contexts of Soqotra’s transitioning polity. The second volume, A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra, Volume II: Cultural and Environmental Annexation of an Indigenous Community, explores how cultural modernization in the light of environmental annexation transforms communal possibilities, development models, environmental values, conservation priorities, cultural practices, economic aspirations, language preferences, livelihood choices, and other key social norms. The two volumes lay the social scientific foundations for the study of Soqotrans as an island-based indigenous community.

This book focuses on Socotra Island, geographically based in Yemen, and aims to explore the island from the social sciences point of view. This book focuses on people indigenous to Socotra, Socotri cultures, heritage and also offers contributions from business, tourism, linguistic, communication, and anthropology. While a lot has been published in natural science about Socotra’s endemic species, biodiversity, and nature in general, social scientific research of the island is very limited. This book addresses therefore addresses this gap and explores various topics of tourism, behaviours, cultures, and language. This book focuses on a clear social science approach of Socotra. The purpose of this book is to publish research about the people, behaviors, heritage, and potential tourism of Socotra. The Socotra Archipelago has long been a land of mystery. It is unknown as a tourism destination for many, however, is a popular destination for adventurers, photographers and travelers who like to travel to remote and undeveloped places. This book explains how Socotra has limited resources of electricity, which is provided by diesel generators, Internet is very slow and limited to certain points on the island. There are no shopping malls or five-star hotels. Roads, schools, and hospitals have been built only recently. This book shoes how these island people do not know the development as we do, which makes it principally interesting to research. Previous interviewers of Socotri people about tourism development in the island have faced many challenges such as language barriers, lack of understanding the meanings and interviewing content, lack of support for the anticipated research results. This book successfully undertakes this challenge as not only in understanding the language, but understanding phenomena like e.g. tourism. Whilst acknowledging the ways in which indigenous island people have never travelled or seen a developed city. Thus, words like ‘developed’, ‘tourism destination’ or ‘washing machine’ may be unfamiliar terms for them. Therefore, new and innovative research methods that are sensitive to Socotra people were implemented in the creation of this book.

The project of an Apophatic Anthropology (1952) was one of the most significant philosophical concerns of Andre Scrima. Pascalian in essence, the approach departs from the Augustinian roots of Western Christian theology and develops a Christian anthropology based on Eastern Orthodoxy. The endeavor of a human being to understand oneself does not lead, as in the case of Pascal, to identification with Jesus Christ's suffering, but further, to an attempt of deification, theosis, in which the main concept is Incarnation. This attempt opens to man the possibility to conceive himself as interior to God. Man becomes therefore the physical and metaphysical bridge between creation and the uncreated, the only creature that bears the image of God. His mysterious inner being thus forms his unity that is transcendent to nature. Scrima's perspective is nourished by the great sources of Eastern spirituality, from Gregory of Nyssa to Maximus the Confessor. Here, philosophy becomes a chapter of Christology. Scrima believed that, by conceiving the person of the Savior, all problems of human nature and human thought have already been asked. In having both divine and human nature, Christ is the paradigm for any human person. The two natures of Christ which, according to the Council of Chalcedon, are unmixed, unchanged, undivided, and inseparable, represent also the encounter between uncreated grace and human nature in the depths of a deified being. An apophatic anthropology is deeply connected with the trials of the modern world. Scrima considers ontological theocentrism to be the only philosophical attitude that is capable to render the dynamic and fertile element of mystery to a human being. This perspective restores a man in the anagogical tension of profound knowledge and brings him back home. Scrima believes also that ignoring this mystery leads to the tragedy of "losing" the image of God in us, which ends in the separation of the paradoxical unity that is essential to any creature."

Why does the world need anthropology and anthropologists? This collection of essays written by prominent academic, practising and applied anthropologists aims to answer this provocative question. In an accessible and appealing style, each author in this volume inquires about the social value and practical application of the discipline of anthropology. Contributors note that the problems the world faces at a global scale are both new and old, unique and universal, and that solving them requires the use of long-proven tools as well as innovative approaches. They highlight that using anthropology in relevant ways outside academia contributes to the development of a new paradigm in anthropology, one where the ability to collaborate across disciplinary and professional boundaries becomes both central and legitimate. Contributors provide specific suggestions to anthropologists and the public at large on practical ways to use anthropology to change the world for the better. This one-of-a-kind volume will be of interest to fledgling and established anthropologists, social scientists and the general public.

Norwegians in colonial Africa and Oceania had varying aspirations and adapted in different ways to changing social, political and geographical circumstances in foreign, colonial settings. They included Norwegian shipowners, captains, and diplomats; traders and whalers along the African coast and in Antarctica; large-scale plantation owners in Mozambique and Hawai’i; big business men in South Africa; jacks of all trades in the Solomon Islands; timber merchants on Zanzibar’ coffee farmers in Kenya; and King Leopold’s footmen in Congo. This collection reveals narratives of the colonial era that are often ignored or obscured by the national histories of former colonial powers. It charts the entrepreneurial routes chosen by various Norwegians and the places they ventured, while demonstrating the importance of recognizing the complicity of such “non-colonial colonials” for understanding the complexity of colonial history.

What kind of a resource - ethnographic, theoretic and methodological - does literature represent to anthropology?