Unraveling Somalia: Race, Class, and the Legacy of Slavery

by Catherine Besteman

Overview

In 1991 the Somali state collapsed. Once heralded as the only true nation-state in Africa, the Somalia of the 1990s suffered brutal internecine warfare. At the same time a politically created famine caused the deaths of a half a million people and the flight of a million refugees.

During the civil war, scholarly and popular analyses explained Somalia's disintegration as the result of ancestral hatreds played out in warfare between various clans and subclans. In Unraveling Somalia, Catherine Besteman challenges this view and argues that the actual pattern of violence—inflicted disproportionately on rural southerners—contradicts the prevailing model of ethnic homogeneity and clan opposition. She contends that the dissolution of the Somali nation-state can be understood only by recognizing that over the past century and a half there emerged in Somalia a social order based on principles other than simple clan organization—a social order deeply stratified on the basis of race, status, class, region, and language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812290165
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	01/27/2014
Series:	The Ethnography of Political Violence
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	296
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Catherine Besteman is the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology at Colby College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

PT. I. INTRODUCTION
1. Somalia from the Margins: An Alternative Approach
2. Fieldwork, Surprises, and Historical Anthropology

PT. II. THE HISTORICAL CREATION OF THE GOSHA
3. Slavery and the Jubba Valley Frontier
4. The Settlement of the Upper Gosha, 1895-1988

PT. III. THE GOSHA SPACE IN SOMALI SOCIETY
5. Hard Hair: Somali Constructions of Gosha Inferiority
6. Between Domination and Collusion: The Ambiguity of Gosha Life
7. Negotiating Hegemony and Producing Culture

PT. IV. VIOLENCE AND THE STATE
8. The Political Economy of Subordination
9. Conclusion

Epilogue
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Besteman's well-written and important book is a fine example of how careful scholarship can expose the realities behind widely held beliefs."

Choice

"Besteman's well-written and important book is a fine example of how careful scholarship can expose the realities behind widely held beliefs."—Choice

From the Publisher