Susanne Dahlgren – författare

Situated in the southernmost tip of the Arabian Peninsula, Aden is considered the economic capital of the Republic of Yemen. Once a British colony, the port city later served as the capital of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, the only Marxist regime in the Middle East. Tracing the social and political history of Aden, Dahlgren explores the evolving ways in which gender and family relations are established. The author offers a complex picture of Adeni society in which norms for morality and propriety vary according to the context of the social space. Documenting a nuanced social flexibility, Dahlgren stresses women’s agency and power to maneuver within a traditional patriarchal Muslim community.

At a time when Yemen has been ravaged by a decade of war and subject to myriad political and military interventions, the essays in this collection serve as a timely reminder of the need for grounded anthropological study in even the harshest of circumstances. From tribesmen to refugees, revolutionaries to farmers, state workers to charity workers, intellectuals to the unemployed and the destitute, we learn of the everyday political languages through which people in the country live their lives. This volume is a call for an anthropology attuned not only to locally significant political concepts, but also to the ways in which people actively confront and reorient them while challenging their worlds and engaging the political imagination in a spirit of abiding critique. This concise collection is the fruit of decades of ethnographic fieldwork in Yemen and will be of interest to students and scholars seeking an intimate and nuanced account of life in the country.