Imagining Soqotra: A Genealogy of an Indigenous Community’s Representations

Abstract This article presents a longue durée genealogy of Soqotrans’ representations by successive cohorts of cognitive flâneurs – surrogate intellectual envoys of the West sojourning through peripheral communities for social data mining. This genealogical excavation is divided into five historical periods, spanning from antiquity to the present, chronicling Soqotra’s role as a crucible for invasive mediations by external actors and its conscription into an exoticizing and primitivizing discursive tradition. The genealogy is framed by the persistent affliction of hermeneutical pestilence, an endemic epistemic bigotry in cross-cultural research that leads to the symbolic dispossession of those represented. This epistemic bigotry is a vestige of centuries-long antagonistic relations between the West and its others, based on presumed relational asymmetry, agential disparity, and racial hierarchy within a global regime of intellectual clientelism framed within a paradigm of mimesis. The article identifies five epistemic practices – traveling theory, cognitive flâneurism, imperialist exoticism, unhinged interpretivism, and a frontier’s complex – that engender the epistemic annexation of communities through representational malpractice and interpretive misdemeanors. These practices’ negative consequences are exacerbated by the “add and stir” approach being used to “study” Soqotra by a new wave of practitioners of academic tourism. Finally, the article highlights the emergence of a widespread incommensurability in societal aspirations generated by an “abyssal line,” signifying the demise of the hegemonic West-centric global ideoscape and the rise of a liminal ideosphere where knowledge production is freed from the reflexive symbolic dispossession of others.