The period I have spent exploring tribal societies in Yemen's northernmost Saʿdah area spans—with interruptions—around fifteen years, and I can hardly imagine a more profound set of changes converging on and in one place. For an anthropologist, these changes are of a political, spatial, technological, and methodological nature, all of which are deeply intertwined.
During this period, political processes in Yemen produced new spatial meanings and configurations, which in turn deeply influenced communication and interaction with my human sources in the field. These changes, caused by the vicissitudes and imponderabilities of deteriorating internal and external conflict, challenged and profoundly redefined the possibilities and parameters of ethnographic practice. Face-to-face approaches of both collaboration and “being in fieldwork” were being altered as digital media and technology became substitute channels through which I came to maintain contact and relationship with an ever-more inaccessible field. Oddly enough, over the years many of my local sources from the Saʿdah area experienced a similar fate: the politics of space, dismemberment, and displacement pursued in Yemen's internal wars, and since 2015 the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen, deprived them of access to their home areas. As a result, since 2015 I have conducted my research on the Saʿdah area in communication with displaced persons, refugees, and people on the move.
“Fieldwork” has always been a forgiving cover term for an adaptive mélange of methods, and despite the importance that anthropology attaches to personal encounters and participant observation, anthropology has a long history of studying cultures at a distance.Footnote 1 When in recent years entire states and regions of the Middle East began to gravitate out of the reach of anthropologists, new deliberations on the pros and cons of distance approaches began to expand ethnography. One of the best known is Antonius Robben's approach that—based on Andre Gingrich's “macrocomparison of distant case studies”—advocates for an “ethnographic imagination” as a comparative approach with other regions to explain phenomena in areas that became inaccessible and cannot be studied directly through ethnographic fieldwork.Footnote 2 This and other approaches provided important causeways into the fields and spaces where ethnographic participant observation became impossible. In my case, however, working by comparison proved unfeasible. Exploring the minutiae of tribal societies, tribal history and genealogy, and tribal politics in Yemen's remote north required personal exchange with sources in (or at least from) the Saʿdah area. What is special are the series of transformations which my work with human sources from the field underwent from 2003 to today, and which I shall briefly summarize in the following.
Like previous generations of researchers in Yemen, I started my research in the Saʿdah area in 2003 by applying the grounded, inductive method of anthropology that relies heavily on fieldwork and participant observation as epitomized by, among many others, Bronislaw Malinowski and Clifford Geertz. During my early stays, I was embedded in the local rural system, mostly staying as a guest in the houses of tribal shaykhs, a situation that enabled me to gain close familiarity with their social and natural environments. Like decades of anthropologists before me, I did my initial note taking the old-fashioned way, by writing with a pen and pencil on paper; I never took a laptop with me to the field. From this time originate networks of friends in Saʿdah that endure to this day. These friendships and those that have been added since were (and still are) the very base of my research. I concur with Marina de Regt who argues—in a Malinowskian style—that empathy and friendship enrich working with sources from the field, because the insights that ensue from a long-standing personal relationship may provide more depth than conventional research methods.Footnote 3 In addition, these friendships later enabled me to counterbalance the difficulties that resulted from the emerging Huthi conflict.
The Huthi conflict erupted in summer 2004 in Saʿdah province. It arose from a multifaceted resistance movement which began to emerge back in the 1980s in Saʿdah and was directed against the marginalization of Yemen's Zaydi-dominated extreme north by the republican government in sectarian, economic, and political terms. Since the turn of the millennium this movement was dominated and led by members of the eponymous al-Huthi family. Over the last decade the Huthi conflict and, since 2015, the concomitant Saudi-led military intervention engulfed large parts of Yemen in a severe humanitarian and hunger crisis which further contributed to the region's instability.
When the Huthi conflict began to spread across Yemen's north, my research had to cope with first difficulties, most of which concerned spatial transformations. The Yemeni government reacted with great rigor in the affected areas. Between 2004 and 2010 it waged six military campaigns against the Huthis, the so-called “Saʿdah wars.” In addition, the government established a regime of closure and spatial dismemberment by which it sought to demonstrate power and assert control, and whose manifestations became starkly etched into the rural topography of northernmost Yemen. The spatial policies of the Yemeni government bore resemblance to policies that have been plaguing Near East politics for decades. Since summer 2004 the inhabitants of the Saʿdah area as well as foreign researchers had to learn to deal with an ever-increasing presence of checkpoints, military installations, curfews, road blocks, mine areas, refugee camps, and a byzantine system of permits governing mobility.
The ensuing increase in complexity of Saʿdah's political and spatial situation made networking and staying in touch with friends more important than ever before, as each of my stays in the research area was preceded by a complicated bargain between various inviting, supervising, and controlling parties. I observed with interest the overt and covert power play between the government, local authorities, police, military, shaykhs, and tribes, which represented a fascinating research topic in its own right. My circle of friends expanded and began to include politicians, administration officials, police, and military officers. I created a folder in which I filed early Yemeni press coverage of the Huthi conflict, and a dossier of influential persons in the Saʿdah province and adjacent areas. This dossier originally served the purpose of keeping track of the numerous names, titles, ranks and grades, offices, tribal and kinship affiliations, phone numbers of my friends and acquaintances whose number grew rapidly, and with all of whom I had to be on good terms to retain access to my research area. Although distance approaches—via the phone or other means of telecommunication—increased, I did not see this situation necessarily as a methodological rupture with conventional forms of ethnography because I was still able, though often with considerable difficulty, to reach my research area.
In 2008 I left Yemen, where I had resided for a total of five years. When I resumed my research on Saʿdah in 2011, the situation had profoundly changed. The Saʿdah area had become virtually inaccessible to foreigners, and in Sanaʿa the security situation was tense. In the meantime, the mobile phone, social media, and online communication had taken Yemen by storm and become an everyday commodity even in the remotest areas. These new technological possibilities created new forms of engagement. From Europe I reconnected with many of my sources in Saʿdah via Facebook, followed by WhatsApp, Telegram, and the like. Social media became a tool and a means of maintaining relationships with people in inaccessible areas. Facebook allowed me to establish new contacts in the remotest areas of Yemen's north. As Yemen increasingly slipped into crisis and civil war, private digital communication transcended spaces and created new proximities. This digital communication was not just a makeshift solution to stay in contact with the field, but also brought great research benefits. Many people could speak more freely than they would have done face-to-face—in Yemen's highly politicized and conflict-prone environment, the mere physical presence of a foreign researcher can already be compromising. Online, however, no one knew that they were talking to me, and all spoke on condition of absolute anonymity. This completely unobserved conversational situation enabled my sources to communicate freely, to engage in open dialogue without fear of reprisals or other limiting concerns, and to do so without having to censor themselves. At times I spent hours per day chatting with people in Saʿdah's remote hinterlands, preferably in the late evening and at night, when they were free for conversation. Rather than taking fieldwork notes after conversation by writing with a pen and pencil on paper, I transcribed the main contents of hours of WhatsApp conversations (emailing the complete conversations to my email account would have been much too bulky). It goes without saying that these close contacts, made possible by digital communication technology, thoroughly disrupted the long-standing ontological immiscibility of home and field.Footnote 4
Meanwhile, Yemen continued to slide into war. A hybrid and brutal combination of sectarian, political, and tribal conflict began to dismantle the geography and notion of once-unified Yemen. The Huthis grew bolder and expanded militarily from their northern strongholds towards the capital. During my short research stays in Sanaʿa in 2012 and 2013, Saʿdah was already inaccessible because of battles between Huthis and Salafis and their respective tribal allies for Saʿdah's only arterial highway. Within the capital, too, physical obstacles to mobility and checkpoints, at which competing groups displayed and strutted their hegemonial claims, had increased massively. These spatial reconfigurations affected not only me, but also hundreds of thousands of internal displaced persons who had already left the Saʿdah area and had sought refuge in Sanaʿa. Among them were many of my sources from among Saʿdah's shaykhs who had fought the Huthis and had been displaced after the latter's power seizure in Saʿdah in 2011. By 2013 we had all lost access to the Saʿdah area. Whereas digital communication seemed to erode distances and borders, on the ground we encountered militarized sites of immobility and surveillance, controlling and restricting our movements.
In March 2015 a Saudi-led coalition of predominantly Sunni states commenced the bombing campaign dubbed Operation Decisive Storm, which sought to systematically cripple and dismantle Yemen's state and governing infrastructure—its military, water, health, education, sanitation, and electricity systems: a tactic that became integral to reordering many states in the Middle East. During the Saʿdah wars the Huthis had expelled many influential shaykhs from the Saʿdah area. Since the beginning of Operation Decisive Storm, however, many of them became themselves displaced.
Nevertheless, in Sanaʿa the political wheels kept spinning. After the expulsion of Interim President ʿAbd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi to Saudi Arabia in spring 2015, some of my friends on the Huthi side had risen to high positions in the now Huthi-dominated government—ministers, governors, high-ranking members of the military, and a brigadier general of the intelligence apparatus. Many of them were on the coalition's hit list. Again, communication changed. I noticed that many—especially those who had their houses bombed by the coalition—began to permanently change their place of residence and communicated from different pay phones from different places, in this way avoiding any pattern, any consistency, any possibility to predict their location. This was not normal behavior, but rather “tradecraft.” I already knew this behavior from the supreme Huthi leaders in Saʿdah who always feared being geolocated on their cell phones. Dismemberment, the aerial war, and the resulting delocalization and expulsion had ultimately deconstructed and reformulated place and space as fluid and fragmented.
Others of my sources from the Saʿdah area had fled abroad and were waiting there for the end of the war. To complete my book on tribal politics in Saʿdah, from 2015 onwards I communicated with people who had taken refuge in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Djibouti, Oman, Iran, the Emirates, Ethiopia, and Uganda. Only a handful of them still persevered in Saʿdah. In a way, we suffered a similar fate: in our communications we were all focused on the Saʿdah area, to which we had lost physical access. A space that was once accessible and familiar became distant precisely because of restrictions on mobility imposed through a decade of politics of closure, dismemberment, displacement, and internal and external violence. As a consequence, and similar to the situation described by Wendy Pearlman in this roundtable, fieldwork became increasingly delocalized and the (re)construction of the research area was produced in communication with people on the move.
For an anthropologist concerned with living people, nothing can replace fieldwork. This short contribution shows, however, that fieldwork is not a narrow concept, but open to adaptations and redefinitions. In exploring Yemen's remote north, I had to cope with a profound transformation of fieldwork during which face-to-face practices of both collaboration and “being in fieldwork” were reshaped and redefined by new practices of communication and engagement. During this process, my sources from the field and I began to move across different physical and digital spaces, as social media enabled us to amplify being in fieldwork by creating more subtle forms of agency in a fluid research environment. The shift from personal to digital encounters and communication was not aimed to signal a methodological rupture with conventional forms of ethnography. Rather it served to maintain close contact between researcher and researched during a particularly turbulent and tragic period of Yemen's modern history. With so many other countries in the Middle East having become similarly difficult to access, my experiences and approaches resonate with those of other researchers still active in the region. From this vantage point, fieldwork is less a set of fixed practicalities and procedures than a distinctive mode of anthropological problematization.
