This dissertation, based primarily on 15 months of anthropological fieldwork on Soqotra, the largest and most populated island of the Republic of Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago, examines the material and social effects of the making of a national Protected Area and a global World Heritage site in the geographical, political, and economic peripheries of the Arabian Peninsula. It argues that the recent state and international emphasis on and manufacture of Soqotra's natural heritage has been accompanied by a forceful local and diasporic focus (by Soqotrans on the island and in the Arab Gulf) on Soqotra's cultural heritage: more specifically, a cultural heritage that Soqotrans can ostensibly own, as opposed to the island's nature heritage that has been rendered "global." Nevertheless, the very articulation of cultural heritage as an antidote to national and global hegemony strikes many Soqotrans as a problematic commemoration of past and present heresy. This dissertation, then, explores heritage as both possibility and prison in a setting where the introduction of "the environment" is one of only many political regimes and social transformations to have "entered" the archipelago in the last fifty years. Chapters 1 and 2 discuss the creation of Yemen's first protected area (the Soqotra Archipelago, and within it, Homhil) from (1) an institutional and (2) the beneficiary community's perspective. The following two chapters, which focus on the Soqotrans' interactions with the various forms of state power that preceded the present-day environmental regime, suggest that rural Soqotrans continue to employ a template of "hosting" and "feeding" the state (and other powerful visitors) as a way of "sustaining" themselves. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the confines of "bedouin" heritage, and the translocal competition for the right to define it.
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