Barbara Bodenhorn

Gabriele vom Bruck

This book is about personal names, something of abiding interest to specialists and lay readers alike. Over a million people have checked the American Name Society website since 1996, for instance. Many philosophers and linguists suggest that names are 'just' labels, but parents internationally are determined to get their children's names 'right'. Personal names may be given, lost, traded, stolen and inherited. This collection of essays provides comparative ethnography through which we examine the politics of naming; the extent to which names may be property-like; and the power of names themselves, both to fix and to destabilize personal identity. Our purpose is not only to renew anthropological attention to names and naming, but to show how this intersects with current interests in political processes, the relation between bodies and personal identities, ritual and daily social life.

An Anthropology of Names and Naming

Mirrored Loss tells the story of Amat al-Latif al Wazir, only daughter of 'Abdullah al-Wazir, the leader of Yemen's constitutional movement of the mid-twentieth century for democratisation of the autocratic imamate. Her relationship with her adored father, who was accused of treason, takes centre stage in this biographical narrative. Amat al-Latif, enjoyed a privileged childhood in a high-ranking family at the heart of Yemeni politics; yet the failed revolt of 1948 was the family's downfall, leaving her and other close relatives exposed to social indignities and privation. She then spent many years in exile, where she suffered a personal calamity that compounded the earlier catastrophe. Through one family's story, Gabriele vom Bruck explores how violence translates into tragedy in the personal realm, and how individual lives and larger cultural and political worlds intersect in Yemen. Her narrative makes these tragic events compellingly tangible, especially at the level of gendered subjectivity--female Yemenis have been either unknown to or deemed insignificant by most male historians of this period. Mirrored Loss is a significant step in righting that omission.

A Yemeni Woman's Life Story

Mirrored Loss

This book tells a story of a Yemeni hereditary elite that was overthrown in the 1962 revolution in North Yemen, after enjoying exclusive rights to the leadership of the Imamate, the religiously sanctioned state for over a millennium. Rather than concentrating on recent political history, this book highlights the personal predicament of those targeted by the revolution. What is their sense of "past" and "self" in a transformed political setting where in some respects the mark of distinction has become a mark of disrepute? Focusing on the cultural politics of memory, the book explores how--in making sense of their current lives and formulating responses to adversity--members of the elite remember.

Gabriele vom Bruck

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