In Yemen Chronicle, Steven Caton interweaves two narratives into a beautifully written ethnomemoir of his fieldwork in Yemen. On the one hand, he provides a riveting account of a tribal war—and its poetic mediation—that he was caught up in while in the field during the late 1970s. On the other hand, he offers a highly personal account of the fieldwork experience itself, drawing on extended excerpts from his field notes, diaries, and letters as well as vivid memory fragments and reconstructed dialogues. In pushing these narratives up against one another, Caton seeks to blur the genre conventions of ethnographic writing and, in particular, the split between the personal, subjective writing usually confined to diaries and letters and the more detached or objective style associated with field notes. By turns dramatic, funny, poignant, irreverent, ironic, and confessional, the book is practically a page-turner—a distinction all too infrequently conferred on ethnographic works. Although the author draws largely on his previous field materials and memories, he incorporates a pivotal return trip to the Yemeni highlands in 2001.

One of the great merits of this work is that it brings to life the vivid and sometimes tenuous connections between tribal politics and tribal poetry as they unfolded through time. Caton plunges the reader into a dramatic tale of abduction, dissimulation, and betrayal: Two Yemeni women were taken from a nearby hamlet, triggering a regional conflagration accompanied by an impassioned exchange of poetic missives. Caton reveals his day-to-day struggles to gain access to and make sense of this poetry even as he sought to stay out of the crossfire (at one point, sleeping in his back room to avoid the bullets flying through his parlor). Through this account, both Caton himself and his Yemeni interlocutors emerge in all their human dimensionality.

In Caton’s attention to the poetry of dispute resolution, readers will find continuities with his earlier project (Peaks of Yemen I Summon: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe, University of California Press, 1990). For reasons no doubt related to both tribal and academic politics, he scarcely mentioned the war in his earlier work. Here, however, it emerges as central both to regional politics and to Caton’s own fieldwork experience. Caton’s previous discussion of a cohesive, but somewhat static, tribal poetic system yields to a far more complex account of the uncertainty, risk, confusion, and fear inherent in attempting to resolve a regional conflagration with words alone—for both Yemeni tribesmen and the ethnographer. Caton was literally caught up in the dispute: at one point, he was abducted, spent several nights in a Yemeni prison cell, and faced interrogation by National Security agents.

The book is neither a conventional ethnography nor a classic memoir. Readers expecting a new performance of Caton’s sophisticated theoretical training in the philosophy of language and poetics will find little formal semiotic analysis. The author presents the poetic texts as episodes in an unfolding drama that rhyme, meter, and metaphor help to build. Caton thinks with theorists—among them, Bakhtin, Burke, Clifford, Durkheim, Goffman, Lacan, Ricoeur, and Said—almost as if they were another kind of informant, useful for bringing particular kinds of illumination to discrete aspects of a social scenario. This dialogic engagement with theory is enabled by Caton’s framing of the work as an ethnomemoir, a move that also allows him to break with several genre conventions associated with ethnographic writing. Like a memoir, this book is unencumbered by citations, footnotes, references, and native-language poetic texts. Yet Caton’s exquisite attention to the embeddedness of the poetry within a particularly sensitive social situation makes the book far more than a conventional fieldwork account. The poems come alive: first, as creative, sophisticated, witty, and sometimes biting exchanges between savvy poets; second, as ethnographic documents that Caton only gradually gained access to via dialogic, engaged, and often frustrating encounters with his own interlocutors.

Caton writes in a lively, jargon-free prose accessible to readers of all backgrounds, from undergraduates to interested lay readers. At the same time, he raises key issues about fieldwork practice and ethnographic writing that make this book appropriate for advanced graduate seminars. With Yemen Chronicles, Steven Caton has produced a tour de force that lays out compelling new terrain for ethnography.
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