The Harvard Gazette recently interviewed Steven C. Caton, Khalid Bin Abdullah Bin Abdulrahman Al Saud Professor of Contemporary Arab Studies and former director of CMES (2004–2009), on his work studying water issues in Yemen from an anthropological perspective, and on how he came to the subject:
After leaving Yemen in 1981, Caton completed his doctoral work at the University of Chicago and began teaching. He published three books, including 1990’s “Peaks of Yemen I Summon,” on the nation’s poetry, and 1999’s “Lawrence of Arabia: A Film’s Anthropology,” which examined the famous movie from an anthropological perspective. It was the third title, 2005’s “Yemen Chronicle: An Anthropology of War and Mediation,” that reacquainted him with the land that had been so formative for his career, and that set him on the path he treads now.
With the Middle East in turmoil and Yemen experiencing on-and-off fighting, Caton hadn’t been back in decades.
In 2001, he had returned to Yemen to conduct research on the tribal war. During that trip, Caton was shocked at the changes — chronicled in his 2005 book, along with his notes and memories from his first visit — that the intervening years had wrought. The capital city, Sana’a, had greatly expanded and modernized. Water, which had not been in short supply during his fieldwork, had become scarce.
In the countryside, water shortages had led farmers to abandon their fields and move to the city. And in the city, increased demand for groundwater had lowered the water table and dried up the gardens and fruit trees that had made Sana’a not just a beautiful and ancient capital, but a green city in a dry part of the world. The nearby wadis, or small valleys, where city dwellers had found shady respite from the city’s madness, had been developed or dried up.
“What shocked me was the water situation,” Caton said. “Entire valleys were abandoned because they either didn’t have the money to drill deep enough to get water or it was not good enough quality to use for cultivation.”