Page 176 - Arabian Studies (V)

164 Arabian Studies V

prominent men were heads of such larger families. Because of their
control of a larger and diversifiable labour force and extensive
property base, the heads of such households were natural leaders in
the community. Or put the other way round, the man with political
ambitions sought to consolidate his control of family property and
family labour at some stage in the growth of his power. Thereafter,
the maintenance of the family’s position depended upon a man
succeeding to the direction of the family enterprise and of his ruth­
less resistance to the alienation of land by men and women moving
out of the household. Such complex households were held together
11 not only by brotherly communion over the common meal but also
by coercion—internal and external.
The factors of external coercion are fast disappearing in modern
Yemen, but they are not difficult to identify. Not long ago such
households were the storehouses of food and fuel in an agricultural
economy centred about local production. Today, as the nation is
becoming increasingly dependent upon imported grain, the store­
houses are located abroad, or internally in the hands of traders or
the state.8 The best of labour, the young men, move out to work in
the oil-producing states. Qat, the most rapidly growing and most
valuable crop for the market, has almost no food value, cannot be
ii: 1 stored, and entails almost everywhere exceptionally individualistic
l organisation for marketing.9 More slowly, the power of local
weapons promises to become less crucial in defining access to land
I
and water in the countryside. In spite of the rapidity with which
Yemen has been penetrated economically, the cash and arms
provided from abroad to conservative rural leaders has slowed the
expansion of state authority in the highlands over the past decade.
This has allowed a measure of political decentralisation to continue
a! within which the great family houses of powerful men flourish.
The family structures and legal institutions which prevented
many men, as well as most of the women, from independent
control of the property on which they had a claim are being trans­
i;
.1:1 formed today. Indeed, property was not entirely free for men
either. Family land, even when farmed by different individuals,
often remained formally undivided. No individual member then
had the right to sell any part of the family land to outsiders, and,
even when the land was divided among the heirs, the local
community recognised a right of pre-emption for related family
members.10 Furthermore, at the base of many complex and wealthy
. households was the refusal of a powerful man to divide the joint
1 ' family patrimony.
I There are several points to note about the larger households. In
an environment where rain-fed grain agriculture was precarious,