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HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES Poetry as Power -- Caton studies complex role of poetry in Yemen society By Andrea Shen
As a child, Steven Caton saw the Academy Award-winning film Lawrence of Arabia for the first time. "It had a tremendous impact on my imagination," Caton says of this 1962 epic tracing the life of T.E. Lawrence, the British officer, adventurer, and archaeologist who unified Arab tribes to fight the Turks during World War II. In particular, he recalls a scene where Bedouin raiders, led by Lawrence, thunder through a canyon in Jordan on their way to lay siege to the port city of Aqabah. "On top of these cliffs, women in black are ululating [uttering loud, shrill cries]," Caton says. "And on the bottom you have these men riding through the wadi, chanting poetry. The camera work goes back and forth between the women on the top, and the men on the bottom, in a kind of antiphony between these gendered perspectives. It’s quite magnificent. That kind of beauty made me really want to go to the Middle East."Caton would get his wish. All his life, he has been something of a Lawrence figure himself, though he might cringe to hear the comparison. He has been a wanderer with a complex cultural identity. Now, as professor of contemporary Arab studies at Harvard, Caton has a new home base. He teaches anthropology, linguistics, and Middle Eastern studies, in a joint appointment at the anthropology department and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies.Caton traces his interest in anthropology to an early sense of difference. Born in Germany to an American father and German mother, Caton grew up speaking German, and he perceived himself as European. When he was ten, his family moved to America. "In class one day I rose to answer a teacher’s question, which was conventional in the German classroom, and I barked out the answer, and the entire class erupted in guffaws," Caton recalls. "I was so embarrassed that when I went home, I said, I’m not going to speak another word of German from now on."It was at that point that I became aware of cultural difference in a really profound way," he says.Caton got his B.A. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and his M.A. from Northwestern University. He focused heavily on linguistics, a field that wed his interest in the humanities (especially literature) to "scientific" discipline. While working toward a joint Ph.D. in anthropology and linguistics at the University of Chicago, Caton renewed his interest in the Middle East. "The U.S. was pouring money into Middle Eastern studies at this time," Caton recalls of the early 1970s. Petroleum-rich countries led by Saudi Arabia had launched an oil embargo to protest the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Fundamentalist Islamic forces were also gaining strength in Iran. In 1979, almost two decades after first seeing the Bedouins chanting poetry in Lawrence of Arabia, Caton moved to Yemen to research a dissertation on oral tribal poetry. He had become fluent in Arabic by this time, a language difficult for English speakers because of its pharyngeal sounds and its unusual morphology. He traded his Western clothes for local garb. He lived, like his neighbors – who claimed to be descendants of the prophet Mohammed – in a house made of stone-and-mud brick, with white plaster detailing, and colored-glass windows. Outside, the mountains rose, arrow-like, thousands of feet into the sky.For what would become his first book, Peaks of Yemen I Summon, Caton studied the central role that poetry plays in Yemeni daily life.He examined the thriving market for cassette-recorded poems. Citizens recorded and sold salvos that were often highly critical of the government. "The government would have its own poets, who would reply to these challenges," Caton says. "So you had a fairly lively debate going on about national politics." Caton also witnessed poetry-mediated negotiations between warring tribes. Gaunt-faced men wearing long kilts, suit jackets, and rifles, the tail of their headdresses flipped over their shoulders, would arrive at neutral meeting places in the mountains."As they arrived, they would be chanting poetry. One side would be chanting a poem, and the other side would be listening to it and then would reply," Caton says. "And then the other side, hearing the reply, would chant yet another reply. And before the talking would even start, they knew what the issues were going to be. And they’d often leave chanting poetry, framing their moral positions once again."Caton also attended weddings, where guests collectively built oral poems as gifts to the bridegroom. These highly formulaic poems would inevitably be interrupted by a lone word-slinger challenging other guests to chant a poem as well-crafted as his. The guests would enact an escalation of temper – including name-calling in rhymed couplets – culminating in the older men making peace, also in verse."I always took this as a kind of moral tale, an allegory about the problem of violence in an honor-driven society," Caton says. "I was critical of a certain orientalism that looked at tribes as endemically violent. I wanted to get beyond that by saying yes, violence happens, but they also have mechanisms of their own to deal with that, to contain it. Poetry is one of them."Yemeni tribal poetry has regular meter, "dazzling" alliterations, and intense use of metaphor, Caton says. He declaims a poem about the civil war between North and South Yemen in the 1970s. Glottal sounds and rolled consonants pour from his mouth. "One of his great strengths is that he understands not just the culture but the language, and uses language as a window onto the deep structure of culture," says William Fash, chair of the anthropology department. Caton is "a fabulous speaker," says Fash. "We’re very pleased that in addition to being a great scholar, he’s contributing a great deal to undergraduate and graduate teaching." Caton has taught at Vassar, Carleton College, Hamilton College, Washington University, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and most recently, the New School for Social Research. He has just published a book analyzing the film Lawrence of Arabia. He is also revising a manuscript about his fieldwork experiences in Yemen. Not surprising for such a nomad, he is also studying the population of migrants who travel back and forth between Yemen and New York City. He is interested in how these human shuttlecocks adjust to life in the United States and create a cultural impact back in Yemen. Caton hopes to bring this transnational mindset to the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. He would like to create "bridging appointments," enabling scholars to spend part of their time at Harvard, and part in a Middle Eastern country. Caton talks of the peculiar homelessness of the anthropologist. "That’s a very deep personal strain in a lot of anthropologists. They talk about not feeling quite at home in their own culture, and that’s why they go outside to another culture. But when they come back, they can’t ‘go home.’ They’re now even more different than they were leaving it."Somewhat like Lawrence, the tribe-less man in Arabia, Caton puzzles over defining his cultural identity. "I see myself as someone who’s engaged in a number of different political and intellectual projects. And this has certain effects, but I don’t see them cohering into a narrative where I can say, this is Steve Caton. When I look back on who I was, or where I’ve been, or where I’ve come from, I can’t give any kind of coherent narrative. Nor do I wish to."
Copyright 1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College |
