This dissertation enhancement grant supports a US graduate student, Mr. Bruce McKim, working under the guidance of Dr. Eric Worby, with the Department of Anthropology at Yale University, to do a multi-site field study in Zanzibar and Oman. Colonial-era accounts often described the social order of Zanzibar as a racially-layered pyramid. At the top was a privileged rural aristocracy of Arab plantation owners, in the middle was a large Indian merchant class, and at the base lay a mass of African laborers. After the 1964 Zanzibar Revolution, however, the state consolidated its control over most economic and social activities and this social order was changed. As a result, the entire Indian community on the island of Pemba emigrated and many of the Arab families migrated to Oman. Zanzibar's recent implementation of market liberalization has resulted in the emergence of a new urban-based commercial class, whose members are mostly Arabs with connections to the Middle East. Mr. McKim will study the social, economic, and political transformations of this commercial class to determine how the Arabs overcame their officially disadvantaged social identity and became successful in commerce, and how they refashioned their identity as an urban elite status group. Information will be collected from ethnographic and archival research in Zanzibar, and interviews with the families of Pemban businessmen who reside in Oman. Research techniques will include participant observation, surveys, interviews, audiotaped oral histories, network sampling, and archival research. Members of the Department of Archives, Museum and Antiquities, Zanzibar Revolutionary Government, will collaborate with Mr. McKim on this project.
The results of this study will increase the knowledge about ethnicity and identity, and how an ethnic group operates in a larger multi-dimensional domain. This project will also support an international research experience very early in the career of an outstanding graduate student. ***
