In July 2008, Yemen's Soqotra Archipelago was officially recognized as a World Heritage Site, thereby becoming one of only five "natural" heritage sites located within the Arab world. This designation is merely the most recent in a long history of state interventions and social transformations to have affected Soqotra's largely pastoral population. Yet, at time when Bedouinness in various parts of the Middle East is celebrated as a form of national-cultural heritage, rural Soqotrans speak of being Bedouin as a form of utter abjection. In this paper, based on fifteen months of fieldwork in one of Soqotra's newly created environmental "Protected Areas," I examine the rural Soqotrans' receptivity to their island's recent changes and their own ambiguous identification with national and international heritage regimes. I argue that rural Soqotrans' self-disparagement of their "Bedouin" selves is shaped both by their material space within the badiya (hinterlands) and by their conceptual place within what Michael Herzfeld has called "a global hierarchy of value" (2004). Indeed, the increasing visibility of Bedouin identity as "heritage" corresponds precisely with the ascendant project of transforming Soqotra into a "World Heritage" site, through which both people and place are "re-discovered" and re-valued as exhibits of their former selves. But what kinds of value(s) does this transvaluation of Bedouinness engender? While Soqotrans are certainly being schooled in the creation and celebration of national and global heritage forms, Bedouinness in Soqotra has not yet been elevated to a collective "heritage" or an inherited "culture." Instead, as suggested above, being Bedouin is considered both a cause and a symptom of one's ostensible "backwardness" and "marginality" on a planetary scale. Nevertheless, in performing their abjection, in calling attention to their degraded state, Soqotrans demonstrate themselves to be as cosmopolitan as their foreign boosters and detractors. This paper concludes, then, that calling oneself "Bedouin" can be an invitation to interrogate and even subvert the global hierarchy; calling oneself Bedouin can be an incisive critique.