While a number of high profile restoration projects and UNESCO sites have attracted the world's attention to Yemen's rich history and immense cultural heritage, individual roles in preserving and transmitting Yemeni culture, especially the roles of female participants, attract less notice. Conservative Yemeni society encourages veiled women to be seen but not often heard in public, especially on matters of national interest. Crucially, however, Yemeni women have taken an instrumental role in the preservation of Yemeni cultural heritage, especially intangible types: children's stories, recipes, sartorial styles, and oral traditions. These national legacies are not as noticeable or feted as the obvious natural and infrastructural sites which have been internationally recognized, but they are at least as integral to painting a complete picture of traditional Yemeni cultural practices. Yemeni women are uniquely suited to this task, as they generally are closer to certain sources for intangible heritage, and it is the growing initiative of these women who increasingly assume the burden themselves of researching and preserving these types of traditions which makes their role both essential and singular. This paper will incorporate interviews with Yemeni women in governmental positions, at local NGOs, as well as foreign female researchers focusing on this topic, who are actively engaged in the preservation of Yemeni cultural heritage. It will examine the challenges they face, the success of their efforts thus far, and their hopes, plans, and concerns about their future endeavors.

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.

This paper first discusses the current study of photography of Ottoman Empire. More specifically, most rightfully engage the subjects of our photographic archive as expressions of new class aspirations, the self-representation of new elites, and defining national and gender identity. To make these assertions, most scholars unquestionably accept certain visual indices as indicators of modernity. Most scholars reach out immediately to poses, studio backdrops and sartorial codes in the photographic portraiture as signifiers of the class or subjective position of the sitter. Therefore, the photographic image provides the viewer and scholar with an a priori internal representational metric to the photographic subject's relationship to modernity, national identity, gender or class affiliation. Second, the current research of scholars of Indian photography (e.g. Pinney) and African photography (e.g. Sprague and Olugu) read against the study of indigenous Middle Eastern photography challenges us to think whether photography participated in and/or documented alternatives to Western modalities of modernity and identity. If so, are we scholars using the correct representational framework to "read" these images such as looking for modernity, new class formations, new gender relations etc. in indices offered exclusively through dress Third, bringing these two sets of research together (the study of Middle Eastern and postcolonial photography), I insist that the social role and effects of photographic image, particularly that of portraiture, can only be gauged if read against the plethora of non-fiction and fiction of the era. The dissonance between the scholarship of Ottoman photography and alternative histories of photography of the colonial world can be understood when, simply said, the photographic archive is read within its own historical and local context, contexts disclosed through the Arab press, fiction and national treatises in Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt. Indigenously produced (studio and amateur) portraiture suggest less the emergence of alternative modernities in Southwest Asia than a profound epistemological phenomenon that accompanied the Tanzimat and the Arab Renaissance. That is, if we look beyond the manifest photographic content defined by poses, studio sets, and dress, we detect a latent content that demonstrates the rise of a radically new form of bourgeois individualism. National, confessional, communal and familial social formations will coagulate during the 19th and 20th century. However, I assert that photography best represents that the indigenous subject was redefined as a monadic individual even if his/her outward practices and appearance might have otherwise represented him/her as traditional.

In the 1960s and 70s, Tunisian cultural policies implicated both female citizens and modern artists in the service of the nation, resulting in the state patronage of an elite woman artist, Safia Farhat. The government simultaneously supported a revival of the artisanat, and particularly women's weaving, as emblematic of national heritage. This paper analyzes the iconography of a series of modern tapestries designed by Safia Farhat and executed by women artisans employed by the Office National de l'Artisanat. The wife of a government minister, Safia Farhat was the first female director of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Tunis (from 1966-1979) and the only female member of the prestigious group of artists known as the Ecole de Tunis. Her elite position enabled her to carry out large-scale artistic projects, such as the production of monumental tapestries for display in newly constructed buildings. In her series titled "Ulysse et Pen lope," Farhat combined local materials, the geometric abstraction of women's weaving, and nationalist imagery to evoke Tunisian cultural patrimony and the birth of a modern national identity. As a cultural producer, Farhat contributed to debates regarding women's transforming social roles in President Habib Bourguiba's quest for modernization. An iconographic analysis of Farhat's tapestries provides a view into how elite women envisioned gender reform in post-Independence Tunisia. This paper assesses the relation between the geometric and figurative motifs depicted in Farhat's representations of Penelope and drawings made by French ethnographers who established the Office National de l'Artisanat. These drawings, which initially appeared in catalogues of women's textile production in the 1950s, were re-appropriated by Tunisian nationalists to symbolize national patrimony in the 1960s. Significantly, during this period, government programs directed at revitalizing the artisanat, and specifically the work of women artisans living in the Gafsa region, intersected squarely with grander modernizing reforms aimed at women's emancipation and economic development. Farhat refers to these reforms in her tapestry "Prnslope I," in which the mythical character Penelope is seated weaving (or unweavinge) a textile formally resembling those traditionally produced by women weavers of the Gafsa region. While this image may signify the fortitude of Tunisian cultural patrimony, upon which nationalist discourses were based, the ambiguity expressed in this work of art also embeds the complexity and contradictions faced by Tunisian women in the formation of a modern identity.