Ho Engseng. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2006.

Extract

For centuries descendents of people from the region of Hadramawt on the southern Arabian Peninsula have navigated the Indian Ocean and inhabited its far-flung littorals. Engseng Ho's The Graves of Tarim offers an anthropological history of these Hadramis, in particular the ‘Alawī Sayyids, one line of the Prophet Muhammad's descendants through his daughter Fāt˙ima and cousin ‘Alī. Beginning in the graveyards of Tarim, a town in Hadramawt where some of the earliest ‘Alawī ancestors are buried, Ho describes genealogical rituals developed at the turn of the fifteenth century used to “presence” those buried there, bringing the living into contact with the dead. These practices, which Ho identifies with a complex of Sufi practices (t˙arīqa) called “the ‘Alawī Way,” took on new resonances as a Hadrami diaspora, “a society of the absent,” spread across the Indian Ocean. Its members, like the buried ‘Alawī ancestors at Tarim, required constant “revivification.” For some this was achieved through genealogies associated with the ‘Alawī Way, transformed and reworked on journeys, which sometimes spanned generations, away from, returning to, and circumventing Tarim.