Marieke Brandt is a senior researcher at the ISA, with a primary focus on the anthropology and social and intellectual history of Yemen. She spent five years in Yemen, where she studied Arabic and worked in development and humanitarian aid, providing services to benefit local communities. Since returning to academia in 2011, she has focused on the bottom-up exploration of Yemen’s Ansar Allah (Houthi) movement. This endeavour required extensive preliminary research through both on-site and digital ethnographic fieldwork, as well as the inclusion of emic source material ranging from medieval manuscripts and handwritten genealogies to contemporary media. Since 2013, deteriorating conditions in Yemen limited ethnographic fieldwork to the digital realm, leading her to refine digital anthropological methods and engage in their theoretical reflection.
These extensive preparatory efforts laid the foundation for her award-winning first monograph, Tribes and Politics in Yemen: A History of the Houthi Conflict (2017), which enquires into the evolution and early trajectory of the Houthi conflict within its local context, and pays particular attention to local agencies in policy implementation, ideology dissemination, and religious hermeneutics at the grassroots level. As her most influential work to date, Tribes and Politics in Yemen led to numerous invitations for named lectures at prestigious universities and institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, and SOAS. It has been extensively reviewed and has been translated into Arabic by the Omani publisher Dar al-Falaq (forthcoming).
Her second monograph, The Tale of a Feud: Domination, Resistance, and Agency in Highland Yemen (2023), extends understandings drawn from this ethnography into the range of contemporary history and biographical reflection. This book, which reviewers have described as “masterful” and “outstanding,” is a social biography of a community leader from rural highland Yemen. It explores how the dominant themes in Yemen’s republican discourse related to national politics, ideology, and religion impacted on and were impacted by the life of an individual. This bottom-up perspective on the making of Yemen’s republican history proved to be exceptional rewarding, as it shows how and for what purposes ideas and discourses are understood, elaborated, reproduced, challenged, manipulated, and exploited on community and grassroots levels. The engagement with the theme of (social) biography and the role of biographical writing throughout history sparked her interest in the interplay between social history, intellectual discourse, and ideology in Yemen. Currently, she enquires into the social und intellectual history of Ansar Allah/Houthi ideology and its dialogical (and ambivalent) relationship with Yemen’s rich modern (post-1930s) secular intellectual history, thus venturing into the vast and largely unexplored field of modern intellectual thought and theorisation in Yemen.
She has received several prestigious fellowships, and her research has resulted in a substantial und internationally excellent publication record. Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in journals such as Middle Eastern Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Medieval Worlds, Anthropology of the Middle East, Journal of Arabian Studies, and Anthropos. Many of her publications have been translated into Arabic, underscoring their significance for Yemeni audiences. Her monographs and edited volumes have been reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Middle East Journal, Review of Middle East Studies, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Arabian Studies, and others.
It is worth mentioning that Marieke is a scholar with a severe disability (deafness), equating to an 80% disability rating.
