I. M. Lewis and Somali Clanship: A Critique

Abstract

In this article, Kapteijns offers a critique of the clanship paradigm of I. M. Lewis, a leading scholar in the field of Somali studies from the early 1960s until today. Kapteijns situates Lewis's paradigm on Somali clanship at a particular historical moment, namely, at the end of the colonial period, and proposes that we see it as representative of a "colonial synthesis" or "colonial consensus" that was worked out between the colonial state (especially the British colonial state) and its Somali subjects over a period of about 80 years. She argues that, rather than seeing the episodes of "clan cleansing" and other forms of clan-based communal violence that marked the Somali civil war (1978 to the present) as evidence that the Lewisian paradigm of clan is correct, we should ask how this way of thinking, which has its roots in colonial state formation, has--in limited, namely, discursive ways-contributed to the Somali self-views that have made such large-scale violence in the name of...