I. M. Lewis and Somali Clanship: A Critique

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 clan possible. This article had been accepted for publication by the editors of Lewis's festschrift, but when Lewis expressed objections to its inclusion, the editors pressured the author to withdraw it. However, the major objective of this article is not to question Lewis's pivotal significance and enormous accomplishments in Somali studies, but to put his work into historical perspective and to bring to bear on it new insights from other areas of study.