Abstract
Children are discouraged from the use of qat before the age of 12, but this rule is not strictly adhered to. Children in qat growing areas and those of poor families of cities and towns often begin occasional chewing at much younger ages than do those of the elite. Poorer children can be seen picking up the remains discarded from adult sessions, or from the streets around the qat markets, and I have observed children of not more than 5 years old being offered a few sprigs from their grandfathers’ robtas in sessions on Jabel Sabr. The common feeling is that qat is too strong for small children but that small amounts occasionally will not harm them. Younger teenage boys and girls gradually begin to attend the qat sessions of parents and relatives, and are thus gently introduced to the pleasures of chewing. In times of famine and among the very poor, qat may sometimes be given to children in the morning to reduce hunger.
Women’s Song
Long live qat,
which makes us kind, and
makes us stay peacefully at home with our friends and families1
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Notes
Recorded by Claudia Fayein (1957).
The way some Yemenis express this is by the phrase yabis batin,it dries the stomach (Messick, personal communication).
I am describing here the male qat sessions. Further on the female version will be discussed.
In Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East a man often carries his own small plastic mouthpiece which fits onto the larger wooden ones, but this practice had not reached Yemen at the time of our stay there.
In order to strengthen her argument regarding the symbolic and social importance of qat, Weir equates the effects of qat with those of coffee and tea, and generally attempts to minimize its pharmacological effects (1985:42, 149). It should be evident from much of the discussion here that while these effects are not as overwhelming as traveler“s reports would lead one to believe, they are one very significant determinant of qat session behavior, and of the Yemenis generally high valuation of the drug. This will be further demonstrated in Chapters 5, 7, and 9 of this book.
This is especially the case in many towns and villages. Women too visit in the afternoons, but extremely few of them chew gat. Whereas in Sanaa and in most villages in the Amran area it is quite acceptable for women to chew gat and to smoke the madaa,this is not the case for Amran women themselves. Most women and men of Amran believe it is wrong for Amran women to chew, but tolerate the gat use of Sanaanias and villagers (Dorsky 1981:56).
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© 1987 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Kennedy, J.G. (1987). A Social Institution. In: The Flower of Paradise. Culture, Illness and Healing, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-6876-0_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-6876-0_4
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