Rethinking approaches to Somali Studies: a narrative review of anthropological, Marxist, revisionist, and comprehensive perspectives

Abstract

Somali Studies has developed over more than a century into a multidisciplinary field encompassing history, anthropology, sociology, political science, linguistics, religious studies, transnational studies and diaspora studies. Despite this breadth, the field has been shaped disproportionately by a few dominant intellectual traditions, whose assumptions, silences, and normative commitments require sustained critical examination. This narrative review traces the development of Somali Studies from early travel writing and colonial ethnography to the establishment of the Somali Studies International Association and the growth of Somali-authored and diaspora scholarship. Drawing on foundational and contemporary scholarship, it examines not only how analytical approaches to Somali society have changed, but also how transformations in Somali society itself—including state-building, urbanization, displacement, migration, environmental change, and diaspora formation—have altered the realities those approaches seek to explain. It then critically examines four broad orientations that have influenced knowledge production about Somalis: the anthropological approach, centered on kinship, lineage segmentation, and pastoral social organization; the Marxist approach, emphasizing class formation, modes of production, and colonial capitalism; the revisionist approach, challenging claims of Somali homogeneity and recovering marginalized southern, agro-pastoral, riverine, coastal, and minority histories; and the comprehensive or integrative perspective, which seeks to combine religion, clan, nationalism, gender, and civil society within a single analytical framework. Each approach is assessed for its contributions and limitations, including colonial entanglement, clan reductionism, economic determinism, and the danger of idealizing tradition or religion, even within the integrative frameworks. Rather than treating these perspectives as a linear progression toward a superior paradigm, this review evaluates the historical circumstances, analytical scales, and social contexts in which their insights remain useful. The review also identifies neglected and emerging areas, including gender, marginalized communities, urban history, environmental and pastoral change, disability, youth, migration, diaspora knowledge production, digital media, and Somali-language scholarship. Its principal contribution is historiographical and programmatic: it brings competing traditions into critical dialogue while advancing a historically dynamic, comparative, methodologically plural, and decolonial agenda for future research in Somali Studies. The study concludes that no single paradigm adequately explains Somali society and advocates an approach that treats Somali communities and Somali-language intellectual traditions as active producers of concepts, evidence, and knowledge, rather than merely objects of external scholarship.