(photo by M. A. Al Awaid)

Risse, Marielle. “‘I Came to You for Good’: An Ethnographic Discussion of Folk Tales from Southern Oman.” Third Joint Seminar of The Folklore Society and the Royal Anthropological Institute;  Royal Anthropological Institute, London. October 26, 2017.

http://folklore-society.com/events/folklore-and-anthropology-in-conversation-1

In the 1970s Dr. Tom Johnstone documented the un-written, Modern South Arabian languages of Gibali and Mehri in the Dhofar region of southern Oman by recording autobiographical stories and folk tales. Several of these spoken folk tales were translated into written English and published by Aaron Rubin in 2014. My presentation will explain how these folk tales, recorded just at the beginning of modernization, reflect worldviews that I see daily in my anthropological work in Dhofar.

I will demonstrate how these texts are representative of southern Omani culture by analyzing the various textual elements of the folk tales such as use of setting, characters, plot events and theme. These texts are among the very few documents transliterated in Gibali and help illustrate ways in which the Dhofari culture has, and has not changed, since the rapid modernization after the 1970s. I am specifically interested in how the folk tales reflect still current understandings of the nature of the relationship between married couples and the existence of djinn.