(photo by Hussein Baomar)

As I am slowly settling into a new type of life, the biggest difference is the issue of observation. When I leave the house now, I am never noticed. Children in the USA are often told “it’s impolite to stare” but in Oman, there are many people from cultures in which it is usual/ expected to watch other people closely.

Oman has visual-based, high-context cultures, meaning adults learn by looking around. You have to know what is going on in nearby spaces. Plus, there are tribal-based cultures, part of which is the necessity of recognizing and acknowledging relatives and tribe-members. When men are in public places like a cafe or store, their heads swivel constantly; they need to make sure they are greeting all acquaintances. Women are also always on the look-out so, although there are less female-male exchanges of glances than in the States, everyone is constantly canvasing their surroundings.

Here, everyone here is walking distracted, staring at the middle distance or the ground, usually wearing earbuds or earphones. The goal is NOT to look at anyone. I had to live for years with two colleagues who refused to acknowledge the presence of me and several other department members, which created a very hostile work environment. But coping with that unpleasantness has helped me deal with my new reality; walking down the hallway of my apartment building people pass each other studiously examining the ground, never offering greetings.

One aspect of common Omani surveillance is a sort of, to use Anne Meneley’s term “Tournament of Value,” in that the good/ smart person is the one who identifies who they are looking at. It used to drive me crazy to go grocery shopping and hear whispered comments about me: “she’s a teacher,” “she’s at X university,” “she’s American,” etc. There was a social value in being able to place me so people who knew who I was would always display that knowledge to others.

The “tournament” part was that when people fail to acknowledge someone they know, they are judged negatively. The judgement might stay as a silent rebuke, but it might be brought out in front of family members and/ or peers, “I was sitting in Y cafe, and he came in and did not greet me, perhaps he was thinking of…” This is didactic teasing – teaching the person that they should take more care in looking at their surroundings.

In response to living in a benign panopticon in Oman, I was very careful about my appearance whenever I left my house. As a foreign teacher, I wanted to make sure that, if students pointed me out to their parents, I appeared sufficiently trust-worthy. And given my work with the research guys, I wanted to look frumpy so that no one would wonder why Z man was spending time with an immodestly dressed woman. The result was, to me, a very odd combination of being closely scrutinized while looking incredibly dowdy: long flower-print shirts, tunics in faded colors, the most uninteresting shoes on Earth, muted make-up.

So imagine my feeling of walking out of my house now wearing a bright pink sundress with messy hair and red lipstick! And no one looks! It’s both freeing and scary. In Oman, when I walked through the mall it sometimes felt like I was the star of a kind of The Truman Show as I constantly would overhear people commenting on me. Sometimes I would be told days or weeks or years later, that I had been seen in X place talking to Y person. But now I am nicely invisible.

And part of my current invisibility is when I walk into a cafe now, I look similar to other customers. For the first few years I was in Dhofar, there were many expats from North America, UK/ EU, New Zealand and Australia. The number declined steadily so that for the last ten years or so, everywhere I went I was a visible minority. At the two cafes I frequented, I was usually the only woman. On college-level committees at work I was always the only woman and the only person from a Western country; by the time I left, I was the only professor who was a native speaker of English.

A related cultural change is that my 19 years of learning how to constantly check my environment and place people, has resulted in a body of knowledge that is of no use here. In Oman, by asking questions and receiving warnings, I was taught that A item of clothing meant the wearer was from B place, that a man who sat in C cafe was D sort of person, that this kind of outfit meant the wearer had that kind of job. Now I can’t derive any information about a person by looking at them.

A friend who moved back to her country after more than a decade aboard told me she went through the same learning curve. When she first moved back, she couldn’t figure out anything about the people she was seeing in daily life; it took a long time to rebuild her knowledge base, e.g. X kind of purse was expensive and Y type of car meant the owner was probably Z. I have talked about the hunt to figure out meanings when watching foreign movies [ Teaching Literature and Staying au courant – The Man from Nowhere and the Ancient Greeks ] but what was once a distanced, intellectual exercise is now my every-day life.

Culture Shock: The Basics

Culture Shock: The Parable of the Boxes

Throwing Children in the Street: Culture Shock Omani Style

Intercultural Exchanges