Researching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula: Creating Effective Interactions

(photo by Hussein Baomar)

Researching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula: Creating Effective Interactions, Palgrave-Macmillan 2025

Abstract

Researching and Working is written for people who are not from the Gulf Cooperation Council countries or Yemen but are currently living or planning to move there. The book contests the idea of information silos, e.g. that government employees, climate researchers, university professors and business managers need different types of information when moving to the Middle East. Expat communities overlap in that business leaders need insights into locals’ behaviors and priorities in order to make strategic plans, teachers become researchers and researchers get hired and settle in-country permanently. Thus, while there are chapters which focus only on teaching or doing research, most of the text is equally helpful for academics and non-academics.

The book is a distillation of observations, academic research and a longstanding, deep involvement within local communities in the southern Arabia. It gives both specific advice (don’t criticize your mother or anyone else’s mother) and explains potential local reactions to common expat speech and actions. People who have spent decades implicitly and explicitly learning cause and effect sequences in their own culture can become lost when the outcome of a particular act changes in new location. One of the most difficult lessons for expats is that in the Arabian Peninsula an action might not have the expected or intended consequence.

Thus the text is focused on practical, realistic situations not academic theories. It clarifies what to say and do at a business meeting, interview session, presentation, home visit they, etc. by explaining the local customs and expectations for such events, concentrating on specific, realistic advice. For example, many books about working in the Middle East give overly general recommendations such as “dress modestly” but Researching and Working explains the underlying reasons. In some places a person who wears badly-fitting, bad smelling clothes to work might be seen as lazy. On the Arabian Peninsula, that behavior can be viewed as a deliberate choice to be rude to co-workers and disrespectful of the work environment, i.e. the person is not seen as slothful or obtuse but as consciously provocative.

The subtitle is Creating Effective Interactions because this book assumes that the readers want to do the necessary work to adjust to a foreign culture and have win-win communications with conversations, meetings, interviews and daily exchanges that leave both the expat and the local feeling understood and respected.

Bibliography for ‘Researching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula’ (2025, Palgrave Macmillan)

Author Overview

Researching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula developed from my books: Community and Autonomy in Southern Oman (2019, Palgrave Macmillan), Foodways in Southern Oman (2021, Routledge) and Houseways in Southern Oman (2023, Routledge). As I wrote these texts I realized I had numerous examples of issues which arose when other expats conducting research in Oman. I started collecting and organizing advice on how to avoid common mistakes, thinking this would be an appendix to my third book. As the list grew longer, I realized it would make more sense to write a smaller, separate, practical book that focused on helping expat anthropologists, business professionals, government employees and teachers.

This book reflects my 21 years of experience working on the Arabia Peninsula in Oman and the United Arab Emirates and draws on numerous examples of cultural interactions in academic, business and personal spheres. I have taught cultural studies classes at the graduate and undergraduate level, given lectures about local culture to visiting expats, published scholarly and non-fiction articles about cultural interactions and presented at local and international conferences on a variety of topics related to southern Arabia. I have also maintained decade- long friendships with locals, taken classes taught by locals, and lived in local communities.

This text explains over-arching concepts such as the impact of Islam on daily life, how to navigate working relationships with the opposite gender and the importance of tribes so that expats can create successful interactions. This book explicates domains of basic knowledge that are absent from the conventional sources of information about the Arabian Peninsula, filling the gap between travel guides which center on tourists’ concerns (hotels, restaurants and site-seeing) and scholarly books which center on one particular group in a society such as Sachedina’s Cultivating the Past, Living the Modern: The Politics of Time in the Sultanate of Oman (2021).

I have frequently heard the frustrations of expats who, often from a lack of basic knowledge, make incorrect assumptions about Omanis, Yemenis, Emiratis and Saudis. I was once talking to another expat about my research and how difficult it is to get information about the tribes who speak Gibali (Jebbali/ Jebali, also referred to as Shahri), a non-written, Modern South Arabian language in southern Oman. He said, “So you must ask a lot of questions.” I said, “No, I ask very few questions.” The look on his face was the look of a person struggling to reframe their whole conceptual framework of what “doing research” means. He is fluent in Arabic and has lived in the Middle East for more than five years and to him “research” means asking whereas in the cultures I study, and on the Arabian Peninsula in general, asking isn’t always the most effective way to gather information.

Posing a question may result in informant saying what they think you want to hear. Asking questions may also put one in a position of weakness, potentially marking you as a person who lacks self-control or self-confidence. It is often best to watch and wait. When one of the men in my research group tells me, “We will come to your house at 5,” I don’t ask who “we” refers to. 2, 5 or 10 men might show up; a good person will have tea and snacks for any possible crowd. And if no one has arrived by 6:30, I will not write to ask if they are still planning on coming. I need to trust that if they don’t show up there is a reason which I might or might not learn in time.

Practicalities of Moving to the Arabian Peninsula

Practicalities of Moving to the Arabian Peninsula: How to Sit, Not Wear Shoes and Use Your Hands

Practicalities of Moving to the Arabian Peninsula: Getting and Sending Mail/ Packages

Practicalities of Moving to the Arabian Peninsula: Navigating Public Spaces

Practicalities of Moving to the Arabian Peninsula: Dealing with Loss

Enthnography

Ethnography – Finding the Middle Ground, part 1 of Discussing Photographs

Ethnography – Whatever You Do, Don’t Smile, part 2 of Discussing Photographs

Ethnography – Staying Calm

Ethnography – Navigating Shaking Hands on the Arabian Peninsula

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Getting it Wrong

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: What is Missing and What Changes