Tag: Anthropology

Culture Shock: (Not) Being Under Observation

(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

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Culture Shock: The Basics

(photo by M. A. Al Awaid)

It is interesting after studying and discussing culture shock for so long to be in the throes of it myself. I knew it would be challenging moving back to the States, but I didn’t know how and in which ways it would be difficult. I keep telling myself it’s like body-surfing, don’t fight the wave, give up and roll with it. Some highlights of my adjustment so far:

* toddler brain – at a certain level of exhaustion and being over-whelmed, your usual cerebral safety features give up and you start saying everything you think, like a small child. I sat next to a woman on the metro who had a small fan and said, “you have a fan!” I found myself wanting to do this constantly for the first few days whenever I saw something unusual for me: telling people that they had a dog or were wearing fun sunglasses. When I went to the laundry room, there was a man with bright orange shoes and I had to tell myself over and over, “don’t say ‘you have orange shoes’!”

* odd choices – I went to a few grocery stores when I first moved in and when I eventually organized my kitchen shelves, I realized I had bought 5 different kinds of artichoke spreads. No basics like pasta, rice, honey or vinegar but I have enough artichokes for 25 people.

* simple things seem impossible – doing my first Uber ride felt like falling off a cliff – using my microwave is harder than figuring out Ancient Greek…

* transference – sometimes you do what feels right, only to realize that it’s not ok in the culture where you now are. I got into an elevator and stood with my back to the side wall, staring at the other two people as I had learned to do, got out of the elevator and realized that I had done it completely wrong! In USA, you stand facing the elevator door and don’t look at anyone. Sigh! I spent days obsessively cleaning my countertop and wondering where to get something to cover the sink drain before I realizing that hordes of bugs would not descend if there was a stray crumb laying around.

* relearning to trust – given that certain cultures value a person who is always in control, I had to learn that in asking strangers for simple information such as directions, it was a 50/50 chance of getting the right answer as sometimes people would not have the information but not want to say “I don’t know.” In the states, usually people will be up-front (I certainly am!) when they don’t know, so you can usually trust what you are told.

* rethinking safety – Before I never worried about personal safety or my possessions; I would walk out of my office and leave my purse, phone, wallet, sometimes even cash on my desk. I would leave my purse in the grocery cart and wander over to another aisle. So I had to keep reminding myself to zip my purse, be aware of surroundings etc. But I was glad to see that within my big apartment building, there is a lovely ethos of trust. Deliveries are left willy-nilly by the front door (cartons of soda, Taco John’s, bags of fresh vegetables, Target boxes, etc.) but I have never had anything stolen, or heard of something that went missing.

* getting upset at odd moments – I stood in the drinks aisle and started at the cases of Mountain Dew; no research guys means no need for Mountain Dew in my fridge. For the first time in 19 years, it’s only diet Coke and seltzer water. I picked up a box of Liptons then put it back, no need for tea or sugar.

Culture Shock: The Parable of the Boxes

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: Leaving and Learning

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: Being Safe and Secure

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Deciding to Hire Expat Workers (part 1 of 4)

Chapter published – “Lifeways of Traditional Fishermen in Dhofar, Oman”

(photo by Hussein Baomar)

My chapter “Lifeways of Traditional Fishermen” has just been published. Because of editorial delays the information presented is now out-of-date as the interviews were conducted at the beginning of the Covid epidemic and the prices have changed. But the manner of and results from fishing remain the same.

“Lifeways of Traditional Fishermen in Dhofar, Oman,” in Fish as Food: Lifestyle and a Sustainable Future. Helen Macbeth, ed. International Commission on the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition – Alimenta Populorum series. 2024: 155-170. https://archive.org/details/macbeth-young-and-roberts-ed-fish-as-food-anthropological-and-cross-disciplinary

abstract

Although most of Oman’s gross national product is derived from oil and gas products, fishing still plays an important role in providing jobs which create a cash-producing export and help ensure food security. However, there is little current information about the lives of traditional fishermen. This chapter presents the results of extensive interviews conducted in 2020-2021 to explain the daily lives and customs of fishermen in the governorate of Dhofar, in southern Oman. The chapter focuses on two important questions about fishing economics: how much does it cost to catch fish and how does that expense create a social benefit for fishermen, regardless of the money earned from the catch?

My research concentrates on the hakli/ qara groups of tribes who speak Gibali/ Jibbali (also known as Shari/ Śḥeret, a non-written, Modern South Arabian language) as their first language. I have been looking at the theme of generosity, including sharing food, for more than ten years and in this chapter I explain how much a typical day and season of fishing costs a fisherman, as well as how giving away part of every catch creates a benefit that is more than monetary. Using interviews and personal experiences, I explain how the cash outlay for gas, nets, bait, etc. is transformed into social, in addition to economic, capital for fishermen.

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Culture Shock: The Parable of the Boxes

(photo by M. A. Al Awaid)

This is the first in a series of short essays about the shock of moving back to the states from Oman, with musing about how (writ large) the two cultures work.

When I realized I had to leave Oman, I talked to a man (X) I had known for years who helped me get through everyday life. X had a wide range of friends and acquaintances with various jobs so when I needed work done, I talked to X and he brought someone to my house, e.g. a plumber when the pipes were clogged with algae, an AC repairman, a man to repaint the walls, a man to charge the gas cylinders, etc.

I asked X if he knew someone who worked at a shipping company and of course he did. A few days later X came with supplies and we put together 4 boxes. After I had filled them, X came with the shipping company representative and a worker. I explained that I wanted door-to-door service as the boxes were mainly full of books and too heavy for me to lift.

The worker set each box on a scale; the rep calculated the weight total/ cost on his phone, gave me a price and I paid him in cash. Then I tipped the worker who carried the boxes to the truck and handed everyone a bottle of water.

Business concluded without any paperwork, although the rep did send X a photo of the bill of lading a few days later, and the whole basis of the transaction was my trust in X.

When I arrived at my apartment building in the States, I was amazed that, despite the fact that I had paid for door-to-door delivery, the 4 boxes had been stacked (2 on top of 2) in the 10-foot space between the (unlocked) door to the street and the (locked) door into the building. The apartment building had a large trolley (like bellhops have) for general use, but the space between the doors was at an incline; the trolley would not stay still while I tried to load the boxes unless I found something heavy to brace it with. The bigger problem was that I could not lift the lower boxes up onto the trolley.

I was 3 days in country, jet-lagged and at a loss. I had no one to help me and there was no way I could pick up 35 kilos of books to set up on the trolley. At least I could take the 2 boxes that were on top (resting on the other 2) as I could push them down and onto the trolley but I needed help holding it still.

There was no one in lobby, so I walked out onto the sidewalk. A young woman was walking towards me so I put my arms in front of me, palms up and asked, “Could you please help me?” She agreed so I asked her to hold the trolley in place while I pushed the 2 top boxes onto it. I pushed the boxes into my apartment, pushed them off the trolley and onto the floor, then went back to the lobby.

If I was in Oman, I would have just called X and asked for help, paid him and given him a bottle of water as I had for many years. But in the States, there was no one to call. I had no idea what I could do – asking a stranger to brace the trolley for a moment was one thing, asking them to pick up very heavy boxes was another.

I maneuvered the trolley next to the boxes and stared at them, trying to think of a solution. A man walked in from the street door, saw me, asked, “Do you need those on the trolley?” and before I could respond, he set his backpack on the ground and walked over. I sputtered thanks as he lifted each box up, then held the building door open for me. Problem solved.

As I pushed the boxes to my apartment, I thought – this is a perfect example of the difference between Oman and the States. In the States, all sorts of small public actions are easy. If I saw someone weaker than me struggling to lift something, of course I would immediately help. Strangers, especially in a city with so many transients as Boston, hold the elevator door and do general courtesies. There are endless repetitions of “please,” “thank you,” “no problem,” and “go ahead.”

In Oman, you can’t trust on that kind of minor help; people don’t hold doors open or pick up something you dropped. There is no chit-chat in the elevator.

I call this marble theory: people have only so much time/ energy/ bandwidth to give others and in Oman most of those “marbles” are given to family, so there are few left over for people you don’t know unless you see someone in great distress.

Several times I was with the research guys at a beach when someone got their car stuck nearby. “Aren’t you going to go help them?” I would ask the first few times this happened. “No, we are close to people [meaning: a town]” or “No, if they need something, they will come and ask” I was told. But when I got stuck in sand miles from anywhere, the three cars that came by all stopped. The first driver was a man with his family. He saw me, drove about two blocks on, stopped, all the passengers got out of the car, then he drove back to help me.

I stood as he tied the tow rope on, then I looked down the road at the group of women and children huddled by the side of the road in the heat. When the next car stopped, that man insisted on driving my car out of the sand, so I took some boxes of cookies over to where the women were waiting. They smiled and greeted me; standing in hot sun for 10 minutes while their relative pulled my car out of sand was nothing to complain about.

Neither way of life is better. If I approached a door with my hands full in Oman, there was zero chance of someone opening it, but there were other compensations such as being able to send all my possessions across the world without filling in forms, signing paperwork or sending e-mails. In the States, I can trust that strangers will perform simple acts of kindness, but mailing a small package involves pressing button after button on the touch-screen at the post office and a signature.

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: Ending and Beginning

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Changes within Cultures

Foodways: Cultures, Food Selfishness and “Could I Have a Little Bite?”

Teaching: Reflections on Culture Shocks

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: Leaving and Learning

(photo by M. A. al Awaid)

When I worked at Sloan School of Management, one of the business books that was often mentioned was In Search of Excellence (1982) which includes the theory of “management by walking around.” This idea posits that good managers leave their desks and talk to other employees to figure out what is going on in the company.

I like that concept because some of my ethnographic work comes from my deciding on a research question and some comes from “anthropology by walking around,” meaning that I am living my life and an ethnographic puzzle falls into my lap. Sometimes, ready or not, the research comes and finds you.

In September 2022, my dear friend Steve Cass died suddenly. I had met him on the first day I was in Oman, so we had known each other for 17 years; 15 of those years our offices were next to each other so we chatted several times a day about teaching issues.

He was a well-respected colleague and teacher, so I knew that he had affected many Omanis but I was surprised to find that many people wanted to process their sadness through me. In the weeks and months after he passed away, several of his former colleagues and students would stop by my office, talk about what a wonderful man he was, weep, then leave.

It felt like being ambushed as no one ever let me know ahead of time that they were coming. I would be in the middle of grading papers or writing an exam, trying to keep myself on an even keel – then suddenly I was dispensing Kleenex, bottles of water and sympathy. My days were often derailed by these unexpected visits as my own grief, carefully bottled up for work, came spilling out.

The worst part for me is that I was expected to listen to their sorrow, but not share my own. People who had not seen him in years would want a detailed description of how he died, cry and tell me stories about Steve, but if I tried to say something, I was interrupted. Even close Omani friends would let me say a sentence or two, then change the subject.

Eventually I started to wish that the mourners would bring their sadness to someone else. I felt that I, with the least resources available, was forced into the position of dealing with other people’s unhappiness when I could scarcely handle my own. People with a spouse, children, a secure job, a house and support systems would express their sorrow, then exit my office, leaving me a complete wreck.

I kept thinking of Ring Theory, the idea that you should dump your emotions on people less affected by a problem [ https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-xpm-2013-apr-07-la-oe-0407-silk-ring-theory-20130407-story.html ]. I was experiencing the opposite effect. If I was with someone who knew Steve and tried to talk about my feelings, they would interrupt and talk about their distress. If the person did not know Steve, then they would listen to me for a moment or two, then interrupt to tell me that I should not dwell on his death.

For reasons I did not understand then, Omanis did not want me to verbally process my feelings. People who could easily talk for an hour straight about a minor irritation in their life refused to listen to me say for more than a few sentences about the loss of a 17-year friendship. I could not find a vantage point to understand these conversations; I endured the best I could and eventually those type of interactions stopped.

Then in April 2024, I started to tell Omani friends that I was leaving Oman and I fell into a new series of problematic interactions. The main reaction to learning that I was going was rage and, as Omanis rarely show fury, it was extremely disorientating to hear “no, you are not going. That is the wrong decision.” I weathered these storms of anger with increasing confusion and, eventually, my own anger.

No one said, “I am sorry you are going”; they went straight into pointed, hurtful declarations, telling me straight out that I was making the wrong choice, demanding to know my reasons then refuting them, telling me to change my mind and saying that I would regret my decision. I was already sad at the thought of leaving; receiving no compassion, understanding, support or empathy made it worse. A European friend who had left Oman a year before me had mentioned the anger of their colleagues when they said they were leaving but I did not expect such vehemence.

And people who knew full well why I was going tried to spin my leaving as my choice. One Omani colleague said, “You are leaving because of your family.” I stared at them and said, “No. Not because of my family at all.” There was a strained silence, then we parted.

Others, after our initial conversation, studiously avoided me with the attitude of “you are making a bad choice and I will leave you alone until you rethink.” Their silence was broken by periodic check-ins, “Are you really still going?” To which I replied, “I would not tease you by saying that I was leaving as a joke!’ This was followed by more silence.

Even saying that the administration had quickly accepted my resignation without talking to me did not elicit acceptance. “No, go take your letter back! You will not resign!” was the response. Any sign of sadness was interpreted as proof that I had made the wrong decision

As the brutal “you are wrong” conversations continued, I wondered if the reaction was because I had made such a big decision without asking for advice. Since I had wanted to know about the local cultures, I was always doing what I could to adjust, taking to heart any suggestions and corrections that were offered by Omanis. I checked in with the research guys before deciding things like where to live; for the two cars I bought, I left the choice entirely in their hands. Maybe the issue was that I had not shown grief over sad events such as my father’s death so perhaps my Omani friends thought I was much tougher than I am. Maybe it was a reflection of Omanis’ fear of the unknown, their confusion as to how I could quit my job without having another job lined up.

One American friend pointed out “they are making it easier for you to leave” and I realized sadly that it was true. Good friends, people I liked and respected, brow-beat me to tears. Then I had an awful day full of problematic conversations, culminating when a dear friend called and asked what, to me, were a series of ridiculous questions about people’s response to my leaving: Of course A had done this nice act, yes? No, they had not. Well, of course B person had done that nice thing to help me, yes? No, they had not. Well, of course, C and D had done this nice action, yes? No, they had not.

I wanted to fling the phone across the room. I had spent the last 2 hours throwing out dozens of carefully collected and organized files full of poem, stories and dramas that represented 19 years of hard work finding good texts for my students. There was no one to give the files to which made me sad and this ridiculous conversation in which my friend kept asserting that there were many helpful people doing positive things made me wonder, why was my friend being such an obtuse Pollyanna? I was miserable, where was the sympathy?

I thought of a recent time when I had been supportive of a close Dhofari friend who had just lost a close family member. As I reflected, I realized that my friend was calm and collected when I came to give my condolences. They, and all their relatives, talked peacefully, trying to put me at ease. In the Dhofari perspective it is the job of the person most affected by a problem to appear the most serene, making a difficult situation easier for others. And finally my perspective shifted and I was able to see the previous few weeks from a new point of view.

I have written a lot about the importance (and difficulty) of “self-control,” but now I was living that cultural aspect and failing miserably. The problem was me. My Omani friends were giving me chances for me to display my self-control and trust in my decisions while I was flailing around like a dying fish. They were leaving me alone so I could save “face” at a time when I was totally uninterested in “face.” They were waiting for me to pull myself up as I felt pulled under.

Of course they were ignoring me, when the going got tough, I resorted to acting like a child, complaining, crying, blaming others and showing sadness. This was exactly the wrong way to go about dealing with a difficult decision. I should have channeled Cyrano and Candide, loudly and happily proclaiming the self-agency of my decision.

They were giving me the compliment of assuming I had their grace and poise but I was abnegating my social responsibilities. Their interruptions of my attempts to verbally process were done in the spirit of kindness; they were trying to stop me from making a fool of myself. I had written about their impressive insistence of public composure at all times in my first book, but now that I was supposed to do that myself I did not have the strength.

The Omani colleague who asked me if the reason for my going was “my family” was allowing me to show that I was not so weak as to leave because someone was treating me badly. They were trying to let me have my self-respect but I blew that interaction. And I blew the phone call with my friend who was trying to give me chances to show how I didn’t care if people were behaving badly. Instead I was petulant and aggrieved.

As soon as I made this breakthrough I tried it out on an Omani friend. “You think I should be strong! You think I am a Dhofari! You think I am hakli! HAH! I can’t carry my sadness like you.” They instantly understood what I was getting at and answered, “Yes, I don’t understand you. I thought you would be strong but you are so weak.” Their framework was: yes, X is horrible but I should not give up my power by saying that X influenced my decision to leave. I should proclaim that was my choice to go.

Then they told me a story of someone who had gone through much more hardship than I but had stayed pleasant and friendly to everyone, acting as if nothing bad had happened. I said I did not have that much power and we had a long talk about differing responses to hard times.

Later, I had the same conversation with several other Omanis, always starting with something along the lines of, “in your culture, the saddest person must be the strongest so maybe you were thinking I would be strong about going, but I cannot be as tough as you.”

The reaction was always laughter, agreement and a discussion of cultural perspectives, with many remarks about my odd behavior. My stating that I understood what was expected of me yet I could not meet those expectations allowed our relationships to smooth out. My despondency ebbed as we all got back on regular footing.

When an Omani friend asked me to dinner, I agreed, then left them a long voice message explaining that I did not want to spend our time with them demanding that I stay and me defending my position. This was very un-Omani boundary setting but now that I was seeing the outline of the problem, I knew I needed to get out in front of it.

At the dinner we discussed my new insight, and I mentioned how I really struggled with interactions after Steve died.

They said, “People were coming to your office to share your grief.”

“But I could never talk!” I responded.

My friend shook their head in exasperation, “You are not supposed to talk!”

“But I wanted to talk!”

“No! They came to show that they are sharing your feelings.”

We stared at each other. It was one of those moments in which the right behavior is so clear, it’s impossible to understand why someone is not agreeing with you.

So, while I still don’t see all the contours of the issue and I can’t easily or automatically adjust, at least I now can, mostly, get myself into the correct mindset. The day after that dinner, two people came into my office to discuss my leaving and I, with difficulty, handled the interaction appropriately.

I smiled, didn’t complain, listened to everything they said with a benign expression and thanked them for their kindness in stopping by. When each person left, I unclenched my jaw and congratulated myself for managing an approximation of the right behavior.

I can now see that if I hadn’t reflected on Omani responses to my leaving, I would never have understood all these interactions. I knew the cultural rule, but it had never been applied to me with such force.

In After Babel, George Steiner asks the hypothetical question “if you speak more than one language fluently, how do you tell what is your real language?” then gave various answers including, the language you choose when you are talking to the person you are in a romantic relationship with, when you see a small child, when you are in danger or when you are sad. That question helps me frame my last few months in Oman. Despite 19 years trying to learn Omani cultures, when I was sad, I went straight back to my American culture, forgetting the lessons I had learned.

The research guys often told me “congratulations” when I said I was sick. It was their understanding that being ill gave you the chance to reflect on your mortality and improve your behavior. So congratulations for this chance to become a better person! Any inconvenience, from running out of cooking gas in the middle of making dinner to loud construction noise that started at 6:30am, was dismissed as “it didn’t kill you, why are you complaining?” They stay calm in every difficult circumstance and expected that strength from me. Somewhat similar to the understanding that you don’t know if you have a good life until you die, you don’t understand a culture until you leave it.

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: Ending and Beginning

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: The Grasshopper

Antigone and Ismene – Making Difficult Choices

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Deciding to Hire Expat Workers (part 1 of 4)

Two poems for courage: “Against Hesitation” by Charles Rafferty and “Thalassa” by Louis MacNeice

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: Ending and Beginning

Now that my time in Oman is ending, I am thinking about when I first came here. My friendships began in the usual ways: meeting colleagues, accepting an invitation to dinner, deciding to take an evening class, accepting a lunch invitation, deciding to teach a summer class and deciding to take language lessons. These small decisions had many consequences, but not life-changing consequences. If I had not accepted that dinner invitation, there would have been another one, or if I had not met that person, I would have met someone else.

Starting my unexpected foray into ethnography was quite different; my academic work hinged on two insignificant, random acts: reading a footnote and cutting vegetables. Thanks to those two actions, I published three books and several articles, gave many presentations and tried to help newcomers with orientation sessions. I also have a whole set of life skills I will probably never use again from making a fire with damp wood to driving up steep inclines to sitting patiently for hours to speaking colloquial Arabic.

The story of the footnote starts on the first day of khareef (the monsoon season) in June 2006. A few Omani men (who were part of a larger group of Omanis and expats that I was part of) sent me a message saying they were in town and wanted to meet. I invited them to my house, sad that the heavy mist would mean that we would have to sit indoors instead of enjoying my nice garden.

But when they arrived, they picked up the trays of water, soda, chips and cookies and brought everything outside. “Khareef!” they proclaimed joyfully as we sat amidst the mosquitos and drizzle. “This is not fun” I thought, but their enjoyment of the humidity and light rain made me realize that there was a lot about them I did not understand. And what field of study helps people comprehend foreign behavior? Anthropology.

So I asked my dissertation professor, Michael Beard, if he had any recommendations for basic anthropology texts to help understand the cultures I was now living amongst. By chance he had a friend and colleague who taught anthropology and was retiring; Gretchen Lang kindly boxed up 20 texts and sent them to me.

I read the books throughout the fall. They were interesting but so few of the texts’ examples dealt with the Arabian Peninsula, I felt that they didn’t pertain to my life. Then I read a footnote that referenced Wikan’s work in Oman as an example of a particular phenomenon. And it was off to the races.

I read all of Wikan, then started reading the works in her bibliographies, leaving my home provinces of literature, pedagogy and travel writing for archeology, architecture, cultural studies, folklore, history, Islamic studies, political science and tourism, then farther afield to animal husbandry, city planning, house construction, fishing, ornithology, use of public spaces and zoology. I ended up writing about Dhofar/ Oman in terms architecture, comparative literature, cultural acquisition, ethnography, fairytales, foodways, gift/ gift theory, houseways and urban studies.

The second act happened in August, 2013. By this time I was part of two research groups with Dhofai men, which were centered around A and B (see note). B’s group included C and some of his friends. In August, C invited me for a picnic dinner with only his friends. We all had a good time and one week later, C invited me again. As we settled down on the mat, he handed me a plate of vegetables and said, “cut these.” I took the metal plate and knife and got to work. From that night until covid hit and we stopped meeting, cutting vegetables was my job. After the covid restrictions waned, the guys started to bring prepared food from home and my job changed to bringing the soda and water.

Years later, when we were talking about how we all met and how long we had all known each other, I mentioned those first beach picnics and C said that his asking me to cut vegetables was a test as he wanted to understand my personality. If I had refused, then he never would have invited me again.

His words were not surprising because by then I knew how the men always teased and tested friends, but it struck me that so much had rested on one small act.

All the men in A’s group spoke at least some English and had traveled; most of the men in B’s group spoke some English and had met other Western people. Also, when I hung out with A’s and B’s groups, we usually met in spaces where they would not see anyone they knew.

But in his group, C was the only one who spoke English so I generally spoke only Arabic. In over 300 picnics with C’s groups I had the chance to improve my Arabic, meet dozens of men, go camping and ask endless research questions. We celebrated weddings and births, mourned deaths, ate a lot of (too spicy!) meals and discussed all sorts of geo-political upheavals.

And, since none of the men had ever socialized/ eaten a meal with a Western, female Christian we went through a lot of steep learning curves together. This June I handed a package of cookies to one man and he replied by saying “Duck?” in Arabic. I thought that was odd, so I repeated “Duck?” then thought, he is making a joke by asking if I am giving him duck food! So I said, “Duck” again and began to quack.

C, who was scrolling through his phone, said, “Open” in English. Oops! I misunderstood; the man said “Open?” in the local slang of Hindi, not “Duck?” in Arabic – two words which sound somewhat similar. And by “Open?” he meant: should I open the cookies now or save them for my children? So I said, “for your children” in Arabic. No one commented on the fact that I had enthusiastically quacked for 10 seconds. This is what you have to put up with when you have friends from different cultures.

Reflecting on over eleven years of meetings, I brought up the subject of how we started to work together with C a few weeks ago. I asked him if he remembered the first time he invited me to a picnic, then the second invitation and “did you ask me to cut vegetables?”

He said, “yes,” then asked me why I was thinking of that subject.

The conversation in Arabic went something like this:

me: Now that I am going, I am thinking of the beginning, and I remember you told me once that when you asked me to cut vegetables it was a test. And I am thinking that it was a chance, an important chance, and if I had said no, then we would not be friends.

C: It is important to test people you don’t know. If they will just sit and never work, there will be trouble later. So it is better to see how a person is at the beginning.

me: I understand, but I am thinking if I was in a bad mood or sick and said “no,” maybe I would have missed knowing you and these men. It was just that one chance. You said you would have not invited me again.

C: I would have invited you once or twice more. You have to give space for a person, maybe they are tired or maybe they are saying “no” because they don’t know what to do. If you had said, “no” I would have given you another chance, because maybe you would have said, “I don’t know how.”

I nodded and we changed the subject. The next day I decided to check my recollections by looking at my excel spreadsheet where I have information (date, place, names, what we ate, what we talked about etc.) on all picnics and camping. For August 11, 2013 I have an entry about meeting at ‘the place’ with C and four of his (now my) friends. For August 17, there is another entry about meeting at the same place with the same people and after the summary for what we had for dinner is the note “me cutting vegetables.”

It’s nice to see my research life validates two of my constant talking points with other researchers: document everything and you may never know the good thing you do that will open doors for you.

Note: For the research guys, their friend groups are never conceived of as being “centered” on one person. I use this terminology as it reflects my reality. In each group there was one man I met first, who introduced me to the other men and ran interference in terms of me asking questions (what should I wear?) and other men asking questions about me.

Antigone and Ismene – Making Difficult Choices

Conference presentation about conducting research on the Arabian Peninsula

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: The Grasshopper

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Claiming Knowledge and Shifting Perceptions

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: What is Missing and What Changes

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: Being Safe and Secure

One aspect of talking to expats is that if I intimated that something they did might not be safe in my opinion, my advice often had to be negated by them pointing out my actions were unsafe, particularly me going camping with only Omani men. This makes me think of how to define “safe” in terms of my life in Oman. On one hand, I camped with men I had known for years and I had usually met members of their family: brothers, cousins, parents, wives and children. On the other hand, I frequently felt insecure and lost. I was constantly telling myself to trust them, trust the process and that, if nothing else, I was going to have a useful learning experience. “Useful,” not necessarily fun or easy.

One Wednesday night, I got phone call at 9pm. It was hard to hear with the sound of wind and waves in the background. A group of the research guys were camping at a beach far from town and they had decided I should come. I wrote out what they wanted me to bring (water, more water and wood), hung up and started prepping. I had to proctor an exam at 8am, which meant getting up, going to work, stopping at store on the way home while I was still in regular clothes, putting everything in the car, buying drive-through McDonalds for lunch, then lots of driving.  

I got to the beach around 4pm. We talked, then they decided that they would take me for a short boat ride. This was not “How are you feeling?,” “Would you like a boat ride?” or “What have you eaten today, as in what are the chances you will throw up if we go out in the boat?’ No, it was: “Now you will go in the boat.”

So, I changed into boat clothes and out we went. It was very nice; the sea was calm and it was lovely to see the shore and hills… but wait. We appeared to be stopping. They were maneuvering a large barrel full of fishing line with many 4 inch hooks imbedded in soft foam to the edge of the boat. Oh, it was a curtain met, a long, strong fishing line to which plastic laundry soap bottles are tied at intervals so it didn’t sink and every 6 feet of so, a short line going down with a hook which they baited with a sardine (like the “icicles” type of Christmas lights which have a long horizontal line with short verticals going down). 

Hooking sardines and tossing the line out took over an hour. The sun sank lower, it got colder, they didn’t let me help so I watched the ocean, shore and seabirds trying not to think about being cold. Then we drove off in the direction opposite camp. I wanted to say that I wanted to go back, but I stayed quiet. If we were driving over to the other side of the bay, they must have a reason.

As the guy who was steering the boat turned off the motor, I realized we were going to a stop next to a fish-trap buoy. He had driven to one of his “boxes” (fish traps) which was very close to shore, meaning it probably had lobsters and since they know I like lobsters, he was deliberately going to the box most likely to have them for my sake (they think lobsters are so-so and would much rather have fish). And, yes, the trap had 8 large lobsters but no fish.

We drove back to shore and moved our camp to up to the top of small headland with a small bay to one side and the large bay (about 2km across) on the other. There were no lights visible so the sky was full of stars. They made a dinner of white rice, a kind of chutney made from various cooked vegetables and lobster taken out of the shell and cooked directly on rocks heated by coals. 

As the rice was cooking, one of the guys took a small shark they had caught earlier in the day and prepped it for drying. He cut it open, took out the guts, then cut the meat into long, thin strips which are all attached to the back of the head so it looked sort of like an octopus (or a small alien from the movie Alien). This is tossed over a rope to dry in the sun for a few days, then eaten. I saw the man cutting the shark, but hadn’t realized he had had put it on a rope that was tied between my truck and their truck.

After dinner, I glanced over at my truck and saw something white, taller than a cat and odd-shaped underneath it. This thing was less than 10 feet away from me so I called the name of the guy who was sitting closest to me, about 6 feet away.

He did not respond, so I said his name again. He said, “fox.” I said fearfully, “that is not a fox” as I have never seen a fox come so close to humans and the thing seemed to be square-shaped. I heard him shift, then his phone light shone on exactly the place I was looking. It was a fox whose hair for some reason glowed white in the darkness and it was standing at an angle so I could see the side of its body and hindquarters, with its tail was wrapped around its body so it looked like a square.

The point of this story is that when I turned back around, I realized that I had been blocking his view. The research guy heard me say his name, saw me looking back towards my truck and said, “fox” without knowing why I was saying his name or what I was looking at. He had instantly put together from how my head was turned that I was looking at the area below where the drying shark meat was hung and the anxiety in my voice meant there was something I could not understand – so the answer had to be “fox.” When I said, “that is not a fox,” he moved over and picked up his phone to show me that, with no visual or sound cues, he knew what it was better than me, the person who was staring at the fox.

So sometimes I felt cold, confused, tired or worried and yet, at the same time, always secure.

Reflections on Ethnographic Work – Trying to Make Sense of Words and Actions

Two poems for courage: “Against Hesitation” by Charles Rafferty and “Thalassa” by Louis MacNeice

Presentation – “Windguru and Other Gurus: Fishing off the Coast of Dhofar, Oman”

Predator Anthropologists, Anthropologist Predators: Anthropological Metaphors in Popular Movies

photo by Hussein Baomar

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: The Grasshopper

 In a recent literature class, we were talking about whether or not parents apologize to their children if the adults have made a mistake. This led to a discussion about how people express forgiveness and care/ concern in indirect ways. For example, a person might bring someone a cup of tea instead of saying the words, “Are you ok?” or “I am sorry.” This conversation reminded me of a short interaction with the research guys and, like most interactions here in Dhofar, it takes much longer to explain than the time of the actual experience.

(photo by S.B., I know that’s a dragonfly but I don’t have a photo of a grasshopper)

After a dinner together, I was sitting in a chair to the north side of a small, plastic, woven mat. My truck was directly to the east, four of the research guys were in chairs on the south side of the mat and there was a fire about 2 yards away to the west.

 Suddenly something that felt like 6 or 7 pins, a few millimeters apart, sunk into my right hand. I yelped, stood up and took a few steps forward onto the mat; one of the men gave a short vocalization of surprise. By the time I was standing still on the mat and pulled my hand up close to my face, two of the men had their phones’ flashlights aimed at me. I could not see any mark on the back of my hand, but it hurt a lot. There was nothing on my sleeve so I started to shake out my long dress; I stamped my feet, hitched up the hem to look at the cuffs of my leggings and scanned the mat. There was nothing.

I said, “my hand!” and started to panic. Faster than I can explain, my brain was processing possible threats but, since I couldn’t think of any likely explanation, my fear grew. I had not felt anything on my wrist or arm before the pain started, nor had I felt something move away as I stood up so it could not have been a snake, spider or scorpion. The fire was too low and far away for it to be a stray spark. There had been no noise and several points of pain all at once so it couldn’t have been a mosquito, sand fly, bee or Jack Spaniel wasp. If it were a group of biting ants, I would see them on my dress. And the pain was far too specific and severe to be a sudden hand cramp.

I kept shaking my dress and scanning the mat, trying to figure out what had happened, when I heard a man say, “Here” in Arabic. I looked to my right and saw that that the man closest to the fire had stood up and was shining his phone flashlight on my chair and the ground around it. There, at the edge of the mat, was a large grasshopper calmly walking along.

I exhaled. I could now process what happened: a grasshopper had jumped on my hand (no noise, no pressure on my wrist or arm), its tiny claws had sunk into my skin and when I moved, it flew off. “Shukran,” I said and sat back down.

In silence, we watched the grasshopper walk across the mat and disappear under my truck. I opened the cooler next to me, pulled out a can of cold soda, balanced it on the back of my hand to numb the pain and I leaned back in my chair. There were a few more seconds of silence, then the men started to talk again.

The whole event took less than ten minutes and there were only 5 vocalizations: my yelp, the man’s expression of surprise, “my hand,” “Here” and my “thank you.” Their concern was expressed through actions (they stopped talking and had their phone flashlights instantly pointed at me), not speech. No one asked “what’s wrong” or “what happened”? They could read the situation perfectly and didn’t need to communicate in order to act effectively. Only the man closest to me stood up and, since I was scanning the area in front of me, he moved to my right side to get a different perspective without anyone saying “look over there!” When he noticed the grasshopper, he trusted that I only needed to see it to put together what happened, so he drew my attention by saying “here.”

Once I had seen the grasshopper, the man sat down and there was a pause so that I could speak if I needed to. There was no reason to kill the bug as it is not dangerous and no one asked “are you ok” or “does it hurt”? If I was pulling out a can of Mountain Dew to set on the back of my hand, of course it hurt. When I leaned back in my chair without talking, I was signaling that I was ok and, from their point of view, there was no need to discuss such a small matter, so the issue was over and normal talk could resume.

Thinking about the incident as I was driving home, I realized that it was a great encapsulation of interactions with the research guys. They can talk for hours about subjects of interest but in the moments of (my) panic, they don’t to need to speak. They instantly assess what is going on and what needs to be done without words.

If I squawk and jump out of a chair, they didn’t have to ask me a question. Clearly something startled me so the best thing to do is stay still, shine light and figure out why I was scared. Once the cause was clear, it wasn’t necessary to say “Wow, you were really scared” or “Gee, you sure moved quickly.”

They don’t have the habit of verbally expressing care. Their concentration, speed of getting lights on me and silence, waiting to see if I needed to say anything once I sat down, proved their concern. 

[As with all of my musings on ethnography, after I wrote this I checked with one of the men who was there that night to ask for permission to write about the event and to check my understanding of what happened. He gave his permission with the usual comment of “don’t use names” and agreed with my opinion. “Why talk?” he asked after I explained this essay, “with something small, there is no need to talk.”]

A good poem for hard times – “Atlas” by U. A. Fanthorpe

Antigone and Ismene – Making Difficult Choices

Reflections on Ethnographic Work – Trying to Make Sense of Words and Actions

Conference presentation on fishing off the coast of Dhofar, Oman

Conference presentation about conducting research on the Arabian Peninsula

New essay: “Ẓâ is for Ẓarf” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)

“The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard) – http://alifbatourguide.com/

Ẓâ – http://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/zaa/

Ẓâ is for Ẓarf

You don’t need to know much about linguistics to hear the difference between a voiced and an unvoiced consonant. English G is the voiced form of our K. English B is the voiced form of P. English D is the voiced form of our T. Those are easy examples. It is possible for a language to make the distinctions very easy to see. When you study Turkish and learn that the consonants B, D, or J (spelled C), become, at the end of a word P, T or CH (spelled Ç), you hardly need to memorize it. It’s easy enough to hear voiced consonants turning into unvoiced ones. Kabâb becomes kebap; Ahmad becomes Ahmet; Persian loan word tâj becomes taç. You can predict the changes by ear without thinking much, without having to know the terms “voiced” and “unvoiced” at all.

As for the pronunciation of Arabic Ẓa, it is the voiced form of Ṣâd. That’s a harder one. Ṣpeakers of Arabic can get it immediately. For speakers of Persian, Turkish, and Urdu, etc. (as in English), Ẓa is (along with Ẓa, Dha and Ḍâd), just another way to say Ẓ.

As for transcription, I’m going for Ẓ. It’s not a completely logical choice, since it’s the same way we transcribed ض,but the stakes are low. (Maybe ض should have been Ḍ anyway.) 

continued at http://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/zaa/

New Essay: “Ṭâ Is For Talisman” on The Arabic Alphabet website

New essay: “D͎âd is for Drubbing” on the Arabic alphabet website

New essay: “Sîn is for Zenith” on the Arabic alphabet website