Houses – Page 2 – Come From Away

When I lived in Oman and came to the States in the summer, I always used Arabic expressions in every-day interactions, like saying shukran, (thank you) to grocery-store clerks. When I moved back permanently, I wondered if that would continue. I used Arabic a few times, but quickly stopped; language use was the easiest part of moving back.

I slowly got used to Americans moving around in self-contained bubbles, usually looking at the cell phone, using earbuds to have a conversation or wearing large headphones. The American dislike of interacting with anyone in public is really pronounced in the winter. Boston often has icy sidewalks with one narrow part that’s clear. It makes sense to me that someone wanting to walk by me would just say, “passing on your left.” Then I would shift/ lean to the right, so they could easily get by me. Instead, people suddenly and silently show up at my left elbow. Sometimes they do this awkward maneuver of walking with their right foot on the snow bank and left foot on the clear part of the sidewalk as they stomp by.

And I am still trying to get conversations right. When I came to USA in the summers, I spent almost all of my time talking to family and friends or I was in conversations in which I knew my part, e.g., talking to clerks, buying something, navigating an airport etc.

But now I have all sorts of short conversations with colleagues and acquaintances so things often go pear-shaped. Someone complimented me a few days ago and I still can’t tell is that was really a compliment or an insult. In Dhofar, compliments are often used to point out a fault, so I am wary of positive statements. And for this statement I can’t read the intention of the person who made the comment and I can’t figure out a way to ask, “What did you mean?” Either I would look like I was fishing for more compliments or the person would have to spell out the insult.

I sometimes revert to Omani understandings at the worst possible times and strand myself in embarrassment. A male colleague introduced me to his wife and I cheerfully said, “THE WOMAN!” We chatted for a few moments and, as I walked away, I realized that saying “THE WOMAN!” was NOT the way Americans greet each other.

I stood still and debated what to do. I could walk back to them, apologize and try to do a 5-minute cultural lecture, or keep walking and hope they didn’t notice or would forget and forgive. I kept walking. Sometimes I try to explain but this seemed like one of those times in which the explanation would just make the situation worse.

In Dhofar it’s rude to put someone’s name in public, especially if it is a female family member so all the research guys referred to their wife as “the woman” or “my family.” For example, if a man said, “I will take my family to Muscat,” he meant “my wife and children.” Men know their close friends’ and relatives’ wife’s name, but there is no reason to say it. I would ask some of guys about their wife and kids if we were waiting for other guys to come but not in front of the group.

Only one of the research guys, who was adorably in love, ever said that name of his wife in front of the other men. When I finally met his wife, I said (in Arabic), “THE WOMAN!” and we smiled, laughed and went through the long process of exchanging greetings. By saying “the woman,” I was showing that I did not know her name (although I did) so that she could introduce herself to me. This is not what an Omani would do, but it was my work-around as her husband had told her about me and she had never met a Christian/ North American before (and might have been wondering why I was hanging out with her husband and his friends). I wanted to appear as non-threatening as possible and signal that he had been respectful of his wife by not saying her name.

When I met my American colleague’s wife, I somehow reverted to that situation and repeated the phrase instead of the expected, “how nice to meet you.”

Another hurdle is getting rid of things. In Oman there was always someone who wanted whatever I did not. If I bought cookies, tried one and didn’t like them, I would put them in a bag for the man who cleaned my office or the man who ran messages to different departments. I washed, folded and set out sheets, towels, clothes, shoes and purses for the woman who cleaned my house; the man who watered the plants got blankets and pillows. I recycled cans and cardboard and had a compost heap.

Living in a studio apartment, I do more recycling (yeah Cambridge!) but what to do with Christmas lights that are the wrong color, a pillow that’s too hard, a paint set I won’t use, freebies sent along with a mail-order? I finally started to leave things stealthily on a shelf in the laundry room of my building or in the kitchen at work, like a multi-purpose Easter bunny.

But the worst cultural hurdle for me is handshakes. I spent 19 years avoiding touching a man [ https://mariellerisse.com/2025/03/15/ethnography-navigating-shaking-hands-on-the-arabian-peninsula/ ] and I haven’t been able to get back into the habit.

The first time it happened, I was doing a simple task (like picking up an insurance card) and the man at the desk put his hand out. At the same moment I thought, “I do not want to shake his hand” and “I have to do this.” My primary reaction was unreasonable anger: “Why is this man forcing me to do something I did not want?” yet I also understood he was behaving normally. I was the one who was at odds with the prevailing culture. I managed to get my hand out and shake, but was relieved when I had to move to another clerk. But then when I left, I had to stop by that man’s desk again and, again, he wanted to shake. “What is your problem?” I thought to myself, forcing myself to be polite.

I had many years of verbal greetings and now 2 handshakes within 1/2 an hour! I was miserable and sprayed my hand with sanitizer after I left the building.

Before that day, the last time I had shook hands with a man was the day I left Oman. The Muslim man who drove me to the airport had been a friend for 19 years. As I turned to say goodbye, he put his hand out; we had never shaken hands so I was not expecting him to. I started crying so hard I could not speak; it was such a kind action, to do something against his culture and religion to signal my leaving. What was a simple every-day action by the American clerk at his desk, was a huge, important gesture at the Salalah airport.

A few weeks after my first American hand-shake, I was in trouble again. A pleasant colleague held his hand out for a fist bump and I froze. Again, I was stuck thinking “I do not want to do this” and “I have to do this and I have to do this quickly or he is going to wonder what is wrong with me.” So, with kind of the same feeling as sticking my hand into a tiger’s cage, I managed the fist bump.

After a few more fist bumps and a few more weeks of working together, I had a short conversation with him about my reluctance as, if he had noticed my hesitation/ discomfort, I wanted him to know it was not personal. My unease had nothing to do with him; it was caused by almost two decades of carefully avoiding that exact situation.

For the future, I don’t know what I will do. I might get back in the groove and glad hand people like a politician. Or I might retreat back to putting my right hand on my heart. I have told people for years that re-entry can be as difficult as moving abroad. And I was right about that.

Leaving Oman: Grief, Grandeur, Museums and Bringley’s ‘All the Beauty in The World’

Bibliography – Creating Effective Interactions: Researching, Teaching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula (forthcoming, Palgrave MacMillan)

Culture Shock: Bumpy Reentry and Moral Dilemmas

Ethnography – Staying Calm

Ethnography – Navigating Shaking Hands on the Arabian Peninsula

March 15, 2025March 15, 2025

I started to write an essay about the problem of dealing with American handshakes, then realized I needed to back track and explain what handshakes mean in Oman.

In the Middle East, the basic premise is that women shake hands or kiss cheeks with women and men shake hands, kiss cheeks or bump noses with men. The exceptions usually are usually between men and women in business situations with non-Arabs and between family members.

It took me a little time after moving to Oman to realize that I should never put my hand out – if the man wanted to shake hands, he needed to put his out first. As I became friends with Omanis, I gradually adopted the local pattern of putting my right hand on my heart rather than shaking hands with a man. The change was partly because of the Dhofari culture understanding that if there is no need to do something, don’t do it.

Also, men who I didn’t know would come up to shake my hand and that felt odd. Several times an unknown man would walk into my office, stick out his hand, then get angry that I would not shake with him. I didn’t who they were (they never gave their name) or why they were doing it.

Their actions led to several conversations with my Omanis students in which I explained that in American culture – handshakes come with names. Either there is someone there to make the introduction or the person extending their hand says their name and their relationship (e.g., I live next door, I am here to fix your printer, I am the manager, I am your daughter’s teacher).

My stopping handshakes was also partially due to interactions with the research guys. A few of the guys shook hands with me the first few times we met, but that gradually ended. Shaking hands with a woman was not something they were comfortable with; they did it at first as a way of respecting my cultures, but as I got used to them and tried to fit in with their cultures, we stuck to verbal greetings.

This was in keeping with the general understanding that men should never touch a woman who was not proscribed from marriage (mother, sister, child, aunt, etc.). If a man did touch a woman before prayer-time, he would have to do the ritual washing before he prayed.

This comes across to some people as “women are pollution.” That’s not how I see it. First, a lot of actions can put a person out of the state of “ready to pray,” it’s not just a touch of a woman. In Islam, a person should make their body, mind and surroundings ready for prayer by creating a temporary sacred space (see below). I was once having a discussion with one of the guys about praying and I said that as a Methodist, I pray a lot, doing small prayers throughout the day in the midst of everyday actions such as brushing my teeth.

“Not in the bathroom!” he snapped.

“God is everywhere,” I answered. For him, God is everywhere but when you pray, you should be solely focused on prayer.

When I first started having picnics with the research guys, their saying “Don’t touch me!” was sometimes annoying as it did not seem a big deal if I bumped someone by accident as we were trying to fit 6 of us around a platter of food, passing lemons, knives, bottles of water and Kleenex. I felt that they were being unfriendly.

I gradually understood that they felt I was being uncoordinated and unhelpful. I wasn’t pollution; I was inept for grabbing a spoon at the same time they did. And the result was that they had to spend the time and water to get ready for prayers. So, I got less clumsy and learned how to notice my surroundings more carefully.

The “Don’t touch me” was part of a much larger lesson about understanding how to move myself and objects through space. For example, if someone needed the floss I would put it in my right hand, pull my hand back to my right shoulder and then throw it at their center mass as hard as I could. This is not the way to move objects! They told me to put the object in my right hand, bring my right hand down to my right hip and loft it up, so that the trajectory was not a straight line but an arc which would end with the object in the lap of the person I was throwing to.

That took a while to learn, but I got it. And I learned how to pass Kleenex boxes by holding on to one end, with the far end towards another person. I learned to hold a cough drop in my gathered fingers, wait until a guy held his palm open underneath, then let it fall.

The lesson that made the biggest impression on me was passing teacups. Tea was served very hot in small cups and, from their culture, you should make sure everyone else has a cup before you drink; this meant I was constantly passing hot cups. I would grab the bottom and be told “Take the top!” To me, that was rude because it meant putting my fingers on the place they would be drinking from. I finally asked, “WHY do I have to take the top?”

They told me, “The bottom is too hot, you will hurt yourself.” Which was absolutely true, grabbing the bottom of a thin carboard cup full of water just off the boil was painful. And for months they had individually and collectively organized cup-passing so that I had the easy part (holding the rim of the cup) and they would take the hard part (holding the bottom).

So, when people try to explain to me that Omani men see women as pollution, the image that comes to mind is a group of men shaking their hands because their fingers are scorched.

Then came Covid and I was enormously grateful for the Omani convention of keeping 4- or 5-feet away from strangers and acquaintances. I always had a healthy buffer zone between me and everyone else. There was no need for those stickers on the floor telling people where to stand in lines. If you were with family, stickers were not going to keep you apart; if you were with strangers, no one was going to stand close to you whether there were instructions or not.

The result of hundreds of picnics with the research guys and an epidemic is that one of the hardest aspects of returning to America is how often people want to shake hands, something I no longer want to do.

Researching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula: Creating Effective Interactions

Ethnography – Staying Calm

Returning to USA – Culture Shock essays

Religion and spaces in houses (from Houseways in Southern Oman, 2023)

A few months after I met one of the research guys he said to me, “I want to see you pray.” The men always did their prayers if we happened to be together at a prayer time, so he knew I had seen what they did and, as he had never seen a Methodist pray before, I recognized the same “how do you do that” type of question that I always asked them. I was sitting cross-legged, so I clasped my hands and rested them on my shins, took a deep breath, closed my eyes and said the Lord’s Prayer and St. Francis’ prayer (“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace”). This elicited a lot of conversations over several weeks about what “doing prayers” means.

One awareness that came out of these conversations is that I myself understand two types of prayers: prayers which a person does at anytime and anyplace with no preparation and prayers that are in a sacred space, i.e., when I walk into a church, I feel I am in an area set-apart from all aspects of daily life as everything in the building makes me focus on my relationship with God.

In my opinion, when the research guys pray there is always some external support in that they will always make physical adjustments, such as doing the ritual washing, adjusting their clothing, facing Mecca and, if possible, laying down a prayer mat. If we are on a boat, lines are pulled out of the water, one man does the call to prayer, hands and mouths are cleaned and the man who will lead the prayers moves closest to the direction of Mecca as the boat temporarily becomes a sacred space. As I don’t want to interfere with the moments of preparation or prayer, I huddle close to the side of the boat and look at the water.

Praying in a mosque is the best way to pray; as one informant told me, “better in the mosque, all other places are the same.” Thus, if they are not in a mosque, the research guys create the sacred wherever they are. In asking about the sacred in houses, informants answered the same way: the majlis, salle or bedroom were equally good, as was any “clean” space. Praying is not acceptable in the bathroom and not advised in a kitchen.

In Dhofar, Omani women do not usually go to the mosque to pray except in Ramadan, thus spaces in their homes become their sacred spaces, a change that is created by their intentions and actions. They usually pray in their bedroom, but none of my informants told me that they had a specific place for prayers. When the call to prayer is heard from the nearest mosque or a cell-phone reminder, the person will wash, adjust clothing (for example a woman will make sure her sheila is tightly wound around her head), lay down the prayer mat and make the gesture to start the prayers. In the same way, if someone wants to read the Holy Qur’an, they will make sure they and their clothes are clean, set up the wooden stand to hold the book in a clean area and begin reading.

Bibliography – Creating Effective Interactions: Researching, Teaching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula (forthcoming, Palgrave MacMillan)

December 4, 2024December 4, 2024

Creating Effective Interactions – Dr. M Risse – working biobibliography

(authors in bold have additional publications which are not included in this list)

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Ahmed, Qanta. 2008. In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom. Naperville, IL: Sourcebooks.

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Al Farsi, Sulaiman. 2013. Democracy and Youth in the Middle East: Islam, Tribalism and the Rentier State in Oman. New York: I.B. Tauris.

Al-Ghanim, Kaltham, Andrew Gardner and Noora Lari. 2023. “Contemporary Women in Qatar: An Ethnographic Study of Their Challenges in Terms of Traditional Applications and Modern Requirements.” Sage Open. 1-17. DOI: 10.1177/21582440231196030

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Al Mutawa, Rana. 2024. Everyday Life in the Spectacular City: Making Home in Dubai. Berkely: University of California Press.

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—. 2022. “Navigating the Cosmopolitan City: Emirati Women and Ambivalent Forms of Belonging in Dubai,” in Migration in the Making of the Gulf Space Social, Political, and Cultural Dimensions. Antia Mato Bouzas and Lorenzo Casini, eds. New York: Berghahn Books. 67-85.

—. 2020, Dec. 9. “Dishdasha Blues: Navigating Multiple Lived Experiences in the Gulf.” London School of Economics Middle East Blog Posts https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2020/12/09/dishdasha-blues-navigating-multiple-lived-experiences-in-the-gulf/

—. 2019, Nov 8. “Dubai Mall or Souq Naif? The Quest for ‘Authenticity’ and Social Distinction.” London School of Economics Middle East Blog Posts. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2019/11/08/dubai-mall-or-souq-naif-the-quest-for-authenticity-and-social-distinction/

—. 2019, April 30. “You Can’t Sit with Us: Prejudice and ‘Othering’ between Khaleejis.” Sekka. https://sekkamag.com/2019/04/30/you-cant-sit-with-us-the-othering-within-arab-gulf-societies/

—. 2019. “The Mall Isn’t Authentic!: Dubai’s Creative Class And The Construction of Social Distinction.” Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 48: 1-2: 183-223.

—. 2018, Dec.4. “Challenging Concepts of ‘Authenticity’: Dubai and Urban Spaces in the Gulf.” London School of Economics Middle East Blog Posts. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mec/2018/12/04/challenging-concepts-of-authenticity-dubai-and-urban-spaces-in-the-gulf/

—. 2017. “Women and Restrictive Campus Environments: A Comparative Analysis Between Public Universities and International Branch Campuses in the UAE.” Higher Education in the Gulf States: Present and Future. 17-9.

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—. 2010. “Immodest Modesty: Accommodating Dissent and the ’Abayah-as-Fashion in the Arab Gulf States.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6.1: 46-74.

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—. 2013, Apr. 22. “Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Knowledge in the Time of Oil.” Jadaliyya. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/28472/Theorizing-the-Arabian-Peninsula-Roundtable-Knowledge-In-the-Time-of-Oil

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Weir, Shelagh. 2007. A Tribal Order: Politics and Law in the Mountains of Yemen. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Weiss, Nerina, Erella Grassiani and Linda Green, eds. 2023. The Entanglements of Ethnographic Fieldwork in a Violent World. London: Routledge.

Wikan, Unni. 1982. Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wilkinson, J.C. 2013. Water and Tribal Settlement in South-East Arabia (Studies on Ibadism and Oman) New York: Georg Olms Verlag.

—. 2010. Ibâḍism: Origins and Early Development in Oman. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—. 1987. The Imamate Tradition of Oman. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

—. 1983. “Traditional Concepts of Territory in South Arabia.” Geographical Journal 149.3: 301-15.

—. 1971. “The Oman Question: The Background to the Political Geography of South-East Arabia.” The Geographical Journal 137.3: 361-71.

Willis, John. 2013, Apr. 22. “Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula Roundtable: Writing Histories of the Arabian Peninsula or How to Narrate the Past of a (Non)Place.” Jadaliyya. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/28485/Theorizing-the-Arabian-Peninsula-Roundtable-Writing-Histories-of-the-Arabian-Peninsula-or-How-to-Narrate-the-Past-of-a-NonPlace

Wilson, Alice. 2023. Afterlives of Revolution: Everyday Counterhistories in Southern Oman. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

—. 2016. “Oman’s Consultative Council Elections: Shaking up Tribal Hierarchies in Dhufar.” Middle East Report 281: 41-3.

Wilson, G. Willow. 2012. Alif the Unseen. New York: Grove Press.

—. 2011. Butterfly Mosque. New York: Grove Press.

Wippel, Steffen, ed. 2023. Branding the Middle East: Communication Strategies and Image Building from Qom to Casablanca Studies on Modern Orient, 38. Berlin: de Gruyter.

—. 2013. Regionalizing Oman: Political, Economic and Social Dynamics United Nations University Series on Regionalism 6. Heidelberg: Springer.

Wippel, Steffen, Katrin Bromber and Birgit Krawietz. 2016. Under Construction: Logics of Urbanism in the Gulf Region. London: Routledge.

Yadav, Stacey Philbrick. 2018. “Ethnography Is an Option. Learning to Learn in Yemen,” in Political Science Research in the Middle East and North Africa: Methodological and Ethical Challenges. Janine A. Clark and Francesco Cavatorta, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 165–74.

Yamani, Mai Ahmed Zaki. 1986. “Birth and Behaviour in a Hospital in Saudi Arabia.” Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 13.2: 169-76.

Yateem, Abdullah. 2001. “Aspects of Social and Symbolic Boundaries Amongst the Bedouin of the Emirates.” Journal of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies 103: 49-87.

Zimmerle, William. 2017. Crafting Cuboid Incense Burners in the Land of Frankincense: The Dhofar Ethnoarchaeology Preservation Project. Washington: Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center/Liberty House Press.

Marielle Risse

Books

Houseways in Southern Oman. Routledge, 2023

This book explains how modern, middle-class houses are sited, designed, built, decorated and lived in with an emphasis on how room-usage is determined by age, gender, time of day and the presence of guests. Combing ethnography and architectural studies, the author draws on over sixteen years of living in the Dhofar region to analyze the cultural perceptions regarding houses and how residential areas fit within the urban areas in southern Oman. Dhofari houses are also compared to houses in other Arabian Peninsula countries and positioned within the theoretical frameworks of the “Islamic city” and the “Islamic house.”

Foodways in Southern Oman. Routledge, 2021

This book examines the objects, practices and beliefs relating to producing, obtaining, cooking, eating and disposing of food in the Dhofar region of southern Oman. The chapters consider food preparation, who makes what kind of food, and how and when meals are eaten. Foodways connects what is consumed to themes such as land usage, gender, age, purity, privacy and generosity. It also discusses how foodways are related to issues of morality, safety, religion, and tourism. The volume is a result of fourteen years of collecting data and insights in Dhofar, covering topics such as catching fish, herding camels, growing fruits, designing kitchens, cooking meals and setting leftovers out for animals.

Community and Autonomy in Southern Oman. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

This book explores how, in cultures which prize conformity, there is latitude for people who choose not to conform either for a short time and how the chances to assert independence change over time. The main focus is on how the traits of self-control and self-respect are manifested in the everyday actions of several groups of tribes whose first language is Gibali (Jebbali/ Jebali, also referred to as Shari/ Shahri), a non-written, Modern South Arabian language. Although no work can express the totality of a culture, this text describes how Gibalis are constantly shifting between preserving autonomy and signaling membership in family, tribal and national communities.

Publications – scholarly articles and chapters – anthropology/ culture/ travel writing

“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

“An Ethnographic Discussion of Fairy Tales from Southern Oman,” Fabula: Zeitschrift für Erzählforschung / Journal of Folktale Studies / Revue d’Etudes sur le Conte Populaire 60.3-4 (De Gruyter, Berlin) 2019: 318–335.

“Understanding Communication in Southern Oman,” North Dakota Quarterly 84.1 (Special Issue on Transnationalism) 2017: 174-184.

“Generosity, Gift-giving and Gift-avoiding in Southern Oman,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 45 (Oxford: Archeopress) 2015: 289-296.

“Understanding the Impact of Culture on the TESOL Classroom: An Outsider’s Perspective,” TESOL Arabia’s Perspective 18.2, 2011: 15-19.

“Cultural Refraction: Using Travel Writing, Anthropology and Fiction to Understand the Culture of Southern Arabia,” Interdisciplinary Humanities 26:1, 2009: 63-78.

Publications – scholarly articles and chapters – literature/ pedagogy

“Using Cultural Understandings to Improve Teaching in Oman,” in Unpackaging Theory and Practice in Educational Sciences. Abdülkadir Kabadayı, ed. Lyon: Livre de Lyon. 2023: 129-141. https://www.livredelyon.com/educational-sciences/unpackaging-theory-practice-in-educational-sciences_595.

“Teaching Paired Middle Eastern and Western Literary Texts,” in Advancing English Language Education. Wafa Zoghbor and Thomaï Alexiou, eds. Dubai: Zayed University Press, 2020: 221-223.

“Teaching Literature on the Arabian Peninsula,” Anthropology News website, October 7 2019. http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2019/10/07/teaching-literature-on-the-arabian-peninsula/

“Selecting the Right Literary Texts for Middle Eastern Students: Challenges and Reactions,” in Focusing on EFL Reading: Theory and Practice. Rahma Al-Mahrooqi, ed. Muscat: Sultan Qaboos University Press, 2014: 165-188.

“Frosty Cliffs, Frosty Aunt and Sandy Beaches: Teaching Aurora Leigh in Oman,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 43.4, 2013: 123-145.

“Who Are You Calling ‘Coddled’?: ‘Cloistered Virtue’ and Choosing Literary Texts in a Middle Eastern University,” Pedagogy 13.3, 2013: 415-427.

“Do You know a Creon?: Making Literature Relevant in an Omani University,” in Literature Teaching in EFL/ESL: New Perspectives. Rahma Al-Mahrooqi, ed. Muscat: Sultan Qaboos University Press, 2012: 302-314.

“Reader’s Guide” for the English version of Khadija bint Alawi al-Thahab’s My Grandmother’s Stories: Folk Tales from Dhofar (Translated by W. Scott Chahanovich, U.S. Fulbright Scholar at Dhofar University, 2009-2010). Washington, D.C: Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, 2012: 17-23.

Conference Presentations – anthropology/ culture/ travel writing

“Conducting Research on the Arabian Peninsula: Creating Effective Interactions,” Middle East Studies Association Annual Conference. Nov. 14, 2024.

“Windguru and Other Gurus: Fishing off the Coast of Dhofar, Oman,” Navigating the Transcultural Indian Ocean: Texts and Practices in Contact Conference, sponsored by the Rutter Project. June 5, 2024

“Crafting a Home: Interior Home Design in Southern Oman.” Home/Making Symposium, Concordia University. Montreal. May 12, 2023. https://www.concordia.ca/finearts/events/home-making.html

“Good Governance and Open Spaces: How the State and Residents Negotiate the Use of Government Land in Dhofar, Oman.” AnthroState Talks for the European Association of Social Anthropologists Network on Anthropologies of the State. May 4, 2023. https://easaonline.org/networks/anthrostate/talks

“Explorations in the North-west Indian Ocean: The Research Journeys of the ‘Palinurus’ along the Omani Coast in the mid-1800s.” Research Expeditions to India and the Indian Ocean in Early Modern and Modern Times, sponsored by the German Maritime Museum / Leibniz Institute for Maritime History. Nov. 3, 2022.

“Private Lives in Public Spaces: Perceptions of Space-Usage in Southern Oman.” Middle East Studies Association annual conference. Montreal, Quebec. December 2, 2021.

“The Costs and Benefits of Fishing in Southern Oman.” Fish as Food: Lifestyle and a Sustainable Future, annual conference of the International Commission on the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, hosted at the University of Liverpool. Sept. 1, 2021.

“Ethical Eating in Southern Oman.” Just Food, virtual conference of the Association for the Study of Food and Society; Agriculture, Food and Human Values Society; Canadian Association for Food Studies and the Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, hosted by the Culinary Institute of America and New York University. June 12, 2021.

“Foodways in Southern Oman,” for the session “Uncovering Truths, Building Responsibility in A Pandemic: Insights from Emerging Monographs at the Nexus of Culture, Food, and Agriculture.” American Anthropological Association. Nov. 9, 2020.

with Keye Tersmette. “Ghurba at Home – Views from Oman.” The Arab World as Ghurba: Citizenship, Identity and Belonging in Literature and Popular Culture, University of Warwick. June 21, 2019.

“Accounts from the Journeys of the Brig ‘Palinurus’ Along the Dhofar Coast in the mid-1800s.” Maritime Exploration and Memory Conference, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England. Sept. 15, 2018.

“Recent Views on Oman.” British Society for Middle East Studies, University of Edinburgh. July 6, 2017.

“Female, Femininity, Male and Masculinity in the Gibali-speaking Tribes of Southern Oman.” The Gulf Research Conference, Cambridge University. August 2, 2017.

“‘Words Mean Nothing’: Fluency in Language and Fluency in Culture in Anthropology Fieldwork in Southern Oman.” British Society for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Wales. July 15, 2016.

“’Why Would I Hurt a Woman?’: Respectful/ Respecting Women in Southern Oman.” Middle East Studies Association Conference, Denver. Nov. 21, 2015.

“Generosity, Gift-giving and Gift-avoiding in Southern Oman.” British Foundation for the Study of Arabia’s Seminar for Arabian Studies, The British Museum, London. July 27, 2014.

“‘I Do Not Need the Night’: The Gibali Conception of Self-Respect in Southern Oman.” Middle East Studies Association Conference, New Orleans. October 12, 2013.

“They Came, They Saw, They Fought, They Compromised, They Left: The Foreign Military Presence in the Dhofar War (Oman, 1965-1975).” Royal Geographical Society Annual Conference; Edinburgh. July 3, 2012.

“Waiting for [both] the Barbarians”: Tourism in the Dhofar Region of Oman.” Traditions and Transformations: Tourism, Heritage and Cultural Change in the Middle East and North Africa Region; Amman, Jordan. April 6, 2009.

Conference presentations – literature/ pedagogy

“Finding the Right Texts for Teaching Literature, Cultures, and Empathy in the Middle East.” American Comparative Literature Association Conference. April 9, 2021.

“‘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. Oct. 26, 2017.

“Antigone, Alcestis, Deanira and Philoketes visit the Empty Quarter: The Reception of Greek Drama on the Arabian Peninsula.” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, University of Utrecht. July 8, 2017.

“‘A Man Was Always Catching Fish’: Fairy Tale Elements in the Ali al-Mahri/ Johnstone/ Rubin Gibali Texts from Southern Oman.” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. March 18, 2016.

“Analyzing Arabic Teaching to Improve English Teaching.” TESOL Arabia Annual Conference; Dubai. March 14, 2014.

“John Clare Looks Good in a Dishdash: Linking John Clare to Middle Eastern Poetry.” Modern Language Association Annual Conference, Chicago. January 7, 2011.

“How Can You Hate the Sun?: Translating Western Conceptions of Nature.” Humanities Education and Research Association, Chicago, Illinois. April 9, 2009.

“Do You Have Anything on Cowboys?: Creating a University Library in the Middle East,” with Chris Sugnet. Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association Conference, Albuquerque. Feb., 2000.

Creative Non-fiction

“Yemen with Yul,” in Emanations 11. Independently published, 2024: 417-429.

“Questions About Food and Ethics,” in Emanations: When a Planet was a Planet. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2021: 403-408

“Ok Kilito, I Won’t Speak Your Language: Reflections after Reading Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language,” in Octo-Emanations. Carter Kaplan, ed. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2020: 233-236.

“Predator Anthropologists, Anthropologist Predators: Anthropological Metaphors in Popular Movies,” Open Anthropology Research Repository. Aug. 25, 2020. https://www.openanthroresearch.org/doi/abs/10.1002/oarr.10000333.1

“What’s in Your Bag?” Anthropology News. American Anthropological Association. Oct. 30, 2019. http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2019/07/23/whats-in-your-bag-2019-edition/

“Living Expat,” in Emanations: Chorus Pleiades. Carter Kaplan, ed. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2018: 308-318.

“Research in Foreign Cultures,” in Emanations: Foray into Forever. Carter Kaplan, ed. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2014: 355-358.

“Throwing Children in the Street: Explaining Western Culture to Omanis,” in Emanations: Third Eye. Carter Kaplan, ed. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2013: 265-274.

“To Learn Arabic, You Have to Talk the Talk,” The Chronicle of Higher Education. May 31, 2012. http://chronicle.com/article/To-Learn-Arabic-You-Have-to/132057

“Your Zimbabwe Stories” and “Memsahib 101,” in Emanations: Sidestepping Academic Dicta into the Higher Ecstatic Ethos. Carter Kaplan, ed. Brookline, MA: International Authors, 2012: 305-312.

“Bringing Theory Home in Oman,” The Chronicle of Higher Education. July 10, 2011: B24.

http://chronicle.com/article/Bringing-Theory-Home-in-Oman/128139/

“In the House of the Infidel or Perfume: The Great Healer,” Button 16, 2011: 6-9.

“For Middle East expats, a fake-holly, not-so-jolly Christmas,” The Washington Post, Dec. 23, 2009: C3.

“An Open Letter to Alice Walker,” The Chronicle of Higher Education. Feb. 20, 2009: B11.

http://chronicle.texterity.com/chronicle/20090220b/?pg=11#pg11

Culture Shock: The Basics

July 28, 2024July 28, 2024

(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)

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Expat Workers and Issues of Payment (part 4 of 4)

October 1, 2023February 20, 2026

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

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Situating Expat Workers (part 2 of 4)

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Expat Workers and Reciprocity (part 3 of 4)

Overview

By chance in the past few weeks I have read several articles about labor and migration on the Arabian Peninsula such as

Gardner, Andrew and Sharon Nagy. (2008). “Introduction: New Ethnographic Fieldwork Among Migrants, Residents and Citizens in the Arab States of the Gulf.” City and Society 20.1: 1-4.
Nagy, Sharon. (1998). “‘This Time I Think I’ll Try a Filipina’: Global and Local Influences on Relations Between Foreign Household Workers and Their Employers in Doha, Qatar.” City and Society 10: 83-103.
Sarmadi, Behzad. (2013). “‘Bachelor’ in the City: Urban Transformation and Matter Out of Place in Dubai.” Journal of Arabian Studies 3: 196-214.

There are lots of numbers, data sets, opinions and ideas in these texts – but no sense of what it’s like to interact with expat workers. There is ethnographic work with and about them, but nothing about the writer’s personal economic exchanges: how to hire, discuss and pay wages, decide work load, etc. This isn’t a fault of the articles which have different objectives, but reading these texts made me reflect on my connections to other expat workers, how I manage them and how they manage me.

This essay will talk about issues with payment. [The information about wages and dates are from monthly lists of expenses that I have kept since I moved to Dhofar. 1 Omani Riyal is about $2.40; there are 1000 baisa in one Riyal so the 500 baisa bill is worth about $1.20.]

***************

In the previous essays I gave examples of me hiring other expats to work for me. In this essay I want to write about some of the bumps along the way. First was my almost complete ignorance about how to hire/ manage people. When a friend told me that I should have someone clean my house, I thought it was a great idea but was not sure about the protocols.

I thought about the examples I knew from my parents and what I would want if someone hired me. From watching my parents interact with people who they hired to help cut bush and work in their gardens, I knew that I should agree on a price beforehand, pay in cash promptly and always have drinks (water/ juice/ soda) on hand.

Over the years, my father made several joking comments to me wondering what his short, small cleaning lady was doing with all the pairs of size 13 shoes he left for her, so I learned that if you have anything to throw away, leave it clean and neatly arranged in a place for the cleaning person to take if they want. And I hated having someone watch over me if I was trying to work, so I was determined to leave the person alone to work in peace.

I had only hired movers on my own before moving to Oman (paid in cash and given lots of soda) so I tried to assimilate these lessons as I started to navigate labor practices in my daily life with N (manager at a housing compound), M (car-cleaner) and T (house cleaner).

When I moved to a house in a small compound, the manager (N) asked for a small salary for cleaning my car, sweeping the sidewalks and watering the garden. This all went well until one day I noticed that none of the work was being done, so I walked over to N’s room to see what was going on. He was sitting on the bench outside his door and told me that he was supposed to go home that week. It was the time for his yearly free trip home but the company that hired him was stalling, refusing to pay for the ticket. He was not going to do any work as it was his right to go home for his vacation. I have never crossed a picket line in my life and this was clearly a protest strike so it was incumbent on me to stand in solidarity. I did the sweeping and watering (and kept paying his salary) until he was able to go home.

After cleaning my car for a few months, M told me (in an English sentence he had memorized) that his daughter was getting married and he needed an extra month’s salary. I was startled but realized that the 10 Omani Riyal was not that important to me, but that amount was important to him. So I handed it over. In the nine years he worked for me, he came several more times with requests and I always said yes.

T cleaned my house for 14 1/2 years. After she had worked for me for 4 years, she told me that her son was at the age to start school. Since she was an expat, she would have to pay for a private school and she needed the fees up-front. She needed the equivalent of 5 months’ salary that week then, she said, she would work for the coming 5 months without pay.

I did not want to hand over all that money. First it would require me taking some cash out of savings and forgoing some items I had wanted to buy that month. Second, it meant trusting that she would, in fact, show up for the next 5 months. Plus, I knew I would feel guilty about her working without pay and would leave some cash for every week so there would be an extra cost for me.

I briefly thought of going to the school myself, to arrange for a monthly payment plan that I would handle. But doing that would infantilize her; I should either give the cash outright or refuse. It was a moment in which my ideals and beliefs confronted everyday-life; the request got right to the core of who I thought I was and what I thought about my place in the world.

On one hand, I couldn’t know for certain that money was for school fees, but if it was for school and I didn’t help her, her son might lose the chance to get an education. As a teacher, I felt I had to respect someone’s efforts to help her child learn. So, I gave her the money. She worked for 5 months with no salary, with me leaving her a few Riyal every week.

Two years later, she again asked for an advance. She wanted to buy a car and needed 4 months’ salary ahead of time. Having a car would make her life immeasurably easier because she would not have to depend on taxis. I agreed.

When Covid hit, I kept paying her salary (as did all the other expats I know who have hired someone to help them clean), but asked her not to come to my house. When it became clear that the disease was spread through direct contact; she and I created a new schedule so that I was always out of the house for an hour before and after she came.

Here is a final example to illustrate the question of how much I am/ should be responsible for those who work for me.

I sort my trash four ways. Soda cans get put in a bag to be set next to dumpsters for people to take for recycling. Non-meat food waste gets composted. Anything that is usable or edible is set to the left side of my front door for the cleaning person or gardener to take if they want and other trash is put in biodegradable bags with the tops tied shut to be thrown out.

One day I had to run back home from work while T (the woman who cleans my house) was still working. As I came up the stairs, I realized that she had opened the trash bags, taken out items I had tossed and put them into other bags for her to take home. The things I had thrown out which she wanted were foodstuff that were older than their “best before” date. I stood on the steps and thought: What do I do about this? How much am I my sister’s keeper?

I asked T to come out to the stairs, pointed to the things she had set aside and said, “not good to eat.” She nodded and said that she would throw them out, but I don’t know if she did.

How long you can use food or medicine after it has passed its sell by/ expired date is something reasonable people can disagree about. My point of view is never to use anything after that date because to reach Salalah, most items are in transit for a long time in trucks that are not temperature-controlled. I often open food that should still be good to find that it is spoiled and I have had enough cases of food poisoning to be wary. I try to use whatever I buy before the “best before” date, but if something expires, I toss it. I know others disagree with me and use medicine weeks or months after the recommended date printed on the package.

My choices were to tell T not to open the trash bags, not do anything or make sure that the expired things were not useable in some way.

Telling her not to open trash bags didn’t really make sense. I have learned from teaching to never say something that you can’t back up and I am almost never at home when she cleans so I cannot tell what she was doing.

To let her decide for herself raised the issue that she might not be able to read/ understand “sell-by” dates. On the other hand, she might understand but was willing to try expired food and medicine as a way to save money.

By tossing out the food and medicine myself, I would be doing what I thought was right but perhaps wasting perfectly usable items. I finally decided to off-the-cuff evaluate what I put in my trash. Now I throw expired items that I think should not be eaten away myself, anything else I leave for T to make her own decisions about.

For me, the through-line in all of these cases is my uncertainty; I didn’t know then and don’t know now if I did the right thing. Being a “boss” is not something I had experience with before I moved here. From the outside, I might look like a confident American expat, but I feel like I am slowly finding my way in the dark, making mistakes and constantly wondering if I am misunderstanding the situation.

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Making Adjustments for Positive Multi-Cultural Exchanges/ Events

Ethnography: Conversations about Men/ Masculinity, part 1

Using Cultural Understandings to Improve Teaching, part 1

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: (Not) Asking Questions

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Expat Workers and Reciprocity (part 3 of 4)

September 30, 2023February 20, 2026

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

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Situating Expat Workers (part 2 of 4)

Overview

By chance in the past few weeks I have read several articles about labor and migration on the Arabian Peninsula such as

Gardner, Andrew and Sharon Nagy. (2008). “Introduction: New Ethnographic Fieldwork Among Migrants, Residents and Citizens in the Arab States of the Gulf.” City and Society 20.1: 1-4.
Nagy, Sharon. (1998). “‘This Time I Think I’ll Try a Filipina’: Global and Local Influences on Relations Between Foreign Household Workers and Their Employers in Doha, Qatar.” City and Society 10: 83-103.
Sarmadi, Behzad. (2013). “‘Bachelor’ in the City: Urban Transformation and Matter Out of Place in Dubai.” Journal of Arabian Studies 3: 196-214.

This essay will talk about the issue of reciprocity. Previous essays talked about my decision to hire help and situating expat workers. The next essay will talk in more detail about paying the people who have worked for me and the types of adjustments that we both make. [The information about wages and dates are from monthly lists of expenses that I have kept since I moved to Dhofar. 1 Omani Riyal is about $2.40; there are 1000 baisa in one Riyal so the 500 baisa bill is worth about $1.20.]

*************

(photo by S. B.)

Thought experiment: imagine that you live in a foreign country where most people speak language A, you speak language B and every morning you see a person (X) who speaks language C in your coffee shop. You raise a hand in greeting but never talk and you notice that X, after drinking a cup of coffee, X walks from the coffee shop into a large, nearby building which you have never been inside of. One morning, X leaves a shopping bag in the café by mistake. What would you do? Pick up the bag and head over to the building? You don’t know the local language and you don’t know X’s language. You can describe what X looks like (if, by chance, you find a person who speaks your own language), but you don’t know X’s name, where X works or what X’s job is and it’s a 3-story building which is divided into 4 sections. Each section has 10 to 20 offices, over 200 offices total. Do you venture in to return the bag? Or leave in in the coffee shop expecting X to come back and retrieve it?

One morning I looked up from my desk and saw M, who cleans cars in the parking lot of where I work. He was standing in the doorway with the man who works as a messenger for my department. The messenger pointed to the car-clearer and said, “He says problem with your car, tire.”

I was surprised that M had ventured into my large, 3-story building to find me. He and I don’t share a common language and he had (as far as I knew) no way of knowing where my office was.

When he first started working in the parking lot, he had walked up to me and said, “cleaning” while pointing to my car. “How much?” I asked. “10 Riyal month.” “Ok.” And that was it. The next day I gave him 10 Riyal and for nine years he wiped the sand from the outside of my car and we always raised our hands in greeting if we saw each other in the morning.

I had never had a car-clearer before so I made a list of rules for myself:

always pay for the month ahead as soon as I get my salary so he can count on money at a certain time
pay the same 10 Riyal every month even if there are vacation days
hand over various cleaning supplies (clothes, sponges, tire cleaner) at least once every month
pay extra if I want the inside of my car cleaned
empty trash out of the truck bed myself before coming to work
do not say anything if he doesn’t come during wind/ sand storms or misses a day now and then

Seeing him standing in the office doorway was one of those moments in which I realized I had been working under a whole set of not-shared assumptions. To me: I give money, he cleans my car was the full description of our connection. I would not have imagined that he would have come into the building having no idea where I was to tell me a tire was going flat.

I gave him a tip; but he would not have known I would do that as I had never given tips before so I don’t think the motivation was money. This was years ago and he has since left that work, so I can’t ask him exactly why he made the effort of wandering around the building to try to find me. But that image of him standing in the office doorway stays with me and makes me think of the quote “gifts differing according to grace.” It was a great kindness for him to find and tell me. I could sort out the tire then, mid-morning when all the shops were open, rather than being surprised when I tried to drive home at the time when shops were closed.

Until I read several articles on expat workers, I hadn’t reflected that I had several similar examples in which I assumed the boundaries were: I pay, they do their specific work, while the person who was working for me saw our connection quite differently.

A second example was a cleaner at work. B was bustling and cheerful. We greeted each other by waving when me met, usually when I was working in the late afternoon, and I would hand over 1 Omani Riyal every week. After he had worked in my department for over a year, one day he walked into my office with three potted plants and set them on the windowsill.

I love plants and had a great garden at home, but never had thought to bring plants to my office. I was happy to have them but also bewildered. Where had they come from? How had he gotten them? And how had he managed to bring them to the university? They were three, large healthy climbing plants (I don’t know the names) in attractive, new pots with matching saucers. I know other people gave him tips so I didn’t think it was for the money and, in any case, he could not have been certain that I wanted them. He wanted plants in my office – so he put them there.

He also gave plants to Steve Cass, whose office was next to mine, but as far as I could tell, to no one else. And he watered and trimmed the plants for as long as he worked in our building.

When I moved out of the house with a garden and into an apartment, with my landlord’s approval, I broke the water pipe and installed a sink on the roof. I then hired P, a gardener, to sweep the roof and water my collection of potted plants.

We don’t have a language in common, so when he first started to work for me, a friend of his came to help translate. I explained what I wanted done; I also said that anything on the small table to the right of the front door should not be touched, but anything I was getting rid of, I put to the left side of the door. If he saw anything he liked, he could take it (such as cushions, towels, bowls, folding tables, etc.) Then I made another series of rules for myself:

pay P as soon as I get my paycheck
don’t try to figure out when/ how often he works – judge by how well the plants are doing
water myself after big windstorms
leave packets of small bottles of water in the upstairs storeroom for him so he doesn’t have to drink from the hose

He had worked for me for 14 months when Covid hit. The roof access is from the stairwell so we were never in the same space at the same time, and he continued to work although my routine changed dramatically. I now taught from home and in the first months (spring 2020) I only left the house once a week to get groceries.

My apartment is the only one on the small landing, so I had gotten used to setting trash bags on the left side of the door at night, then bringing them to the dumpster in the morning. But since I was no longer walking down the stairs every day, sometimes there would be a bag or two for a few days. One day when I opened the door to take everything to the dumpster, I was amazed to find that the trash was gone. There was no one else who used the stairwell and the other stuff on the landing (small table and plants) was still there. Who would open the door to the hosh (courtyard), open the door to the house, walk up the stairs and take my trash bags?

Bizarre. This bothered me for many days, as it happened twice more and I could not figure out what was going on until I realized P had taken it upon himself to toss the trash. I had never asked him to, didn’t expect him to; he made the decision himself that taking out the trash was his responsibility.

M, B and P all went out of their way for me, spending their time and energy to make my life better in ways I did not ask for or expect. When each of these examples happened I was surprised, the root of which was assuming that our relationship was money-based and the generosity was one-way. For M and P, I gave salary, they gave their labor and as extra I gave tips and supplies (cleaning clothes to M and water for P). B’s salary was paid for but I gave tips. I perceived them as not having further agency in that they would do their assigned work and only that. But their actions showed that they viewed themselves as having the ability and choice to decide what to do.

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Expat Workers and Issues of Payment (part 4 of 4)

Ethnography: Conversations about Men/ Masculinity, part 1

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Changes within Cultures

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Claiming Knowledge and Shifting Perceptions

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Situating Expat Workers (part 2 of 4)

September 29, 2023February 20, 2026

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

Overview

By chance in the past few weeks I have read several articles about labor and migration on the Arabian Peninsula such as

Gardner, Andrew and Sharon Nagy. (2008). “Introduction: New Ethnographic Fieldwork Among Migrants, Residents and Citizens in the Arab States of the Gulf.” City and Society 20.1: 1-4.
Nagy, Sharon. (1998). “‘This Time I Think I’ll Try a Filipina’: Global and Local Influences on Relations Between Foreign Household Workers and Their Employers in Doha, Qatar.” City and Society 10: 83-103.
Sarmadi, Behzad. (2013). “‘Bachelor’ in the City: Urban Transformation and Matter Out of Place in Dubai.” Journal of Arabian Studies 3: 196-214.

This essay will talk about my decision to hire help. The previous essay talked about my decision to hire help and later essays will talk in more detail about some of the people who have worked for me and the types of adjustments that we both make. [The information about wages and dates are from monthly lists of expenses that I have kept since I moved to Dhofar. 1 Omani Riyal is about $2.40; there are 1000 baisa in one Riyal so the 500 baisa bill is worth about $1.20.]

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(photo by S. B.)

First, I want to highlight that my experiences are with other individual expat women and men who have come to Oman on their own, meaning they are sponsored by one Omani or a small company, not as part of teams hundreds of men strong. I can’t speak about the life of workers at large construction businesses beyond memories from 1997 of trying to walk between the buildings of the American University of Sharjah (AUS) as the men who were building the campus napped in the shaded walkways. As I stepped over their sleeping forms, I thought that I was probably being grossly culturally inappropriate, but they took up every inch of the shade so it was either don’t walk during nap-time, walk in the full sun or make one’s way amid the resting men. It was a great lesson in the practicalities of construction. I, with my Ray-bans and air-conditioned office, needed to understand that making the buildings required a lot of labor and that labor had the right to relax out of the noon-day sun.

I had a second lesson while living in campus housing at AUS. The man who was in charge of the apartments rang the doorbell one afternoon. When I opened the door, he was standing with 4 other men, one of whom was carrying a large TV set. “I am having coffee with women,” I said, “can you please come back in 2 hours?” He said, “Yes.” And I didn’t get my TV for a month. He had been ready to install it and I should have asked my female guests to leave so he could do his job. By saying “no,” I had insulted him and he installed every other TV on campus, waited another two weeks for good measure, then came back and did mine. Lesson learned.

Since I moved to Oman, I give up whatever I am doing when a repair person comes – no matter how inconvenient the time. I say “yes” to AC repairmen who want to tear open vents as I am trying to write midterm exams and telephone repair people who want to come in the middle of a birthday party.

Sometimes Omani friends and the research guys mention encounters with expat laborers; usually there is a clear divide between stories from men and women. Men work with expats laborers usually in connection to construction and the stories are usually negative. It’s hard to parse what is genuine confusion, what is incompetence and what is deliberate malice. The men don’t want to tell me details (as it is not common to dwell on negative people/ events) but here is one example from my life this year.

I wanted to have three rooms painted. Another expat I know brought an expat painter and his assistant to my house to give an estimate. The painter had been working in Oman for five years so he had a lot of experience.

He was very careful to ask if I was using “regular paint” or “machine paint” (paint in which the color is added when you buy it, available at only one store). I said, “machine.” He told me I would need 20 liters for each room and that the machine paint came in cans of 20 liters so I only need one can for each room. He also said he would need 3 rolls of tape to over the woodwork around the doors and light switches. That seemed like too much paint and not enough tape to me, but I haven’t painted a room in over 10 years so I deferred to his expertise.

When I got to the one store that mixes paint on request, I learned that “machine paint” comes in 4 or 18 liter cans and I was surprised that the painter had gotten the size of the can wrong. Since he had said 20 liters was needed, I bought an 18 liter can and a 4 liter can in each of the three colors for a cost of 64 Omani Riyal, thinking it was better to have too much than too little. I would keep the extra on-hand for touch-ups.

I got help to move the furniture into the middle of the rooms and cover everything with tarps. The painter arrived on time, looked at the 3 rolls of tape and announced that this was not nearly enough, so the person who was helping drove off to the store and bought more.

The painter and assistance worked from 8 to 5pm with a few breaks and did a great job. When they finished I paid the agreed price – 60 Riyal, plus I gave a 4 Riyal tip to each and they could take the tarps and the rest of the packet of water I had brought for them.

Then I went to take the paint cans to the trash and realized that they had only used about 12 liters per room; the large cans were 1/3 full and the 4 liter cans were untouched. As the paint was custom mixed, I could not return it and was stuck with a large amount of paint. I wondered how a person who has spent the last five years painting rooms would not know how much paint I should buy.

Stories from Dhofari women about female expat workers in their homes are usually about very positive interactions. For example, when I asked a female, Dhfoari friend if she wanted to have coffee, I was told that their maid was going back to her country, so my friend and her sisters were taking her shopping to get presents for the maid’s family. Once I was sitting in a female friend’s salle to have coffee and saw a new maid bring in a tray. My friend explained, “she’s new and very young, we didn’t think she would be so young, she misses her family so we are buying her many phone cards.”

Most of my female friends have workers who stay with the family for 10 years or more and they make adjustments to help the workers. One, for example, told me, “my father’s driver, his mother is sick so he is at home for a month so we rented a bus to bring the kids to school.”

Their stories made me realize that my basic assumption (I hire someone and they do the work) was not accurate. When someone works for you for a while, you create a relationship that must be respected. My obligation to the people who work for me is not simply that I pay the salary, a topic I will discuss in my next short essay.

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Expat Workers and Reciprocity (part 3 of 4)

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Expat Workers and Issues of Payment (part 4 of 4)

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Getting it Wrong

Teaching: Reflective Teaching and Motivation

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Claiming Knowledge and Shifting Perceptions

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

September 28, 2023February 20, 2026

Overview

By chance in the past few weeks I have read several articles about labor and migration on the Arabian Peninsula such as

Gardner, Andrew and Sharon Nagy. (2008). “Introduction: New Ethnographic Fieldwork Among Migrants, Residents and Citizens in the Arab States of the Gulf.” City and Society 20.1: 1-4.
Nagy, Sharon. (1998). “‘This Time I Think I’ll Try a Filipina’: Global and Local Influences on Relations Between Foreign Household Workers and Their Employers in Doha, Qatar.” City and Society 10: 83-103.
Sarmadi, Behzad. (2013). “‘Bachelor’ in the City: Urban Transformation and Matter Out of Place in Dubai.” Journal of Arabian Studies 3: 196-214.

There are lots of numbers, data sets, opinions and ideas in these texts – but no sense of what it’s like to interact with other expat workers. There is ethnographic work with and about them, but nothing about the writer’s personal economic exchanges: how to hire, discuss and pay wages, decide work load, etc. This isn’t a fault of the articles which have different objectives, but reading these texts made me reflect on my connections to other expat workers, how I manage them and how they manage me.

This essay will talk about my decision to hire help, later essays will talk in detail about some of the people who have worked for me and the types of adjustments that we both make. [The information about wages and dates are from monthly lists of expenses that I have kept since I moved to Dhofar. 1 Omani Riyal is about $2.40; there are 1000 baisa in one Riyal so the 500 baisa bill is worth about $1.20.]

***********

(photo by S. B.)

It is difficult to write about hiring people without sounding complacent, a point that was brought home when I read an ethnographic text about Western expats on the Arabian Peninsula who hired nannies and housekeepers. The author vilified the employers as spoiled, lazy, racist and delusional. The author had obviously never hired anyone to do work for them and had a healthy dislike of those who did.

Writing back against that attitude is not easy. I know I could do all the housework myself but I choose to hire someone to clean my house. This can be seen as indolent but I think it’s more helpful to situate one’s positionality when being critical. “I would never…” is very different than “I have never been in the position to…”.

My decision to hire help is predicated on several lifestyle differences such as how housing designs here allow bugs and sand to enter, the monsoon season and the size of houses.

When I visit my mom in the summer it always takes me a few days to tone down my bug vigilance. “MOM, CRUMBS!!!” I yell on the first morning when I walk into the kitchen and see evidence of sliced bread on the countertop. I quickly rinse the bread board, wipe down the bread knife and inspect the countertops for any speck of bread. Luckily, she has great tolerance for this and within a day or two I mellow out as I remember that a few crumbs on the counter sink will not induce hordes of critters to invade her kitchen.

When I get back to my own kitchen in Dhofar, I return to my watchful ways because I live in a cement block house where ants and cockroaches come out from cracks in the tiling and up from the sink and floor drains. They even crawl out though the electric outlet openings. Twice I have had mice scurry up to my first-floor apartment through the washing machine outtake pipe. There are lizards on the walls, bees flying in through the AC vents and spiders galore.

When I talk about the people I have hired to help me by cleaning my house, I know it can seem like I am lazy. I moved to the Middle East with bona fides of self-sufficiency. When I was a child, I had daily chores and once I lived on my own, I have doing all the cleaning myself. But life is different herein Oman.

For example, I have done my own laundry since I was in 6th grade and it’s simple: put everything in washing machine, then the dryer, fold and put away. But there are no dryers here and my top-loading washer has two bins. You put the clothes in the left-hand side bin, add soap, let it fill with water and turn the knob to agitate the water. Then you let the water drain and lift the sopping wet fabric up and place it in the right-hand bin which spins the water out. Then you hang everything on drying racks, wait for it all to dry, fold and put away. Going to a friend’s house and using her washer/dryer combo in the States makes me ask, “What do you do with all your spare time? Put your clothes in the machine, come back an hour later to find everything clean and dry? It’s a dream!”

Also, my friends’ houses are not in close proximity to deserts. “Sweeping the floor” means one thing in my mom’s house and something very different after a 3-day, 40 kph sandstorm in my Dhofari house where you can see daylight between the window frames and house walls. It’s a joy to sweep in my mom’s house; it takes about 5 minutes and you end up with a tiny pile to discard. After a sandstorm here I need to sweep the entire house and dust everything which takes hours. And there are usually more than 5 sandstorms every winter.

In addition, from June until the end of August, Dhofar has a monsoon season with drizzle and fog on most days. As this is also the time of annual vacation, if there is no one to clean the floors, turn fans on and off and keep watch, mold can grow. I brought a friend home from the airport when she returned to start the school year and when we walked into her living room, her sofas were coated with black mold. When I came back from vacation this summer and opened my car door, the front seats and dashboard cover were green with mold, there were even threads of mold hanging down from steering wheel.

When I lived in Madison, Boston, Minneapolis, and Grand Forks, I had a studio or one-bedroom apartment which was easy to take care of. In Salalah, apartment buildings are usually exclusively expat and I want to live in Omani neighborhoods, which means renting a small house or a floor of a house which are built for extended families. My “small” apartment has a salle, majlis, kitchen, 3 small bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. Friends who have rented houses with 4 or 5 bedrooms just shut the doors of the rooms they don’t use but I would rather hire someone to clean all the spaces.

A related point is that it’s better for me to have a slightly larger place to live as there are fewer “third spaces” here. In the month of Ramadan, for example, cafes are closed until after sunset. In the monsoon season, roads can be so crowded, it’s better to stay home. During Covid lockdowns and curfews I was really grateful I could turn the 3rd bedroom into a work space for on-line teaching. I also like that the woman who cleans my house has a key and can feed the cats if I am away for the weekend camping.

In addition to the calculations of spending time (washing clothes, sweeping, getting rid of mold) vs. spending money (paying someone to clean my house), there is the aspect of how easy it is to get help from someone who wants to work.

When I owned a car in the States, I would wash it now and then but here it is a government regulation that cars must be clean. So I could either spend ten minutes every morning wiping the sand off my truck or I hire someone to do it for me. In most parking lots of large stores, there are expat men who do this work for a small fee. Where I work, there are two men who come every morning to the covered parking area. You can pay them 500 baisa for each cleaning if you want it now and then or 10 Riyal for the month.

There are many such opportunities and I usually much hire and/ or tip everyone both because it makes my life easier and because I have been in need in my own life. I spent years without health insurance because I couldn’t afford it. I have always worked since I was in high school but I had to take out student loans for college. If my older brother had not kindly settled my student loans, it would have taken me at least a decade to pay them off. After the 1997 Red River flood, I ate Red Cross meals for weeks. Having received so much help in my life, I feel I need to be generous.

Every week, I give a money to the people who clean the building where I work and I tip the men who bag groceries. Although it’s not habitually done here, I always tip wait-staff and delivery men. When expat government employees are cutting weeds near my house, I hand out cash and bottles of water. If it’s safe to pull to the side of the road and I have cash in dashboard cubby hole, I give cash to the men who sweep streets. If I have time when there is a team of expat men gardening along the roadside near my house, I will buy cookies, as well as liters of water and soda, and hand them over.

Before I became an Associate Professor, I worked in sandwich shops, restaurants, libraries, a bookstore and an antique store and I can push my own grocery cart. But if I am walking in the parking lot of a grocery store and a man in the jumpsuit uniform of a cleaner walks towards me with his hands extended, I know he is asking to bring my cart to my car for a 1 Riyal tip. So I step away from my cart and let him push – a move that can be seen as being lazy/ exploitative or giving someone a chance to earn extra money.

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Situating Expat Workers (part 2 of 4)

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Expat Workers and Reciprocity (part 3 of 4)

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Expat Workers and Issues of Payment (part 4 of 4)

Outline and Chapter Abstracts for ‘Researching, Teaching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula: Creating Effective Interactions’

Houseways: Podcast, a discussion with Ahmed Almaazmi and Ayesha Mualla

June 2, 2023June 23, 2023

(photo by Onaiza Shaikh, living room in a rental house in Dhofar)

I had a great conversation yesterday with Ahmed Almaazmi and Ayesha Mualla for the Indian Ocean World – New Books Podcast.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/houseways-in-southern-oman

One interesting point that came up in our talk was how changes in house design affect the inhabitants. For much of the Arabian Peninsula, the most common type of house had a central courtyard until the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s depending on the area. With this type, not often found in Dhofar, all the rooms of the house open onto a center space that is exposed to the sky. Thus there are open sightlines in all directions; while more recently built houses are often ‘closed’ with hallways and corners which drastically cut down on the chance of seeing other inhabitants.

The reaction to this change can vary from person to person/ family to family. Some might celebrate the feeling of openness and togetherness found in a house with many vantage points to see most or all of the rooms, where it was easy to cross path with family members. Others see modern houses with limited sightlines as a great advantage in that people can come in and leave without others knowing.

One Dhofari friend told me that having a large open area near the front door, big enough for a few sofas, has been a blessing for her elderly father who can sit in that space all day and see every person as they move between the salle, majlis, kitchen, stairs and front door.

On the other hand, a different Dhofari woman told me about the early years of her marriage when she lived with her husband’s parents and felt a tremendous pressure to have herself and her children always well dressed and on-view in the public areas of the house. She and her husband eventually moved into a small rental hour so that she could have a more peaceful life.

This is one of Maneval’s main points in New Islamic Urbanism: The Architecture of Public and Private Space in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (2019): the built elements for privacy (high walls, limited sightlines in houses etc.) allow for people to act as they chose as they can create non-observed spaces for themselves.

Thus one can imagine a courtyard house with an family member who rigidly watches, criticizes and controls all the movements or a house in which inhabitants happily greet each other and sit together in harmony. Just as there are modern houses in which people are thankful to have privacy and chances to live as they please and other modern houses in which people feel cut off from each other and lonely.

The only drawback to our talk was that, to prepare, I read a published copy of my Houseways in Southern Oman book and found numerous typos. It was disappointing to see so many mistakes: Salalah misspelled, the author R. Guest written with a small ‘g’ and Modern South Arabian languages referred to as “South Arabian languages.” The proof I was given to check was write-protected, so I could make edits but I could not ‘accept’ the changes to see what the corrected version would look like. The result is odd spacing, missing words and small errors. Very frustrating!

Houseways: House plans

Houseways: Dhofari/ non-Dhofari house plans

Houseways is published and more examples of houseplans

Selected references related to Houseways in Southern Oman, Oct. 2022

Houseways in Southern Oman

Selected references related to Houseways in Southern Oman, Oct. 2022

April 20, 2023April 29, 2023

(photo by Onaiza Shaikh)

Selected references related to Houseways in Southern Oman – Dr. Marielle Risse

bibliography last updated Oct. 2022

[references for pre-historic and pre-modern Dhofar are also listed in separate topic-specific bibliographies at the end]

Abdelghani, Montasser. 2013. “The Impact of Shopping Malls on Traditional Retail Stores in Muscat. Case Study of Al-Seeb Wilayat.” Regionalizing Oman. Steffen Wippel, ed. New York: Springer. 227-47.

Abu-Lughod, Janet. 1989. “What Is Islamic about a City? Some Comparative Reflections,” in Urbanism in Islam: The Proceedings of the International Conference on Urbanism in Islam (Tokyo: Middle Eastern Culture Center): 193-217.

—. 1987. “The Islamic City: Historical Myth, Islamic Essence and Contemporary Relevance.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 19.2: 155-76.

Adam, Khalid and Liudmila Cazacova, 2012. “The Round Dhofari House Popularity Uniting the Past and the Present.” Proceedings of the 6th International Seminar on Vernacular Settlements. Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, North Cyprus. 365-74.

Akcan, Esra. 2014. “Postcolonial Theories in Architecture” in A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture (1960-2010). Elie Haddad and David Rifkind, eds. London: Ashgate. 119-40.

—. 2014. “Global Conflict and Global Glitter: Architecture in West Asia (1960-2010)” in A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture (1960-2010). Elie Haddad and David Rifkind, eds. London: Ashgate. 317-43.

Al Gandel, Thamna and Ibrahim Bryan Finn. 2017. Learn About Dhofar from 530 Questions and Answers. Muscat: Dar al Wraq.

Al Harthy, Sultan. 1992. The Traditional Architecture of Oman: A Critical Perspective. Unpublished M.Arch. thesis. The University of Arizona. https://repository.arizona.edu/bitstream/handle/10150/555398/AZU_TD_BOX353_YARP_1120.pdf?sequence=1 – https://repository.arizona.edu/handle/10150/555398

Al Hinai, H., W. J. Batty and S. D. Probert. 1993. “Vernacular Architecture of Oman: Features that Enhance Thermal Comfort Achieved within Buildings.” Applied Energy 44.3: 233-44. 10.1016/0306-2619(93)90019-L

Al Ismaili, Ahmed. 2018. “Ethnic, Linguistic, and Religious Pluralism in Oman: The Link with Political Stability.” Al Muntaqa 1.3: 58-73.

Al Kathiri, Muna Salim and Liudmila Cazacova. 2014. “Islamic Architecture Features and Modern Housing: A Case Study of the North Awqad District in Salalah, Oman.” The International Journal of the Constructed Environment 4: 1-18.

Al Mohannadi, Asmaa Saleh, Raffaelo Furlan and Mark David Major. 2019. “Socio-Cultural Factors Shaping the Spatial Form of Traditional and Contemporary Housing in Qatar: A Comparative Analysis based on Space Syntax.” Proceedings of the 12th Space Syntax Symposium.

Al Mohannadi, Asmaa Saleh and Raffaello Furlan. 2019. “Socio-cultural Patterns Embedded into the Built Form of Qatari Houses: Regenerating Architectural Identity in Qatar.” Journal of Urban Regeneration and Renewal 12.4: 1-23.

Al Thahab, Ali, Sabah Mushatat, and Mohammed Abdelmonem. 2014. “Between Tradition and Modernity: Determining Spatial Systems of Privacy in the Domestic Architecture of Contemporary Iraq.” ArchNet – International Journal of Architectural Research 8.3: 238-250.

Albright, Franklin. 1982. The American Archaeological Expedition in Dhofar, Oman, 1952-1953. Washington DC: American Foundation for the Study of Man.

Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson, Ingrid Fiksdahl-King and Shlomo Angel. 1977. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford: OUP (Center for Environmental Structure Series).

Alkhalidi, Abdulsamad. 2013. “Sustainable Application of Interior Spaces in Traditional Houses of the United Arab Emirates.” Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences 102: 288-299.

AlMutawa, Rana. 2022. “Navigating the Cosmopolitan City: Emirati Women and Ambivalent Forms of Belonging in Dubai,” in Migration in the Making of the Gulf Space Social, Political, and Cultural Dimensions. Antia Mato Bouzas and Lorenzo Casini, eds. New York: Berghahn Books. 67-85.

Ammann. Ludwig. 2006. “Private and Public in Muslim Civilization,” in Islam in Public: Turkey, Iran and Europe. Nilüfer Göle and Ludwig Ammann, eds. Istanbul Bilgi University Press. 77-125.

—. 2002. “Islam in Public Space.” Public Culture 14.1: 277-79.

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Newton, Lynne and Juris Zarins. 2017. The Archaeological Heritage of Oman. Dhofar Through the Ages. An Ecological, Archaeological and Historical Landscape. Muscat: Ministry of Heritage and Culture Sultanate of Oman.

—. 2014. “A Possible Indian Quarter at al-Baleed in the Fourteenth-Seventeenth Centuries AD?” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 44: 257-76.

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Othman, Zulkeplee, Rosemary Aird, and Laurie Buys. 2015. “Privacy, Modesty, Hospitality, and the Design of Muslim Homes: A Literature Review.” Frontiers of Architectural Research 4: 12–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.foar.2014.12.001

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—. 2017-2018. “Husn Al Baleed: Civil and Military Architecture along the Indian Ocean in Medieval Times.” Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology 13-14: 28-41.

Pavan, Alexia and Michele Degli Esposti, 2016. The Urban Shrine in Quarter A at Sumhuram: Stratigraphy, Architecture, Material Culture. Quaderni di Arabia Antica 4, Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider.

Pavan, Alexia, Agnese Fusaro, Chiara Visconti, Alessandro Ghidoni, and Arturo Annucci. 2020. “New Researches at The Port of Al Balid and Its Castle (Husn): Interim Report (2016-2018).” The Journal of Oman Studies 21: 172-99.

Pavan, Alexia, S. Laurenza, and R. Valentini, 2020. “Masonry and Building Techniques in a Medieval City Port of the Sultanate of Oman: Preliminary Typological Atlas at al-Balīd.” Newsletter Archeologia 10: 321-46.

Pavan, Alexia and Chiara Visconti. 2020. “Trade and Contacts between Southern Arabia and East Asia: The Evidence from al-Balīd (southern Oman).” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 50: 243–57.

Pirenne, J. 1975. “The Incense Port of Moscha (Khor Rori) in Dhofar.” Journal of Oman Studies 1: 81-96.

“Population.” 2022. Data Portal – National Centre for Statistics and Information. https://data.gov.om/OMPOP2016/population. June 2.

Potts, Daniel. 2016. “Trends and Patterns in the Archaeology and Pre-Modern History of the Gulf Region,” in The Emergence of the Gulf States: Studies in Modern History. J.E. Peterson (ed.). London: Bloomsbury. 19-42.

Ragette, Friedrich. 2003. Traditional Domestic Architecture of the Arab Region. Felbach: Edition Axel Menges.

Raymond, André. 1994. “Islamic City, Arab City: Orientalist Myths and Recent Views.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 21.1: 3-18. https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/13530199408705589

Remali, Adel, Ashraf Salama, Florian Wiedmann and Hatem G. Ibrahim. 2016. “A Chronological Exploration of the Evolution of Housing Typologies in Gulf Cities.” City, Territory and Architecture 3.14: 1-15. doi:10.1186/s40410-016-0043-z

Richthofen, Aurel von. 2019. Spatial Diversity and Sustainable Urbanisation in Oman. unpublished dissertation. Technische Universitaet Carolo-Wilhelmina zu Braunschweig. https://doi.org/10.24355/dbbs.084-201901220928-0

—. 2016. “Visualizing Urban Form as Mass Ornament in Muscat Capital Area” in Visual Culture(s) in the Gulf: An Anthology. N. Mounajjed, eds. Gulf Research Centre Cambridge. 137-58.

Risse, Marielle. 2021. Foodways in Southern Oman. London: Routledge.

—. 2021. “Private Lives in Public Spaces: Perceptions of Space-Usage in Southern Oman,” presentation at Middle East Studies Association annual conference. Montreal, Quebec. December 2.

—. 2019. Community and Autonomy in Southern Oman. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

—. 2018. “Accounts from the Journeys of the Brig ‘Palinurus’ Along the Dhofar Coast in the mid-1800s.” Maritime Exploration and Memory Conference, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England. Sept. 15.

—. 2015. “Generosity, Gift-giving and Gift-avoiding in Southern Oman.” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 45: 289-96.

—. 2013. “Verstehen/ Einfühlen in Arabian Sands (1959): Wilfred Thesiger as Traveler and Anthropologist.” Journeys: The International Journal of Travel & Travel Writing 14.1: 23-39.

—. 2009. “Cultural Refraction: Using Travel Writing, Anthropology and Fiction to Understand the Cultures of Southern Arabia.” Interdisciplinary Humanities 26:1: 63-78.

Roche, Thomas, Erin Roche and Ahmed Al Saidi. 2014. “The Dialogic Fashioning of Women’s Dress in the Sultanate of Oman.” Journal of Arabian Studies 4:1: 38-51.

Rose, Jeff. 2022. An Introduction to Human Prehistory in Arabia: The Lost World of the Southern Crescent. New York: Springer.

Rose, Jeff and Yamandu Hilbert. 2014. “New Paleolithic Sites in the Southern Rub’ Al Khali Desert, Oman.” Antiquity 88.341. https://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/rose341

Rose, Jeff, Yamandu Hilbert, Anthony Marks and Vitaly Usik. 2018. The First People of Oman: Palaeolithic Archaeology of the Nejd Plateau. Sultanate. Muscat: Ministry of Heritage and Culture.

Rose, Jeff, Vitaly Usik, A. Marks, Yamandu Hilbert, Chris Galletti, A. Parton, V. Černý, J. Geiling, M. Morley, and R. Roberts. 2011. “The Nubian Complex of Dhofar, Oman: An African Middle Stone Age Industry in Southern Arabia.” PLoS ONE 6(11) e28239.

“Salalah al-Wusta & Gharbiya: Dhofar Governorate: Documentation and Heritage Management Plan.” 2016. University of Liverpool and the Ministry of Heritage and Culture. https://issuu.com/archiam/docs/20170908_hmp_salalah

Salama, Ashraf. 2015. “Urban Traditions in the Contemporary Lived Space of Cities on the Arabian Peninsula.” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 27.1: 27-39.

—. 2014. “A Century of Architecture in the Arabian Peninsula: Evolving Isms and Multiple Architectural Identities in a Growing Region,” in Architecture from the Arab World (1914-2014): A Selection: Bahrain Catalogue in Biennale Venice. G. George Arbid (ed.). Manama: Bahrain Ministry of Culture. 137-43.

Sale, J. 1980. “The Ecology of the Mountain Region of Dhofar.” The Journal of Oman Studies: Special Report 2: The Oman Flora and Fauna Survey 1975. Muscat: Diwan of H. M. for Protocol. 25-54.

Scholz, Fred. 1980. “Part III. Case Study: The Sultanate of Oman,” in Bedouins, Wealth, and Change: A Study of Rural Development in the United Arab Emirates and the Sultanate of Oman. Tokyo: United Nations University. https://archive.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/80143e/80143E07.htm

Singh, Kaushalendra. 2018., Jan 12. “A Saga of Legacy at Bait al Ghassani.” Oman Observer. https://www.omanobserver.om/article/64672/Front Stories/a-saga-of-legacy-at-bait-al-ghassani

Smith, G. Rex and Venetia Porter. 1988. “The Rasulids in Dhofar in the VIIth-VIIIth/XIII-XIVth Centuries.” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1: 26-44.

Smith, John Alexander. 1991.“The Islamic Garden in Oman: Sanctuary and Paradise.” Garden History 19: 187-208.

—. 1983. “Desert Developments.” Building Design 11: 18-21.

Sobh, Rana and Russell Belk. 2011. “Domains of Privacy and Hospitality in Arab Gulf Homes.” Journal of Islamic Marketing 2.2: 125-37.

—. 2011. “Privacy and Gendered Spaces in Arab Gulf Homes.” Home Cultures 8.3: 317-40.

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Speck, Jeff. 2013. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time. New York: North Point Press.

St Albans, Suzanne. 1980. Where Time Stood Still: Portrait of Oman. London: Quartet Books.

Stephenson, Lindsey. 2011. “Women and the Malleability of the Kuwaiti Dīwāniyya.” Journal of Arabian Studies 1.2: 183-99.

Stephenson, M.I., Karl, A.R. and David, E. 2010. “Islamic Hospitality in the UAE: Indigenization of Products and Human Capital.” Journal of Islamic Marketing 1.1: 9-24.

Tabook, Salim Bakhit. 1997. Tribal Practices and Folklore of Dhofar, Sultanate of Oman. Unpublished PhD thesis, Faculty of Arts, Exeter University.

Tabuki, Salim Bakhit. 1982. “Tribal Structures in South Oman.” Arabian Studies 6: 51-6. (same author as above)

Takriti, Abdul Razzaq. Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans and Empires in Oman 1965-1976. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Thesiger, Wilfred. 1991/ 1959. Arabian Sands. New York: Penguin.

Thomas, Bertram. 1932, reprint. Arabia Felix: Across the Empty Quarter of Arabia. London: Jonathan Cape.

Usik, Vitaly, Jeff Rose, Yamandu Hilbert, P. Van Peer, and Anthony Marks. 2013. “Nubian Complex Reduction Strategies in Dhofar, Southern Oman.” Quaternary International 300: 244-66.

van Nes, Akkelies and Claudia Yamu. 2018. “Space Syntax: A Method to Measure Urban Space Related to Social, Economic and Cognative Factors,” in The Virtual and the Real in Planning and Urban Design: Perspectives, Practices and Applications. C. Yamu, A. Poplin, O. Devisch, and G. de Roo, eds. Routledge: New York. 136-150.

Varanda, Frenando. 2017. “The Domestic Architecture of the Northern Plateaux and Eastern Slopes of Yemen: Building Attitudes and Formal Identities,” in Architectural Heritage of Yemen: Buildings that Fill my Eye. Trevor Marchand, ed. London: Gingko Library. 89-99.

vom Bruck, Gabriele. 2018. Mirrored Loss: A Yemeni Woman’s Life Story. New York: Hurst.

—. 2017. “Bodies on the Move: Gender Dynamics on a Sanaani Minibus,” in Architectural Heritage of Yemen: Buildings that Fill my Eye. Trevor Marchand, ed. London: Gingko Library. 187-93.

—. 2005. “The Imagined ‘Consumer Democracy’ and Elite Re-Production in Yemen.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11.2: 255-75.

—. 1997. “A House Turned Inside Out: Inhabiting Space in a Yemeni City.” Journal of Material Culture 2.2: 139-72.

Walsh, Tony. 2013. Walking Through History: Oman’s World Heritage Sites.

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Weir, Shelagh. 2007. A Tribal Order: Politics and Law in the Mountains of Yemen. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Wikan, Unni. 1982. Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Winter, Tim. 2015. “Urban Sustainability in the Arabian Gulf: Air Conditioning and its Alternative.” Urban Studies. 1-15. doi: 10.1177/0042098015608782

Wolfe, Charles. 2020, Sept. 9. “Five Principles of the ‘Urbanism of Experience’.” Public Square. https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2020/09/09/five-principles-urbanism-experience

Yapicioglu, Balkiz and Liudmila Cazacova. 2018. “‘Omani Burqa’ vs. Decorated Facade of Modern Omani House: The Case of Salalah, Dhofar Region, Oman.” The Academic Research Community Publication. 101-111. ISSN online: 2537-0162

—. 2016. “The Building as a Statement of an Artefact: The Mijmara.” International Journal of Ecology & Development 31.3: 99-116.

—. 2016. “Culture Embedded in City’s Architecture; Incense Burning Custom and Its Effects on Modern Buildings’ Features of Salalah, Oman.” Proceedings of the 5^th International Conference on Sustainable Tourism and Cultural Heritage. Istanbul, Turkey.

Yarwood, John. 2012. Urban Planning in the Middle East: Case Studies. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Yule, Paul and K.K. Mohammad. 2006/ 1998. “Report on Al-Baleed Pottery: Reference Collection, RWTH Aachen University” Muscat: Office of the Adviser to His Majesty the Sultan for Cultural Affairs.

Zarins, Juris. 2009. “The Latest on the Archaeology of Southern Oman.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 129.4: 665-74.

—. 2007. “Aspects of Recent Archaeological Work at al-Balid (Zafar), Sultanate of Oman.” Proceedings of the Seminar of Arabian Studies 37: 309-24.

—. 2001. The Land of Incense: Archaeological Work in the Governorate of Dhofar, Sultanate of Oman, 1990-1995. Muscat, Oman: Sultan Qaboos University Publications.

—. 1997. “Mesopotamia and Frankincense: The Early Evidence,” in Profumi d’Arabia. Alessandra Avanzini, ed. Rome: L’Erma Bretschneider. 251-72.

—. 1997. “Persia and Dhofar: Aspects of Iron Age International Politics and Trade,” in Crossing Boundaries and Linking Horizons. G. Young, M. Chavalas and R. Averbeck, eds. Bethesda: CDL Press. 615-89.

Zarins, Juris and Newton, Lynne. 2012 “Al Balid: Ancient Zafar, Sultanate of Oman. Report of Excavations, 2005-2011 and Salalah Survey.” Unpublished ms., Muscat-Salalah.

Zerboni, Andrea, Alessandro Perego, Guido S. Mariani, Filippo Brandolini, Mohammed Al Kindi, Eleonora Regattieri, Giovanni Zanchetta, Federico Borgi, Vincent Charpentier and Mauro Cremaschi. 2020. “Geomorphology of the Jebel Qara and Coastal Plain of Salalah (Dhofar, southern Sultanate of Oman).” Journal of Maps 16.2: 187-98.

Zimmerle, William. 2017. Cultural Treasures from the Cave Shelters of Dhofar: Photographs of the Painted Rock Art Heritage of Southern Oman. Washington: Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center/Liberty Press.

—. 2017. Crafting Cuboid Incense Burners in the Land of Frankincense: The Dhofar Ethnoarchaeology Preservation Project. Washington: Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center/Liberty House Press.

Selected references – Al Baleed and Sumhuram

Albright, Franklin. 1982. The American Archaeological Expedition in Dhofar, Oman, 1952-1953. Washington DC: American Foundation for the Study of Man.

Avanzini, Alessandra, ed. 2008. A Port in Arabia between Rome and the Indian Ocean (3rd C.BC. – 5th C.AD) Khor Rori Report 2. Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider.

—. 2002. “Incense Routes and Pre-Islamic South Arabian Kingdoms.” Journal of Oman Studies 12: 17-24.

Avanzini, Alessandra and Alexander Sedov. 2005. “The Stratigraphy of Sumhuram: New Evidences.” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 35: 11-7.

Belfioretti, Luca. and Tom Vosmer. 2010. “Al-Balīd Ship Timbers: Preliminary Overview and Comparisons.” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 40: 111-18.

Buffa, V and A.V. Sedov. 2008. “The Residential Quarter,” in A Port in Arabia between Rome and the Indian Ocean (3^rd C. BC – 5^th C. AD). A. Avanzini, ed. Khor Rori Report 2, Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider: 15-59.

Carter, Henry. 1846. “The Ruins of El Balad.” Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 16: 187-99.

Cleveland, R. L. 1960. “The 1960 American Archaeological Expedition to Dhofar.” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 159: 14-26.

—. 1959. “The Sacred Stone Circle of Khor Rori (Dhofar).” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 155: 29-31.

Costa, Paulo. 1982. “The Study of the City of Zafar (Al-Balid).” Journal of Oman Studies 5: 111-50.

Franke-Vogt, Ute. 2002. “Remarks on the Classification of the Pottery from Al-Balid, Dhofar (Oman).” Unpublished ms., Office of the Advisor to HM the Sultan for Cultural Affairs: Muscat-Salalah.

Giunta, Roberta. 2009. “Coins from Al Balid, A Preliminary Report.” Unpublished ms, Office of the Advisor to HM the Sultan for Cultural Affairs: Muscat-Salalah.

Newton, Lynne and Zarins, Juris. 2014. “A Possible Indian Quarter at al-Baleed in the Fourteenth-Seventeenth Centuries AD?” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 44: 257-76.

Orazi, Roberto. 2002. “The Harbour and City of Khor Rawri.” Journal of Oman Studies 12: 210-222.

—. 2017-2018. “Husn Al Baleed: Civil and Military Architecture along the Indian Ocean in Medieval Times.” Journal of Indian Ocean Archaeology 13-14: 28-41.

Pavan, Alexia and Michele Degli Esposti, 2016. The Urban Shrine in Quarter A at Sumhuram: Stratigraphy, Architecture, Material Culture. Quaderni di Arabia Antica, Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider.

Pirenne, J. 1975. “The Incense Port of Moscha (Khor Rori) in Dhofar.” Journal of Oman Studies 1: 81-96.

Yule, Paul and K.K. Mohammad. 2006/ 1998. “Report on Al-Baleed Pottery: Reference Collection, RWTH Aachen University” Muscat: Office of the Adviser to His Majesty the Sultan for Cultural Affairs.

Zarins, Juris. 2007. “Aspects of Recent Archaeological Work at al-Balid (Zafar), Sultanate of Oman.” Proceedings of the Seminar of Arabian Studies 37: 309-24.

Zarins, Juris and Newton, Lynne. 2012 “Al Balid: Ancient Zafar, Sultanate of Oman. Report of Excavations, 2005-2011 and Salalah Survey.” Unpublished ms., Muscat-Salalah.

Selected references: Himbert, Rose and Usik – Pre-historic

Hilbert, Yamandu. 2013. “Khamseen Rock Shelter and the Late Palaeolithic-Neolithic Transition in Dhofar.” Arabian Archeology and Epigraphy 24: 51-8.

Hilbert, Yamandu, Jeff Rose and Richard Roberts. 2012. “Late Paleolithic Core Reduction Strategies in Dhofar, Oman.” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 42: 1-18.

Rose, Jeff. 2022. An Introduction to Human Prehistory in Arabia: The Lost World of the Southern Crescent. New York: Springer.

Rose, Jeff and Yamandu Hilbert. 2014. “New Paleolithic Sites in the Southern Rub’ Al Khali Desert, Oman.” Antiquity 88.341. https://antiquity.ac.uk/projgall/rose341

Rose, Jeff, Yamandu Hilbert, Anthony Marks and Vitaly Usik. 2018. The First People of Oman: Palaeolithic Archaeology of the Nejd Plateau. Sultanate. Muscat: Ministry of Heritage and Culture.

Usik, Vitaly, Jeff Rose, Yamandu Hilbert, P. Van Peer, and Anthony Marks. 2013. “Nubian Complex Reduction Strategies in Dhofar, Southern Oman.” Quaternary International 300: 244-66.

Other selected references – pre-modern

Charpentier, Vincent, Jean-Francois Berger, Rémy Crassard, Fredico Borgi and Philippe Béarez. 2016. “Les Premiers Chasseurs-collecteurs Maritimes d’Arabie (IXe-IVe millénaires avant notre ère) [Early Maritime Hunter-Gatherers in Arabia] Archéologie des Chasseurs-collecteurs Maritimes. Catherine Dupont and Gregor Marchand, eds. Paris: Société Préhistorique Française. 345-66. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311650424_Les_premiers_chasseurs-collecteurs_maritimes_d’Arabie_IXe-IVe_millenaires_avant_notre_ere

Costa, Paulo. 2001. Historic Mosques and Shrines of Oman. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.

—. 1983. “Notes on Settlement Patterns in Traditional Oman.” Journal of Oman Studies 6.2: 247-68.

de Cardi, Beatrice. 2002. “British Archeology in Oman: The Early Years.” Journal of Oman Studies 12, 2002.

Garba, Roman, Alžběta Danielisová, Maria Pia Maiorano, Mahmoud Abbas, Dominik Chlachula, David Daněček, W. Al-Ghafri, Stephanie Neuhuber, Denis Štefanisko and Jakub Trubač. 20202. TSMO (Trilith Stone Monuments of Oman) Research Project Expedition Report of the 2nd Season 2019-2020. Muscat: Ministry of Heritage and Culture. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341193620_TSMO_EXPEDITION_REPORT_OF_THE_2nd_SEASON_2019-2020_campaigns_TSMO_2A_2B_Ministry_of_Heritage_and_Culture_Sultanate_of_Oman

Hulton, Jessop and J. Smith. 1830. “Account of Some Inscriptions Found on the Southern Coast of Arabia.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 5.1: 91-101.

McCorriston, Joy, Michael Harrower, Tara Steimer, Kimberly D. Williams, Matthew Senn, Mas‘ūd Al Hādhari, Mas‘ūd Al Kathīrī, ‘Ali Ahmad Al Kathīrī, Jean-François Saliège and Jennifer Everhart. 2014. “Monuments and Landscape of Mobile Pastoralists in Dhofar: The Arabian Human Social Dynamics Project 2009-2011.” Journal of Oman Studies 12: 117-44.

Newton, Lynne. 2010. “Shrines in Dhofar,” in Death and Burial in Arabia and Beyond: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, Society for Arabian Studies Monographs 10. Lloyd Week, ed. 329-340.

Potts. D. 2016. “Trends and Patterns in the Archaeology and Pre-Modern History of the Gulf Region,” in The Emergence of the Gulf States: Studies in Modern History. J.E. Peterson (ed.). London: Bloomsbury. 19-42.

Zarins, Juris. 2001. The Land of Incense: Archaeological Work in the Governorate of Dhofar, Sultanate of Oman, 1990-1995. Muscat: Sultan Qaboos University Publications.

Zimmerle, William. 2017. Cultural Treasures from the Cave Shelters of Dhofar: Photographs of the Painted Rock Art Heritage of Southern Oman. Washington: Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center/Liberty Press.

—. 2017. Crafting Cuboid Incense Burners in the Land of Frankincense: The Dhofar Ethnoarchaeology Preservation Project. Washington: Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center/Liberty House Press.

Tag: Houses

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