Tag: Oman

How NOT to Describe People Who Are Foreign to You: Exoticizing Omanis

A recent article in a major English-language newspaper about the Dhofar region of Oman included the sentence:

They [Omanis] are immensely private, with women rarely leaving the home and men going about their work in tribal clothes with elaborate head wraps, rifles and decorative daggers known as khanjars.

I taught at a university in the Dhofar region for 19 years, returning to the States 3 months ago. This text is not only similar to many travel articles, it is similar to books written in the early 1900s in which Omanis were portrayed as primitive and exotic.

There are a couple of layers to the above quote. One is that Dhofari women do leave the home. They might be a pharmacist, a teacher, a small-business owner or a director within a large organization. They might work in a law office, a restaurant, an airline or a company that leads tours for foreigners. Their work might also be taking care of goats, cultivating plants, gathering shellfish, designing clothes, taking photographs at events or making perfumes. These are some of the jobs that my female Dhofari friends have; I also have female friends who are studying for graduate degrees.

And they leave the house for the social work of connecting with and supporting family members by visiting new mothers and the newly wed, relatives who are not feeling well, elderly family members, those who are mourning and those who are celebrating.

Lastly, “rarely leaving the home” when writing about Muslim, tribal women usually carries the implied meaning of “not allowed to leave.” Thus, a woman who stays home might be viewed as inactive, isolated, not earning money and/or unhappy. However, homes in Oman are frequently multi-generational with over 30 family members living together. In addition, homes of relatives are often located close to each other so that people can walk short distances to see parents, siblings, cousins, etc.

The Dhofari women I know who don’t study or have conventional employment have options. They might be the social lynch pin for their family by acting as primary care-giver for a disabled relative, running a day-care for their nieces, nephews and neighbors’ children or being responsible for not only all the meals in the house, but also for feeding impoverished neighbors and/ or relatives. Or they might learn foreign languages, do the floor-plan for the new family house, run a web-site devoted to reading and culture, or create an Instagram business that centers on food, beauty, fashion or perfume.

I know that a travel writer, excited about a culture that is new to them, might not want to go into all these kinds of details. But when the writer was in Dhofar, they saw dozens, if not hundreds, of women outside the house. Women drive (there are women taxi drivers) and work in hotels, stores and the airport. And the writer saw dozens, if not hundreds, of men who were not carrying guns or knives. Men who herd animals carry a gun for protection from wolves and hyenas; men going to a formal event such as a wedding, wear a khanjar (dagger), belt and shawl as part of standard ceremonial attire.

Why write something that was constantly disproved by observation? And if the writer was told this information, I think that journalists should ask themselves when interviewing a person: What is this person getting in return?

A journalist/ writer is getting good copy when they conduct an interview. They are gathering quotes to weave into their story which they plan to publish, hoping their words will be read, discussed, cited and passed on. But the interviewee is also thinking of the future – they want their words to be read and they may be speaking to create or counteract opinions.

Several times when I was doing research an Omani interviewee would make a statement and then remark how they were speaking through me to an intended audience. For example, when talking to Dhofari men about driving their female kin to visit relatives, one said, “I know you [Americans] think we are not good with our women.”

An Omani saying “women [are] rarely leaving the home” might be talking through the journalist to represent the area in a certain way. Again, a casual visitor might not know all these kinds of details but the solution is simple: avoid blanket statements by adding modifiers: “some women” and “some men.” Another way to avoid this kind of overgeneralization is to ask Omanis and/ or people familiar with the area to double-check the article before publication

To me, the above quote sounds like “zoo mode,” i.e., let’s talk about these perfectly normal people as though they were exotic animals. When a person in Cambridge, MA wears a scarf because it is cold, am I going to talk about “elaborate head wraps”? No. Dhofari men wear scarves that are as exotic and take as much time to put on as my L.L. Bean scarf.

Why write that Dhofaris have “tribal clothes”? Why not simply explain what they are wearing? Every culture has tribal clothes. I work in Cambridge where the tribal clothes are khakis with button-down shirts and everyone is carrying their SPECIAL, SACRED, TRIBAL OBJECT: a waterbottle.

(Minor point – the article includes a photo with the caption “The beaches can get busy in the khareef [monsoon] season.” The photo was not taken during the khareef season because the ocean is quiet; there are no waves. In the khareef season, there are high waves for over two months.)

my essay about “zoo mode” – Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Changes within Cultures

a discussion of “zoo mode” in travel books from the 1890s-1950s (from Annotated Bibliography of Texts Pertaining to the Dhofar Region of Oman)

Theodore and Mabel had already explored in Italy, Greece, Bahrain, South Africa, Ethiopia, Sudan and Yemen when they arrived in Oman. Their trip to Dhofar began when they left “Maskat” (Muscat) December 17th, 1894 and traveled by ship south along the coast, arriving in Mirbat on January 20. They left the Dhofar region from Al Hafa (part of modern day Salalah) on January 23, 1894. They traveled along the coast and a short distance in the mountains in the late 1800s; I believe they are the first Westerners to visit the Dhofar mountains to write a description of it.

Although James and Mabel Bent were not in the employ of the British government, they were quintessential Victorian age travelers who, in their writing, specifically support British imperialism in their  Southern Arabia (1900/ 2005).[5] The book, written by Mabel after Theodore died soon after they returned to England from Oman, viewed all landscapes through the perspective of how the land might be useful to the Empire:

If this tract of country comes into the hands of a civilizing nation, it will be capable of great and useful development…and a health resort for the inhabitants [i.e. British inhabitants] of the burnt-up centers of Arabian commerce, Aden and Maskat (274).

The Gibalis, here referred to as Qara, traveling with the Bents, however, saw the Bents as equals. The Qara men she traveled with always addressed her, to her anger, only as “Mabel” (with the prefix when calling a person “ya,” i.e., Ya Mabel!) and informed the Bents that “they did not wish us to give them orders of any kind as they were sheikhs” and “We are gentleman” (258, 266). The mountain people of Dhofar, Mabel Bent writes, are “endowed with a spirit of independence which makes him resent the slightest approach to legal supervision…They would not march longer than they liked; they would only take us where they wished… and if we asked them not to sing at night and disturb our rest, they always set to work with greater vigor” (248).

But she does include a fair amount of real information, taking the time for example to explain how indigo is used to dye clothes (145).  She describes the scenery with careful attention to plants, rock formations, distances, etc. (e.g., Wadi Ghersid, 256; Wadi Nahast, 265) and, noticing that the language spoken in the “Gara” [Qara] mountains was not a dialect, she includes a few words (275). Some of her information is still current. She mentions, for example, that oaths “to divorce a favorite wife, are really good” (180) and the technique of cooking on stones (250) which I have seen practiced several times.

The Bents eventually stop struggling to control and “we gave up any attempt to guide our own footsteps, but left ourselves entirely in his [Sheik Sehel] hands, to take us whether he would and spend as long about it as he liked” (257) but her summation is typical of British Victorian-era travelers: “we had discovered a real Paradise in the wilderness, which will be a rich prize for the civilized nation which is enterprising enough to appropriate it” (276).

A geologist who traveled with Bertram Thomas on a short visit to Dhofar in the 19020s writes

Regarding the interesting non-Arab tribes, the Mahri and the Gara…They are entirely nomad, and live under the shelter of trees or caves. They have no cultivation, but live on the produce of large herds of cattle and some camels. I found them always very friendly, and on several occasions I was persuaded to partake of a meal with them…Their diet consists exclusively of meat and milk products. Firearms are very scare among these tribes, instead they are armed with very poor quality swords and small shields of wood or shark-skin. They are also very adept at throwing a short pointed stick. (Lees 1928 456, 457).

As the title suggests, Bertram Thomas’s Arabia Felix Across the Empty Quarter of Arabia (1932) is happy book which details his famous first crossing of the Empty Quarter starting from Salalah. He begins the book with a general history told with imperialistic British moralizing judgment, i.e., “for where treachery is a habit of mind, men are actuated by the stern necessities of the moment, not by any principles of morality.” As the Bents discovered, Thomas asserts that “A European who would travel happily must be prepared to adapt himself to their standards” but “[o]ften I found myself the only member of my party in the saddle, while the others walked for long hours to spare their mounts” (192, 176).  The main differences between Thomas and the Bents is that he traveled later, (he arrived in Salalah October 8th, 1930), did longer and more difficult journeys and was more interested in recording the Omanis’ speech and habits.

Many of the details he sets out are still prevalent as with the cushions hard as “medicine balls” in “bright scarlet or emerald-colored trappings” (17), the description of a dance (34), food preparation (e.g., making bread 166) and the list of shrines (85). He notices that men in the mountains do not eat chicken, a habit that is still followed by older men from the mountain tribes (59). Thomas tells the story of killing a chameleon brought in by an old man who then exclaims “it is treachery. I found it [the animal] innocent in a bush and it came along with me trusting and this is what I consent to happen to it” (63). I see exactly the same framework of not killing an animal being used by the Gibali men I know, to the point of a man not killing a scorpion which has stung him.

Thomas and Thesiger are divided by the Second World War. Thesiger traveled through present day Oman, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates between 1946 and 1950. In addition to Arabian Sands (1959), he published many articles on his travels (1946, 1948, 1949, 1950). Thesiger marks a break with the previous writers as he is neither an accidental traveler (like the shipwreck narratives) nor is he traveling for imperial benefits (anchorage/ supply depots) or even to collect knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but for personal interest and personal challenge.

Thesiger, like Thomas, crossed the Rub al Khali but he spent more time with his guides and was far more interested in their lives than Thomas. In talking about Dhofar, he mentions the traditional dark blue cloth (45), mountain honey for costal sardine trade (49), and throwing sticks (49) that are evident in the Bents’ and Thomas’ description, but he goes farther than any of them in explaining both his point of view and the point of view of his companions.

Thomas reports that “each of my companions not only knew at a glance the footmarks of every camel and man of my caravan, but claimed to know those of his absent tribe, and not a few of his enemies” (178). Thesiger gives the same information but includes specific examples (e.g., 122). Thomas notes that “where food or water were short, no one of them would think of not sharing it equally with his companions, and if anyone was away, perhaps tending his camels, all would wait his return to eat together” (157); this is an accurate description (still in practice today) but he did not ‘live’ this as Thesiger did, sitting thirsty and impatient for the others to come (65).

After Thesiger, the next travel writer is Jan (then James) Morris’ journey with Sultan Said bin Taymur from Salalah to the north of Oman in 1956 as described in Sultan in Oman (1957/ 2008). Whereas Dhofaris are discussed with accuracy and respect by Thesiger, Morris lets loose with insults as demeaning as the Bents. It is rather a surprise, after the gradually lowering racist/ condescending tone seen in the arc from the Bents through Thomas to Thesiger, to read her smug, complacent, and judgmental book.

She begins by widely overstating her achievement, declaring that she undertook “The last classic journeys of the Arabian Peninsula,” as if being driven in a jeep from Salalah to Muscat in 1956 was on par with Dougherty or Philby (1). To drive home the (moribund) English tradition, she notes that “Curzon and Gertrude Bell rose with us approvingly” (2).

She describes Gibalis as

tribes of strange non-Arab people…with their poor clothes, their indigo-stained faces, their immemorial prejudices. [In the monsoon season] the plain was full of these queer Stone Age figures, lean and handsome, and they wandered like fauns through the little marketplaces of Salala. (22)

They have “shaggy,” “strange” and “fuzzy” hair and practice “obscure rituals, taboos, and prejudices” (30, 39, 31). In keeping with the general tone of relegating the inhabitants to prehistoric times, there is no mention of guns. The people “hurl in the general direction of their neighbors the heavy throwing sticks (less scientific than boomerangs) with which they were sometimes quaintly armed” (40). It is clear than even in Thomas’ accounts, much less Thesiger, that the men of this region had access to and knowledge of guns. In fact, the cover of one edition is one of Thesiger’s photos showing Bin Ghabaisha holding a rifle.

The descriptions illuminate more about Morris’ travels than Oman, i.e., Risut is “Like a bay in Cornwall or northern California” (20). “The deeper we penetrated into these Qara foothills, the more lifeless and unearthly the country seemed… It was like an empty Lebanon;” the “abyss of Dahaq” is compared to “Boulder or Grand Coulee” and the Qara mountains “felt like England without the churches, or Kentucky without the white palings” (27, 27, 38). A small lake is “‘Better than the Backs,’ said my companion, ‘not so many undergraduates’” which only makes sense if the reader knows this is a term referring to the place where several Cambridge colleges back onto the River Cam (30).

Travel books about Dhofar from the 1980s onwards

Rory Allen’s Oman: Under Arabian Skies (2010) focus almost exclusively on the authors’ feelings, and when describing Omanis, the prose turns a distinct shade of orientalist purple, as in:

There is a sense of lawlessness [with the Bedu of Sharqiyah]…this anarchy gives one a sense of freedom and of a being without constraint. Rousseau’s “Noble Savage” comes to mind when looking at these Bedu, and they are noble and have not lost that primitive force inside. In Jungian terms their primitive psyche remains intact, that primeval power and urge that makes the Bedu so strong, so essential, individual, intuitive and spontaneous and above all it makes him so vital and impossible to control or rein in. This makes him the free spirit that down deep we all want to be. (Allen 2010 61)

There are several books by travelers or ex-pats about Oman which include a chapter or two about a weekend or short vacation in Dhofar. One of the first, and worst, examples is Suzanne St Albans, who visited in the late 1970s and wrote Where Time Stood Still: A Portrait of Oman (1980). Reminiscent of Jan Morris, she says of Gibalis that “certain freakish customs still linger on among the more primitive tribes” and gives “witchcraft murders” as an example (25). The Jibalis are “wild savages” who “refuse to be absorbed, disciplined or even understood” (153).  She refers to them as “primitive aborigines in the Qara [Mountains]” and “grand, pastoral, cave-dwelling noblemen have never worked with their hands” (152).[10] How would “primitive” people living in caves and herding flocks have survived if they had “never worked with their hands”?

Her writing creates a vision of an ancient, primitive people which erases the reality of the Dhofar region in the late 1970s. St Albans only carefully describes the life of a small percentage of the inhabitants, living in caves and rough dwellings in the mountains. She discusses “witch doctors” but not the many mosques or daily religious practices of Dhofaris (154). In Salalah at this time there was an airport, Holiday Inn, “shops and offices and ultra-modern television centre” and hospital (180) but she never shows Omanis interacting in/ working in these modern surroundings. The “comfortable seaside bungalow” she stays in is owned by British ex-pats who are described but when visiting the “model farm” she discusses the cows; there is no reference to Omanis who work there (163, 164).

Her account of the Dhofar War (1965-1975) shows sympathy only for the British soldiers who fought on the side of the government, which makes sense given that the first ‘thank you’ in her Acknowledgements section is to Brigadier Peter Thwaites. The second is “The Sultan’s Armed Forces provided transport where I wanted to go” (ix). Most of the other people mentioned are also British and military.

Musallim bin Nafl, the first leader of this revolution, is dismissed by the Duchess as “a useless loafer” and a “shiftless, bitter, dissatisfied layabout” but when she visits mountain villages she is appalled at the conditions (155, 156). She never connects the revolution encouraged by Musallim and the desperate poverty endured by his people. The difficulties of daily life she herself witnessed encouraged the mountain people to fight against their government which denied them the basic amenities of modern life such as schools and electricity.

Maria Dekeersmaeker’s The DNA of Salalah, Dhofar: A Tourist Guide (2011) is a guide just for the Dhofar region but it is unfortunately confusing with sentences such as “Horizontalism and parrellism are the trends in urban development of Salalah city. Off roads are the guidelines to the Rub al Khali Desert, the Dhofar Mountain Range and the coastal plains” (153).

The non sequiturs make the book difficult to read. The first section is called “In the Footsteps of the Sultan.” One sub-section entitled “Beloved Mother” about the Sultan’s mother starts with a discussion of falaj, water channels (32). The sub-section “Renaissance Landmarks Education” includes several paragraphs about football (soccer) stadiums and clubs in Salalah (34). The sub-section “Landscape Architecture” is about the Salalah Port and the next sub-section, “The European Connection,” is about the cement factory.

Her discussion of modern Dhofaris makes misleading mistakes to highlight the exoticness, i.e. “real Dhofar men wear a skirt and a t-shirt” (163) with a focus on the rural/ pre-modern. She divides Dhofaris into three groups (Bedu, Jebali and Hadr) and then describes their lives in terms of what animals they take care, as if in 2010 all three groups only herded animals and fished (55-56).

New essay: “’Ayn is for Arab” on “The Arabic Alphabet” website (by Michael Beard)

“The Arabic Alphabet” website (written by Michael Beard, illustrated by Houman Mortazavi) – http://alifbatourguide.com/

‘Ayn is for Arab – http://alifbatourguide.com/the-arabic-alphabet/ayn/

 

‘Ayn is for Arab  –  illustration by Houman Mortazavi   

If we are predisposed to linguistic timidity this is the sound that scares us off. Strictly speaking it is simply the voiced equivalent of ح. But.

I had met Sayed a few months before, in Australia, where he’d tutored me in Arabic. Our lessons foundered on the gagging “ah” sound that has no equivalent in English – or in any other language. “You sound as if you’re choking on spaghetti,” Sayed would say, correcting me. “Just choke. Forget the spaghetti.” He usually gave up after fifteen minutes and tutored me in the wiles of Cairo instead. (Tony Horwitz, Baghdad Without a Map, 72-73)

Even a respected linguist makes it sound a little forbidding: ‘Ayn (that’s its name) is

…the voiced pharyngeal fricative, the most characteristic sound of Arabic . . . the throat muscles are highly constricted with the vocal cords vibrating to produce a sound close to a gag.” (W.M. Thackston (in Introduction to Koranic and Classical Arabic, xvi)

A manual teaching the Urdu script, by a linguist who has evidently read Thackston, says that in Urdu the letter is a simple glottal stop, but that in Arabic it was “a sound made when the throat muscles are highly constricted and the vocal cords vibrate . . .” and adds “similar to the sound made when retching” (Richard Delaney, Beginner’s Urdu Script, 89). William Jones, long ago, in his grammar of Persian (1771) describes the sound in Arabic as “harsh,” and adds, quoting the 17th-century scholar Franciscus Meninski, that it resembles vox vituli matrem vocantis, which I believe means “the sound of a calf calling for its mother.”

Jonathan Raban, in an account of his own study of Arabic, resists the ‘Ayn temptation. It’s still a difficult sound, but it’s not frightening. He even makes it sexy.

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

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

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

New essay: “Ṣâd is for Zero” on the Arabic alphabet website

Culture Shock – Communication is Always the Worst Part, part 1

(photo by Onaiza Shaikh, Instagram: Onaiza_Shaikh)

A friend recently asked if I was planning to write about culture shock, I laughed and said, “that is all I write about.” And, as I have always avowed, the hardest part of culture shock is how to talk to people. You can adjust quickly enough to the clothes, food, meal times and public demeanor, but communicating is the real terror.

For example, in the States, age is off the table as factor in work conversations. Talking to a person who is older than you does not create a power differential.

Also, American conversations are like ping-pong, incessant back and forth. Someone gets in a comment and then it’s the other person’s serve. I keep forgetting that I am supposed to ask the question back!

After living for years with people who will tell you what they want to, when they want to – I am out of practice of asking questions. Now, someone will inquire, “How was your weekend?” and I say, “Fine, thanks.” Then five minutes later I remember that I was supposed to say, “How was yours?”

In Oman, the research guys and I would do endless repetitions of “how are you?” but no one really cared about the answer. If someone wanted to talk about their weekend, they would start in. And if they wanted to talk for 45 minutes, they would. I still remember the first time an Omani decided to tell me about their weekend: it was a 20-minute monolog. Don’t try that in USA.

This past week I watched a conversation in which one person was trying to explain how to do something and the other person kept interrupting to focus on just the data that they wanted. It was excruciating for me, but the two Americans were well-pleased with each other. One had taught and one had learned in a fencing-match style that was exhausting to listen to (no one finished a sentence!) but was exactly the kind of interaction they both expected and were ready for.

It’s accepted in America that people can pick their input. There’s an implied: I can choose what information you are giving me and I only have to pay attention to information that I think is relevant or important at this moment. For example, all those people moving through cityscapes while texting, missing when the walk sign lights up because they are looking at their phone.

In Oman, it’s more common to pay attention to surroundings and when dealing with people, you need to focus on their motivations as what you are hearing is less important than what you are seeing. For example, compliments were often meaningless, and often used to bring attention to a problem not convey something positive.

One example this week was that several people told me about a mysterious quirk in Google maps that showed up in relation to our work building which had been on-going for over a year. I figured out the reason within a day. I had the same data they did, but I was looking at it from the perspective of an outsider who was unused to navigating with apps. I always had to use my own knowledge to decide where I was walking/ driving.

Another example was when a person suggested a major change in one aspect of the work-flow as a certain delay was creating anxiety in one group of people. My suggestion was to reframe the issue for the anxious people. Don’t buy into their framework that the delay was a worrisome/ bothersome pause. Posit the delay was a beneficial and deliberate slowing down of the system to ensure everything was perfect before the data went live. The delay helps them from making mistakes. That kind of rethinking comes from years of living in Oman and being told (implicitly and explicitly) that I must always know what other people are thinking/ how they see the world so I figure out how I can best communicate with them.

So, I have skills in some areas, but I still need a lot of work in others . So… “How was your weekend?”

Culture Shock: The Land of Detachment and Toolboxes

Bumpy Reentry and Moral Dilemmas – Adjusting to Life in the States

Culture Shock: (Not) Being Under Observation

Culture Shock: The Basics

Culture Shock: Bumpy Reentry and Moral Dilemmas

Living in a small apartment with big windows in a tepid climate, until sunset on most days the only electricity I use is running the fridge.

Weather report predictions are usually way off. In Oman it was warm and humid for 9 months, drizzly and humid for 3 months and there was always plenty of warning about storms. Here, every day is a chance for an unannounced rainstorm or unexpected heat wave.

Amazing how everything is set up for people who are at least lower middle class. I got an e-mail which assumed I could print a document, sign it, scan it and send it as pdf within 10 minutes, as if it was normal for every person to have a multi-function printer at home.

I love my grocery store because it has all the daily requirements (Peeps, yellow mustard, frozen pretzels, crab cakes and fresh juices) but it is small. There is everything you need (chips, tea towels, flower bouquets, apple pie, mops) but with a limited selection so you don’t feel overwhelmed. But one item they don’t have is… matches. In fact, none of the stores have them so I had to order from an on-line store and have matches sent to me. Coming from a place in which many people smoked so matches and lighters were available everywhere, it is odd to buy matches by mail.

I was looking forward to being invisible in the States, i.e., wearing clothes that lots of other people were wearing, in particular sundresses! I have a collection of six brightly colored, floral, cotton sundresses and always felt like a parrot amongst sleek, tuxedoed penguins in Oman. But when I left my new apartment in a cotton candy pink dress with magenta flowers, I soon realized that there was not one other person in the neighborhood in anything similar. Day after day, store after store, I kept looking for a soulmate but after several weeks I have to concede defeat.

Moral dilemmas

People looking at their phone while waiting for crosswalks on the way home from work are so focused that they don’t notice when the ‘walk’ sign lights up. I start walking, hoping that their peripheral vision will alert them to motion, but once I crossed a street, glanced back and saw all ten people had not moved. Should I make a verbal comment? I am tempted to bark “ten-hut, forward march,” but that might be a bit muchish.

My wallet now has a coin pouch, so I decided to keep quarters in it and use them for parking meters about to expire. One day I came upon a parking policeperson giving a ticket to the first car in a line of six vehicles. I walked to the second parking meter and started slotting in quarters. She saw what I was doing and quickly briskly to the third car. I was just behind her and dropped in a quarter but she had already taken a photo of license plate and said, “They are getting a ticket.” So, I moved quickly to the last three cars and dropped quarters. She was scowling and I walked on wondering what would happen if the owner showed up and saw the ticket on the windshield when there was time left on the meter. Drama!

The post office near where I live has no postcard stamps, so I put on full price stamps. No problem. But then the main post office for the area also had no post card stamps and I had a buy a full sheet of full-price stamps to get the 2 stamps I needed for postcards. Complain? Stop writing postcards?

Steve Cass

(photo by Hussein Baomar)

Some types of sadness lessen in time, while some submerge, then come back full-strength. Today is two years since Steve Cass passed away. I still miss him terribly – he was so cheerful that he pulled people along with his happy magic. For Steve, every morning was a fresh start, a new chance for good things to happen. The motto he taught students was ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’ which aptly sums up his philosophy: there is always hope, always a way forward. His joie de vivre was a much needed tonic for me and many others.

Yet with all his positivity he didn’t ignore, overlook or accept corrupt behavior. He was a gentleman, but also a warrior for better teaching and he continually fought on behalf of our students. His insistence on speaking truth to power was a much needed jolt of honesty for those who only heard a chorus of approval for their policies, regardless of those policies’ effectiveness or usefulness.

Now that I have moved back to the States, I often wish I could talk over with him all of my culture shock and how much I miss Oman. I know he would have exactly the right words to make this transition easier. He made life brighter for everyone he met.

Steve Cass

Steve Cass, teacher and friend

Remembering Steve Cass

Culture Shock: The Land of Detachment and Toolboxes

photo by Onaiza Shaikh,

Instagram: Onaiza_Shaikh

To survive in the US, you need scissors, 8 square feet of empty floor space, a complete collection of tools (screwdrivers, hammers, wrenches, etc.) and a cell phone.

That’s it.

You use your phone to order everything for your apartment and then you use your floor space and tools to put it all together: a fan, a lamp, pots and pans, bookshelves, etc. I am having a hard time adjusting to the IKEAfication of the States where everyone is expected to have a Masters of Mechanical Engineering. You have to set up your own wi-fi, make chairs, reset the garbage disposal and hang pictures, no matter your manual dexterity or skill level with drills.

Even the simplest action (opening a container of guacamole!) requires patience. First you have to take off the cardboard cover, then take off the lid, then take off the inner cover.

On bad days I think American consumers have been sold a load of codswallop and told it was spun gold; everything is impersonal and do-it-yourself. Coming into the system is over-whelming; I have to deal with 3 different apps for my apartment building. Farewell to the happy days of simply calling Ali, world’s best landlord, for repairs!

But there are benefits of living in a culture in which transactions are often impersonal: there’s no one to create chaos out of personal animosity. Getting a lease required submitting certain forms: if you don’t have the paperwork, you don’t get the apartment. There’s no way to influence the outcome through networking or to stop the rental through enmity.

If you want to do anything, you go to websites, tap in information, get codes sent to your cell phone, enter the codes, type some more and voila! Then you spend hours putting whatever you ordered together, but at least it is all at your own speed and under your control.

When I think of leaving Oman, I have numerous unhappy memories of chaos with people deliberately lying to me and others about processes. I spent 2 1/2 hours my last morning in Oman trying to get people to complete a task I was told would be done days earlier. I finished the paperwork on my severance pay with ten minutes to spare before the bank closed – a harrowing and upsetting end to 19 years!

However, I don’t think systems are necessarily better in the States. It’s often entertaining in Oman to have so many things based on personal relationships; almost everything is negotiable if you stay pleasant. Yes, you can get the ‘forbidden’ I-tunes music program onto your computer if you get along with the computer tech person. When I went to get my first covid vaccine, the nurse told me to come back in a week. I said, “I live alone and I am scared,” and she gave me the vaccine.

In the States, crying, screaming, smiling or begging are of no avail: you either have the little computer code on your phone or you don’t. It’s not better, not worse – different. And I don’t say this lightly. Many times I talked to my students about how, when you arrive in the USA, everyone stands in one of two immigration lines. If the line takes 2 hours, then you stand for two hours. There are not people, as on the Arabian Peninsula, who walk along and pull people out of the immigration line who have young children or need assistance.

New book – Researching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula: Creating Effective Interactions

Culture Shock: The Basics

Reflections on Ethnographic Research: Getting it Wrong

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: Mental Maps and Wayfinding Apps in Dhofar, Oman

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: Mental Maps and Wayfinding Apps in Dhofar, Oman

This proposal was accepted for the Royal Geographical Society’s 2024 annual conference but I had to cancel as I moved back to Boston. Since I had notes written up, I decided to post this essay as a less academic version of what I planned to talk about.

Proposal – “Mental Maps and Wayfinding Apps in Dhofar, Oman” for the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) Annual Conference. August 27-30, 2024. https://www.rgs.org/research/annual-international-conference

One of the Dhofari men in my research group recently told me that the road I needed to turn off onto to get to the beach where we were meeting was after the mosque “where the road goes up and then down.” I knew that particular road weaves among foothills for over 30 kilometers without any straightaways. When I finally figured out after which mosque and which going “down” I realized that there was a sign at the turnoff.

But the men I do research with in southern Oman do not heed or discuss road signs when giving directions. Their mental maps are made up of geographical, not written, markers.

Electronic geo-locating is used throughout southern Oman for only two general purposes. The first is for finding a house. As most delivery drivers are not Omani and some do not speak Arabic or the local Modern South Arabian languages, finding a house is done with various mapping apps and the person who made the order must send a photo of their house. Also, fishermen have adopted different kinds of modern technology such as Google maps and Windguru to keep up to date about wind speed and direction. They also plot fishing areas on maps which are shared.

The result is that fishermen in my research group are very fluent in map-reading when gathering information about tides, currents, underwater formations, wave height, etc. but will navigate on land using only mental maps created from their own travels and what close friends and family members have told them. I have been lost with them many times, but the solution is always to simply keep going to see what happens, ask a person if possible or stop and look at the landscape to try to guess where the road might lead. Opening up any type of printed or electronic map is never an option. Hence, in 19 years of teaching and doing ethnographic research in the Dhofar region, I have never heard a man refer to a road by its given name. Roads are called by the towns they pass through or their endpoint.

In my presentation I will discuss how men and women in Dhofar not only create and pass on information about important locations using permanent indicators, such as mosques, tombs, hills and the color of rocks. I will also address how this use of mental mapping stands in contrast to the limited use of electronic geo-locating devices and applications.

Essay

In spring 2024, one of the research guys got in touch to say that the group would go camping. If I wanted to join, I should be at one of the fishing towns on Thursday at 2pm. I met up with two other men in another pick-up and we drove about 1/2 hour on a good, one-way-each-direction road, then off onto a gravel road through a wide wadi (dry river bed). After about 20 minutes, we turned off onto small road, threading though hills about 20-50 feet high, usually with the rocky inclines on either side of one-car-wide path.

Then it got bad. Either climbing up-hill (rocks on one side of road, steep drop off on the other) or balancing along on top of hills, lots of sharp curves and most inclines were ‘hail Mary,’ i.e. the angle is so steep that when you reach top of hill, the hood is up so high, you can’t see road or which way to turn. I was thinking “thank heavens I am following someone because this is hard driving, bleak landscape and no cellphone signal” (foreshadowing!).

We finally pulled out onto a sandy track following the curve of a beach about 4:15pm and drove to a shelter where the other guys were relaxing. We chatted and had dinner about 8pm, then I realized two of the men were there for fishing and had gotten up at 5am. By 9pm, it was bedtime, whereas usually we stayed up talking until 1 or 2am. I tried to sleep (on mat, under stars) and got bit my every insect imaginable. I wasn’t feeling great so I never fell asleep; the men all got up at 5am for prayers, then breakfast and the fishermen went out to sea to check their boxes (fish traps).

I thought “I need to get home and sleep” but how could I leave when I wasn’t sure that I knew the road out? So I drank tea and chatted with the men who weren’t fishing. After 2 hours, I mentioned that I thought I should go home and by the grace of God, one man wanted to leave. They all decided it was better that he pray the Friday prayer at home; it was decided that we should leave around 10am, meaning another hour of chatting and tea-drinking. Then I drove back with the man who knew the road, he let me choose the way, correcting me when I made one mistake.

2 weeks later one of the guys sent a message on Thursday saying that we couldn’t meet on Friday as usual because they were busy, but they were free that night. So I drove out to the beach only to discover that the reason they were busy Friday was that they was going back to that same beach. And they thought I should come, driving alone with a large cool-box (almost the size of my pick-up’s bed) filled with ice. They would fill the box with that day’s catch Friday night, then Saturday morning I would drive the freezer back to town where the guy who buys their fish would take it, while they would fish all day Saturday, then return home by boat.

It was all such fantastical nonsense, that I could cope with a huge chest full of ice over that road, that I could get to that exact beach again, I just looked at them and said, “I love your trust in me and I would love to be worthy of that trust but…” But this was not a discussion.

One of them gave me verbal instructions (“turn off after the mosque where the road goes up and then down and when your car is turned like this, do not take any right, but when your car is turned to there, then take the first right…”). No cell signal, no one with me and the hills so close and high, I could not plot by the sun. Oh, and since I was going on a Friday, I had to be in the fishing town at 10am the next morning so the other men could load my pick-up before Friday prayers. And it was now 10pm!

I drove home and organized everything. Got up at 8am and packed, went to the store for water and soda, was in the town at 10am, and back on the road by 11. I was stressed for the entire drive, but made it to the right place. Other people were already in the shelter we had stayed in so I went to a nearby elevated place and waited. And waited. I had thought (from the last trip) that they would be done with fishing by about 4pm but it got to be 5:15pm with no sign. I had no idea where they were or if anything had happened.

The sun was going down and I didn’t trust myself to choose the right roads in the dark so I knew I would sleep there. I had everything I needed to spend the night and was not concerned about being alone; however, I was not sure if they were ok or if I had missed some vital piece of information, such as I was supposed to be someplace else.

I was also a little angry because they had told me to send a message when I reached the fishing town, when I turned off the main road and from the last high hill, but when I drove back up to the high hill (where I could get cell signal) at 5pm, I could see that they had not seen any of the messages I sent, meaning they didn’t know if I had reached the place or not. The road is easy for them but it was my first time driving it alone and I felt like they had asked me to do something a little difficult, then not taken care to make sure I was ok.

They finally showed up at 5:30, loaded fish into the ice chest and we set up camp. When everyone settled down to drink tea, I asked about their day. They had left their town (by boat) and had spent the whole morning fishing. The waves were high, so they could not look at their phones. At 2pm, they drove into the large bay to check messages. They could not get a signal so they drove in closer to shore until they could see my truck on a wide ledge over the ocean. Now that they knew I had gotten there and was ok, they went back out to open sea to check fish traps. It made me feel a lot better to know that they had, in fact, checked on me.

After we ate dinner, I asked one of the men where the beach road ended towards the eastern and western directions. He answered then said to me, “now you are smart,” meaning that a wise person gathered information about the nearby roads. The “now” was added because during my first trip to that beach, I hadn’t asked about the road network. The third time I went there; I drove the beach road in both directions until it ended and was again complimented for (finally!) acting like an intelligent person.

On my last trip to that beach I realized that there was a sign for a small town a few klicks before the turn off from the main road, as well as a road sign with the name of the area directly before the turnoff point. They could have used the two signs in their directions instead of “turn off after the mosque where the road goes up and then down.”

But they don’t use man-made aids to navigate away from towns. I have never seen any of them use a paper map or call a road by its official name; they call a road by the town they are going to or its termination, i.e. “the Muscat road.” And they don’t say unnecessary information, e.g. “take the wadi before Hadbeen” not “turn left into the wadi before Hadbeen,” because the ocean is on the right side of the road, a wadi could only be on the left side. The only times I have seen one of them use GPS on land is when we wanted to get to a myrrh tree which someone had dropped a pin on and to drive around in the Empty Quarter.

The point of view of the research guys is that a good person is constantly constructing mental maps as it’s your responsibility to know where you are on land. When you go to a new place you should ask about the road networks and, if there is time, drive to endpoints. It is fine to ask someone about the road if it is your first time in the area, but you should memorize every road so well that you only ask once and can easily return to the same spot years later.

And never show fear. My favorite quotes from the guys are their responses to my expressing dread at having to drive up a steep slope: “You think that’s a hill? Give me your car, go sit at home.” Upon seeing the wreck of a piece of heavy machinery that had fallen off a steep road with a sheer wall of rocks to one side and a long drop-off on the other, one of the men said, “the driver meant to do that.”

In towns, they use landmarks, usually mosques, to navigate; the Dhofari women I know navigate by mosques, but also use shops and restaurants. If you need to get to a person’s house, either someone would drive you or give precise instructions. If you are going to attend a wedding or to give condolences, once you are in the general area, it’s easy to spot the house as it would have many cars parked out front (and strings of lights for a wedding).

GPS/ dropping a pin on your location is usually for expat delivery drivers who might not be fluent in Arabic or English. To receive food or a mailed package, you turn on your phone’s location and send a photo of the outside of your house or office building.

In other words, navigation is almost entirely based on visual clues. Dhofaris use what they can see to move across landscapes in contrast to using, for example, distances (“go three kilometers”), time (“drive for ten minutes”) or cardinal points. Expats use GPS to get to a general area, then use a photo of the building, as opposed to using street names and house numbers.

For navigating at sea, however, fishermen use both traditional and electronic methods of navigation. The most basic method of positioning is to triangulate using two points on land, e.g. “when I see that rock by the headland and the side of that mountain, then I know I am in the right place.” Fishermen also carry internal schedules of tides, as well as wind and wave patterns. The men I know would often tell me that, for example, the wind would die off in an hour or would start up at dawn.

I was terrified the first few times we returned from night fishing; sitting at the bow, I was amazed that they could drive their boats safely through rocky areas on moonless nights. With only weak starlight for illumination, they would bring the boat right to the beach without hesitation. If I expressed surprise at their knowledge, they would say, “If you do not know this, you should not be in a boat!”

But, in compliment to their personal knowledge, they also use GPS and weather/wave apps such as Windguru [https://www.windguru.cz/53 – sample page below]. The result is that fishermen in my research group are very fluent in map-reading when gathering information about tides, currents, underwater formations, wave height, etc. but will navigate on land using only mental maps created from their own travels and what close friends and family members have told them.

Coda

I saw The Finest Hours (2016, about an American Coast Guard rescue in heavy weather) with a Gibali-speaking hakli fisherman and he kept a quiet running critique of the boat handling skills with an occasional “not bad.” He guessed correctly that the townspeople would bring their cars to the water’s edge to help guide the boat home as he been part of similar efforts in his own town. The tagline of the movie is “We all live or we all die” which sums up how the fishermen envision their community.

They never try to hide information about good fishing locations as they know that all aspects of their lives are in Allah’s care; if they are supposed to have a good catch, they will have it, if not, then not. Therefore, all fishing spots that are marked on weather/ map apps are set for anyone to see, not hidden. There is a strong belief that a person who persistently and knowingly works selfishly against the good of the community will be given some sort of divine punishment and it is not the responsibility of the other fishermen to bring that consequence about, beyond the necessity of avoiding the man and making excuses not to fish with him.

Example of Windguru data

windguru

New book – Researching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula: Creating Effective Interactions

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

Culture Shock – (Not) Being Under Observation

Culture Shock: The Parable of the Boxes

 

New book – Researching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula: Creating Effective Interactions

I am happy to announce that my 4th book, Researching and Working on the Arabian Peninsula: Creating Effective Interactions, has been accepted for publication at Palgrave Macmillan. I am very grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who gave positive and helpful comments.

This book outlines strategies for current or soon-to-be business professionals, government employees, anthropologists, researchers and teachers to communicate, study and work effectively on the Arabian Peninsula. Using first-person accounts, as well as scholarly research from the fields of anthropology, history, literature, political science and travel writing, this text gives clear advice so long- and short-term visitors can create successful interactions with people from Arabian Peninsula societies. By discussing how the practicalities of work and research intersect with cultural norms, this book fills the gap between guides aimed at the casual tourists and academic texts on narrowly defined topics.

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: Leaving and Learning

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

Culture Shock – (Not) Being Under Observation

Predator Anthropologists, Anthropologist Predators: Anthropological Metaphors in Popular Movies

 

Culture Shock: (Not) Being Under Observation

(photo by Hussein Baomar)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culture Shock: The Basics

Culture Shock: The Parable of the Boxes

Throwing Children in the Street: Culture Shock Omani Style

Intercultural Exchanges

Screenshot
Screenshot

Culture Shock: The Basics

(photo by M. A. Al Awaid)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culture Shock: The Parable of the Boxes

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: Leaving and Learning

Reflections on Ethnographic Work: Being Safe and Secure

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