Introduction
Once while gardening, a branch I was trimming snapped and hit me in the eye. When one of the Gibali men in my research group saw my bruises, he teased me by asking several times about which tree I had been trimming, when it had happened, etc. I finally had enough and told him I didnāt want to discuss it further, so he asked me point-blank who had hit me.
I was so surprised by this question; we went back over our conversation carefully. He had not, in fact, been teasing me from his point of view. He assumed that I had been punched and was lying about the tree to cover myself, i.e. he thought I was following the Gibali pattern of ignoring/distancing myself from the insult to keep not only my self-respect, but his. If I admitted to him I had been hit, he might have had to get into āthe storyā by figuring out if the hit was justified and, if not, perhaps help me figure out a reprisal.
He kept asking me about the tree to check whether I was really going to stand by my ālieā or not. My refusal to keep bantering about the bruises meant that I was ready to admit what had happened. If I wanted to keep my self-control/autonomy, I would have continued to discuss the subject without emotion, proving that I was going to handle the situation myself. After I understood his POV, I explained that if I had been hit, I would have started with that point.
A few points stand out in that story. One is that he didnāt ask me directly. From the outside, tribal cultures can appear to have people locked into certain actions but, as I will explain in this book, Gibalis are always negotiating between preserving their rights and acting in accordance to group dictates. As a result, Gibalis are wary of entering into the private life of others, as they donāt want people interfering in their own lives.
Second, he didnāt mind that I was lying to him. In tribal cultures in general and Gibali culture in particular, it is accepted that people will cover their actions and motivations to protect themselves and others. It is better to āhold yourselfā than to show. Lastly, although he had known me for over five years at that point, he believed there was a possibility that I had done something to warrant for being punched. His reaction was: someone hit Marielle and it seems she doesnāt want me to get involved, let me check if she is going to stand by her lie or not. There was no automatic assumption that I was the victim. Given the propensity to cover unpleasantness, it was possible I had some (hitherto) hidden personality flaws which would give someone justification to punch me.
Community and Autonomy in Southern Oman explains how and why Gibalis create and interpret situations based on the twin desires of autonomy and collectivity.
Gibali Language
Gibali as a noun refers to a non-written, Modern South Arabian (MSA) language and the tribes of people who speak it in Dhofar. The country of Oman is divided into eleven governorates and Dhofar is the southernmost governorate. Dhofar is 38,300 square miles, bordering Yemen, Saudi Arabia and the Indian Ocean. From Salalah, the largest city in Dhofar, to Muscat, the capital of Oman, it is a 10-hour drive across a mostly barren desert plain; thus Dhofar is quite separated from the rest of Oman. Salalah is located on a coastal plain with a 40-kilometer beach on the southern side; the mountains Jebel al Qamar, Jebel al Qara, and Jebel Samhan ascend on three sides, set back about 10 kilometers from the coast (see Zarins 2001, 23). There are towns and villages in the mountains, one town (Thumrayt/Thumreit) and a few villages in the bare gravel plain on the far (northern) side of the mountains and a series of small towns strung along the coast from Dhalkut (close to Yemen) to Hasik.
Arabic is the official language and used for education, government, and business in Oman, but in Dhofar many people in the coastal and mountain villages speak Gibali as a first language.
The word āGibaliā comes from the Arabic jabal, mountain, and can be spelled in English as Jibbali, Jebbali, or Gebali. 1 Gibali is also referred to as Shehri/Shahri/Shary which is an approximation of the word āmountainā in the Gibali language and the name of a tribe. The people who I know, work with and/or interviewed, however, refer to themselves and their language as Gibali. The word can also be used as an adjective, e.g. āa Gibali house .ā
When I say a person is āGibali,ā I mean a person who has one or both parent(s) who spoke/speak Gibali as a first language, who themselves speak Gibali as a first language and who identify themselves as Gibali not just in a linguistic but a cultural sense. 2 In Dhofar, āGibali cultureā has a specific meaning, i.e. events, actions, and circumstances that are seen as āGibaliā but within groups of Gibali speakers there are linguistic and cultural divisions, for example, between the Al Sheri, Al Kathiri, and hakli . There is also some intermarriage between Gibali and non-Gibali Dhofaris.
The Culture/Not Culture Argument
As I have and will continue to use the word/concept of culture, I want to briefly acknowledge criticism of the term. Abu-Lughod (1999) argues that
My own argument for writing against culture was developed in the context of trying to think how I might write an ethnography of a Bedouin communityā¦that did justice to the complexity, uncertainly, and contestations of everyday life and to the individuality of its membersā¦I concluded that the idea of āa culture,ā with its inevitable generalizations and typifications, had become a central component of the distancing and othering against which I wanted to work, even while I recognize that humans are, in the broadest sense, āculturalā beings. (1999, S14)
Further, āthe culture concept retains some of the tendencies to freeze differenceā (Abu-Lughod 1991, 144). Volpp frames it that there is āthe general failure to look at the behavior of white persons as cultural, while always ascribing the label of culture to the behavior of minority groupā (2001, 1189). Thus
Those with power appear to have no culture; those without power are culturally endowed. Western subjects are defined by their abilities to make choices, in contrast to Third World subjects, who are defined by their group-based determinismā¦Culture is constantly negotiated and is multiple and contradictory. The culture we experience with a particular community will be specific and affected by our age, gender, class, race, disability status, and sexual orientation.ā (1192)
I think the way to combat culture as a concept that confines and codifies is to make explicit the multiplicities of peopleās lives, as Abu-Lughod does, and to make the limitations of both the anthropologist and her/his research clear. For example, my research is limited because I donāt have access to older (over 60) or very wealthy Gibalis. Almost all my informants and friends are middle-aged and middle-class.
Further, I think Brumann has a practical point of view that is helpful in taking some of the power away from the term ācultureā: āit could be a healthy reminder that what people of a given nation really have in common is often trivial things such as familiarity with certain soap brands, commercial slogans or TV stars and not an ever-present awareness of their common history and heritageā (1999, S12). I have a friend who grew up in East Germany and to her, the fall of the Berlin Wall meant the disappearance of all of the common household products. The companies that made the laundry soap, canned food, window cleaners, tissues, etc., that she had grown up with were all out of business within a few years. When I meet Americans overseas, we donāt chat about the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court, āAmerican exceptionalism,ā Manifest Destiny, or Congress, we commiserate about the lack of ice in drinks and our favorite football teamsā standings.
When a Gibali friend went to Europe, he complained to me that he couldnāt get āfresh milk.ā I wrote to him that every store had fresh milk and that he should look in the refrigerated section, but he insisted that there was none. When he came back to Dhofar, I tried to figure out what the problem was. He had been looking for milk that was labeled with both the expiration date and the production date. In Dhofar, you usually buy milk āmadeā the same day or only one day before, as the factory that bottles the milk is less than a kilometer away from stores that sell the milk. He had been asking cashiers for milk of the same day and was amazed that European commercialism, technology, education, and organization couldnāt manage to figure out how to get milk from cows to a store in one day. Thatās the kind of culture I am interested ināthe moments when what it is normal for you conflicts with someone elseās normal, and then figuring out the details of why the conflict happened.
My Research/Gibali Language
Although I have lived in Dhofar for over twelve years, I am not fluent in Gibali and not speaking the language might seem to be an insurmountable barrier to understanding the cultures. One point is that an outsiderās behavior is more important than their language for integrating with Gibalis. When I am with Gibali friends and informants, we are on their terms and only their terms when we sit, talk, eat, drink, drive, fish, and on camping trips, sleep. Itās not imperative that I know how to conjugate the verb āto drinkā; it is imperative that I donāt start to drink a cup of tea until all the older people I am sitting with have their own cup. To drink before all of the group has their own cup marks a person as selfish and greedy, someone to be avoided.
The āavoidā is significant because Omanis in general, and Gibalis in particular, take great pride in not showing their emotions. Thesiger (1991/1959) describes this as the āthe deep and biting social disciplineā of Be...