Of ties and time: Sociality, gender and modernity in an Omani town.

Abstract

This dissertation is about a town in Southern Arabia and the ways that gendered sociality and infrastructural transformation meet and become mediated through peoples' understandings of local history and religious values. Focusing on the mundane social world of neighborhood women in the town of Bahla in the oil-rich state of the Sultanate of Oman, I analyze how memories and interpretations of urban life play out in relation to people and practices understood to be at the margins of shifts that have come to define a town's contemporary history. The subjects of this dissertation are housewives, divorcees and widows who inhabit the town through their daily visiting, exchanges and stories. Their activities and conversations demonstrate unintended effects and re-workings of development projects, discourses and policies, as well as multiple, subtle and contradictory ways that the past is entangled in daily lives. Each chapter of this dissertation is structured along two intersecting axes. On the one hand, I focus on the material structures and technologies that Bahlawis associate with development and modernity, and, on the other, I examine related aspects of the mundane social world of women. Tacking back and forth between the two allows me both to investigate the materiality of abstract notions such as development and modernity, and to provide an account of the mundane and quotidian. Examining the material incarnations of development, such as settlement patterns and roads, plastic thermoses, abundant coffee, schools and piped water entangled in women's daily encounters, as well as discourses (including religious) surrounding these icons of development illustrates the complex ways they are helping to shape and being shaped by gendered sociality. Bringing these two axes together highlights how gendered sociality is not only, as numerous studies on women's networks have illustrated, a site in which one can observe social organization or mechanisms of solidarity and hierarchy. This dissertation argues that the configurations of sociality are also historically contingent as well as objects of shifting discourses, notions and practices of development, domesticity, heritage, history and religion.