← New Books Network
New Books Network
Marielle Risse, "Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman" (Anthem Press, 2026)
00:36:17
Loading summary
Transcript35 lines
- [00:01]
A
This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Whether you're packing for a vacation or dressing for a wedding, Nordstrom has head to toe looks for wherever summer takes you. From swimwear and bold color to romantic florals and dresses that make an entrance. Find the right style for every unforgettable moment. Shop new arrivals from brands you love, like Farmrio, Free People, Vince, Waif, and Staad. Plus free shipping and returns and styling help whenever you need it. Make it all so easy. Shop now in stores@nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app. Hi, diva. It's Rachel and Jordan. Yeah, hi. Quick question. Why are you not spending your Venmo Balance? Yeah, we're concerned you can, like, buy stuff with it. Ugh.
- [00:38]
B
You love buying stuff and earn cash
- [00:40]
A
back on eligible purchases.
- [00:42]
B
Mm.
- [00:42]
A
You love purchasing eligible things. So the money your friend sent you yesterday, that's today's ramen or rideshare or eye patches. The skincare kind, not the pyro kind. Spend with Venmo and you can earn cash back with Venmo Stash. Venmo Stash bundle terms and Exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms at Venmo Me Terms, Idaho. Verification required to use a Venmo balance. Thinking about refresh the carpet in your home? Now's the time to do it for a limited time at the Home Depot. Get 10% off installed carpet projects on trusted brands like Lifeproof, Lifeproof with Pet Proof Technology, Home decorators collection, and TrafficMaster Plus. With installations starting at just 49 cents per square foot. Upgrading your space is more affordable than ever at the Home Depot. Offer valid June 11, 2026 through June 28, 2026. Exclusions apply for licenses see homedepot.com licensenumbers welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:36]
B
Hello everyone and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host for today's episode. My name is Emisa Bakui and today we are speaking with Marielle Ricey about her book Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in the Full Oman. This book actually draws some decades of lived experience and ethnographic engagement. And when I say ethnographic engagement is very detailed in Southern Oman to explore marriage in all its phases, from the beginning, premarital interactions to spouse selection through engagement, wedding practices to marital relationship and the role of extended families, as well as divorce and remarriage. So it raises a lot of a lot of important themes on marriage, but also on kinship, religion and everyday negotiations. And I'm happy that Professor Rise is here to speak about this book. Thank you so much for joining joining us.
- [02:44]
A
Marielle, thank you so much for having me. I'm really happy to be here and to have this conversation with you.
- [02:52]
B
I really appreciate you making time to join us. So to begin with, would you please introduce yourself to our listeners?
- [03:00]
A
So my name is Mario Risi and I have a PhD in English literature. And I moved to the Middle east first to work at the American University of Sharjah where I was for two years. And then I came back to the States and then I went back over to Oman, to Southern Oman, the region of Dhofar in the city of Salalah. And I worked there for 19 years and I taught literature and I taught some cultural studies classes. But after the first year my interest turned to anthropology and ethnography. And first I was just reading the history and the anthropology of Southern Arabia. But eventually I started to do my own work and that led to me publishing five books, four specifically about the Dhofar region and one specific group of tribes who are known as the Hekli or the Kara tribes. And then one book is a more general book about living, working and researching in the Middle east, in particular on the Arabian Peninsula.
- [04:11]
B
Awesome. Thank you so much for this brief introduction because I looked at your profile and you have very enriching profile. You describe yourself as coming late to anthropology, relatively late, because of your training and which you just told us. So how would your training in literature and your experiences, especially your background, moving to Oman and all that, shape the way you observe, interpreting, write about social life? Because this book actually focuses more on social life.
- [04:47]
A
Well, my, my training was in literature, but my PhD dissertation was on nonfiction writing. It was on travel writing and it was a study of the entire genre, you know, all the way from before Marco Polo to modern writers. And what makes travel writing and what makes good, good travel writing and what are the generic markers of travel writing? So I was already working and focusing on non fiction writers. And what interested me about travel writing was how people described and how people coped with a place that was new to them or failed to cope with a place that was new to them. And so one of the first academic works I wrote when I was in Oman was about this triangulation that I saw between literature, travel writing and anthropology and how those three genres have a lot of overlap. So literature is fiction, but it has to be true to what humans do and think. I mean, if you're, if you're reading literature where you think these people, this, what they're doing doesn't make sense. It's not good literature. And in travel writing, you need to very accurately describe the place, what you're seeing, the food, the smell, the texture, the. The shops, all of that. And that is exactly the skill that you need for anthropology. You need to be able to say, there's this group of people who do everything completely differently and let me figure out what they're doing and why they're doing it and how they're doing it. And to me, that brings you right back to literature, because with literature with an interesting character, you want to know their motivation, you want to know how their background shaped them into this person who could do this thing or would not do this thing. And so to me, all three are very focused on good description and on character development.
- [06:54]
B
Thank you so much. And you develop your character so well. I mean, you write in this child that that leaves us more or less being in the present with you, and you make it feel the senses as well. So I think your background really helps us to see so much about Oman. Throughout your book, you actually resist heavy theoretical framing. Is it because of you writing as a part of critiquing contemporary anthropological theory, or is just your deliberate choice to develop your characters and to describe things in detail and prioritize ethnography?
- [07:36]
A
I think it's sort of funny that anthropology is a interlocking systems of knowledge about how people do things differently all over the world. But yet when you sit down to write anthropology, there's a lot of gatekeeping in terms of, like, you know, it's sort of like everybody in the world does everything different, but here, you know, here is the only thing you're allowed to do for anthropology. And there was one article that I wrote that was that I wrote a proposal, sent it to a journal, they accepted it, I wrote the article, and they rejected it. And part of the reason was because they had long quotes. You know, they have this framework where it's like you write everything yourself. You don't have, you know, three sentences of quotes from another writer. And I thought, let's just resist. This is just ridiculous. I mean, there's just. There's as many ways to do anthropology as there are people in the world. And if you're describing somebody, you can do it in a lot of different ways. And what I found with a lot of anthropology texts, and this isn't a criticism, it's just they're set up where the beginning of the chapter has an incident, and then it describes the incident, and you have this description of the people and the time and the place and their names. And then you have 20 to 25 pages of interpretation of the incident. And I literally say at the beginning of the book, my book, like, if you want a book like that, I, I'm not the person to read. And part of it is because by the time I started writing Ethnography of Dhofar, I had already lived there for so many years in a Dofari neighborhood teaching Dhofari students, that it wasn't like I was framing my work in terms of, you know, here's this thing that happened and it, and it can explain all these things about the culture. What I was more interested in doing was saying, here's how on a large frame the culture works. So I'm not specifically going against anthropology theory. I think it's valid, I think it's great. People use it. My interest was more trying to explain in a more cohesive and comprehensive way what I was seeing people do. And part of that is that for writing about the Arabian Peninsula, there's very few books where it's like, okay, here's what a day looks like for a middle class person who works at the electric company. How do they wake up? What are they wearing? You know, what are their PJs, what's their breakfast, what happens in the morning? When do they go to work? You know, when do they come home? What do they have for like those kind of like, here's how a day works. I just wasn't seeing it. And so part of what I did when I was writing was I wanted to write the book I wanted to read.
- [10:38]
B
And you didn't just write a book you wanted to read. It's a book I enjoyed reading and I once my students and other people to read it because they can read it from different angles as an anthropologist, but as someone curious about another place, about someone who wants to know how marriage, religion. So it's beautifully written and I really, I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. But also you show us that there are other ways of writing. Like there is not just one way of anthropological writing. I like that emphasis. Thank you so much. I have a question also about the methodology because you had an unusual. I know you talk in the book about your guys having access to both male and female participants. So I was wondering how does this actually impact the kind of knowledge that you were able to assess, but also what you were unable to, to, to show because some of them became your friends and, and some are your students and all that. So I'm wondering, like how does this impact assets, but also what knowledge are able to share with us?
- [11:53]
A
Yeah, so the first thing is that there's a. There's a lot of information about the students which I don't share, you know, and that is a really strong barrier for me. You know, they weren't agreeing to be part of research. So there's a couple times in the books where I'll say, you know, some students thought this or some students. But there's no detailed explanations. There's no stories about students because that. That knowledge of their behavior and what they said and what they thought, that. That wasn't fair game for me as far as I was concerned with. With the research guys. So as I say in the book, I met a few of them in a sort of group situation where there are a lot of people sort of hanging out. And over time, that turned out to be me just hanging out with four or five of these men. And I call them the research guys because if I called them friends, that would be seen as a romantic entanglement, which it wasn't. So it happened very slowly. And this is what I said and you had said about coming to anthropology late is that I had already met two different groups of men and had picnics and had gone out and talked and had coffee. And, you know, they. They sort of navigated this entirely new kind of situation of being with a female before I started the research. And it was easier for me because I'm older and because I don't look romantic interest. And I was wanting to know what they did and like, picnics and going fishing. I mean, it was driving around and looking at beautiful things. That was all a lot of fun for me. And the. There wasn't really anything that the men said along the way. I mean, there were a few comments, but it was very, very few where it was like, don't write that or don't put. That's not for your book. That's what they would say. That's not for your book. And it was, you know, like a very personal comment. And I always checked. And so as the years went on and I was doing these articles and then the books, and they were very clear, like, this is. This is when she's taking notes. This is when she's being an anthropologist. When I had the book out in front of me, it's like, this is. This is serious time. And then I would put the book away and we would talk about fishing prices. So it was a very slow process. And I am one of very, very few Western women who's been in that situation. And I'm really grateful for their kindness.
- [14:47]
B
Awesome. I'm sure they are also grateful for, and the work you did together and for producing this book. But beyond that, maybe you had a lot of other discussions that are fruitful as well. So your book kind of departs from conventional ethnographic structure and you even had a note on the literature. You avoid linear case driven chapters and rightly so. You talk about how it always starts with event, incident time and all those things that is almost very occurring in most ethnographic work. And you do a case driven chapters instead of thematic reflections. What might have informed this kind of book structure.
- [15:37]
A
So I, what I did and, and I say this is that I, I set the book up in a way. I think all of my books more like travel books in that the first few chapters are very heavily about me because I wanted people to have a sense of who I was and what I was doing and why. Because I think if you set up your author as this is me and you know, the reader gets an opinion on that author, then the reader is more like they're watching over my shoulder as I explain this, because they think, oh, well, you know, she has this background, so this will be interesting or important. And I think that's really important in travel writing because the best travel books tell you something about the author. But also, I mean, a couple months ago I read a work about southern Oman in which the author says nothing about themselves, nothing. And, and the way things are presented it to me is very mystifying because it's like, I know who that author is. And to read this text and think the way you're presenting this is very much enmeshed in who you are. But that's not clear here. You know, it's somebody sort of presenting something at a distance when actually the topic is very close. And so, you know, people make different choices. And my choice is to be this is who I am, this is what I'm doing, this is what I see my limitations are. And then I sort of start my descriptions, which are usually very general, but I sort of feel like you know who I am. So you get a sense of why I'm saying this. Plan B is a backup birth control option that's there for you when things don't go according to plan. It specifically works after unprotected sex and before pregnancy occurs by temporarily delaying ovulation. Plan B is available nationwide at all major retailers and through delivery apps like DoorDash, no ID, prescription, or age requirement. It's the number one OBGYN recommended brand of emergency contraception and it won't impact your future fertility. That's freedom to be use as directed. The best part of Waking up A full cup of Folgers coffee and music on full blast. Wake me up. Wake me up inside me.
- [18:04]
B
I wake up every evening with a
- [18:07]
A
big smile on my face the moment I wake up. The best part of waking up is Folgers in your cup shop, Folgers K Cup pods and more at your nearest retailer. Hey, you feeling hungry? Run to Denny's for the new Eternia Everyday Value Slam, part of Denny's slab and meal deals, and see the new Masters of the Universe movie, only in theaters June 5th.
- [18:40]
B
I really appreciate that because your positionality really comes clear in, in the book, what you do, who you are and why you are there and what's all those things. So it kind of, it gives us a lens to look at the author and how they look at things. So I appreciate, I think you are emphasizing the importance of us being, being present because how do we know what perspective you come with if you don't set yourself? Yes. So thank you so much. So I had a question about how you write about assumptions, especially Western assumptions, and how consciously you framed your book, not necessarily about correcting dominant narratives, but really showing us what is really happening, happening there. And you make it very clear this is what is happening. So no matter what kind of lenses you wear, stereotypes, assumptions, especially about religion, especially about Muslim women, especially about southern Oman, you get to see this is exactly what's happening. So don't base your generalization on things you haven't encountered and perhaps Western assumptions that travel in media and all that. So I wondered, why was that such a conscious effort?
- [20:12]
A
Well, it's not funny, but it's funny. But I just got so tired of hearing Western, like, North American, European women going off about how oppressed and miserable Arab, Muslim, tribal women are. And it's just, I cannot tell you how frustrating it is because these women, most of them never met, you know, the women they were describing or if they met them, they weren't friends, they weren't going over for coffee. They, you know, they weren't enmeshed in their lives. And so they're seeing something at a distance and they're, they're proclaiming it to the world. And I deliberately, for all of my books, just didn't write about men and women because I was so tired of it. And then for the last book, I'm like, okay, you Know what? This is gonna be my last book. I'm just gonna. I'm just gonna set it out here. There are women who are miserable in every religion, in every country, in every kind of situation, and there are women who are happy in every religion and every country. And unless you have a lot of knowledge, and knowledge does not mean I read a book once or I talk to one person that then. And I'm not going the other way. You know, I'm not saying all Muslim women who are Arab and in tribes are. Have. I'm saying there's different kinds of happiness. There's different choices people make for different reasons. There are people who make choices that you would never make. That's great. Don't make that choice. Doesn't mean that that is not a good choice for that person. It is so frustrating talking about Dhofari women, because everybody is like, well, the Taliban. It's like, it's Dhofar Oman. It's Dhofar. It's different. You know, it's like somebody who spent a lot of time in Sweden wants to lecture you about Sardinia. You know, it's not the same thing. And so. So I kind of gave up. And, like, in the book, I'm just really clear. I'm like, you know what? Here's who I am.
- [22:35]
B
I like when you. You talk about female circumcision, and you said, when I talk about pleasure, people just rolled their eyes. Because people who have lived as something and experienced something could talk about it much more differently than watching from a distance and assuming you know everything and you've experienced it with them. I wanted to now ask about the second wife. So actually, you encourage us throughout the book to suspend judgment about so many things, but, yeah, I want to talk about multiple marriages. Just because you open your book with polygyny, a topic that tends to provoke strong reactions from many angles. But I wondered, why did you begin here rather than a different approach or a broader overview? What was the reason?
- [23:32]
A
I kind of felt like if the. And this sounds negative, but it sort of felt like, if you can't get your head around polygamy, don't bother with the book. You know, like, and. And I know that sounds very obnoxious, but I just felt like I'm. Let's get it out. You. You know, you want to say. You want to say polygamy is a horrible thing. You want to complain, Whatever. Whatever. Fine. Here's what I think. Here's what I think from 21 years. Here's what I think from being really Close friends with, with Arab, Muslim tribal women. Here's what I think. And I just felt like I, I don't want to sugarcoat it, you know, I don't want to wait till chapter 17, like here, right here, first page. And if you, you know, and I get it because I used to be like that. And that's part of the reason I wrote, and I wrote the way I did was like, yes, you know, I would go after the guys for all kinds of things, you know, and they would tease me. Like one of them would be like, oh, I'm getting a second wife. And I would go, but, but it's within a framework and there's reasons for it and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And just to sort of go, it's wrong. I just feel like, you know, take a breath, take a breath and understand that people live differently. And what I, what I found so often with expats is that they would have this sort of, this sounds obnoxious, but they would have this like, child of the world, I'm a nomad, I don't really have a passport, but I belong to everything. I belong to the world. You know, they would have this sort of feeling and then they would hit the fact that all the stores were closed at 2:00 or, you know, they would, they would hit some sort of personal cultural boundary and then they would just go into, that's wrong.
- [25:34]
B
Thank you so much. I want to now touch on some of the terms that you use and you redefine, such as family, household and marriage. Why was it so important to you to clarify these terms?
- [25:51]
A
Well, I was really blessed with two good reviewers for the book and one of the things that both of them said was define your terms more. And, and one of them had a really good comment of like, how could you, you know, what are ways to be married where you aren't really married? Which made me think, because in Dhofar, no, you know, marriage is public. Marriage is in front of people and household again, you know, in terms of expectations. So in Oman, and specifically in southern Oman, a household is 30 or 35 people. And it's not just multi generational, it's transient, so that you have these huge houses that look like, you know, it's a mansion, but a house that, you know, in America would be a mansion for one family. It's going to have, you know, the initial married couple and then all of the married sons, the wives and the children, and then the unmarried daughters and sons, but then, you know, an aunt an uncle, a nephew, a cousin, you know, people coming in to stay for a couple of weeks or a couple of months. So I thought it was important to understand that because a lot of cultures have, you know, family is this sort of very set, small thing. They live together, and that's. That's. That doesn't obtain in Dhofar.
- [27:24]
B
Thank you. So you also outline key expectations about marriage, such as universal marriage, family approval, and virginity. But you also argue in your book that the men and women can resist familial pressure, especially when it comes to this whole. You. You do complicated the binary between arranged and love marriages. And so my question was, how rigid are these norms in everyday practices, and how do people resist such pressure, familial pressure?
- [28:00]
A
Well, it's just this. The structure of all of that discussion came to me because I was good friends with a woman who had many sisters, and every single marriage among that group of sisters was very different. And one. The father just decided, you know, and everybody was angry and everybody was upset, and the girl was, you know, it was. It was. But. But there were a lot of different. A lot of different possibilities. And you think, okay, this is one father, one mother, large group of daughter. And, you know, this one is. Is, you know, her father, you know, a man came to her father, and her father said yes. And so, you know, everybody's fighting it. And she eventually got divorced. You know, it was like, okay, you know, there was enough family pressure to marry, but then, no, no, this is not going to work. Whereas another sister married for love. Another sister married somebody outside. It was like. And I just thought, you know, it's. It's. It's showing that different people want different things and can fight. And so, you know, there were men in the research group who fought their wife's family. You know, the wife's family said no, and they're like, nope, I'm marrying her. And she stood strong, and he stood strong, and they got married. And so there were women I know and women I know of who were able to create that life that they wanted. And I am not saying that this is throughout all of Oman or all of Arabia or all of this. I'm saying I'm talking about this specific area, and this is what I saw. And your point earlier about my references is, you know, I decided not to do a comparison. Unlike my other books. I wanted to say this is what I'm seeing here. And that's why, I mean, I talk about a lot of different books. There's a lot of books about Oman you know, and I'm like, if. If somebody wants to take what I did and move it out into the world, you know, compare it to the Netherlands or compare it to someplace else, you know, they are welcome to do that, but that's not what I want. I wanted to say this is what
- [30:18]
B
I'm seeing here, and that's what I really appreciate about your book, because you are very honest, what you are doing and. And your limitations and. And your strengths and all that. So that is really very helpful for the reader. I have another question, and it's on the engagement and maha. So the maha plays a very central role. Could you describe to listeners who are yet to read your book and how they should interpret it? Is it symbolic gesture or is it financial transaction or is both?
- [30:53]
A
It's both. That's a good point. It's. It's financial, but it's also the. The issue is that some women don't work. And that money for the mahad, which is the dowry, so the man pays it, and that allows the woman to buy gold and jewelry and dresses and perfume, not just for herself, but. But all of you know, the sisters and, you know, mom, friends. And so that money, it's not like it goes just to her. That money, it comes to her and then goes out in a lot of different ways and throughout the community. And some of it stays with her so that she has her own money and that she has her own things. So it's not just a symbol. I mean, it's a symbol of his. The husband's ability to protect and take care of the woman, but it also has a huge benefit to her entire family and her future.
- [31:59]
B
Thank you so much. Now, since we are talking about future, some of these marriages end in divorce. And you know, you know that divorce is relatively normalized. How does this compare with assumptions about stigma and. And how. You also know that women are able to return to their families? Yes.
- [32:22]
A
So it's. It's. It's. If the two people, as most things in Dofari life, if the two people behave well, there's no stigma, you know, because it's clear. Like, they just didn't get along. Like, we tried to find people who get along, they didn't get along, and they just separate. And there is sometimes some family pressure just in terms of, like, we don't want somebody acting too hastily or just throwing something away or whatever. But if you want to stay divorced, you stay divorced. And the women just goes back to her father's house, maybe a brother's house, depending on her age in the background. And then she might get married again or she might not, but it's not. Her life doesn't change. And I like, in America, I think a lot of women, when they're, when they get divorced, their life change, especially if it's like a couple who sort of communicate or go through social life as a couple when they're divorced, she might lose friends, you know, in terms of money, she might lose monetary status, she might have to move out of the house. You know, all of these things. It's like, no, her life stays very, very similar.
- [33:33]
B
Thank you so much. We are almost ending. Do you have any final ways or maybe you want to share you're working on now with us?
- [33:42]
A
No, I. I mean, I'm still working on my website, which is just my name, and I still am posting a lot of small essays about different topics, you know, about moving back to the States and differences between America and Oman and of course, you know, just really celebrating Oman and peace right now and how they are a nation of peace and how Sultan Qaboos and Sultan Haitham have been just absolutely at the forefront of trying to do negotiations, trying to bring countries together that unlike many countries in the Middle east right now, they are absolutely not advocating for any kind of war, any kind of aggression against anybody. Sultan Caboose's foreign policy was no enemies. You know, we have no enemies. And I think that's very important in this day and age that to really celebrate what Oman has done in terms of peace.
- [34:51]
B
Marielle, thank you so, so much for advocating for peace and for writing this beautiful word that's not just about marriage practices, but it actually challenges us on the assumptions and the stereotypes we hold about love, about choices, about gender roles, about what is even a good marriage. And this book actually leaves me and all those. Please get a copy, go read it. To question a lot of things and not take it on assumptions only. And I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time, for your wisdom, for your insights and everything. And thank you listeners for listening.
- [35:36]
A
Thank you, thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and bluesky with the handle ebooksnetwork and subscribe to our weekly substack newsletter@newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.