In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town

IN THE TIME OF OIL: PIETY, MEMORY, AND SOCIAL LIFE IN AN OMANI TOWN Mandana Limbert Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010 (264 pages, illustrations, map) $24.95 (paper)Reviewed by Jatin DuaMandana Limbert's In The Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town is a richly textured ethnographic analysis of the and tensions of everyday life in Bahla, a small town in the interior of Oman, in the aftermath of the massive infrastructural, bureaucratic, and social changes that followed the discovery of in the 1960s. While peripheral to the larger theater of petroleum extraction, refining, and export in contemporary Oman, historically Bahla was an important town in the interior region (al-Dakhiliyya), a territory that until the 1950s was a quasi-independent theocratic state, the Imamate of Oman, based on Ibadi doctrine, a third branch of Islam after Sunnism and Shi'ism (4). Using an ethnographic lens, Limbert's narrative eschews the simple (and simplistic) narrative of rupture and radical change that dominates popular accounts of the boom in the Arabian Gulf and instead highlights the complex and multiple temporalities and modes of reasoning through which Bahlawis inhabited and understood Oman's dramatic produced transformations (3).Critical to Limbert's argument is the relationship between the past, present, and future. In an important intervention into our understandings of social memory and the construction of temporality, Limbert posits that in Bahla, as in the rest of Oman, the present is deeply inflected by multiple visions of the past and the future. The prosperity of today is seen as an aberration between the remembered poverty of the past and the probable poverty of the future. From official discourse to everyday conversation, the discovery of and the that have resulted from the boom are not seen as a step along a linear developmental trajectory, but rather as a miraculous interlude that will end as soon as supplies dwindle-a that is simultaneously known (twenty years) but also constantly deferred. As Limbert argues, this vision of temporality helps revise notions of permanence and linear teleology that scholars take to be at the heart of development discourses. Oman's development discourse promises no of endless prosperity or national maturity, but rather brings to the fore the miraculous, the fleeting, and the ephemeral. Additionally, this discourse intersects with other ways of framing pasts and futures and other sensibilities and anxieties. There are questions about hereditary rule, especially given that the current Sultan Qabus, widely believed to be responsible for Oman's renaissance, has no heir. And there is the historical memory of when Bahla, far from being on the periphery, was the center of the Ibadi imamate, which could potentially, and redemptively, rise again.It is these multiple sensibilities, temporalities, and modes of time reckoning that occupy the remainder of the book. Specifically, through a focus on the shifting spatial geography of Bahla, tensions about sociality, the implementation of public education, infrastructural development, and the reimagining (including forgetting) of the relationship between East Africa and Oman, Limbert's text brings to light the contested understandings of the past and the uncertain expectations of the future that structure Bahlawi and wider Omani ways of making sense of the dreamtime of oil (3, 1).Chapter two begins in the shadow of the Bahla fort, a structure dating back in popular memory to the pre-Islamic Sassanid dynasty (226-651 CE) and indexing the town's antiquity. This chapter examines the intergenerational ways in which the spatial geography and the built environment of the town have been remembered and refashioned since the 1970s. In a familiar move within the ethnographic genre, this chapter serves to locate the author's field of study, but instead of describing a static backdrop for anthropological research, Limbert shows how the town of Bahla, the fort, the walls, and the road are all dynamic entities that reflect changing material and social realities (21). …