I am pleased to announce the publication of my new book: Seasonal Knowledge and the Almanac Tradition of the Arab Gulf. Details about the book, including a free online pdf of the table of contents can be obtained here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-95771-1

Below is the start of the Introduction…

Before the middle of the twentieth century, everyday life in the Arab Gulf was oriented to the sea and the land. Along the coast and for the island of Bahrain there had been a thriving pearl diving industry until the 1920s, while fishing remained one of the most important food production activities. Trade around and beyond the peninsula was still largely carried out by traditional dhows. Apart from Oman, which has a long tradition of irrigated and rainfed agriculture, most of the Gulf states faced a harsh, arid environment with limited water and only a few fertile oases. Herding of camels, sheep and goat was one of the main ways of surviving in the arid areas. It should not be surprising that prior to the oil wealth that created a lush economic transformation, the main topic of concern was the weather. Successful navigation, pearl diving and fishing required an intimate knowledge of seasonal change, as did pastoralism and farming.

Information on the seasonal sequence for the Arabian Peninsula stems back over a thousand years in collections of poetry, star lore and almanacs. One of the most important Arabic texts is the Kit?b al-Anw?’ (Book of Weather Stars) of Ibn Qutayba (d. 276/879), who is quoted by almanac compilers in the Gulf to this day. Ibn Qutayba describes in detail local knowledge about star risings and settings, weather seasons, pastoral activities, agriculture and a range of environmental conditions. Unfortunately, much of this indigenous heritage has disappeared, as the folklore of generations is now rarely passed on orally within families. In recent years older individuals in the Gulf have written memoirs, preserving their knowledge of life before the Petro Utopia. This gives us a glimpse of the past, a puzzle with many missing pieces, but not the full understanding that comes with actual contact.

Resurrecting the history of seasonal knowledge in the Arab Gulf and the entire Arabian Peninsula thus requires a textual archaeology. It is not enough to simply document what is written, as though one is showing off museum objects; this knowledge needs to be placed into a lived context to have a better understanding of how people went about their lives off the land and on the sea.

The past is like an ocean in which we can sample only a small part of the vast number of ideas and customs that have passed by over the years. To follow this metaphor, most of our sampling is along the shore, learning from individuals we can ask directly or engage with in ethnographic fieldwork. We can only cast our research net a short distance in trying to reach back into what really happened and was said in the past. A historian can sail as well, dropping an anchor where there seems to be something worth exploring. But there are depths in this ocean of knowledge that can never be reached. There are also reefs, barriers that make it difficult to have smooth sailing through our disciplined search for the past. To what extent can we know what local knowledge was shared? Then there is the question of what kind of fish we are trying to catch. Is everything that has been done and said, no matter how many generations back, something we should call “heritage”? If we read about it in a book, even one written centuries ago, does that automatically make it “heritage”? How can we vouch for the accuracy of what has been written down when we cannot see it for ourselves or question the interpreter? These are not insurmountable hurdles, but they do caution us to recognize the limitations of reconstructing the past.

My career as a scholar began in the highland mountains of Yemen, where I carried out ethnographic research on traditional water resource use and local agriculture in the late 1970s. Talking with farmers and observing their work for over a year allowed me to gain an understanding of local practices that no book could give me. While in the field I had access to a fourteenth century Yemeni agricultural text, which described many of the agricultural activities I was seeing for myself. My first book was an edition and translation of a thirteenth century Yemeni agricultural almanac. Over the years I have become what is best called a historical anthropologist, someone who looks at heritage as a product evolving from a past and not simply what one sees, without hindsight, functioning in the present. As an anthropologist I focus on the diversity of what people do and say, giving voice to them rather than plugging them into an outside theoretical package from the start. As a historian I have an opportunity in examining texts to see the strands of past knowledge that survive and still influence the present.