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Join social anthropologist Dawn Chatty in a lecture about her forty five year experience with Harasiis tribe in Oman, in which she has documented their social and technological transformations over the years.
About the lecture
Dawn Chatty first met the Harasiis tribe of the Jiddat-il Harasiis in 1978 on a medical expedition to locate a few tuberculosis patients who had not completed their course of treatment at the hospital in Salalah. Here in the Jiddat il-Harasiis, the core central desert of Oman, known as Al Wusta, was a community whose first language was Harsousi, one of the five Modern South Arabian Languages along with Mahri, Jibbali, Socotri, and Batahiri spoken in south eastern Arabia.
Two years later, in 1980, Dr Chatty was living in Muscat and was approached by the Omani government to help extend government services (health, education , and welfare) to these mobile camel and goat herders without forcing them to settle. After securing funding from United Nations Economic and Social Council and working closely with the Ministers of Health, of Education and of Social Affairs and Labour, she initiated a four-year development project which ended up extending over several decades.
Over these past 44 years, she has documented the Harasiis social and technological transformations from sheltering under trees to reading in comfortable air-conditioned villas as well as azabs with portable kitchens, water bowsers, mobile rooms with air conditioning and Wi-Fi access as well as large marquees under which the extended families sit and enjoy festive as well as ordinary occasions together. They have come a long way thanks in large part to the government services they received. But they have also made their own choices and designed their own ‘settlement’ which continues to draw in the desert life and their animal herds.
Please note, this is an in person event only and will not be available via live stream.
About the speaker
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Dawn Chatty is a social anthropologist whose ethnographic interests lie in the Middle East, particularly with nomadic pastoral tribes and refugee young people. Her research interests include a number of forced migration and development issues such as conservation-induced displacement, tribal resettlement, modern technology and social change, gender and development and the impact of prolonged conflict on refugee young people.
She is both an academic anthropologist and a practitioner, having carefully developed her career in universities in the United States, Lebanon, Syria and Oman, as well as with a number of development agencies such as the UNDP, UNICEF, FAO and IFAD. After taking her undergraduate degree with honours at UCLA (University of California at Los Angeles), she took a Master’s degree in Development Studies from the Institute of Social Studies, the Hague, Netherlands. She returned to UCLA to take her PhD in Social Anthropology under the late Professor Hilda Kuper.
Following the award of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, Dr Chatty spent the period October 2005-September 2007 researching and writing a manuscript on Dispossession and Forced Migration in the Middle East. The volume was published by Cambridge University Press (May 2010) with the title Dispossession and Displacement in the Modern Middle East.
Her most recent book is Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State (Oxford University Press and Hurst Publishers, 2018).