UC Berkeley

My dissertation describes the ethical practices and discourses that structure face-to-face interaction among rural Muslims in the mountainous areas of the Dhofar region of the Sultanate of Oman. I locate this ethics within communicative practices of concealment and circumspection that operate on the spatial arrangements of interlocutors. As a matter of the practice of Islam, attention to how one is spatially accessible to an interlocutor is informed, on one hand, by an ethical injunction for the individual to disinvest from this world (dunya) and consider the afterlife (āxira), and on the other by the necessity of social interaction: the contact with others that hospitality and sociability entail is also desired, ubiquitous, and provisioned by God. The communicative practices I detail -- ways of moving the body, sitting, displaying and concealing affect, as well as forms of talk -- constitute an 'ethical stance' on social relations and push past gendered questions of modesty to describe a spiritual discernment about spatial relations that links concealment in social space with responsibility, self-evaluation, and contemplation of (āxira). This dissertation is based on two years of fieldwork conducted in a mountain homestead, living with speakers of Śẖerēt Modern South Arabian, an unwritten minority language related to Arabic. I focus on the homestead as the main site of sociable interaction, and the primary space in which Islam is lived and instructed for this community. I do so in two parts. Part One lays out the built and social dimensions and everyday activities that constitute the 'domestic' where this ethics is practiced. Part Two qualifies and locates semiotic practices of concealment in sociable interaction, as well as the corporeal, contemplative, and corrective forms of attention to one's own and others' conduct that point to and shape the problem of being around others. Part One describes the topography and routes of transit in the region, the built space of homesteads, and patterns and genres of daily activity and sociability, as well as kinship, in order to qualify and establish hospitality interaction and the structuration of domestic space as the dominant framings for sociality. I locate interactional conduct as construing and managing specific relations of exposure between people, applying analytics of 'accessibility' to identify the structured channels by which these relations are understood. I argue that spatial relations of exposure in terms of visibility, kinship and acquaintance, surveillance, and shared networks trace gendered differences in the experience and structure of contexts within which ethical concealment is practiced. Part Two details the normative practices of withdrawal and circumspection that enact this ethics of concealment. One chapter focuses on hospitality interactions with guests, seating plans, gaze, and paths for walking through and around hospitality interactions. Another chapter relates the covering of male and female bodies to the practice of 'acting comfortable' by which affect, personal information, and deixis are concealed, smoothed over, and unmoored from present circumstances in order to create an appearance that is both affable and impersonal. These normative communicative practices work to conceal, modulating accessibility in space as an ethical question of interpersonal exposure. The final two chapters raise the question of the danger and consequentiality of exposure. A chapter details the sensation of xizzet, a feeling of shame and shyness, that constitutes a corporeal discernment about spatial relations, in the terms laid out above. The final chapter relates conversations about eschatology, responsibility, and receiving others that construct this ethics of accessibility as an ambivalent stance, where selves are both attendant to the social world, yet must seek a subjective position outside of it.