Published Work

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Following His Majesty’s Directives: Corporate Generosity, Social Responsibility, and State Making in Oman

Anthropological Quarterly, 2021

This article investigates the social and political effects of the introduction of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in Oman. With oil reserves dwindling, Oman faces the challenge of transforming a society and economy long dependent on distributive state spending into a diversified economy capable of continuing the nation’s prosperity after oil. As a seemingly market-based solution to the problem of “too much” government, CSR has been championed by officials and practitioners as a tool to empower private sector businesses to replace the state as a provider of welfare and services. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with members of Oman’s business community, state officials, and others, this article challenges these presumptions, demonstrating that CSR has been implemented in Oman in ways that perpetuate the nation’s dependence on oil revenues and distributive state subsidies. Pointing out that the Omani state’s subsidy-driven development has long relied on the incentivized collaboration of private sector businesses, this article argues that the introduction of CSR in Oman has occurred in ways that resonate with older practices of corporate generosity. Instead of introducing market-based alternatives to state-guided subsidies, CSR has been instituted in Oman in ways that allow the state to leverage private sector organizations to extend its distributive reach. In conversation with scholarship on the role of neoliberal discourses and practices in the diversification efforts of states of the Arab Gulf, this article highlights the discrepancy between development plans and their outcomes to demonstrate how seemingly neoliberal interventions may be co-opted to achieve alternative ends.

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility, rentier governmentality, diversification, neoliberalism, expertise, the state, Oman

Cultivating “Omani ambitions”: Entrepreneurship, distributive labor, and the temporalities of diversification in the Arab Gulf

Economic Anthropology, 2020

Despite substantial investments in the diversification and development of their economies, Oman and other Arab Gulf states have yet to experience structural changes that meaningfully reduce their dependence on oil. Pointing out that the “problem” of oil dependence has never existed independent of a development apparatus attempting to solve it, this article explores how developmental discourses and institutions in Oman produce unintended (but nevertheless salient) distributive effects. With scholarship on the region dominated by work on the rentier state that dismisses the importance of developmental institutions and the labor of citizens in systems of rent distribution, this article proposes a new framework that investigates how rentier development operates as a discourse in ways that shape the allocation of resources and the behavior of citizen-subjects. Through the lens of an Omani entrepreneur named Mohammed and the organizations and individuals who encouraged and supported him, this article draws on insights from the anthropology of development to describe how efforts to transform mind-sets and instill entrepreneurial dispositions generate not a structural change in Oman’s economy but distributive arrangements that enable citizens to earn livelihoods and support through the enactment of virtues that resonate with the state’s development narratives.

Keywords: Diversification; Entrepreneurship; Rentier State; Distributive Labor; Temporality; Arab Gulf

Other Publications

The Shaman's Wages: Trading in Ritual On Chedu Island. Kyoim Yun. (Book Review)

American Ethnologist, 2022

A book review of Kyoim Yun’s The Shaman’s Wages: Trading in Ritual on Chedu Island.

Notes from the Field: Reflections on being white and foreign in Oman

Arizona Anthropologist, 2015

A short reflection on how my position as a white American researcher influenced my ethnographic research in Oman.