In Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf, released this month, Professor Miriam Cooke argues that Gulf states have invented a new cultural brand – “the tribal modern” – which combines elements of modernity and aspects of an imagined tribal society. With Norman Foster-designed heritage museums, falconry shows and automated camel races, Gulf states are fusing imagined past and postmodern present to create a unique culture.
Prof Cooke writes that in the Arab Gulf the “tribal” and the “modern” have intermingled to form “the tribal modern”, but this argument is much less impressive when rewritten as follows: some of the Gulf’s culture is both tribal and modern. It’s a bit like saying that, in Ikea’s furniture catalogue, the “old” and the “new” have combined to form “old new” Ikea furniture. So understood, Prof Cooke’s argument isn’t an argument at all – it’s a description, and a trite one at that. Cultures draw from the past and the present simultaneously, even as they misremember the past. There is nothing new in this. And the less said about Prof Cooke’s “barzakh” theory, the better.
Despite the theoretical emptiness, Prof Cooke makes some good observations about the region’s culture. The cosmopolitan past is often played down; official historians build a narrative of unity out of a much more complex reality; they have political reasons for doing so; economic progress started from a very low base; the lives of pearl fishers was hard; it was striking to watch a procession of camel riders celebrate Qatar’s 2022 Fifa World Cup win. And there’s a lot of Bedouin poetry that’s worth reading.
Prof Cooke’s “barzakh” theory, is a masterpiece of pseudo-academic meaninglessness – see the Q&A for her attempt to explain it.
And some of Prof Cooke’s factual claims are just sloppy. “ … psychiatrists locate [gender identity disorder] … in the corpus callosum,” writes Prof Cooke, citing Wikipedia as a source.
This will be news to many psychiatrists.
“On November 1, 2011,” Prof Cooke writes, “Hissa Hilal published an article in the Saudi English language paper The National.”
Prof Cooke, it appears, is not one of our subscribers.
Does Professor Cooke’s book tell us what “the barzakh” is?
It says it is a “space of intersection between multiple knowledge systems”.
Right. And does the book explain that further?
“To understand how such a space functions in the mutual constitution of the tribal and the modern, it needs to be broadened so that the various entities in this equation converge, even while remaining distinct. It is only their seemingly contradictory yet totally undiluted convergence that releases the potential for their dynamic interaction.”
And what does this barzakh do?
“Only in the barzakh can the dynamic of cultural continuity and change be discerned … In the 50-year barzakh linking and separating the pre-oil sheikhdoms and today’s nation-states, each of which is shaping the other in a dynamic, cultural-political field in which apparently contradictory states remain in balance, the tribal does not compromise with the modern, nor does the modern erase the tribal.”
Right. I still need more.
“The dynamic of globalism and tribalism narrates tribal history … and provides another way to think about the incursion of the new into the flow of desert time.”
Um …
“While the generative space of the barzakh is at once physical and metaphysical, cultural and civilizational, it is also, critically, epistemological. Barzakh thinking lingers in all liminal states of separation, connection, and transformation. It is crucial to the Arab Gulf brand.”
abouyamourn@thenational.ae