Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia, vol. 2: Ethnographic Texts.

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.
• Position: Book review

Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia, vol. 2: Ethnographic Texts. By CLIVE HOLES. Handbook of Oriental Studies, vol. I, 51/2. Leiden: BRILL, 2005. Pp. lxi + 347. $150.

Volume 1 of this work, the Glossary, appeared in 2001; volume 3, a description of the dialects presented in the volume undergoing review is, we are told, forthcoming (p. ix). All three of these publications are based on pioneering fieldwork accomplished by the author on the island state of Bahrain during 1977-78 and in the Sultanate of Oman from 1985-87. The approximately 100 uneducated speakers, aged forty and older at the time of recording, spoke into tape recorders on Bahraini history, marriage, customs, family life, popular culture, agriculture, fishing, and pearl-diving, among other ethnographic topics. The fifty-five excellent published texts of thirty-nine speakers (thirteen 'arab, "indigenous Bahraini Sunnis" and twenty-six Baharna, "indigenous Bahraini Shi'ites") constitute a solid basis for an ethnography of eastern Arabia during the pre-oil era.

To avoid the self-consciousness that is evident when a tape recorder is placed in front of an informant, it was a wise decision on Holes' part not to reveal (to many) that speech was being recorded. Thus, these speakers did not know at the time that they were being recorded (p. x). Holes actually comments on the phenomenon of the "monitor" by describing what he refers to as the "observer paradox": "One can only gather accurate speech data through observation, but the speaker's consciousness that he is being observed changes the nature of the data he produces, and therefore what is observed" (p. xix, n. 2). This paradox notwithstanding, the texts are, in my opinion, authentic transcriptions of natural speech.

In this connection, let me single out chapter eight, the sawalif, "stories, anecdotes, yarns" (pp. 299-328), which truly reflect impromptu speech. The author describes the kind of monologue called salfa, pl. sawalif, related to the verb solaf, "to have a chat; tell a story." Although some of this material has been published previously, it is satisfying to see these data in one convenient work, and in some cases, errors have been corrected (e.g., in the text [pp. 302-4] originally published in Zeitschrift fur arabische Linguistik [1984]). I further applaud Holes' decision not to "clean up" the texts in any way. Thus, they contain the "hesitations, false starts, ungrammatical turns of phrase," etc. (p. xx)...