Miriam Cooke 
Tribal Modern 
Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf

In the 1970s, one of the most torrid and forbidding regions in the world burst on to the international stage. The discovery and subsequent exploitation of oil allowed tribal rulers of the U.A.E, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait to dream big. How could fishermen, pearl divers and pastoral nomads catch up with the rest of the modernized world? Even today, society is skeptical about the clash between the modern and the archaic in the Gulf. But could tribal and modern be intertwined rather than mutually exclusive? Exploring everything from fantasy architecture to neo-tribal sports and from Emirati dress codes to neo-Bedouin poetry contests,
Tribal Modern explodes the idea that the tribal is primitive and argues instead that it is an elite, exclusive, racist, and modern instrument for branding new nations and shaping Gulf citizenship and identity—an image used for projecting prestige at home and power abroad.

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Introduction       


1. Uneasy Cosmopolitanism   

a. A Millennial Crossroad

b. Cities of Salt

c. Contamination


2. Pure Blood and the New Nation  

a. The British

b. Nationalizing Tribes

c. Tribal Marriages

d. DNA and Money 


3. The Idea of the Tribe    

a. Invention of Tribes

b. Tribal Classes


4. The Brand     

a. Invention of Traditions

b. Thinking through the Barzakh


5. Building the Brand    

a. National Museums

b. Vernacular Architecture

c. Nationalizing Vernacular Architecture


6. Heritage Engineering    

a. Modernizing Differently

b. Heritage Sports

c. Pearl Diving

d. Orientalist Art as Tribal History

e. The Heart of Doha


7. Performing the Nation    

a. Tribal Dress in Gulf History

b. The Million’s Poet

c. Neo-Bedouin Language


8. Gendering the Tribal Modern   

a. Uneasy Cosmopolitanism Again

b. Pathologizing the Gender Barzakh

c. Women Writing in the Barzakh

d. The Terrible Cold


Conclusion      

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

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miriam cooke is Braxton Craven Distinguished Professor of Arab Cultures at Duke University and author of several books, most recently Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (Duke, 2007) and Nazira Zeineddine: Biography of an Islamic Feminist Pioneer (Oneworld, 2010).