What to make of a Sultan's tear: Phaticity, praise poetry, and social infrastructures in the Sultanate of Oman

Abstract

The distributive political economy of contemporary Arab Oman yields a status-differentiated social infrastructure composed of elites who distribute and non-elites who, in many ways, rely on those distributions. The construction of communicative links within social infrastructures via the performance of sung poetry depends on the phaticity of the link being activated. For Omani poets, different linguistic performance genres telescope the vast social distance between elites who listen and non-elites who sing in different ways and with different results. Omani poets from the rural north of the country conduct cross-class social contact—conceptually “vertical” social infrastructural movement—by way of two contrasting genres of Arabic praise poetry: a one-off request or statement, the solo qasida, and a recognitive, addressive choral form that reciprocally establishes and evaluates such vertical relationships, the 'āzī. I argue that the metapragmatic distinctions that Omani poets draw between these two genres reveal a subtle phatic ideology that allows certain modes of communicative contact to index deeper, cross-class social ties within grand public performances, while simultaneously reinforcing tacit norms of elite avoidance of non-elites in everyday social intercourse.