Boredom has taken hold of rural young women in the Dhofar region of Oman. Remote areas and nomadic-pastoral lifeways have been subject to massive infrastructural reorganization and sedenterization over the past 50 years as the Omani state consolidated its sovereignty over contested southern regions. Now, domestic architecture, electricity, and the increasing accessibility of mountain households bring more and stranger guests to women's patios, while also enabling time away from social activity with family and guests. Yet, the avoidant ways that young women are pushing back on these pressures leave them out of daily activity and sap their vitality. They speak ambivalently about interacting with both intimates and strangers. Social life is intrusive, exciting, and disruptive to equanimity, and they navigate these relational affectations in ethico-Islamic terms. In contrast to other theorizations, I argue that their boredom is not simply an effect of modernized forms of political and economic subjection but is generated by their own complex response to the ways the reinfrastructured landscape brings them into contact with social others. By attending to the bodily and spatial dynamics of interaction and its avoidance, this article examines the ramifications of circulatory infrastructures on how sociality is understood and conceptualized.
Kamala Russell is an assistant professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago whose interests lie at the intersection of interaction, lived space, and the feeling and moving body.
