Agrarian Studies Colloquium: Scott Erich "The Subterranean Sea"

The core of the Agrarian Studies Program’s activities is a weekly colloquium organized around an annual theme. Invited specialists send papers in advance that are the focus of an organized discussion by the faculty and graduate students associated with the colloquium.

This topic embraces, inter alia, the study of mutual perceptions between countryside and city, and patterns of cultural and material exchange, extraction, migration, credit, legal systems, and political order that link them.

It also includes an understanding of how different societies conceive of the spatial order they exhibit. What terms are meaningful and how are they related?: e.g., frontier, wilderness, arable, countryside, city, town, agriculture, commerce, “hills,” lowlands, maritime districts, inland. How have these meanings changed historically and what symbolic and material weight do they bear?
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This chapter juxtaposes two natural resources that loom large in histories of the Arabian Peninsula: pearls and oil. Pearling and fishing were once the largest industries in the Persian Gulf, until they were eclipsed in economic importance by oil in the mid-twentieth century. This transition "from pearls to oil" is often discussed in the historiography of the region as abrupt: an overnight leap from fishing villages to rentier states. This chapter instead focuses on the messy transition between these resource regimes, taking material cues from the fact that pearl reefs and oil fields inhabit the same stretches of the sea, and the fact that oil in this region is fossilized planktonic life from a prehistoric ocean. Drawing on the methods of ethnography, historical anthropology, and critical geography, this chapter takes the actions of present fishermen, colonial histories, and deep time into consideration. Conceptually, foregrounding the materiality of pearl reefs and oil fields coheres what might appear to be unwieldy resources, timescales, and geographies together in the present, where groaning steel rigs and bobbing skiffs crowd each other at sea. Accordingly, this chapter views the overlapping geographies of extraction in the Gulf as setting up not only a clash of economic lifeways (the dominant understanding of this history) but of temporalities, environments, and systems of enclosure at sea (the thrust of the remainder of Taming the Sea).