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Accepted Contribution:
Contribution short abstract:
This paper explores social micro-saving groups (jamʿiyya) in Central Oman, arguing that these local saving practices play a particularly important role for women, not only as forms of commoning—collectively managing resources—but also as acts of kinning, constructing and maintaining kinship ties.
Contribution long abstract:
This paper examines the practices of social micro-saving groups (jamʿiyya) among women of different age groups in Central Oman, framing them within the concepts of commoning and kinning to explore the intersection of economic and relational dimensions in kinship. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2016-2017, including a survey of 70 households in a rural Omani town, I analyze local saving groups as a central mechanism of communal financial management within extended families. Jamʿiyya refers to informal saving clubs where members contribute fixed amounts at regular intervals, and the pooled sum is distributed to one member in rotation.
In Oman, a relatively affluent oil-based welfare state, social saving groups do not replace bank accounts but complement them, strengthening and replicating social relationships. I argue that jamʿiyya practices play a particularly important role for women, not only as forms of commoning—collectively managing and distributing resources—but also as acts of kinning, constructing and maintaining kinship ties. Savings goals and uses vary across gender, age, and status groups, with educated women, often earning higher salaries than their husbands, playing key roles in achieving savings goals, such as (co-)funding celebrations or home renovations.
By enacting jamʿiyya practices within familial networks, Omani women reinforce and negotiate relational solidarity, illustrating how such practices intertwine the economic and social-emotional dimensions of kinship. This paper contributes to the anthropology of kinship and economic anthropology by examining processes of commoning in the intimate sphere of the family.
Un/Commoning the Intimate. Kinship as Lived and Contested Resource
Session 2