Аннотация:Wandering through a modestly sized supermarket in a peripheral section of Dubai one scorching hot day in July 2006, I came across an aisle solely devoted to coconuts.They were separated into bins based on specifiable origin and pedigree-Kenya, Ethiopia, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Oman, Philippines.The logic of this variety seemed to speak as directly to communities who favored coconuts from their own home regions as it did to a brisk trafficking in agricultural products.The Gulf port city of the pre-oil era has today been absorbed into the post-maritime Gulf metropolis, whose civic demographics are shaped by new economies, labor patterns, and jet-age networks of commerce and transsettlement.In this chapter, drawing on fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2017 in Oman, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait, I focus on the Baloch 1 citizenry of the Arab Gulf states while centering the circuitry of the Indian Ocean that has long bound together cultural spheres sited on disparate shores of the Indian Ocean littoral.Baloch society in the western Indian Ocean region presents an extremely complex picture when viewed through the lens of cultural texts and arts.The large Baloch communities sited in the Arab Gulf states attest to this history and this complexity as they navigate between a distinctive peninsular identity and a Balochistan-facing nationalism in which a rich heritage of cultural arts, including music, dance, and poetry, is proudly enshrined.My argument here is twofold.First, a geographically expansive, historicized perspective is needed to conceptualize and identify the ways in which the Indian Ocean as an "inter-regional arena" (Bose 2002, 368) is clearly legible in major
