Marielle Risse, "Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman" (Anthem Press, 2026)

“I used to be like that,” Marielle Risse says about her own initial reaction to polygyny. That confession is the key to her book, Ethnographic Reflections on Marriage in Dhofar, Oman. Risse spent 19 years living in the southern Omani city of Salalah, embedded in a Dhofari neighborhood and teaching at the local university. The book is not a theoretical treatise on marriage. It is an attempt to write the kind of ethnography she wanted to read: one that explains, in concrete, everyday terms, how marriage actually works for a specific group of people. It is a deliberate effort to replace distant judgment with close description.

A Different Kind of Ethnography

Risse came to anthropology late, after a PhD in English literature focused on travel writing. She sees a direct line between the skills needed for good travel writing and good ethnography: the ability to describe a place and its people accurately, to capture texture, smell, and motivation. Her book resists the standard anthropological structure of a brief incident followed by 20 to 25 pages of theoretical interpretation. Instead, she organizes the book thematically, with the first chapters heavily focused on her own positionality. She wants the reader to know who she is and what her limitations are before she begins describing anyone else. “If you set up your author as ‘this is me,’ then the reader is more like they’re