Latest news with #pearldivers
Arab News
5 days ago
- Business
- Arab News
The Gulf can build future success by looking to the past
In the Arabian Gulf, there is an understandable fascination with the future: smart cities, AI clusters, and economic zones that promise diversification beyond oil. But amid this forward momentum, we risk forgetting that the Gulf's economy was once thriving not because of central planning or industrial zoning, but because of something far more organic: trust, adaptability, and deeply human connections. Before the modern nation-state drew hard borders across the Arabian Peninsula and southern Iran, the Gulf was part of a far older and more fluid geography. Communities in places such as Qeshm, Dubai, Muscat, and Bandar Abbas did not simply trade — they lived, moved, worked, and married across regions. Their strength lay not in homogeneity or formality, but in intersectionality: the convergence of professions, identities, and roles within and across households and communities. In my research on the history of trade in the Gulf — families with ancestral and economic ties stretching across the region — I found that their livelihoods were anything but linear. One person might be a pearl diver during the season, a scholar the next, and an informal arbitrator within his community when called on. Women, too, played roles beyond the domestic: managing household finances, facilitating trade relationships, and anchoring family ties across shores. These were not exceptions; they were features of a society that understood economic resilience as a communal endeavor, grounded in social versatility and collective trust. There was no formal 'cluster strategy' — but the Gulf functioned like one long before the term existed. People, skills, goods, and ideas came together not through infrastructure, but through relationships: between tribes and towns, merchants and craftsmen, men and women, elders and youth. The economy was informal, yes — but it was remarkably efficient, precisely because it was interconnected. Today, when we talk about economic clusters, we tend to speak in terms of infrastructure. Zones are carved out, incentives are layered in, and success is measured in contributions to the national economy and employment targets. These are all important. But what made the Gulf economy thrive in the past — and what can make it thrive again — is something harder to quantify: intersectional connectedness. In an age of fragmentation, intersectionality is not a soft value but a strategic asset. Maria Hanif Al-Qassim The UAE's recent experience building a national food cluster offers a powerful example. Launched in 2024, the cluster was developed not as an isolated zone, but as a living ecosystem built on values deeply rooted in Gulf tradition. It prioritized trust, adaptability, and collaboration — not just between government and private sector, but across farmers, logistics providers, regulators, entrepreneurs, and researchers. The goal was not just economic output, but a shared sense of purpose and mutual accountability. This approach echoes the pre-oil way of doing things in the UAE: where public and private blurred, where roles overlapped, and where economic activity was embedded in the rhythms of community life. The food cluster did not just revive a sector; it revived a mindset. And that mindset is more relevant now than ever. In an age of fragmentation — where technology often isolates, and sectors compete for attention and resources — intersectionality is not a soft value but a strategic asset. It is what allows ecosystems to adapt, what allows people to participate meaningfully in change, and what anchors innovation in lived experience rather than in abstraction. As we build the next phase of the Gulf's economic transformation, let us not only look outward — to global competitiveness or cross-border trade. Let us look inward, at the web of relationships that have always been our strength. Because long before we had clusters, we had community. And when communities are connected across lines of class, role, geography, and function — that is when real prosperity begins.
The National
28-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The National
How AI helped Christopher Joshua Benton reimagine forgotten links between Japanese and Arab diving cultures
When the Portuguese first reached Japan in the 1500s, they didn't arrive alone. Alongside them came enslaved and indentured servants, many of them black. Given Portugal's footprint in the Gulf at the time, it's highly likely that some of the first black people to set foot on Japanese soil came from the Arab world, and brought with them elements from the region's culture. This idea sparked Christopher Joshua Benton 's latest project, From Toba with Love – currently being displayed at the Tokyo Arts and Space Hongo (Tokas). His aim was to explore what he calls a 'comparative ethnography' between the ama divers of coastal Japan and the ghawwas, or pearl divers, of the Arabian Gulf. 'I was sort of curious about both the real and imagined connections between the Gulf and Japan,' says Benton, who lives and works in the UAE. That curiosity, rooted in a piece of speculative history, soon spurred Benton into an investigation of the two coastal traditions. From Toba with Love is a three-channel video installation housed inside a black lacquered structure inspired by the traditional amagoya, or hut used by Japanese ama – women known for free-diving for abalone, seaweed and shellfish. The installation features three films: Lover's Shell, The Copper Stranger and the titular From Toba with Love. It centres on an imagined romance between Mabrook, an African-born Gulf pearl diver, and Paru, an ama. For Benton, the love story between them was a vessel for questions about diaspora, cultural memory and the shared traditions of divers. It also tested his assumptions about the two cultures and revealed where imagination had to intervene. 'No matter how much research I did through books, it was completely different once you start doing fieldwork,' Benton says. Over the course of a three-month residency in Japan's Mie Prefecture, Benton set out to connect with local historians and ama divers. However, he quickly found that access wasn't easy. The lineage of ama – or 'sea samurai' as they are sometimes referred as – spans thousands of years across coastal Japan and South Korea, but their numbers today are small. 'It is estimated that there might only be 600 left,' Benton says. 'And it's so hyper-local so ama divers in one town might not know ones just in the town over.' Despite language barriers and difficulty approaching institutional archives, Benton eventually found a breakthrough. On his last day in Toba – the city in the Mie Prefecture that lends its name to the project – Benton met an ama diver. 'It was such a gift. She was really generous, and we had a two-hour lunch,' Benton says. Her name was Aiko – a former photographer who had joined a city programme designed to recruit younger women into the dwindling tradition. 'She's not from the lineage in the same way that most people sort of inherit it from their families, but she's one of the youngest ama for sure.' This interaction is touched upon in the third and final film. It also adds an emotional layer to the fictional character of Paru. But there were still more gaps in the research than Benton was comfortable with. To move forward, Benton began stitching together fragments from museum collections, folklore and historical postcards. He also drew from the archives of Toba Sea Folk Museum and Northwestern University's Humphrey Winterton Collection. Benton used the materials in a method he calls 'pastmaking' – blending archival research with speculation, storytelling, and artistic invention. AI was a powerful tool for this pastmaking and for filling the archival slips. Benton used AI diffusion – a form of generative imaging technology – to animate the postcards, colonial photos, and personal collections, bringing to life the story of Mabrook and Paru. 'It would've been impossible to do this project even six months ago,' he says. However, as expected with the use of AI, the results were not rendered with a documentary-level realism. The archival images were animated into film with dreamlike imperfections and a subtle glitches that have become idiosyncratic of the technology. In the earlier part of Mabrook's story, which shows how he was captured into slavery after being lured by dates, Benton turned to colonial-era photographs for visual references. 'It's weird because it's not an imagined Africa. It is Africa, but it's a colonial vision of the most exotic version of it,' he says. 'For the most part, we have no clue who the people are in the images. And so for me, a big question is like, well, in that gap, what's plausible?' One of the AI imperfections that Benton points out is how the model changes the protagonist as the story continues. The Mabrook in one segment is replaced by another child in a subsequent one. Benton leaned into these flaws, seeing them resonate with the nature of the fragmented story the artist was telling. 'There's a way to make it to where the protagonists are always the same, but for me, the protagonist switches because I want to maybe drive home this idea that Mabrook's story could have happened to any child,' Benton says. Counterbalancing his time in Japan, Benton's visits to Ras Al Khaimah brought the Gulf's own pearling past into sharper focus, serving as a foundation to the other half of the project. 'In Ras Al Khaimah, I did two trips,' he says. 'One was to this place called Suwaidi Pearls. They maintain a pearl farm and have great educational material. I also went to Al Jazeera Al Hamra village and filmed a bit. The architecture is beautiful.' Those visits allowed him to immerse himself in the physical remnants of the region's diving culture, from traditional boats and tools to the architecture of long-abandoned coastal villages. Benton hopes to bring From Toba with Love to the Gulf after the work concludes showing in Japan in August. He also aims to expand the project. 'I would love to bring it to the UAE, Saudi, or Oman or Qatar,' he says. 'But also I really want to add more stories to it. It's more than Mabrook and Paru. There's other people who could be featured.'
