The growth of the Saudi state and associated economy, particularly since the early 1970s, has introduced alternative ways of making a living. Fundamental economic, social, technological and political change over the last eight-or-so decades has seen the abandonment of long-standing maritime practices. “e do not remember the past,” cautions the intellectual historian Allan Megill ( 2007: 54), “We ‘remember’ what remains living within our situations now.” For the communities of Saudi Arabia’s Farasan Islands (جزر فرسان) in the southern Red Sea and in the nearby mainland port-city of Jizan (جيزان), “what remains” is in a process of rapid diminution. These memories, recorded and interpreted here, identify the Farasan Islands as a former centre of the pearling industry in the Red Sea, and identify them and Jizan as open to far-reaching maritime-mediated cultural influences in an era before the imposition of the attributes of the modern nation-state. Through this reflection, it becomes clear that the extra-biological memory and archive of the region’s maritime past is sparse that intergenerational transmission is failing that the participation of state agencies in maritime heritage creation is highly limited and that, as a result, memories current among the older generation have limited prospect of survival. The extent of the retention of maritime material cultural items as memorials is also assessed, and the rôle of individual, communal and state actors in that retention is considered. Their recounted memories are inscribed, and Arabic seafaring terms recorded. An older generation of men recall memories of their experiences as boat builders, captains, seafarers, pearl divers and fishermen. This paper is a product of the encounter of the authors with keepers of maritime memories and objects in the Farasan Islands and Jizan. This widespread withdrawal from seafaring activity among many people in these formerly maritime-oriented communities has diminished the salience of such activity in cultural memory, and has set in motion narrative creation processes, through which memories are filtered and selected, and objects preserved, discarded, or lost. Vestiges of wooden boatbuilding activity are few long-distance dhow trade with South Asia, the Arabian-Persian Gulf and East Africa has ceased and a once substantial pearling and nacre (mother of pearl) collection industry has dwindled to a tiny group of hobbyists: no youth dive today. Rapid socio-economic transformation across Saudi Arabia in the age of oil has disrupted longstanding seafaring economies in the Red Sea archipelago of the Farasan Islands, and the nearby mainland port of Jizan. The sustenance and reproduction of the resulting narratives depends further on effective media of intergenerational transmission otherwise, they are lost. People create narratives of their maritime past through the remembering and forgetting of seafaring experiences, and through the retention and disposal of maritime artefacts that function mnemonically to evoke or suppress those experiences.
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