“Start of Content” in “The Fragmentary City”
Preface
In this book, I speak from an ethnographic and empirical foundation to the experiences of the millions of transnational labor migrants, mostly from South Asia, who journey to the wealthy states of the Arabian Peninsula for some portion of their lives. I seek to convey an anatomy of the transnational migration system that shuttles those migrants to and from the wealthy states in which they are employed. Along the way, I articulate and analyze some of the fascinatingly unique and noteworthily interesting social, cultural, and urban arrangements that result from the unprecedented demographic concoctions of people gravitationally attracted by the region’s hydrocarbon wealth. Nestled at the heart of those objectives is an enduring fascination with the cities of Arabia, and therein one will find the book’s central thesis: Doha, exemplary of cities throughout the region, is a complicated tool by which state and citizenry manage their relationship with the rest of the world and by which they seek to govern those forces present in the urban landscape they have constructed. In that sense, this book is about the city of Doha.
Like most books grounded in the craft of ethnography, what follows is primarily a collation and discussion of other people’s experiences intermixed with my own experiences as a participant-observer. Over multiple projects spanning more than two decades, thousands of transnational labor migrants and a constellation of other people have shared aspects of their lives, experiences, and perspectives with me and occasionally with my colleagues and my research assistants. This book aspires to remain true to those men and women and to the information they gifted me. The core of my analysis is built on that foundation. Although it is seemingly customary to thank many of our interlocutors by name in the preface of an ethnography, I will name none of those individuals here. I refrain because I find the custom of naming interlocutors that readers will not know to be oddly performative.1 Nonetheless, I am grateful to all of them and comfortable with the fact that most of them—if they remember me at all—know that. A few of them remain close friends of mine to this day. I am equally grateful to the handful of institutions that played a key role in the production of this book—to Qatar University, the University of Puget Sound, the Whiteley Center, and a global coterie of scholars, colleagues, and friends who have helped me and this book along its way. I have learned a great deal from those people, and while I also list none of them by name here, most are aware of my deep gratitude. Additionally, my students at those various institutions were particularly influential in shaping my understandings, and I am grateful for the opportunities I have had to teach and interact with young adults on several different continents. Jim Lance at Cornell University Press and the two anonymous readers he arranged had perhaps the most significant impact on this manuscript, and I am grateful to all of them. Finally, I am happy to name my family and express my gratitude to them: my daughter Astrid, and my parents, Gordon and Janice. Thank you for everything. You are the greatest blessing of my life.
Although my aspirations with this book are primarily anthropological, intellectual, and ethnographic, I hope this book will be at least vaguely recognizable as a creative work. In a previous chapter of my life I was a songwriter and musician of sorts, and I briefly attempted existence as an aspiring poet just prior to that. Photography is a useful and wonderful new hobby for me. Moreover, for many years I was married to a working artist. With all of that water under the bridge, it seems that creativity has been a lifelong passenger on my journey, and I continue to place a high value on the creativity that we might bring to the various disciplines and to the conversations that academics have stewarded through the difficulties of the previous century. In this book, that creativity has been mostly straitjacketed into the chapters and analyses that comprise an ethnographically moored book in the academic vernacular the present moment demands. Nonetheless, I hope that readers are able to glimpse that penchant for creativity in the photographs included here and perhaps in the stylistic and analytic latitude that anthropology has long allowed.
Although I will elaborate on the ideas by which this book is framed in the chapters to come and pontificate even further in the postscript, let me briefly turn to the destinations that I envision for the journey ahead. I certainly hope to convey how the city of Doha serves as a tool by which the Qatari people govern and regulate their relations with the world. I also hope to illuminate the transnational migratory conduits that bring tens of millions of foreigners to the Arabian Peninsula. I want to think about the kinds of social forms that blossom and proliferate in these unusual demographic circumstances. I also want to think about the fundamental nature of the astonishing cities that have arisen from the mostly empty deserts on the Arabian Peninsula. I will explore a variety of different angles on the tens of millions of people who arrive to work in Arabia, and I also want to think about all the other things that travel along those same migratory conduits—the money, the ideas, the various technologies, the germs and viruses, the natural resources, the liquified energy, the fashions and styles, and so much more. Throughout this journey, my emphasis will remain trained on the material circumstances, social relations, and cultural phenomena that coalesce in the city of Doha.
This emphasis may seem counterintuitive to some readers. A swath of ethnographic scholarship exists, including contributions from a growing list of scholars concerned with the societies and peoples of the Arabian Peninsula, that is actively oriented toward a set of conversations that readers will find are largely omitted from this book. Though those works often march under the banner of anthropology, they are primarily engaged in a set of conversations concerning the emotional terrain of human life—succinctly, they are concerned with how people feel. This concern is often framed in terms of belonging, inclusion, and exclusion, but it also pervades a variety of other ongoing scholarly conversations. I see those conversations as a testament to what sociologist Frank Furedi (2003, 44) noted more than two decades ago—that “individual emotions and experience have acquired an unprecedented significance in public life.” His assertion might be usefully modified only by noting that this tendency seems most paramount in America, or perhaps the West; in my estimation, the reorientation of anthropology around a concern with the emotional well-being of our subjects employs a therapeutic metric that is both undeniably and ethnocentrically entwined with the American experience. In this book, I seek to remain focused, instead, on the complicated terrain and the varied circumstances in which the emotional states of my subjects are conjured—those material circumstances are the object of my objectivity (D’Andrade 1995). As this suggests, in the final accounting I view the emotional states of the diverse individuals who fall in the ambit of this ethnography as epiphenomena. They are an unpredictable variable which is only partially dependent on the material relations I seek to describe here.
In exploring this analytic pathway, my foremost commitment is to the discipline of anthropology, and to its exploration and long-standing veneration of the social and cultural terrain of human difference. In taking on the very same objective that guided generations of anthropologists before me, my aim is always for impartiality and fairness in the analyses I present.2 I hope that this book lives up to those aspirations. These aims are emblematic of the social scientific tradition that was central to anthropology in its first century of existence. As the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss described it, anthropology’s burden in the social sciences was always particularly cumbersome: “The objectivity aimed at by anthropology is on a higher level [than the other social sciences]: The observer must not only place himself above the values accepted by his own society or group, but must adopt certain definite methods of thought; he must reason on the basis of concepts which are valid not merely for an honest and objective observer, but for all possible observers” (Lévi-Strauss 1963, 364). Through the positivist and social scientific frame of the vantage point I have summarized here, I also seek the transcendent vernacular that Lévi-Strauss capably described so many decades ago.
This explication of the city and the social relations contained therein is offered as an example that might inform our conversations and plans for a human future that seems almost certain to be urban. From that vantage point, I have a variety of audiences in mind for this book. There are numerous stakeholders attuned to Doha and cities like it, and even more who compose the overlapping realms of academia concerned with cities, in general, with this city, in particular, and with the migrations and movement of all the various people who inhabit it. With that diverse audience in mind—Qatari citizens, legions of foreign workers, a diasporic middle class, other visitors and tourists, scholars and academics, policymakers, journalists, urban planners, and an array of miscellaneous others—we can conclude this: undoubtedly, the first two decades of the twenty-first century have been one of the most interesting, eventful, and historic epochs for the many residents of the Qatari Peninsula, and for the Qatari people. There is so much for us to learn from their experiences and from the city they have constructed in the desert. Follow me for a bit.
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