CONCLUSION
A City I Will Never See
The intricate connections between religion and the urban form are fascinating and varied features of human history (Mumford 1961; Buras 2019; Kotkin 2005). Take, for example, the case of Kumbh Mela. In India, huge numbers of people come together every twelve years in a periodic gathering at a major juncture of rivers. There, tens of millions of Hindu devotees bathe in the river waters and celebrate their religious community. A vast temporary city, much of it on poles suspended above the rivers, arises to serve what has been labeled the largest congregation of religious pilgrims in the world (Mehta et al. 2015). Kumbh Mela is a fascinating example of the interplay between religious aspects of culture and the urban forms that grow from human congregation.
In a similar vein, some eight hundred miles to the west of Doha is Mecca, another city whose history is deeply entwined with religious pilgrimage and, more broadly, with human mobility. On the outskirts of Mecca is Mina, the “City of Tents,” another sort of ephemeral city. Unlike Kumbh Mela, of course, the remainder of Mecca is not a coagulation of tents and temporary structures but rather a permanent feature of the fantastically beautiful Saudi desert landscape. With all Muslims compelled to attempt, if possible, at least one pilgrimage during the brief flicker of the human lifespan, the whole of the city has expanded in dramatic fashion to accommodate more and more pilgrims. Like Doha and the other cities of the Arabian Peninsula, Mecca has grown in tandem with an array of different mobilities, regional interconnections, and capital accumulations. In the case of Mecca, those mobilities and connections are all tethered to the Kaaba, the elegant holy cubic structure toward which all Muslims pray, and to the Grand Mosque that surrounds it. The Saudi King’s official title is the “Keeper of the Two Holy Mosques,” a testament to the symbolic centrality of the city in Saudi society. This is the city that once enchanted Malcolm X on his pilgrimage in 1964, a year in which Mecca attracted an estimated two hundred thousand pilgrims. Today, that number has ballooned into the millions, and plans are now afoot for the city’s infrastructure to accommodate tens of millions of annual pilgrims in the decade to come (Nagraj 2020).
FIGURE 17. A traffic sign on approach to Mecca and Medina. Photograph from Wikimedia Commons.
The evolutions of Mecca place it in the ambit of other cities on the Arabian Peninsula. In my analysis of Doha, I have endeavored to discern and identify some of the patterns, attributes, and social relations that might connect Doha’s experience with those other cities. Concerning Mecca, however, the parallels with Doha are striking: the ancient neighborhood around the Grand Mosque was mostly bulldozed in past decades, and the Ottoman citadel dating to the eighteenth century—a vestige of previous imperialism—was quietly razed to make way for something new. Mecca is a highly edited urban palimpsest. The financing of Mecca’s recent urban redevelopments also blurs the division between the public and private sectors, as seen in Qatar and elsewhere in the GCC and previously discussed in this book. The mountainous amphitheater that once surrounded the holiest of Muslim spaces has been forever altered, with ancient peaks flattened to accommodate new hotels and constructions. The Binladen International Holding Group, the largest of the Kingdom’s construction companies and a name familiar to most, completed the US$15 billion Abraj Al Bait project in 2011. Also known as the Golden Clocktower Complex, it is the third tallest building in the world by current measure. The hotel portion of the project includes thousands of luxurious rooms. Those with direct views of the Grand Mosque might readily cost more than US$3,000 per night. The same complex includes a five-story shopping mall with some four thousand retail spaces. This puts Starbucks, Sbarro, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Krispy Kreme, H&M, Cartier, Tiffany, and countless other commercial outposts typical of the planet’s commercial junkspace steps away from the holiest of Muslim sites (Koolhaas 2002; Augé 2009).
After viewing the city from a helicopter, Saudi artist and photographer Ahmed Mater remarked that Mecca now seems bathed in green, fluorescent light. He and others now compare Islam’s holiest city to Las Vegas (Hubbard 2016). In his explorations of Mecca and with his camera in tow, Mater even spent time in the labor camps of the transnational migrant worker population that resides in Mecca, a workforce present there to help to erect a mostly new city atop the remnants and vestiges of the old. Like Doha, many of those workers dwell in camps now located at the periphery of the city. And in Mecca, even bigger urban changes are afoot: the Kingdom recently announced a truly massive new urban project intended to reshape much of the city. Named Masar, the urban project includes retail, commercial, cultural, and government centers. The plan also calls for tens of thousands of hotel rooms and residences to be added to the city’s current stock. The planners, financiers, and the array of corporate partners they have assembled promote the Mecca-to-come with the generic language of cosmopolitan marketing—as “a modern landmark and cultural destination with multiple features” (Arab News, 2020). The recipe for urban development described here, as well as the grandiose unit of urban redevelopment with which these changes have been conceptualized, closely resembles the case of Doha and its growth, as I’ve presented in this book.
When it comes to Mecca, critics continue to vociferously point to what will be lost with the changes afoot, if they have not been lost already. Ziauddin Sardar first began to witness the ongoing destruction of the city in the 1970s, and had this to say on the topic: “It is through the effort of traveling to Mecca, walking from one ritual site to another, finding and engaging with people from different cultures and sects, and soaking in the history of Islam that the pilgrims acquired knowledge as well as spiritual fulfillment.” Or consider the sentiments of Sami Angawi, the founder and former director of the Hajj Research Center: “Races, nationalities and customs, professions and trades and even languages and dialects have all mingled in the crucible of Mecca” (quoted in Mater 2016, 595). Both of these remarks seem eloquent and concise summarizations of the value of diversity long fostered by the pilgrimage to Mecca. But those sentiments also speak to the vitality of the urban milieu more broadly, and are strikingly similar in their phrasing to the value attributed to the cosmopolitan ethos of the city—the value in encountering difference and in engagements with otherness. Yet while cities and spaces can foster these interactions, they can also impede them. Sardar (2014) pointed to the changing nature of Mecca: “Today, hajj is a packaged tour, where you move, tied to your group, from hotel to hotel, and seldom encounter people of different cultures and ethnicities. Drained of history and religious and cultural plurality, hajj is no longer a transforming, once-in-a-lifetime spiritual experience. It has been reduced to a mundane exercise in rituals and shopping.”
When it comes to the city of Mecca, there is even more of interest that I can point to here. A quick perusal of the city’s recent history points to an alarming legacy of danger. One year, 107 people were killed by a collapsing crane. Another year, 2,236 humans perished in a stampede. Yet another year, that number was 1,426. In 1979, some 50,000 pilgrims were held hostage by a band of Saudi insurgents, and the subsequent battle to control the Grand Mosque lasted nearly two months. Hundreds died, and sixty-three militants were later beheaded. Setting these violences aside, we can continue in another direction, for there is even more here. In Mecca, numerous diasporic communities have long been woven into the fabric of the city. Can we apprehend Mecca, in part, as a city of diasporic refuge? By what arrangements have these communities inhabited the urban landscape for so long? Or, pushing in yet another direction: what is the impact of the closure of the city’s famous night market, where religious pilgrims brought their various wares to sell? Have these activities moved to other spaces in the city? And are interstitial urban spaces at play here? I could readily continue, but let me suggest what seems obvious—that Mecca is perhaps the most interesting of the worlding cities on the whole of the Arabian Peninsula and merits the attention of the many diverse urbanists thinking about humanity’s urban future.
But this long excursion into the fascinating aspects of contemporary Mecca is intended to preface an altogether different point in the conclusion of this book. Mecca is a city I will never see. The visceral and embodied experience of this urban landscape, and the inherently social aspect of our human collectivity that coalesces in Mecca’s streets, all of it drawn to the sacred gravity of the Kaaba at the center of that ancient city—these are features of Mecca I will never experientially know. It is a city and an urban experience from which I am excluded (see figure 17). Knowing it only from afar, peering over the shoulders of this cultural text’s authors, and grasping it only through the curated experiences of others, I nonetheless think there is even more of an analytic import here. Does not the hajj and the experience of Mecca that I am straining to glimpse gain meaning and vitality through my exclusion? It seems obvious to me that the sacredness at the heart of this city—the essence of the “once-in-a-lifetime spiritual experience” that Sardar described—is a result of the common bond of faith shared by the diversity of pilgrims who annually trek to the city. That common bond and the urban social fabric manifested in Mecca are a product of my exclusion. I see no reason to lament my exclusion other than the unsatiated curiosity of an urbanist, I suppose. For me to lament my exclusion would smack of an American sort of entitlement, would it not?
It is in this sustained musing about Mecca that readers might be able to first intuit the value of exclusion that I wish to assert here. Drawing again on Douglas (1966) and the tradition of structural anthropology, it seems clear that exclusion, meaning, and urbanists’ sense of place are all intricately entwined. Another place I think we can see the same value to exclusion is in the Qatari experience that I have sought to portray in this book. In my analysis, the most important mechanism by which the Qataris have managed and shaped that experience is the city itself. In more specificity: through the segmentation of the workforce and the consolidation of Qatari citizens in the public sector; by insulating themselves in neighborhoods clustered in the urban landscape; by the maintenance of some approximation of endogamy; by continuing to speak Arabic in those spaces and to each other; by tending to and maintaining social relations we might recognize as “traditional”; and foremost, by building an archipelago of discrete urban spaces in which all of it might take shape—all of this helps explain the prominence of Qatari social distinction and its enduring definition. This perseverance is all the more remarkable in light of the sea of foreigners that inhabit the Qatari Peninsula, and the preponderance of foreign matter in the urban landscape constructed there. The perseverance of Qatari society, and the coherence of the culture that emanates from it, is an anthropologically noteworthy fact.
Imagine if this book had been framed differently and had commenced with a different core assertion: This ethnography tells the story of a small set of Arab tribes and the society that congealed around them in history. Under the seemingly incessant siege of the forces of modernity, constantly reckoning with the impending possibilities of cultural change, growing increasingly interconnected with the capitalist world system, and navigating overlapping and complicated relations with a sequence of powerful imperial forces all the while, Qatari social and cultural distinction has somehow persevered into the contemporary era. Again: this assertion is all the more astonishing when one considers the superdiverse demographics of the city, and the Qatari people’s fragmentary portion of that demographic whole. And also again: as this book suggests, the city itself has a lot to do with the preservation and the perseverance of the Qatari way of life. With the central role of the city in the calculus of my argument, I think another point merits even further emphasis here: the perseverance of Qatari social and cultural distinction requires space, and in this case, urban space.
The same is true, I suggest, for many other residents of Doha in this era of mobility. A legion of foreign workers has been attracted to the peninsula and to the opportunities available there. Almost none of them wish to integrate into Qatari society nor remain on the peninsula in old age. In an era that seems to demand mobility and to compel their migration away from their homes, most of those foreign workers keep their gaze steadily trained on their faraway homes, at least in part. The major portion of migrants’ paychecks are regularly remitted to those households in distant lands, and a transnational migrant worker’s savings, modest as it may be, is commonly earmarked for the maintenance of those other ways of life. Through their earnings and energies, migrants seek to remain a part of a society grounded in another place, to buy land or build a better home there, to pay for children’s education or for a daughter’s dowry, to save enough to return home and eventually retire. Their aspirations are territorialized. In the interim, migrants’ contractual vacation months—time to be spent at home every year or two—are anticipated with great energy and planning. In summary, the many and diverse foreigners present in Qatar are quintessentially transnational creatures, as are the livelihood systems they build and to which they contribute.
All of this is to say that the spatial segregation of various communities in the urban landscape of Doha has some positive aspects and features with which we need to reckon. Those urban spaces and places in the city often have a cultural gravity, of which we should take note.
Urban Space and the Territorial Gravity of Culture
To assess the enclaves, zones, and precincts produced by the urban spatial discourse undergirding Doha’s growth and to take measure of the cultural gravity I see in those enclaves and spaces, we might commence with an assessment of the practical utility of these arrangements. Many of the enclaves, compounds, camps, and zones encountered in Doha’s urban landscape provide linguistic, cultural, and culinarily familiar spaces for humans borne on the tides of this era of mobility. Those spaces and places are where transnational migrants might land upon arrival, assess the horizons before them, where they might gather information from others, glean advice from veteran migrants, and take a deep breath as they gird themselves for whatever challenges they face next. Those enclaves, compounds, camps, and zones—also those neighborhoods, districts, precincts, and various other urban spaces—are the spaces where culture, always a collective endeavor, might take root and perhaps even flourish. It is the abstract relationship between culture and space that is my eventual destination here, but I want to linger for a moment more on the recurring practical utility of this cohesion and the segregation of difference.
In 1992, after four years of college, I moved to New York City. My first apartment there was on 6th Street on the Lower East Side, just a block off Tompkins Square Park. With a close friend, I shared an overpriced studio located on the same block as nearly a dozen Indian restaurants. There were no Indian restaurants on the next street over nor two blocks east past Avenue A. Rather those restaurants gathered together in the urban landscape by choice. Similarly, after the conflict in Indochina was finally quelled and the Americans were expelled, Vietnamese immigrants to the United States began to remake the neighborhood up the hill from Seattle’s International District. With an evident abundance of entrepreneurial energy, this resulted in a busy neighborhood referred to as Little Saigon. We see the same cultural gravity in the urban landscapes of Arabia. Indian restaurants, businesses, and residences gather in the urban space around the century-old Indian Club of Bahrain. Bangladeshi migrant entrepreneurs commandeer an abandoned superblock in the urban heart of Abu Dhabi, and it becomes ephemerally refashioned as Little Bangladesh (Elsheshtawy 2017). Villages and regions from throughout South Asia stake out geographical claims in the parking lots surrounding the Al Attiyah market on a Friday afternoon in Doha (see figure 9).1 Similarly, although usually assigned to their labor camps by their employers, transnational labor migrants commonly sort themselves into rooms within those camps, and cohabitate with roommates similar in terms nationality, language, religion, style, and various other facets of human existence that fall under the umbrella of culture. Even more examples are possible here, but all of this charts the cultural gravity that I discern as a recurring social feature of the urban landscape. Humans are social creatures, and culture is oftentimes the core element of the gravity that pulls us together in space. In a world where hundreds of millions of people are on the move—the defining feature of the era of mobility, as I have termed it—our cohesion in urban space around this gravity has a practical utility.
In addition to the practical facets of the cultural gravity that I have described, there is also a more philosophical angle on the separation, segregation, and maintenance of cultural distinction that merits articulation here. This justification begins with the value of cultural diversity and difference—a value long perceived as integral to the urban milieu. Like many urbanists before her, for example, Jane Jacobs (1961) praised the diversity of the urban environment and dedicated her life to its protection. In New York City, Jacobs saw neighbors and strangers woven together in an urban social fabric that she praised. There she took note of what she called “sidewalk ballet,” the subconscious order beneath the veneer of disorder and chaos that one might first perceive in the city. Similarly, Lewis Mumford spoke glowingly of the special quality of life in the city. From his vantage point, “only in a city can the full cast of characters for the human drama be assembled.” In dialogue with those who are different from us, we might take “the first step out of that tribal conformity which is an obstacle to self-consciousness and to development,” Mumford (1961, 116–117) concluded. These sentiments sound strikingly similar to Ziauddin Sardar’s remarks about the hajj; it is through the engagement with difference that we humans might find spiritual enlightenment.
The enduring value of diversity to the urban milieu is a correlation that many would agree is now axiomatic. And as previously noted, estimations of the value of urban diversity tread essentially the same ground as those theorists concerned with cosmopolitanism and the cosmopolitan ethos. The anthropologist Ulf Hannerz (2005, 200) defined cosmopolitanism as “an intellectual and aesthetic openness toward divergent cultural experiences.” That definition will suffice for our purposes here, but the reader might note that matters of cosmopolitanism’s definition preoccupy much of the concept’s elaboration over the last two decades. With Hannerz’s basic definition in hand one can at least perceive the proximity of the cosmopolitan ethos to urbanists’ praise of diversity in the city.2 Those two conversations come together in Elijah Anderson’s (2011, 276) conceptualization of the urban spaces he identifies as “cosmopolitan canopies.” Drawing from his observations of Philadelphia, the city that is his home, Anderson theorizes the functional value of urban spaces in fostering this cosmopolitan ethos. These spaces convene various inhabitants of the city, and, as he states, “provide an opportunity for diverse strangers to become better acquainted with people they otherwise seldom observe up close.” A historic market in Philadelphia serves as Anderson’s prototypical example. Continuing, Anderson adds that “when people exposed to all this return to their own neighborhoods, they may do so with a more grounded knowledge of the other than was possible without such experience.”
What initially caught my attention in this assertion, and what remains vital to the argument I am assembling in this conclusion, is not the places in the city where differences come together and interact, although those spaces are a welcome addition to our urban landscapes. Rather, I think our attention should be levied at the places to which people return, as Anderson passingly describes. I am interested in the implications of this return to one’s “own neighborhood” in the city. The value that Anderson perceives in the cosmopolitan canopy is the value of diversity and the positive benefits of engagement with difference. The differences of importance here are not individuals’ many differences—for example, that I met a particularly tall woman at the market, or that a red-headed server publicly berated me in the food court. Rather, the “grounded knowledge” of otherness, as Anderson describes it, and what one “brings back” to one’s neighborhood are experiential understandings most conveniently glossed by the concept of culture. And here, then, is the key point: the magic that Anderson perceives in these cosmopolitan canopies is a magic premised on the cultural differences between the individuals in interaction. To continue to benefit from the energy of these interactions, the cultural differences involved need to be maintained.
The urban theorist Christopher Alexander intuited this fact many decades ago. He argued that the preservation of subcultures in the urban landscape was an ecological matter—“that distinct subcultures will only survive, as distinct subcultures, if they are physically separated in space” (Alexander 1977, 49).3 Doha seems noteworthy for achieving this outcome: squarely amid the era of mobility as we humans are, facing an urban future that will seemingly contain larger and larger waves of people pulled, impelled, forced, or drawn from their homes to a life on the move, the preservation of human diversity is a more pressing issue than ever. Without the urban ecology to preserve those differences, those differences will eventually blend together, and what “appears heterogeneous turns out to be homogenous and dull” (Alexander 1977, 43). From this angle, we might appreciate the city of Doha and the urban spatial discourse that shapes the experiences of the many different peoples who inhabit it.
The constraints, exclusions, segregations, borders, zonings, and various limitations on human mobility have proven to be dangerous tools in human history.4 But as Frank Furedi (2020, 11) contended, “humanity has always been in the business of drawing lines,” and the simplistic and often wholesale indictment of borders and boundaries currently fashionable in American academia purveys a perspective deeply ignorant of the spatial foundations of public life and the spatial dimension of human culture. As this book has sought to demonstrate, Qatar is an exceptionally busy and notably diverse urban juncture in the contemporary world. Despite the plural and heterogeneous nature of this urban juncture, Qatari distinction and social cohesion remain strong. For the many others who work for the Qataris, also, Doha seems to allow those inhabitants to maintain their cultural and social distinction. Is it possible that they, too, gain something from Qatari exclusion? Regardless: this diversity and its maintenance is pinned to the organization of urban space in Doha, and to the enduring truth that culture is a collective project that requires a territorial footprint. In barzakh, in the Ottoman millet system, in the arrangements of the historical port cities that emerged in tandem with the circuits of trade in the Indian Ocean World—the intricate balance of togetherness, distinction, and difference have, for centuries, been managed and maintained in ways that are unfamiliar to Western cities and to most American thinkers (Barkey 2005; Gupta 2008; Eldem 2013; cooke 2014; Barkey and Gravilis 2014; Roberts 2021). As anthropologists have argued for more than a century, our cultural diversity is perhaps humankind’s greatest achievement and asset. The preservation of that diversity in the era of mobility is an objective that merits our collective attention and our energies.
The Antipathy for Exclusion
In closing, I want to begin with the sentiments of the anthropologist Marc Augé, from his introduction to the second edition of Non-Places. Augé (2009, ix) says: “The ideal, egalitarian world may come not through the abolition of frontiers, but through their recognition.” In my estimation, the task to which our species should aspire is to aptly manage this planet and its resources and to manage its various frontiers as best we can, starting now, if not earlier. As we navigate new policy realms in the governance of human mobility, we will do so with the nation-states, the borders, and the legal regimes that currently occupy our maps. Scholars, researchers, and policymakers need to maintain a level-headed and evidence-based conversation about the preservation of human diversity in navigating our challenging global future. As an anthropologist, I am particularly concerned with the differences between humans that take social and cultural forms. The premise of this needed conversation about the maintenance of human cultural diversity should be the very same premise upon which the whole of anthropology was built long ago—that human diversity has an inherent and strategic value. As Augé (2009, xv) continued: “our ideal ought not to be a world without frontiers, but one where all frontiers are recognized, respected and permeable; a world, in fact, where respect for differences would start with the equality of all individuals, independent of their origin or gender.”
This ethnography is offered as an empirical contribution that might help inform that conversation. As I noted in the preface of this book, I believe there is so very much for us to learn from the Qatari experience and from the city they have constructed in the desert. This book is offered as an addition to the ethnographic canon. In recent years, I have returned to the depths of that canon with great energy, and with a growing admiration for the commitment to impartiality typical of my many predecessors’ ethnographic engagements with social and cultural otherness. I have tried to replicate their commitment here, although this book has the added complexity of being not just about otherness but about others’ engagement with otherness. In plumbing the depths of the ethnographic canon, however, it has also dawned on me that readers of this book—should there be any at all—will likely mine this ethnography for details and threads that I cannot perceive from my vista point in the present. It seems likely that a level-headed and evidence-based conversation about the preservation of cultural diversity during this era of mobility will be a difficult conversation to properly cultivate. With the impending and more immediate future in mind, I see numerous challenges and impediments to the conversation that we must have about the maintenance of cultural diversity in this era.
First, the neoliberal capitalist world system is now clearly in full possession of the entire planet. That economic system and the social relations it conjures continue to generate inequalities that are deeply woven into capitalism’s DNA. The permutations and evolutions of state, society, and city emanating from the common foundation of global capitalism are one of the themes to which this ethnography might speak. But in the contemporary era, the energies with which some academicians seek to combat the production of that global inequality are frequently misdirected against the very nature of difference itself. The expression of difference, and particularly its manifestation in the form of culture, should not be misapprehended as a proxy for economic inequality. Nor should the ethnographer’s interest (or the cosmopolitan’s interest) in engaging that difference be mistaken for political or moral support for the underlying engines of economic inequality. The economic inequalities generated by capitalist relations are quintessentially problems of a global scope, and are thus shared by all. In the endeavor to redress that inequality—an endeavor shared by some—we must not sacrifice our commitment to diversity and to the value of human difference.
A second point of potential friction, and a challenge to any level-headed conversation about the preservation of cultural diversity, concerns the nation-state and the policy environment constructed around it. Anthropologists see the world as a mosaic of social and cultural differences accumulated over the longue durée of human history. Boundaries and the borders of nation-states were somewhat recently erected atop this mosaic of difference, and therefore imposed on the blurry continuum of human variability. There is much to both understand and lament in the excavation of this history of the present. But we must attempt to set those lamentations aside, difficult as that may be; the best tools with which we might navigate our impending global future are those of the nation-state and the various political regimes that lay before us today. It is worth adding that, in addition to being the best tools for the planetary challenges at hand, they are also the only tools appropriate to global governance that we possess unless one maintains some glimmer of hope for the boisterous populism of the social mediasphere, now more carefully curated than ever by the planet’s largest profit-seeking corporations, most of which are based in America. Suffice it to say, as flawed as they are, I perceive the apparatuses of the nation-state as integral to our collective path forward.
The third potential friction I see concerns the dire need to maintain an inclusive and diverse scholarly conversation about the urban future that lies ahead for our species. Taking stock of where we commenced the twentieth century, our progress on this front has been extraordinarily immense. Our ongoing conversation about our planetary future—a future that also seems inevitably urban—must embrace the scope of human diversity, and must continue to plunder the depths of our understandings of that diversity as we seek guidance and wisdom on the journey ahead. Despite the fireworks and various performative confrontations to the contrary, however, I believe the American dominion over this conversation remains stronger than ever, and movements to decolonize those conversations are oftentimes nothing more than a charade in subconscious fealty to American hegemony. In light of this book’s sustained consideration of migration, the city, and difference, I suggest that we can see that American dominion at a few key junctures.
Foremost, that American dominion is the taproot of the deep antipathy for boundaries, segregation, and borders of any form. In part, that antipathy is a projection of American privilege, and the planetary command of the American ethos that grew from the collapse of the Cold War and the full extension of neoliberal conditions to all corners of the globe. But that antipathy also projects the privileges integral to American citizenship and the domain of the American national container to the global ecumene; it transposes the rights of mobility configured in the national container to the domain of the entire planet. In both senses, we can take stock of America’s durable hegemony in the global ideoscape, and then perhaps recognize what this antipathy to boundaries, segregation, and borders eclipses in our assessment of city and society. The histories of other places and other cities—including Qatar—are replete with divisions, segmentations, segregations, and limitations on human mobility and movement. The Ottoman Empire’s millet system is just one example, albeit a pertinent example to the region. The broader Indian Ocean World provides a host of other examples in its multifaceted history, and the contemporary permutations of space and distinction in Doha echo aspects and portions of those historical arrangements. In more fairly assessing the arrangements and exclusions orchestrated by the city of Doha, we need to better apprehend the positive qualities rendered by these spatializations and their value to people on the move.
Another place where we might take an estimate of this American hegemony and its occlusion of our capacity to grapple with the value of cultural difference is the mirror image of the point above. Along with the antipathy for boundaries, segregation, and borders, the fetishization of integration and inclusion permeates many global scholarly conversations today. Similarly, it suffuses the conceptual tools with which those conversations are commonly articulated. Here, again, we see the distillation of objectives that were tailored in various long-standing conversations about the American national container being projected upon the whole of the global ecumene and upon various states in that domain. In Qatar, few citizens wish for the legion of foreign workers to integrate into their society. Likewise, few of the foreign workers present on the peninsula and in the city wish to remain in Doha or, more specifically, wish to integrate into Qatari society. To appropriately take stock of the city, migration, and mobilities characteristic of the contemporary era, we must dethrone the American penchant for inclusion, and we must undermine the centrality of the aspiration for integration in our social world. Conversely, the capacity for distinction and the maintenance of difference should be promoted where possible.
Yet another locus for this American hegemony is in the referential centrality of the United States and its cities in those global scholarly conversations. In a previous era of scholarship, American centrality was typically ensconced in various assertions of progress and civilizational stature, for which the United States served as a model in many estimations. In the contemporary era, the United States remains a central reference point, albeit now more often encountered as the negative space promulgated by a bursting legion of academic guilt-mongers. These tactics inhibit meaningful engagement with difference and otherness. To foster an inclusive and diverse scholarly conversation about our planetary future and the cities that will comprise it, we need to open the scholarly conversation to other values, other experiences, and to a discussion of other configurations of city and society. Over more than a century, anthropology and its ethnographic toolkit have been configured precisely to this purpose. Perhaps anthropology’s holistic grasp of otherness might provide some antidote to the epistemological and ontological infrastructure of American hegemony. As I have sought to portray in this book foremost with the concept of a social prism, portions of that hegemony lie in the concepts and categories by which we assemble our understandings of difference and distinction and by which various social movements then congeal. I offer this ethnography of city, space, and people in an attempt to spark a conversation removed from the ambit of that hegemony.