Postscript
This is a strange time to be an American scholar. It is perhaps an even stranger time to be an anthropologist. In this era, the roving and mercurial gaze of others in the intellectual ecosystem I inhabit oftentimes disregards arguments, evidence, reason, and logic. Instead, critics seem more concerned with who has the right to speak, and how the perceived moral code conveyed by the speaker’s ideas might or might not be construed. For an anthropologist whose intent is to talk about the noteworthy, troubling, fascinating, and sometimes captivating aspects of other places, other cities, and the other people who occupy those locations, these conditions have resulted in a particularly perplexing moment to have offered readers this book.
At this perplexing historical moment, the objectives and analytic themes I describe are oftentimes eclipsed by a set of issues that present themselves as more pressing and immediate than those that preoccupy me here. In their American iteration, those more pressing issues mostly orbit around what we now refer to as identity, around the American iteration of the socially constructed idea of race, and around the enduring landscape of inequality that continues to characterize the human world, as it always has. In the projection of those issues upon the disciplinary heart of contemporary anthropology, and upon the simple act of someone like me offering the book you have just read, two sets of concerns have arisen that seem necessary to address in this postscript. They are necessary in the sense that they matter so dearly to disciples of the paradigm that currently dominates my discipline and all of the American academia in the early decades of the twenty-first century.
The first tier of those concerns is about who is speaking. In essence, there is concern about me, the author of this text. For the record, I am a white, middle-aged American male who commenced life in America’s lower middle class. Through my parents’ effort and success, I entered adulthood with a family solidly (if briefly) lodged in America’s upper middle class. Significant portions of my childhood and my adulthood were spent living outside the United States. In childhood, I was first outside the United States as my parents chased opportunity. In adulthood, I was outside the United States as I chased my own opportunities, most of which concerned ethnographic fieldwork and the pursuit of my PhD. In the context of that fieldwork and the research projects underpinning the analyses presented in this book, those qualities of mine—my whiteness, my American passport, and my male gender—opened many doors for me. Simultaneously, and obvious to anyone familiar with the societies present on the Arabian Peninsula, those same qualities also closed other doors to me, including some that are of great interest to anthropology.1 Notably, these particular aspects of one’s identity—and here, also take note of the departure of “subjectivity” from our conceptual vocabulary—increasingly typify how we Americans gauge one another.2 Regardless, I am unsure if these basic and personal details will satiate readers who bring these sorts of concerns to their engagement with a text like this. I suspect they will not.
Although much of American academia is brightly concerned with these aspects of human identity, anthropology actually digested many of these concerns several decades ago in the discipline’s “reflexive turn.” A by-product of the rise of postmodernism, in the early 1990s anthropologists began to focus intently on the ethical implications of our capacity to portray otherness in this world, and more broadly, on our long-standing intellectual commitment to grappling with the social and cultural forms that comprise human diversity. These concerns were magnified by the fact that, via the method and craft of ethnography, the anthropologist’s persona and character are, simultaneously, her or his primary research instrument. We anthropologists immerse ourselves in other cultural worlds, and in doing so, we seek to learn, to holistically describe, and to impartially analyze what we see and what we encounter. We do so from whatever vista point we are able to establish therein. With anthropology’s “reflexive turn” now entering its fourth decade, its various frictions and polemics strangely endure and abound.3 In recognition of those seemingly endless frictions, this book has taken the pathway that Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992) discerned long ago with her conceptualization of “good-enough ethnography.” Anthropologists should feel compelled to remain attentive to the reflexive issues described above and to the politics of representation at their heart. But that attentiveness should never be allowed to compromise our interest and our proven capacity to conduct meaningful ethnographic work about others. Our long-standing objective as anthropologists—to cross thresholds of cultural difference with empathy on a mission of understanding—should endure.
A second tier of concerns, beyond the ad hominem aspects detailed above, inquire about my beliefs, my ideals, and the ideological commitments I have brought to the authorship of this text, and thereby imply that the objective of impartiality is a mirage. While attacks on the objective of impartial assessment are both preposterous and debilitating, here I will turn to those beliefs, ideals, and commitments, although I suspect they are already apparent. Where shall I start? Perhaps I should start with some caveats. Like Peter Zeihan (2022, 471), who I was reading as this manuscript went through its penultimate edit, I am a student of history, an internationalist, a long-standing environmentalist, and a democrat (that’s a small d). But unlike many others who may share some of that ground, my beliefs and ideals are tempered by a scientific commitment to impartiality and an anthropological commitment to a form of cultural relativism. What I think, believe, and what I might wish the world (or Qatar) to look like is less important to what you have encountered in this book than it is for many of my contemporary colleagues. That is the strange and interesting overlapping space between scientific impartiality and anthropological relativism—and the essence of the objectivity that Lévi-Strauss envisioned for anthropology in the quote I presented in the preface to this book.
Let me attempt to be even more specific. If it is not already evident, I am deeply committed to understanding the world as it is, and from the waning privilege of my American positionality, to improving that world for others as best I can. Those twin commitments, in varying proportions, characterize most of my work as a scholar, a researcher, a teacher, and an academician. This book has been more directed at explanation and understanding and less at the objective of improving or reshaping the world in some manner or other.4 In addition to those fundamental ideological commitments, I have further allegiances that might be of interest. I believe the most significant event in recent human history is the global expansion of the capitalist system over the last five centuries, a historical expansion so magisterially illuminated by anthropologists Eric Wolf (1982) and Sidney Mintz (1986). This expansion was a stunning human achievement that is deeply implicated in almost all of the human achievements we venerate today, and also the culprit behind many of humankind’s most significant challenges we face. And in terms of my allegiances and beliefs, there is even more, much of which might also already be apparent to readers. Along with Marvin Harris, I believe that the values we hold dear, and the system in which those values cohere, is a collective adaptation to human existence that we usefully term culture. To summarize Harris’s pithy phrasing (1979, ix): “human social life is a response to the practical problems of earthly existence.”
Additionally, like the generations of anthropologists before me, I am fascinated by the many different ways that humans distinguish and categorize both others and themselves—caste, class, tribe, age set, clan, race, religion, ancestry, moiety, gender, ethnicity, and a dozen other cultural ingenuities that pepper the ethnographic canon. I have termed those culturally different ways of categorizing difference a social prism—a concept I have coined for the culturally specific and clearly differentiable modes for subdividing the blurry terrain of human difference. I sought to explain my conceptualization of the social prism at some length in the earliest chapters of this book, but that blurry continuum of human difference merits one additional point here. I share Paul Gilroy’s conviction (2000) that science points to a planetary humanism, and to the foundational equality that underpins anthropology’s long exploration of cultural difference. As anthropologists have been arguing for over a century, we human beings are all cut from the same cloth.
I believe both of the questions I have endeavored to answer in this postscript—who is this author and what does he believe—are symptomatic of deeper problems with intellectual discourse in American academia today. I hope that my evidence and my analysis of it were gauged on its own merit. But let me clarify this point even further: while a part of me chafes at the questions I have addressed here, I recognize those answers do have a particular value to anthropology, for again, in ethnography we ourselves are the research instrument. Despite those reservations about questions that seem personal, I am more broadly supportive of inquiries and transparency around funding. As we all know, or at least ought to know, following the money is oftentimes key.
In building this book, sustained financial support for the research underpinning it resulted foremost from my job as a tenured professor at a private liberal arts college in the United States, a vocation squarely premised on the steep slope of American inequality.5 The research monies underpinning the sequence of projects I have conducted over two decades include funding from the Qatar National Research Fund, Qatar University, the Fulbright Foundation, with support from the Bahrain Training Institute, and with additional funding from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, from the REALM research unit at Columbia University, from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, and from a few other sources. I also received research monies and other forms of support from my employer, the University of Puget Sound. As you should expect, however, the words, ideas, and analyses I have presented here are entirely my responsibility, although they are a bricolage of others’ ideas, works, and creativity. All said, in the two decades of work underpinning this monograph, the most intense pressures I have felt concerning the explication of my analyses and findings have been from the intentions and preferences that other foreign colleagues, acquaintances, and supervisors imagine the Qataris to possess, something I discussed in more detail in the penultimate chapter of the book. Notably, I have encountered equally intense pressures emanating from the campus culture in which I exist and from American academia more broadly. Via those pressures, hegemonic forces seek to govern analytic trajectories and delimit scholarly conversations at both the conceptual and discursive levels.6 In this book, I have tried to disregard those pressures as best I can, albeit with the result of an analysis that is seemingly out of alignment with the dominant American paradigm of the day and with the crusaders in its vanguard.
But there is more to this issue. From my vantage point, many of these contemporary American academic concerns and pressures have coalesced in the increasingly thin ethnographic portrayals of the people who occupy other cultural realms in the contemporary world. Complexities, ambivalences, compromises, contingencies, certainly joy, and countless other aspects of the endlessly mercurial human soul were always essential features of the humanity that anthropology found in all of the many peoples it has considered so far. These threads and nuances are long-standing features in the discipline’s impressive ethnographic canon—an encyclopedia of cultural diversity that is unparalleled in human history. In an intellectual era preoccupied almost entirely with power and inequality, and endlessly fixated on the shifting therapeutic terrain of how people feel, anthropology’s portrayals of otherness (however the anthropologist might construe that otherness) seem increasingly desiccated, sadly pessimistic, and so thoroughly American in terms of the social prism those analyses typically purvey.7 This ethnography has searched for some oxygen beyond the bounds of that hegemony.
To return to the framing with which the book commenced, I hope that this text has productively contributed to the growing ethnographic canon that will inform how we humans might cohabitate in the cities that will carry us into our planetary future. And I hope that it might contribute in some small way to the preservation of cultural diversity and the veneration of difference on our tumultuous planet.