1     FRIDAY ETHNOGRAPHY AND THE CITY

Methods for Humans

Ethnography, as a method, is perhaps best defined as a toolkit containing many different research tools. What binds them together under the moniker of ethnography is not the component tools, but instead the overarching aspirations of ethnography’s practitioners—to holistically understand, as best possible, the experiences, perspectives, and understandings shared by a group of people culturally unfamiliar to the ethnographer. Veteran ethnographers would likely add that this understanding is achieved only through sustained immersion in the foreign cultural world in question. There are caveats, exceptions, and matters of concern buried in the folds of this definition. Moreover, it is a definition ensconced in the anthropological tradition, where the method was born and elaborated over nearly two centuries. But the definition I have provided here is neither attentive to all of ethnography’s adherents and numerous practitioners in many other disciplines, nor is it attentive to the permutations that we encounter in anthropology, in the form of anthropologists who seek to analyze their own cultural home, or those who, via auto-ethnography, suggest that with an internal dialogue they might treat themselves as a subject—as the quintessential key informant—in their research project. Despite these new permutations, the definition to which I adhere remains true to the ethnographic tradition and to the toolkit of methods pioneered over a century ago by a cadre of European and American men who sought to understand, from the inside out, the social and cultural differences readily encountered at the fringes of expanding European empires, as well as in the troubled spaces of westward expansion on the North American continent. Through that endeavor, anthropologists reached a leveling sort of relativism, thereby configuring an intellectual lens through which different ways of being in this world might be gauged and considered without judgment. This sustained academic endeavor produced the ethnographic canon—humankind’s best (and only) comprehensive encyclopedia of the diversity of cultures our species has constructed in the past several centuries. Need I reiterate that this canon is an extraordinary and unsurpassed human treasure?

Before discussing some of the tools in the ethnographic toolkit that rests behind these chapters, it merits note that there is no particular research project underpinning this book. Rather, this book is the summation of a swath of different research projects reaching back two decades to my time in graduate school at the University of Arizona and to the first time I set foot on the Arabian Peninsula. The laborious indexing of those projects would overwhelm this chapter and would shift the reader’s focus away from the path ahead. I recognize, that like other ethnographers, I sometimes take an authoritative tone in reporting my findings and interpretations, and that some assertions in this book may seem too disconnected from any evidentiary foundation to pass without notice. I also recognize that anthropologists’ penchant for cultural immersion—for simply “being there,” and the certitude it can yield—is oftentimes the principal vehicle for our analytic authority. For those reasons, a brief methodological overview of the portions of my research trajectory that directly pertain to the topics at hand seems apropos.

The craft of ethnography that anthropologists ushered through the twentieth century has accommodated various adjustments, permutations, and creative new directions with changing times and circumstances. Indeed, it is surprising that the practice of ethnography in the twenty-first century still closely resembles the practice of a hundred years ago. The anthropologist Caroline Osella coined the term “Friday ethnography” to describe one of those permutations characteristic of the ethnographic work with labor migrants in contemporary Arabia—our shared endeavor.¹ In short, most labor migrants on the Arabian Peninsula are busy with work six days a week. Many of the migrants I have worked with over the years would oftentimes depart their labor camps early in the morning, wade through stifling traffic for hours in a company bus that shuttled them to their worksite, then work a long day, and finally return to camp late in the evening, leaving only enough time for a quick meal and a bit of socializing before sleep beckoned. There is little space in that schedule for the curious—and sometimes inane—questions that accompany an anthropologist’s presence. Fridays were a different matter, however. During my years in Qatar, most of my Fridays were spent with friends, acquaintances, and interlocutors in the labor camps (see figure 2). Sometimes we would stay there and visit; other times, we would go places together and do things—visit friends, shop for groceries, or seek out some new nook of the urban spectacle that surrounded us. In light of these ethnographic realities, “Friday ethnography” aptly describes those anthropological attempts at cultural immersion that by necessity are largely consigned to a single day each week.

During those times in the labor camps, and with countless other interlocutors on a dozen different projects, much of the data I collected took the form of interviews. More specifically, I commonly utilize the format that H. Russell Bernard (2011) refers to as the semi-structured interview. In this format, one embarks on an interview with a brief topical outline that lays out the basic waypoints to which the interviewer seeks to guide the conversation. Utilizing the same topical outline with numerous different interviewees yields a set of conversations with a similar (and analytically comparable) architecture. In the final accounting, the semi-structured interview is more of a structured conversation, and like any conversation, it is coconstructed. In addition to the topics predetermined by the ethnographer to be of interest, the semi-structured format encourages the interviewee to guide the conversation to topics and issues that she or he sees as pertinent or important. Using this format, I have interviewed bedouin pastoralists, members of the wealthy diasporic elites present in Arabia, the transnational laborers in the lowest echelons of the foreign workforce, Bahraini and Qatari citizens about the foreign presence in their homelands, about feelings of nationalism, about how those citizens go about constructing their own identities, and much more. Although numerous projects and communities of subjects have slipped out of this rough accounting, it is undeniable that the semi-structured interview is a key and recurring feature of the ethnographic toolkit I deploy.

Participant-observation is oftentimes referred to as the foundational method in anthropology, and in addition to the interview, it is another vital component of my ethnographic toolkit. The methodological impulse behind participant observation resembles the contemporary penchant for “experiential learning,” which shares the underlying conviction that we come to understand things more concretely and comprehensively by doing them. For anthropological ethnographers, this takes the form of immersing ourselves in the quotidian activities of the culturally foreign worlds we seek to understand. The portions of my fieldwork with transnational labor migrants that utilized this tool would include those many Fridays cooking together, eating together, and meandering about the labor camps in the Industrial Area of Doha or, less frequently, elsewhere in Qatar. Broadly speaking, pedestrian activities such as going places and doing things together—be it shopping, sightseeing, exploring the city, or running errands—also fall in the ambit of contemporary participant observation. But the limitations of my participant observation should also be apparent: for a researcher concerned with the transnational migrant proletariat, as I have long been, an ideal form of participant observation would include signing a two-year contract, embarking on the journey to Arabia from some South Asian departure point, and enduring the various hardships and challenges these transnational migrant argonauts commonly encountered in the Gulf states. Indeed, some intrepid anthropologists have pursued this sort of participant observation in their research endeavors, but in this case, my skin, my passport, my fatherhood, and my eroding capacity to endure such hardships put any such attempt out of reach.²

Yet there are other realms where participant observation might also be recognized in the research projects underpinning this book. As a professional migrant employed in Qatar between 2008 and 2010, I was also subjected to the sponsorship system, and while my passport and the job that awaited my return to America insulated me from some of the pressures that many other migrants endure, class, position, and privilege do not simply inoculate one from the vulnerabilities and risks that are structurally embedded in the sponsorship system—a point brightly illuminated by Natasha Iskander (2021) in her work. In terms of participant observation, then, there was some experience I shared with other migrants as a result of being another foreigner employed in Arabia.³ Similarly, considering the fact that the city itself is, in part, the subject of this ethnography, simply inhabiting (and thereby experiencing) the city also resembles a form of participant observation. The anthropologist Sulayman Khalaf (2006, 244) termed this aspect of the ethnographic method “participant living,” and I hope that his methodological insight resonates with the work I present here. In summary, via participant observation, much of the understanding that I accumulated was the result of lived experience, as it remains in the present.⁴

Another methodological aspect of the research undergirding this book is the multi-sited nature of my ethnographic work. In the 1990s, anthropologists began to recognize that the social worlds we sought to understand increasingly seemed to require our presence in multiple geographical locations. The discipline conceptualized this permutation as an adjustment to globalization, or perhaps to the deterritorialization of culture and society in the contemporary era of mobility. In concrete terms, many of the labor migrants I have studied in Arabia live a quintessentially transnational existence. They are corporeally present in Qatar, for example, and toil there for two years, four years, or more. But their mental and spiritual lives are only partially moored in Arabia. Their gaze frequently remains trained on their faraway homes, on the family they left behind, and on their plans and intentions for whatever savings they have been able to accumulate during their time abroad. Multi-sited ethnography was configured to apprehend the complicated geography of these social fields. The multi-sited approach implies that any holistic, anthropological understanding of the transnational migrant’s experience requires one to visit the places from which these migrants come, and to which almost all of them will eventually return if they have not already. Numerous projects have provided me with opportunities to ethnographically engage with the communities, households, and other institutions found in a variety of places in these migrant-sending states, including substantial fieldwork sojourns in Nepal, Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan.

Importantly, a notable set of methodological shortcomings also undergird this book. Over a century ago, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1922) essentially codified the ethnographic toolkit via his work with the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands just off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Many of the proclamations he configured during his time on the islands remain integral to ethnographic practice: anthropologists should endeavor to stay for a year or more, immerse themselves in the social and cultural imponderabilia of everyday life, endeavor to live among their subjects when possible, and anthropologist should speak to those subjects in their own language. The last of those criteria merits discussion here. In 1999, I arrived in Saudi Arabia with a middling, intermediate capacity in Arabic, but the intervening years have not been kind to my abilities. Moreover, Arabic proved largely useless as my focus shifted to the culturally and linguistically diverse population of foreigners resident on the Arabian Peninsula. As a population, these resident foreigners, and particularly the vast component of that population that I refer to as the transnational proletariat, speak dozens of different languages. I speak none of those languages. Arabic, Hindi, and Urdu have some currency as the lingua francas amid the superdiversity one encounters in Arabia, but no language has the same footprint as English.⁵ In my fieldwork, I have operated almost entirely with English and have utilized a cadre of translator-researchers whom I have hired, befriended, and trained since 2002. I have learned a great deal from the long and sustained relationships I have established with these translator-researchers, many of whom also have life experiences as the labor migrants I have long studied. Nonetheless, readers should recognize that without facility in any of the languages indigenous to the working class of migrants, the research and findings underpinning the entire arc of my ethnographic work are inattentive to the nuance and detail that fluent conversations would allow.

Of the sustained string of projects underpinning this book, I will briefly describe three in more detail here to give readers a vantage point on the evidence presented in the remainder of this book. First, in 2002 and 2003, my time in graduate school culminated with a year of ethnographic research in the Kingdom of Bahrain. That research was funded by the Fulbright Program and by the Wenner-Gren Association, and my presence in the Kingdom was sponsored by the Bahrain Training Institute. Although my project was originally conceptualized around an ethnographic assessment of the relationship between citizens and foreigners on the islands, within weeks of my arrival I tightened the focus of the project to an assessment of the diasporic and historic Indian community’s experience there. Over the course of my time in Bahrain, I conducted formal interviews with sixty-six individuals, most of whom were migrants. In the legacy of participant observation, I also joined several Indian-dominated fraternal organizations and spent quite a bit of time at the many Indian social clubs in the city. Through one of those social clubs and its outreach efforts, I was able to begin frequent visits to some of the labor camps where the lowest echelon of transnational migrants dwelled. The portion of the migrant world I encountered there captured my attention and remains central to my concerns (Gardner 2005, 2010a, 2010b).

The second project was funded by the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS) at Georgetown University in Qatar under the guidance of Mehran Kamrava. Between 2008 and 2010, my small family and I lived in Doha, where I taught at Qatar University. For three preceding years of teaching at the University of Puget Sound, I had been reading Philippe Bourgois’s ethnography In Search of Respect with my students, and through our class discussions I had developed an appreciation for the depth of insight that Bourgois had been able to assemble by focusing on such a small cadre of ethnographic subjects. Via a project supported by a CIRS grant, I sought to follow a set of ten newly arrived labor migrants from several different sending states through two years of their life in Qatar. Periodic interviews—sometimes monthly, sometimes biweekly—allowed me to better envision the arc of the experiences that migrants encounter upon arrival in Qatar. Repeated interviews also allowed me to grow close to some of these transnational migrants on a personal level. Moreover, the grant provided funds for me to visit many of these migrants’ families in Sri Lanka, Nepal, and India, and thereby better understand the places and contexts from which they came. Several of the young men I befriended as a younger man at work on this project remain close family friends to this day (Babar and Gardner 2016; Gardner 2012a, 2012b, 2017).

The last project was funded by the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) as part of its National Priorities Research Program. In seeking this funding from the state in 2010, we contended that, to that date, scholarship concerning labor migration to Qatar (and, indeed, all of Arabia) relied on small-scale, qualitative, and sometimes ethnographic findings, and more occasionally, on quantitative analyses utilizing nonrepresentative samples of a slightly larger scope. With funding and support from the QNRF, and in collaboration with Qatar University’s Social and Economic Survey Research Institute, between 2010 and 2013 we conducted the first large survey of low-income labor migrants built upon a random sampling frame, thereby yielding a representative set of quantitative data. That sample allowed us to extrapolate our findings for all low-income migrants in Qatar. Our team surveyed 1,189 labor migrants, and the project included additional components built around qualitative interviews and a series of focus groups. Interestingly, our quantitative findings generally corroborated many of the findings reached by previous, small-scale ethnographic projects but also led to significant revisions in the research community’s understandings of some aspects of the migrant experience in Qatar (Gardner et al. 2013).

These three projects are merely notable examples from a longer array of ethnographic work conducted over more than two decades. Before turning to a description of the methods I used to apprehend the city itself, I want to conclude this section with an ethnographic vista point that I reached only at the tail end of those two decades. In the earlier years of my work among the population of transnational labor migrants on the Arabian Peninsula, the problems and experiences those migrants conveyed to me had a pressing immediacy that permeated my writing and analysis. But many of those same migrants remain my friends to this day, and the problems that loomed so large in their (and my) consciousness in our first encounters are now distant features in the rearview mirror of their lives. What I was unable to see as a neophyte ethnographer was how the issues, problems, challenges, and frustrations they described to me fit into the larger arc of their lives—into the longue durée of a modern human life. This awareness roughly corresponds with a shift from a synchronic perspective on our ethnographic subjects—as a portrayal of their world as a snapshot in time—to a diachronic vantage point that seeks to convey our subjects’ experiences across time. This book, and much of my work nowadays, leans more toward this diachronic perspective.

Mbethods for Cities

The ethnographic toolkit I have described here was configured for the study of humans in their natural social environments. For most of Qatar’s residents, and for the residents of the highly urbanized neighboring states, those environments mostly consist of the city itself. Although the city can be “read” in the archaeological sense—as a palimpsest, yielding evidence of the social relations and the ideals fixed in the material vestiges of eras now past—the city obviously cannot be interviewed. And although Khalaf’s notion of participant living helps connect the ethnographic tool of participant observation to an assessment of the urban form, ethnography itself does not provide a sufficient toolkit for a comprehensive analysis of the city. Or, at least, modifications are needed if an ethnographer wishes to, as the anthropologist James Holston (1989, 314) once put it, take “an entire city as a unit of study.” As a result, I pursued a different methodological approach for this objective, and in the remainder of this chapter, I will briefly convey the methods I used to apprehend Doha’s varied urban landscape. This approach to the city itself complemented a constellation of interviews with various subjects about their life in the city.

Following others, the term I will use to describe this methodological approach to the city is urban drifting. The taproot of this approach to the urban form is oftentimes traced to Baudelaire’s descriptions of the Parisian flâneur—the archetypal urbanite and nineteenth-century European man, the leisurely Parisian stroller, the boulevardier, the adroit observer of contemporary urban life “who everywhere rejoices in his incognito”(Benjamin 1999, 443).⁶ Lurking in Baudelaire’s description of the flâneur are connotations of detachment, and perhaps a subtle condescension to otherness that I wish to extricate from my iteration of this method. To accomplish this, I would turn to Baudelaire’s contemporary, Friedrich Engels, and thereby complement Baudelaire’s aloof flâneur with Engels’s forensic attention to the forces of inequality contouring the city, his grip on the sensorial register of the British slums rendered by the Industrial Revolution, and his gradual recognition of the organismic character of the cities he encountered. The thread that connects Engels to Baudelaire’s flâneur most clearly is the experiential nature of their engagements with the urban milieu. Like ethnography as a whole, and like the impetus distilled in the practice of participant-observation, the value of “being there” was a central tenet in both of these early renditions of what I term urban drifting.

While we might trace the taproot of this urban method to the nineteenth-century works of Engels and Baudelaire, the methodological approach of urban drifting was more clearly articulated and codified a century later by the Paris-based Situationists in the 1950s.⁷ Their methodological explication of the dérive (often translated as urban drifting) outlined a method of engagement that yielded what they termed the psychogeography of the city. For the doyen of the Situationists, Guy Debord, this technique of urban exploration compelled one to seek “swift passage through varied environments” (McDonough 2009, 78). The Situationists’ aspirations were to encounter the hidden, to see the overlooked, to experience and engage those places and those neighborhoods beyond the quotidian circulations of bourgeois urban life. The Situationists gravitated to the unexpected and consciously sought the happenstance encounters that urbanity allows and perhaps encourages. From one angle, their methodological explication sought to ensure an encounter with the sorts of urban spaces that Engels had so compellingly described a century before.

In Debord’s estimation, urban drifting was inevitably a flexible endeavor: a dérive “unfolds in a few deliberately fixed hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments, or on the contrary over several days without interruption” (McDonough 2009, 82). The experiential engagement with the city codified and articulated by the Situationists is a recurring feature in scholarship concerning the city. Lewis Mumford (1961, xi), an American contemporary of the Situationists, conveyed the essence of those sentiments in the preface to his magisterial The City in History when he declared that his “method demands personal experience and observation, something unreplaceable by books.” More recently, Douglas Saunders (2010, 2) echoed the same in describing his habit of introducing himself “to new cities by riding subway and tram routes to the end of the line, or into the hidden interstices and inaccessible corners of the urban core.” In between Mumford and Saunders, and even more so in the present moment, a constellation of others—too many to list here—corroborate or otherwise affirm this experiential approach to the city.⁸

There is a substantial and storied legacy to the experiential engagement with the city. And this method, termed urban drifting, shares an enormous amount of ground with ethnography itself. Like ethnography, the method of urban drifting is experiential by design; it is exploratory in nature, as practitioners seek out the unexpected, the hidden, and the unforeseen in the urban landscape; and like ethnography, in this methodological approach the practitioner herself serves as the research instrument. Those are three key elements that can be traced back to the nineteenth century and to some of the first writings concerned with the social topography of the city. The same key elements connect the methodological approach of urban drifting to the storied ethnographic tradition. Yet unlike practitioners of the past, in the contemporary era we have a key addition to this methodological toolkit, for many of us now have cameras in our pockets, often at all times. As a result of the camera’s ubiquity, we can add photography (and the images that result) to the list of key items found in the toolkit utilized in apprehending the city via urban drifting.

Photography and anthropology have a long and tangled history. This is partially a product of their coincident arrival in the mid-nineteenth century. Photography played a prominent role in archaeology because of the subdiscipline’s central concern with space, and photography was utilized in a variety of other manners throughout the first century of anthropology’s extrapolation and development. But Jacknis observed that while photography proliferated in the discipline—sometimes serving as a form of research data for anthropologists, perennially central and useful in presentations to the professional community of other scholars, and always a notably important feature in the public’s waxing and waning attention to the discipline and its practitioners—photography’s methodological stature in anthropology was never secure. Even into the 1980s, photography was portrayed and deployed as a component of research that was decidedly supplementary to the ethnographic mission (Banta et al. 2017). Only with the advent of the digital age and the concomitant proliferation of the image in ways that even Benjamin (1999) had not foreseen did photography ascend to a more central place in the ethnographic toolkit. This shift was accompanied by a spate of scholarship and by the extrapolation of new vantage points on the role of the image in contemporary society.

Although photography played an ancillary role in anthropology’s methodological toolkit for much of the twentieth century, in architecture and in the related fields concerned with urbanism and the urban form, photography and the image have been much more important for a much longer period of time.⁹ Le Corbusier’s 1933 The Radiant City, for example, provided a captivating amalgamation of photographs, sketches, and architectural renderings heralding the arrival of high modernism. Similarly, Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project—assembled from the notebooks he carried to the Spanish border in his attempt to flee the Gestapo’s grasp—contained numerous sketches, drawings, and images intended to complement his writings. Rich with images, these early works established the template for the study of architecture and the urban form for the remainder of the century. As one of the countless examples, each of the 253 “patterns” elaborated by Christopher Alexander (1977) and his team in A Pattern Language commences with a photograph intended to convey the archetype they seek to describe. Just a few years earlier, Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s famous sojourn to Las Vegas also relied heavily on photography. As Brown later recalled, “photography was our primary tool,” and in Learning from Las Vegas (the book resulting from that sojourn), textual elements seem to yield the spotlight to the image itself. This balance seems strikingly apropos for a book often heralded as helping to usher postmodernism and its bottomless concern with representation into existence and scholarly circulation.

In this book, my capacity to include images is limited by the associated costs, but in an ode to Christopher Alexander’s book, each chapter contains an image, or several images, that might conjure some additional fragment of insight for readers.

Concluding Thoughts

For numerous scholars and researchers concerned with the juncture between urban spaces and the human experience therein, photography has served as a key tool—as a form of empirical evidence that is particularly adept at portraying both spatial and symbolic features of the city, and as a mode for conveying those findings to others. In this book, the evidentiary foundation is ethnographic in nature. But as I have sought to articulate here, significant parallels exist between the ethnographic tradition and the methods described here for apprehending the city. Foremost among those parallels is the experiential foundation of these modes of understanding and the embodied nature of both participant observation and the experience of “being there” in the city. Moreover, both photography and ethnographic data are empirically curated by the provisioner, which inevitably confounds any puritanical notions of impartiality.

To recapitulate, the methodological underpinnings of this book convey a commitment to the social sciences—to a description of the methods I used and the implication of the replicability and also to the presentation of empirical evidence to support my analyses. These are only the first steps toward the higher level of objectivity that Lévi-Strauss envisioned, as articulated in the preface to this book. Building on that tradition, the proliferation of the camera phone and the ubiquity of the image itself also suggest that the anthropological definition of evidence should be expanded to include the photograph. But that seems of minor importance here. More vitally, the inclusion of occasional photographs will hopefully allow readers to better gauge my analysis and, more precisely, gauge the relationship between my evidence and the analytic conclusions I reach.