Introduction CITY, SOCIETY, AND MOBILITY
In early 2008, a young Nepali man named Divendra made the arduous journey from his home village in the Terai—Nepal’s low southern plain—to Kathmandu.1 Upon arriving in the mountainous country’s capital city, he spent several weeks navigating the complicated bureaucracy faced by all migrants destined for work outside Nepal. Eventually, after passports were stamped and boxes on various documents were checked, after that paperwork was filed and processed, and after various additional fees were paid, he boarded a plane bound for the Arabian Peninsula. This was Divendra’s first time on an airplane, and he brimmed with anticipation for what he would encounter in Doha, his destination. The image of a new life in the cosmopolitan city had captivated him. In the years prior to his departure, a penchant for Hollywood movies had stoked his imagination of the possibilities—already he had envisioned himself on some high floor of a towering modernist skyscraper, frantically running documents to an important meeting, working in cadence with the busy energy of the office he pictured in his mind.2 The glistening skyline he could now glimpse from the plane only spurred his imagination. In which of those skyscrapers would the next chapter of his life begin?
Readers will spend more time with Divendra throughout this book and will meet other people as well. The outcome of Divendra’s aspirations will become more clear in subsequent chapters, but here I want to note that I, too, arrived in Doha that same summer, and the same skyline captured my attention as we approached Qatar’s busy airport by air (see figure 1). That skyline also served as a backdrop for my imagination, and I puzzled over where the fates would fit me in this gleaming, mostly new city on the Arabian Peninsula. With additional flights in and out of Qatar in the subsequent year, I came to realize that Divendra and I were not alone in our musings. In fact, Qatar Airways’ business class section, into which my new employer placed me on my increasingly regular transcontinental flights to and from Doha, was peppered with a variety of cosmopolitan professionals like myself, most of whom were in some way or another compensated for helping Qatar manifest its vision. Some were even involved in the process of helping Qatar articulate that vision. But among this class of professionals and assorted others peering out the windows of the plane at Doha’s skyline were the architects, urban planners, and a coterie of others for whom the city was not just the backdrop of their imagined future nor the context for a new chapter in their life, but rather the direct focus of their attention and their energies. Some of these individuals were helping to plan and design the astonishing urban trophy case that had so quickly sprouted from the barren desert terrain; others, budding academic urbanists like myself, would inhabit this city, and attentively go about their business as best possible in an urban landscape that seemed to be under perpetual construction. Still other arrivals, like Divendra, both inhabited the city and helped to construct it, whether by driving cement trucks through the dusty urban landscape or manually carrying cinder blocks from one place to another on a construction site. In some manner or another, so many of our lives revolved around the city itself.
FIGURE 1. Nepalese transnational migrants on break, with the skyline of Doha’s West Bay in the background. Photograph by the author, 2018.
In brief, this book concerns that city—the city of Doha, Qatar—and the various people who inhabit that worlding urban junction. My concern is with the city itself but also with the society that both produced that city and now inhabits it. The methodological foundations of the book are ethnographic in nature—drawing foremost from what ethnographers call data. Here, those data include interviews with a diverse constellation of migrants, residents, citizens, visitors, and assorted officials. These interviews are the result of a sustained sequence of research projects that stretch back more than two decades. But like any modern ethnographer, my own stories and experiences also illuminate this book and comprise another form of what anthropological ethnographers call data. As a result, the reader will find the book peppered with a variety of details and tidbits—details about citizens and their perspectives on the changes they have witnessed, stories of transnational migrants and their experiences crossing the Arabian Sea to toil on the hot peninsula, fragments drawn from my experiences in the city and amid various institutions therein, narratives about navigating the urban landscape of Doha by foot and by car, and quite a bit more. These research methods and the projects underpinning them are described in more detail in the next chapter, which coalesces in the point that I can succinctly convey here: the subject of this ethnographic work is both the city itself and the society that inhabits it.
Assessments of Doha and the other astonishing (post)modern cities of the Arabian littoral are beginning to accumulate in the scholarly literature. Most of them mention foreigners’ presence to some degree, but this foreign presence mostly skirts the margins in their conceptualizations and analyses. Doha is a city in which nine of every ten urban residents are foreign temporary workers. One finds similar demographic proportions in a few other cities in the neighboring Gulf states. Most of the foreigners present in these cities can be described as transnational labor migrants, an appellation that connotes both their place in the working class and the temporary nature of their presence in Arabia. In light of the unparalleled proportions of foreigners to citizens found in Doha and those neighboring cities, this book is premised on the idea that these foreigners have not figured centrally enough in our estimation of these cities.3 There are valuable historical contributions to our understanding of urban Arabia, and there are numerous new contributions focused almost entirely on the intricacies of urban planning and design (Fuccaro 2009; Al-Nakib 2016; Elsheshtawy 2008; Salama and Wiedmann 2016; Rizzo and Mandal 2021). To take one particularly excellent book as an example, in Ahmed Kanna’s brilliant ethnography of Dubai (a city some 250 miles to the east of Doha), migrants are a feature of his analysis, but do not quite find their way to the central limelight of how he understands the city. Conversely, in much other ethnographic work, the city and the urban spaces therein are eclipsed by the migrant experience itself (Gardner 2010b; Vora 2013; Norbakk 2020; Wright 2021). In those contributions, the city serves more as a backdrop to the experiences of these communities of migrants, and therefore emerges as the sometimes-pertinent setting of an ethnographer’s explication of those experiences.
In a few scholarly works, both the city and its inhabitants are analytically balanced in judicious ways. I take inspiration on this front from my mentor, Sharon Nagy, and the sequence of articles that explored Qatari society and urban space in novel ways (Nagy 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006). Yasser Elsheshtawy’s work on the cities of Arabia is also exemplary and inspiring (Elsheshtawy 2008, 2010, 2019b, 2022). In his work the experiences of the migrant majority of Dubai’s inhabitants figure centrally in the analytic portrait he paints of the city. One might make the same claim about Robina Mohammed’s and James Sidaway’s occasional contributions to the same scholarly conversations, about Laavanya Kathiravelu’s impressive monograph, and about portions of Dalal Alsayer’s scholarly work (Mohammed and Sidaway 2016; Kathiravelu 2016; Alsayer 2019b). Farah Al-Nakib is directly concerned with many of the same issues that preoccupy me here (Al-Nakib 2016). And Natasha Iskander’s book homes in on the city of Doha and the migrant workers who construct it, and does so with unprecedented focus (Iskander 2021).
In this scholarship, the city itself, as well as the experiences of the humans who inhabit it, are considered in dialectic. In my rendition—an analysis of Doha, Qatar, and the work you have before you—I explore the migration system that feeds millions of transnational migrants into the city, I assess the experiences of the migrant majority in the city, and I seek to gauge how both city and society have taken shape around those mobilities. My goal is to provide readers with a vista point on the emergent and unusual permutations of city, state, and society produced by these transnational flows of people, capital, and ideas. Simultaneously, I seek to illuminate how the city serves as a complicated tool by which state and society seek to govern those flows. In summary, this book’s goal is to shift the foreign presence in urban Arabia into the limelight, and to connect the active scholarly conversations concerning urbanism in Arabia with the burgeoning conversations concerning migration, mobility, and the transnational flow of humans in our contemporary era.
One key perspective underpinning this analytic journey is my commitment to an anthropologically moored epistemological diversity, and therefore to a deep and empowering engagement with non-Western otherness. Six decades ago, and coincident with the veritable crescendo of the modernist era, Bernard Rudofsky assembled his influential exhibit Architecture without Architects at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Peering past the notable legion of luminary Modernist experts who, at that time, dominated global thinking about architecture, planning, and the urban form, Rudofsky’s exhibit portrayed the magnificent creativity that humans, in an array of different cultural settings and different historical times, have displayed in constructing the built environment. Rudofsky’s exploration of these diverse architectural vernaculars was a spark that, in retrospect, yielded a legacy that remains more vibrant and pertinent than ever.4 For many decades, the dominant urbanist paradigm suggested that cities outside the ambit of the West—cities like Doha—were best understood as weak attempts to mimic the urban modernity exemplified by Western prototypes. Although contemporary analysis has largely abandoned this reading of the global urban form, one proliferate strain of scholarship concerned with cities and their planning today maintains the conceptual centrality of the West, only now, instead of those disparate cities being portrayed as poor mimicries of the Western urban ideal, modern critics trace complicity and guilt for the urban problems those cities endure to their purported Western source. This is the same essentialism under a different pretense, for in both calculuses the Western urban form remains the central and defining point of reference.
To exit this conceptual imbroglio, I follow Rem Koolhaas who, speaking to these Western critics in his 1995 essay about Singapore, declared that “The ‘Western’ is no longer our exclusive domain … it now represents a condition of universal aspiration. It is no longer something that ‘we’ have unleashed, no longer something whose consequences we therefore have a right to deplore; it is a self-administered process that we do not have the right to deny—in the name of various sentimentalities—to ‘others’ who have long since made it their own” (Koolhaas 1995, 1013). Whether our concern is with the Western, with neoliberal capitalism, with migration and mobility, or with the patterns taking shape in cities around the globe, the grand structural forces at work in these urban microcosms no longer have a clear geography. In this book, I seek to emphasize the agency that others display as they navigate the same structures of meaning and history that we, in a place like America, also face. I am, after all, an American anthropologist with a lifelong interest in cultural difference and the cities others have constructed.
In the remainder of this introduction, I frame the contents of this book with a discussion of several interrelated themes central to the journey ahead. The first thematic discussion concerns the city itself, here condensed into a brief jaunt through the expansive scholarly realms of urban studies, urban anthropology, and urban history. The second concerns society and culture, the twin concepts that carry readers to the heart of the anthropological discipline and its long-standing interest in the diversity of others’ collective experiences in this world. The third of these thematic foundations concerns migration and, more broadly, mobility. Migration, in particular, is central to my expertise, assembled via several decades of active research in the region. But migration and human mobility are also empirical and demographic social facts—core features in the lives of the legion of foreign men and women who inhabit the city of Doha and many other cities like it. In each of these brief sojourns, the reader will take note of the scope of my interests. My framing discussions reach for what the French historian Fernand Braudel (1972) once called the longue durée—an approach to history that emphasizes the long term. With this book’s ethnographic foundations, and with ethnography’s penchant for the present and the particular, framing these essays in the longue durée is intended as an antidote, or at least a counterweight, to the ethnographic specificity to come.
On the City
If one can envision the whole of our species’ existence for a moment, then the emergence of cities is clearly a recent development. Cities began to emerge some six thousand years ago on the heels of the Neolithic agricultural revolution and the tectonic effects it had on the organization of human life. Those effects were notable and varied, and their impact reverberated through time: the slow sedentarization of our previously mobile species commenced in this era; the predictable existence of surpluses became a common feature of the human landscape; and the need for organized, collective action—for increasingly large irrigation projects, for example, or for the erection of defensive structures to protect cities from marauders of various sorts—became a necessity. Changes to the infrastructural level of human existence, including to the way that some humans extracted sustenance from the environment, and to the technologies by which that extraction might occur, produced new sorts of relations and new social forms. Both resulted in an increasing social complexity. Cities can be seen as material manifestations of the increasing differentiation and social stratification that resulted from the tectonic changes of the Neolithic era. New sorts of hierarchies concretized the increasingly varied social and economic roles characteristic of the expanding landscape of inequality, itself the result of the surpluses generated by the agricultural revolution of the Neolithic era (Buras 2019, 66–70; Mumford 1961; Kotkin 2005). In Lewis Mumford’s resonant analysis of humankind’s historical trajectory, he further suggests that these changes pivoted on a singular key factor: “the most important agent in effecting the change from a decentralized village economy to a highly organized urban economy, was the king, or rather, the institution of Kingship” (Mumford 1961, 35). Queens, kings, emperors, pharaohs, tyrants, and other sorts of despots functioned as the governing hub of the “central nervous system” by which the increasingly complex urban societies and economies were individually coordinated.5
Inequality was a central and catalyzing factor in the formation of the city in human history.6 The foundational and deeply historical connection between inequality and the urban form is also evident in the present era, for that inequality is visible at every turn in a city like Doha. But scholars’ long-standing attention to the inequalities visible in the city only deepens the irony that it was amid the emergent urban landscape of inequality that, several millennia ago, democracy was born. Neither Doha, nor any of the neighboring cities on the Arabian Peninsula, are the product of democracies, but there is more to the association between cities and democracy than first meets the eye. It was in ancient Athens that the idea of the polis first emerged. The meaning of that word bends our English, for it refers to the city itself, certainly, but it also connotes the community bound by the obligation of collective management and governance of the city. In that second portion of the definition, we can see how the Hellenic concept of the polis conflated the material city with the ideas of citizenship, community, and belonging. All of this was pinned to the Athenian veneration of the polis, and most vitally, it was in the city that humans first disassembled the institution of kingship. It was via the governance of the polis that men first distributed and shared with other men the power and responsibility of Mumford’s “institution of kingship.” It is also at that same juncture where the idea of equality was born, and therefore, where the conceptualization of the rights that premise so much of our thinking today was ushered into human consciousness. In summary, the irony I am pointing to here is that the idea of human equality sprang directly from the manifestation of inequality that is the city.7
Although the city first emerged as an instantiation of the inequalities generated by the Neolithic agricultural revolution, our contemporary fixation on inequality in the urban landscape traces its roots back to the Industrial Revolution and the capitalist forces that reshaped the urban milieu in the nineteenth century. It was Friedrich Engels’s analysis that first deployed inequality as the key lens by which we might assess the urban landscape. Indeed, the distribution of inequality in the urban landscape that so concerned Engels remains a central issue for contemporary urban theorists.8 But underpinning the theses presented in this book, I suggest that we should be wary of consigning our analysis of the city to inequality alone.9 Although readily encountered in any city, and so strikingly obvious in a city like Doha, that inequality is merely one facet of the broader differences and manifold diversities long integral to the urban ethos. Differences of all sorts coalesce in the city, and the estimation of that difference reaches into the depths of social theory: Adam Smith (1937) was concerned with the energies released by the same division of labor that fueled urbanization, for example. Emile Durkheim (2014) took stock of the organic solidarity that bonded such difference together in interdependence. Jane Jacobs (1961) contended that Manhattan’s sidewalk ballet and the safety it conferred resulted from diversity in the urban social fabric. Ongoing scholarly conversations about the cosmopolitan ethos continue to speak to the value of the diversities and the differences that interact in the city: Douglas Saunders (2010) envisions cities as transitional spaces, as locations where so many of us—from different places and all part of the great human migration from village to the city—have clambered out of poverty; Elijah Anderson (2011) speaks of cosmopolitan canopies, those urban spaces that bring difference together and encourage deeply humanizing interactions. All of this, and much more like it, points to the thinness of inequality when considered alone. In the analysis presented in this book, I seek a more holistic assessment of difference—one that includes, but is not limited to, the economic renditions of inequality that first concerned Engels.10
With this grand history of the city as our backdrop, one meaningful thread woven through this history and the reservoir of scholarship behind it concerns the relationship between society and the city. For many generations, urban theorists have been attuned to how urban spaces shape our social and psychic life. The Athenian agora, a marketplace and, simultaneously, the urban space where citizens might meet, interact, and discuss any matters of urban governance at hand, is a classic example, and as an urban space, the agora is theorized to be integral in the emergence of the democratic form (Kitto 1951). The influence of space on social life permeates Elijah Anderson’s extrapolation (2011) of cosmopolitan canopies as well, and in his recent book, Eric Klinenberg (2018) frames the value of these spaces by terming them a form of social infrastructure. These very same convictions were central to Frederick Law Olmsted’s vision of how nature might better fit into the cities of the late nineteenth century, a conviction distilled in Olmsted’s aspiration to find and articulate a sense of place in the urban landscape (Buras 2019). Even the key principles articulated by the Congress of New Urbanism, whose directives and ideals are perhaps the most influential paradigmatic force in recent urban planning history, are premised on the notion that good spaces yield good communities (Murrain 1996). Finally, echoing the portrayal of the Athenian agora as a public space vital to the birth of democracy, even a brief inspection of Jurgen Habermas’s description of the public sphere conveys the integral role that, in his estimation, spaces played in the emergence of European democracies: British coffee houses, Parisian salons, and German reading clubs were the “institutional criteria” by which citizens established and maintained the public sphere that, in his calculus, provided a vital democratic counterweight to the powers instilled in the state (Habermas 1991; Mah 2000, 158–161). In summary, all these works—and a plethora of more work not mentioned here—theorize, explore, and assess the influential role that urban spaces play in shaping our social life.
In the most often-quoted tract from The Eighteenth Brumaire, Karl Marx (1996, 32) suggests that “[men] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please in circumstances they choose for themselves; rather they make it in present circumstances, given and inherited.” These sentiments not only reinforce the first and aforementioned thread that I discuss above—that spaces have the capacity to shape our social existence—but also point to an altogether different thread woven through these works in urban theory: that cities are material palimpsests of the human past. A palimpsest, of course, is a term for an ancient manuscript that’s been partially erased for reuse, on which the evidence of the former text remains discernible.11 It is an ideal metaphor for the built environment, and for the city itself: in a Beaux Arts structure from 1910, prominently located at the center of a small American city, we might see the collective investment in the civilizing discourse of a bygone American era, and the acquiescence of Americans of that era to the value of governance that such a building once signified. Conversely, deep in the folds of Le Corbusier’s modernism and its repetitive uniformity we might glimpse the socialist egalitarianism that underpinned that twentieth-century movement (Le Corbusier 1967). Similarly, in the urban remnants of an aging Arabian fareej, with its narrow streets yielding spaces cloistered from the public hum of the city and its markets, we can glimpse the centrality of family and clan in the Arabian social tradition.12 The acres of sacrificial space at the center of the pre-Columbian city of Cahokia invite speculation about the violent nature of North American hierarchy and social relations some 900 years ago (Kolson 2001). As these examples suggest, cities are complicated, multi-authored texts in which we might discern the enduring accumulation of relics and remnants of our past. In that sense, cities are a rich encyclopedia of past human relations. Like any city, therefore, Doha is a historical text.
On Society and Culture
The concepts of society and culture carry us into the heartland of the anthropological discipline. With the first sentence of his 1871 book Primitive Culture, Edward Burnett Tylor inaugurated the discipline of anthropology with his definition of culture. In his initial estimation, culture consisted of “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and other capacities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 1958, 1). Eight decades later, the anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn (1952) took stock of the definitional landscape in a book entitled Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. They looked for the common threads woven through some 164 different definitions of culture and eventually settled upon this distilled and often-quoted synthesis: “Culture consists of patterned ways of thinking, feeling and reacting, acquired and transmitted mainly by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values” (Kluckhohn 1951, 86). Hundreds of other definitions were in circulation as well, obviously, but in this definition one can recognize the common threads woven through most of the others—that culture is shared, learned, and multifaceted. Arguments about the precise components of these definitions continue to fuel anthropological debate, and as I often convey to students, asking a cultural anthropologist to define the concept at the core of her discipline is often the quickest route to a vista on scholarly befuddlement. In addition to its other attributes, the definition of culture has been unwieldy and unruly for more than a century.
Scattered throughout this book, readers will occasionally encounter the concept of a social prism. This is a conceptual tool I have developed, and as an aspect of culture, it merits a brief explanation here (see also Gardner 2019, 2021c). Along with all the other features of culture that we inherit from those before us, we might also discern the framework by which we classify and organize the continuum of human difference so readily encountered in this world. This framework is what I refer to as a social prism. Like any other aspect of a given culture, social prisms vary from one culture to the next. Even within the same culture, a social prism has the tendency to morph over time. And as a facet of culture itself, one’s social prism is acquired by each of us as a member of our society. In the ethnographic canon, anthropologists have described castes, tribes, clans, moieties, genders, classes, ethnicities, phratries, sects, age sets, races, and countless other social ingenuities that are the substance of this framework. To remain open to cultural and epistemological diversities, I not only remain actively interested in other categorizations of human difference, but reflexively, I also endeavor not to reify the dominant American social prism in my analysis. Put another way, in this ethnography I make a conscious attempt not to privilege American social categories as primordial or obvious. Instead, periodically in the analyses presented here I seek to recognize those analytic categories as arbitrary and contingent social constructions, and to thereby subtly acknowledge that the categories of the hegemonic American social prism are oftentimes in service to the tattered remnants and vestiges of American imperialism.
Although I see this American social prism as a facet of the complex American culture, the concept of culture itself is also embattled today. A pressing set of long-standing (and ongoing) debates concern the boundaries of culture and thresholds of difference. In the waning decades of the twentieth century, a cadre of anthropologists contended that the model of culture bequeathed to anthropology by its American progenitor, Franz Boas, problematically overemphasized the static, cohesive, and place-bound essence of culture.13 Perhaps it was no coincidence that these critiques arrived during the concentrated spate of global interconnection that characterized the last decades of the twentieth century—the precise period that commenced what I refer to as the era of mobility, and what we might also term the neoliberal era.14 While I recognize the destabilizing effects that these expansive new mobilities and interconnections ushered into the terrain of culture, I nonetheless see mortal flaws in these popular (and widely accepted) critiques of the culture concept. Foremost, these critics’ case is more an indictment of a caricature than any real and enduring anthropological legacy: as Ira Bashkow (2004, 444) convincingly argued nearly two decades ago, “most ethnographic studies today address the translocal connections that are entailed by neocolonial economic structures, regional exchange systems, diasporic communities, immigration, borderlands, mass media, evangelism, tourism, environmental activism, cyberspace, and so on.” He further asserts that these same processes and forces were familiar issues to Boas and his students a century ago: their deployment of hybridization, diffusion, integration, and other such conceptual ingenuities were the mechanisms by which they emphasized cultural distinction and difference without implying that cultures were discrete and static. As Bashkow contends, arguments aimed at the Boasian legacy typically disregard the entirety of the conceptual toolbox that he bequeathed the discipline.
These conceptual frictions have an interesting parallel with my own fieldwork. On my first trip to the Arabian Peninsula in 1999, and far afield in the remote hinterlands of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s northeastern deserts, I found myself conducting a long ethnographic interview with an elderly Saudi man of bedouin heritage. A previous interview with another person had alerted me to the historical significance of the dirah, or the bedouin homeland, to the tribes and their enduring existence on the arid Arabian Peninsula. In the interview at hand, I pushed my bedouin interlocutor to delineate the historic boundaries of his tribe’s homeland. He spoke with clarity and cohesion about the propriety of the wells at the center of that homeland, but my attempts to cull any precision from him about the boundaries of the dirah were oddly futile. His tribe’s dirah ended “somewhere over there,” he indicated, and then vaguely pointed to a distant mountainous ridge or some other feature of the landscape. I eventually surrendered my objective and moved on to another topic, and it was only after successive interviews and more introspection that I came to better see my missteps: I had been imposing my own (American) understanding of land and property on a different tenure tradition.15 For all the pastoralists who once relied on the Arabian deserts for sustenance, the tribal propriety of the wells mattered greatly, as that water sustained all life in the desert. But the boundaries between one homeland and the next were blurry and indistinct, as further precision served no purpose.
I have come to think of this experience as a metaphor for the resolution of the dilemma concerning culture, boundaries, and place. Like those wells that once anchored the bedouin dirah, we might recognize the core and central elements of a given culture, and we might do so without the impossible requirement of delineating the precise boundaries between one culture and the next. Indeed, this view aligns with anthropologist Robert Lowie’s memorable “antiprimordialist” take on culture, a view that emphasized the syncretic nature of all cultural assemblages.16 But this looser definition of culture, and the imprecision that it allows, finds further support in our on-the-ground analyses of Doha and the other Gulf states. Migrants themselves recognize the core and central elements of the different cultures they encounter in the city. They think about each other with the stereotypical shorthand on which we humans often depend, and they deploy those reductive assessments and essentializations in their quotidian interactions with others in the city. At the same time, real and observable cultural differences are forged and maintained in diaspora by language, food, ethnicity, custom, religion, nationality, and the many other variables of difference that cohere to the concept of culture. For the legions of migrants from so many different places and traditions, those distinctions are produced and reinforced in everyday discourse and social interactions in Doha.
While culture has been discussed here at some length, we can dispatch with the concept of society more readily. Unlike culture, which is thought of as primarily a human attribute, society is the term we use for any group of interacting organisms. While culture is what those humans collectively build and share, the term society denotes the group of people who build and share it. In this sense, the concept of society conveys something both material and inherently communal. Yet the concept of society resembles culture in one integral way: both concepts, while central to anthropology, have the perplexing feature of being applicable across a variety of scales. This is particularly evident with culture. At one end of the continuum, for example, we might coherently discuss aspects of the culture of global capitalism. Additionally, one can talk coherently about the cultural ethos of much smaller accumulations of humans—the culture of the institution that employs me, for example, or the culture that diasporic groups carry with them as they move out into this world. While not prone to the same malleability, society also manifests these scalar flexibilities. One can speak of Qatar and the conglomeration of diasporic and transnational communities who inhabit the peninsula as a singular and pluralistic society. At the same time, we can also extract those individual components, and thereby speak coherently of Indian society in Qatar, or the norms of the Qatari society that hosts those communities, and in doing so, mean something particular and less comprehensive than the singular whole of pluralistic society found on the peninsula. The flexibilities with both culture and society, while puzzling, are also of great utility.
On Mobility and Migration
For those of us who do not reside on the African continent, it is worth recollecting that our distant ancestors began their walk out of Africa some fifty thousand years ago. Physical anthropology, further energized in recent years by successive revolutions in our capacity to analyze the human genome, has elaborated this story in great detail, but one aspect of that story only grows more clear with the accumulation of better evidence: migration, movement, and mobility have been integral and recurring features of human existence for time immemorial. Indeed, one might even argue that mobility is one of our species’ defining characteristics. With a history seemingly composed of incessant movement, our eternal mobility undermines many of the claims, assertions, and assumptions that operate under the banner of indigeneity.17 Regardless, migration and movement have always been central features of the anthropological lens. And as one would discover in the inspection of any place’s deep history, migration and mobility certainly have a significant footprint in the history of the Arabian Peninsula’s peoples. Scholars concerned with the Arabian Peninsula often bifurcate the social history of the people there into two groups characterized by their respective and interrelated modes of production: the bedouin (or bedu) people maintained a pastoral nomadic livelihood, and in occupying the interior regions of the Arabian Peninsula, they lived in a state of nearly constant mobility; the seafaring hadhar peoples of the coastal region, although foremost a merchant class based in the city or village, built livelihoods tethered to the sea and the mobility it allowed (Altorki and Cole 1989: 17–18; Crystal 1990; Longva 1997, 2006; Al-Nakib 2014).18 In summary, our species’ sedentarization some ten thousand years ago, and the more recent enclosure of humanity in the national containers that today shape our comprehension of the world, together suggest the exceptionalism of our present moment: the borders, boundaries, tenure, and stasis we’ve imposed on the landscape are notable exceptions to the human norms perceptible in the longue durée of our existence.
Setting these philosophical concerns aside, contemporary migration has undoubtedly had a significant and direct impact on Qatari society over the last century. The nation’s first census was conducted in 1970, just a year before independence. Of the 111,113 individuals resident on the peninsula that year, some 45,039 were Qatari citizens. Composing just over 40 percent of the total population, citizens were already a minority in their own land in the years just before the OPEC embargo. In Qatar (and in the neighboring Gulf states) the proportion of foreigners would continue to balloon in the coming decades: in 1986, foreigners made up 73.3 percent of the resident population; by 2010, foreigners made up 85.7 percent of the resident population on the Qatari Peninsula. At the time of writing, nearly nine of every ten residents are foreign-born migrants, like Divendra—temporary workers with little possibility (and little expressed interest) in naturalization. Most of these workers are directly supporting a household at home (De Bel-Air 2017; Snoj 2019). Altogether, sustained migration to Qatar and the neighboring Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states comprises what is tabulated to be (after Europe and North America) the third largest transnational flow of labor migrants in the contemporary world (ECSWA 2007; Naufal 2011). On average, some eighty-seven migrants arrive each day in Qatar, and while these transnational workers hail from nearly ninety different sending countries, the most significant labor-sending nations are India (700,000), Bangladesh (400,000), Nepal (400,000), Egypt (300,000), and the Philippines (236,000) (Snoj 2019). To state the obvious: in history, and in the present, migration has been a central social fact in Qatar’s experience.
Although the six GCC states contain just a tiny sliver of our global population, more than a tenth of the total number of transnational migrants in the world today were present there in 2016. The GCC states’ proportion of global remittance flows is correspondingly substantial: in 2014, nearly a quarter (23 percent) of all migrant remittances (totaling some $98 billion) flowed outward from the Arabian Peninsula (De Bel-Air 2018). Other calculations reveal that, in 2021, the total outflow of remittances from Qatar, specifically, totaled some $11 billion, a number that was down slightly from previous years (Migration Policy Institute 2022). For comparison, the total remittance outflow for the United States in 2020 was $68 billion. With a total population of citizens that would place it among American cities like Anchorage, Buffalo, Lincoln, or Pittsburgh, it is clear that Qatar plays an outsized role in the flow of remittances in the contemporary world. Moreover, those remittances are directed at some of the most marginal and underdeveloped regions of the world. In summary, and to again state the obvious: migration, and the broader mobilities tethered to the Qatari Peninsula, are economically significant to millions of migrant households and the villages, towns, cities, and regions they inhabit.
The relationship between these migrations and the city itself is the central puzzle of this book. But Qatar, like its neighbors, is one of the most urbanized places in the world. For a nation-state so suffused with migrants and foreigners, one would certainly expect the city to be deeply shaped by migration. But migration does not cover sufficient analytic ground to entirely frame these chapters. Consider that nearly two decades ago, the anthropologist Paul Dresch (2006, 214) declared that “regional and local order has been threatened in the Gulf more than most places since the mid-twentieth-century by flows of trade, imagery, and foreign persons.” The key point I take from his assertion is the breadth of his concern, and the causation that he envisions behind those flows of what he calls “foreign matter.” In this book, and like any anthropologist, my interests are directed at people—both those on the move and those at home in the city of Doha. But I am also interested in all the other things that are on the move—the structures that Dresch hints at and the other sorts of foreign matter that sometimes travels via the same conduits and circuits as transnational migrants themselves. The concept of mobility aligns with this broader spectrum of matter-on-the-move, and although the book is more than two decades old, I often think about the matter of that mobility in the fields that Appadurai (1996) provided us; he spoke of contemporary human mobility and globalizing interconnection in terms of the ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and the ideoscapes that comprise it. These terms, and the concept they together convey, reach for the breadth of the matter on the move in the world today.
As they already have, readers will also encounter additional dalliances with my notion that our contemporary era might be appropriately recognized as the “era of mobility.” Human mobilities today, while varied, depend nearly wholesale on the ongoing exploitation of our planet’s hydrocarbon resources and the readily accessible, nonrenewable caloric energy available there. That energy is also the reason for this book, for the migrations with an endpoint or a waypoint in Doha, and for the city itself—the urban construction in the limelight of this book. In labeling our time as the “era of mobility,” I am articulating my suspicion that we will look back at these decades with a lens that’s hard for us to envision from the vantage point of the present—that from our postoil future, we will regard the contemporary era, and places like Doha, as urban palimpsests of humanity’s waning moments in the petroleum-fueled hyperactivity of the present. The readily accessible and nonrenewable caloric energy underground in Qatar is also deeply entwined with the city and society described here, and with the entirety of the world as we know it.
In summary, the era of mobility I posit as characteristic of our contemporary historical juncture is an attempt to grandiosely characterize the domain of the mobilities, the people, and the processes that I seek to ethnographically apprehend in this book. These concerns with mobility and migration inevitably lead back to a discussion of culture. Two decades ago, anthropologists confidently arrived at the conclusion that while globalization was changing lots of things, it was not simply snuffing out the cultural distinction and the many sorts of differences it engrossed. Rather, cultures (and the societies undergirding them) adjusted, evolved, changed, or, to use a verb that arose in the interim, “morphed” into something different. Yet via the identitarian nature of the contemporary moment—an American paradigm deeply in cadence with neoliberal capitalism, I might again add—culture is often now portrayed as a feature of one’s identity that might be brandished or, alternatively, rejected. I find the American portrayal of culture to be steeply misguided, and in the countervailing thread woven into this book’s analysis, I not only suggest the ongoing vitality of culture but also hold that culture is inevitably and always a collective project. To peer even further ahead in this book, I also assert that the production of culture remains a process that requires space, a point that will not be fully attended to until we reach the book’s concluding chapters. But for clarification, one of the central theses of this book is that cities like Doha have evolved and grown the spatial infrastructure needed to maintain diverse cultures and difference amid the blizzard of human interaction fueled by this era of mobility. Hang on to that assertion.