1. I myself conformed to this practice in my previous books.

2. This is akin to what Molotch and Ponzini (2019, 3) describe as the objective of “restraining judgement.” It is interesting that they come to that conclusion amid a discussion of the book Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott, and Izenour 1972)—the visually intensive tome that was, arguably, the watershed moment in ushering postmodernist concerns into architecture, urban planning, and urban studies. Notably, those postmodernist concerns are equally implicated in the long and sustained indictment of the impartiality underpinning the objective of “restraining judgement.”

1. Divendra and all the names of migrants and other interlocutors that appear in this book are pseudonyms. Portions of Divendra’s story, utilizing the same pseudonym, are further elucidated elsewhere (Gardner 2012, 2015a).

2. It was in stories like these that I envisioned the fact that many of these migrants were dreaming of a meritocracy of sorts—a place where their achieved capacities might meet with opportunity.

3. Kathiravelu (2016, 10–12) makes this same point and contends that migrants’ omission is a result of the national identity projects underway on the Arabian Peninsula. While this is certainly astute, her emphasis is on the omission of their contribution rather than their mere presence. That logic also pardons the successive waves of scholars and academics who have sought to address the busy juncture of city and society in Arabia.

4. For example, Buras (2019) sees the legacy of good planning everywhere in human history. In summary, the diversity and differences that Rudofsky (1964) helped us glimpse are now fully digested and central to our thinking about the city.

5. Kolson (2001) provides an insightful overview of the pre-Columbian urban history of North America, and one that is particularly attentive to hierarchy, differences, and the remnants of the built form. Some phrases gleaned from his captivating chapter on the topic include aspects of urban societies in North America that were “minutely ranked,” “highly regimented,” clearly prone to “endemic warfare,” driven by “extraordinary competition,” forged via “intense warfare,” manifesting “social differentiation” and a “powerful centralized authority,” with signs of “apparent cannibalism” in places, and mostly consisting of “ranked societies” with clear evidence of the “division of labor.”

6. Speaking particularly to inequality in the Arab world, Raymond describes the deep history of inequality in the social structure underpinning Arab cities and points to the good historical evidence of that inequality. More than just an enduring form of inequality, Raymond (2008, 68) also takes note of the scale of this inequality, and at one point describes it as “an inequality so huge.”

7. Here I am struck by the parallels with Orlando Patterson’s assertion (2018, xxix) that freedom, and our understanding of it, are intricately tied to the human history of slavery in all of its global manifestations. As he explains: “Before slavery people simply could not have conceived of the thing we call freedom. Men and women in premodern, non-slaveholding societies did not, could not, value the removal of restraint as an ideal” (Patterson 2018, 340). Similarly, one might contend that only amid the various landscapes of inequality, and the various despotisms that emerged in tandem with them, did the democratic idea of sharing power come into vision as a desirable possibility.

8. Fine examples would include Friedrich Engels (1993), Mike Davis (1990), and W. E. B. DuBois (2010), but many others would fit on this list as well.

9. Mumford was clearly also a proponent of this broader estimation of difference and the value of the diversities that coalesced the city. For Mumford (1961, 34), “The city was the container that brought about this implosion, and through its very form held together the new forces, intensified their internal reactions, and raised the whole level of achievement.”

10. Lewis Mumford (1961, 34) again: “As with a gas, the very pressure of the molecules within that limited space produced more social collisions and interactions within a generation than would have occurred in many centuries if still isolated in their native habitats, without boundaries.”

11. As McDonough (2009, 11) notes, “For the [French] Situationists, cities were profoundly historical landscapes, whose current appearances were shaped … by the successive events that time has buried, though never completely effaced.” Interestingly, Kolson (2001, 184) carries this point even further in suggesting that great urban spaces, by definition, are those that willingly accommodate the cultural detritus of the past. A decade earlier, however, Harvey (1989) was careful to note that this palimpsest was certainly a text edited by the political-economic forces that are at the center of his focus.

12. See Dresch (2006) and (Salama and Wiedmann 2013, 20), for example. I found Al-Nakib’s explication (2016, 58–69) to be particularly insightful and clear.

13. This is a widely purveyed reading of Boas. Several of the memorable works in my own digestion of this critique include Gupta and Ferguson (1997), Marcus and Fischer (1986), and Moore (1999). Eric Wolf (1982, 6) noted that in the aftermath of Boas, cultures were too often envisioned as bounded objects, “like so many hard and round billiard balls.”

14. Perhaps it is also not a coincidence that these critiques arrived in the aftermath of the postmodern turn, a philosophical conglomeration of ideas that draw their principal energies from the task of destabilizing and deconstructing any coherent knowledge structures inherited from the past.

15. Molotch and Ponzini (2019, 26) make a similar and general point about the dominance of the Western city in our understanding of the urban processes endemic to all global cities.

16. See Bashkow (2004, 445) for an excellent discussion of Lowie.

17. When chronologically framed by the longue durée, claims to have been in some place for “time immemorial” often morph into more pedestrian claims—to have been some place just prior to more recent arrivals, or perhaps to have been in some place for a longer period than those newer arrivals.

18. We might also recognize the bedu/hadhar bifurcation of Arabian societies’ tradition as a social prism reified by generations of social scientists. See both Longva (2006) and Al-Nakib (2014) for particularly illuminating discussions of this aspect of the Kuwaiti social prism.

1. Caroline Osella via personal communication.

2. Seth Holmes (2013) provides a fine example of that anthropological intrepidity in his journey with undocumented migrants across the Mexican-American border.

3. I conducted fieldwork in Saudi Arabia for two months in 1999. I later resided in Al Ain (in the United Arab Emirates) for three months in the summer of 2002. Later in 2002 and for much of 2003, I resided in Bahrain, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork for my dissertation. Subsequently, between 2008 and 2010 my family and I resided in Doha during my employment at Qatar University. Finally, in addition to these periods of residence in Arabia, a series of projects commencing in 2010 allowed for periodic visits for work and research, resulting in numerous years in which I spent more than a month on the ground in Qatar.

4. Don Stull, who was at the time the editor of Human Organization, once pointed out to me that “lived experience” seems to be the only sort of experience available to us humans.

5. In reflection of this fact, I have also left out the denotation of [sic] in the various verbatim quotes in this text. That denotation, signifying “as written,” connotes an error or a recognizable grammatical mistake. These denotations would unnecessarily clutter the analyses presented here, particularly given that English is a second or third language for many of my informants.

6. See Walter Benjamin (1999, 443) not only for this quote but also for a broader discussion of Baudelaire’s articulation of an early idea of modernity, a conceptualization entwined with life in the urban metropolis.

7. Yasser Elsheshtawy (2022, 178–180) provides a clear overview of drifting, its history, and pedestrian-focused approaches to the city.

8. See also Wolfe (2016) and his notion of the “urban diary”; Brogden (2019, 13) and his conviction that “walking provides an important slowing-down encounter with the urban landscape, as part of an essential phenomenological element within ‘lived experience;’ ” or Klinenberg’s intuition (2018, 4) that by being there, “at ground level I would observe certain neighborhood conditions that aren’t visible in quantitative data.” Similarly, see Elsheshtawy 2010, 60.

9. In addition to those described here, see Buras (2019), Elsheshtawy (2022), Gehl (2011), Koolhaas (1995), Mater (2016), Mehrotra and Vera (2015), Rudofsky (1964). See Natasi (2019) for a discussion specific to the role and circulation of images of Arabian cities.

1. As Hopper (2015, 9) reports, slaves comprised an estimated 22 percent of Qatar’s population in 1905, a result of the increasing global demand for dates and pearls, the two primary exports of that era. While the slaves of African descent remain of central focus, European-led abolishment and interference with the African source countries shifted the Middle Eastern slave trade to Baluchistan, and “by the 1920s had replaced East Africa as the main source of new labor for eastern Arabian markets” (Hopper 2015, 203).

2. See Geertz (1973) and Anderson (2006). If you have not spent time with Anderson’s footnotes in Imagined Communities, I would highly recommend their perusal, particularly in consideration of the fact that your curiosity evidently brought you here.

3. See Hewison (1987, 45–47). Dresch (2006, 206) perceived the “industry of nostalgia” that developed around notions of authenticity and the neighborhoods the Gulf Arabs collectively imagined in their past.

4. There are plenty of examples, but I am struck by the words of Ibrahim bin Saleh Bu Matar al-Muhannadi: “We were much better off in those days, believe me. Don’t be deceived by appearances. In those days, people were more generous and sincere … they were honest with each other” (quoted in Othman 1984, 49).

5. Here again, I am drawing on the image of the state and the society provided by Onley and Khalaf (2006).

6. See Samin (2017, 149–153) for a similar description of Saudi Arabia.

7. Alshehabi (2019) sees four key characteristics to the petro-modernist state: ensuring the centrality of the ruling families at the apex of the state’s political structure; to produce a population loyal to the ruling families and committed to the petri-nationalist state; the establishment of a vast welfare state to care for the citizenry; and to carefully and adroitly deploy contemporary technological advances while simultaneously preserving traditional premodern relations.

8. Consider other perspectives on the rentier state as well: before his killing in 2004, one of the founding leaders of al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Muqrin, exclaimed that Saudi “people have begun to imagine that making a living can only be accomplished by securing a government job. This is a vulgar notion that the apostate traitorous rulers have planted in people’s heads. They also planted in their minds the notion that you will not be able to eat or drink until they control you and you become their employee” (quoted in Samin 2015, 202).

9. While oftentimes portraying that chaos, those scholars, like von Grunebaum (1955), took it as their mission to discern patterns and characteristics underpinning urban agglomerations across the whole of the Middle East and North Africa.

10. Fletcher and Carter (2017) delineate a set of “structural principles” that extrapolate ideas first ventured by Raymond (2008), whose principles serve as a starting point for their analysis.

11. In her descriptions of Manama, Fuccaro (2009, 9) contends that “The mixed ethnic and sectarian composition of the urban population reflected a long history of immigration associated with trade, pearling, pilgrimage and military conquest.”

12. This seems to be one of the many points where scholarly narratives and common sense seem to be at odds.

13. Notably, Hay (1959, 110) commences his assessment by exclaiming that “Development has been carried out in a controlled and orderly manner and the haste which produced such chaotic conditions at Kuwait has been avoided.”

14. In their detailed ethnographic assessment of the Saudi Arabian city of ‘Unayzah, based on their fieldwork there in 1986 and 1987, Soraya Altorki and Donald Cole (1989, 128–129) note a strikingly similar situation: “many of those [foreign workers] who work in the city reside in the old mud-brick part of the town which has been abandoned by most ‘Unayzah people for new housing in other areas.”

1. Divendra would pull a similar maneuver in the years to come as he sought to extract himself from this particular job.

1. The Gulf Cooperation Council is also referred to as the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf.

2. Note that those migrants who do express a desire to remain in the Gulf states are the most accessible population to visiting academics and journalists, and also occupy an outsized space in the collective attention directed at the migrant population residing on the Arabian Peninsula. For instances of this broader concern with ideas of belonging, the reproduction of these various diasporas, and the messy social realities therein, see Gardner (2010b); Mahdavi (2016); Babar (2017); Norbakk (2020); Alloul (2020, 2021).

3. Two decades ago, Karen Leonard (2002, 214) framed it thusly: “As trans-status subjects caught up in the processes of globalization in the Gulf, professional men and women find themselves displaced from their homelands and pushed to consider migration to the West, while working-class men and their wives at home focus more strongly on the homeland and their place in it.”

4. Iskander (2021) convincingly argues that this turnover is an integral feature of a migration system that exploits the unskilled.

5. Elsewhere (Gardner 2021b), my back-of-the-napkin estimates look something like this: twenty-five million migrants on the Arabian Peninsula, multiplied by four to account for migrant comings and goings over a decade, and then multiply that figure by five to underestimate the members of the households those migrants represent and support. This yields an estimated five hundred million people embroiled in this migration system.

6. Steven Vertovec (2007, 1024) conceptualized superdiversity to describe the increasingly familiar demographies comprising “small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socioeconomically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade.” The Eurocentricity of this definition is betrayed by his use of the term “immigrant,” which is mostly inapplicable in the GCC, but the conceptualization remains valuable here.

7. The basic infrastructure of this process is perhaps most clearly visible in Tristan Bruslé’s work (2009/2010, 158–159).

8. I suspect there may be some places where this is also true for young women, but I have no firsthand knowledge of that.

9. For more detail, see Gardner et al. (2013). Several members of the research team assembled for the project detailed in this paper hope for an opportunity to soon update these figures and to measure changes to these costs over the last decade. It also merits mention here that these averages obscure the variability between sending countries: costs are much higher in some sending locations than in others. We noted extraordinary variation in these costs between sending states, with Bangladeshi migrants reporting the highest costs and the migrants from the Philippines reporting the lowest costs in our sample (Gardner et al. 2013, 11–12).

10. Although there are notable parallels in other migration systems and their histories: the US Bracero Program, for example, also locked migrant workers to their employers, and the Gastarbeiter program in Germany (also from the 1960s) did the same.

11. The emphasis on the social and cultural roots of the kafala is discussed by a variety of scholars, including Beaugé (1986), Longva (1997), Gardner (2010b), Frantz (2011), Lori (2012), Diop, Johnston, and Trung Le (2015), and perhaps most comprehensively, by Jureidini and Hassan (2020). Alshehabi (2019) strongly emphasizes the British colonial legacy of the kafala, and Iskander (2021, 32) rejects explanations tied to the cultural legacy of the region. In their assessment, Jureidini and Hassan (2020) perceive more substantial ties between the kafala and Islamic tradition.

12. The distribution of authority was also clearly described by Jill Crystal (2005, 168–170).

13. This certainly reinforces the value of systematic and quantitative research, and this very argument was central to our research team’s successful 2010 proposal to the Qatar National Research Fund. This anecdotal cherry-picking is perhaps responsible for the negative reputation that clings to the migrant-heavy Gulf states, despite outward-bound wealth transfers that surpass those of most other wealthy regions of the world.

14. See Gardner (2018) for a longer discussion of the symbolic role of law on the Arabian Peninsula.

15. The impact of the changes was perceived as largely ineffective. See Gardner (2010b) and Lori (2012, note 16) for more detail.

16. For example, see “Reform the Kafala System,” Migrant-Rights.org, https://www.migrant-rights.org/campaign/end-the-kafala-system/. These critiques reliably come from institutions whose raison d’être (and funding streams) are tied to the ongoing critique of the Gulf migration system. See Iskander (2021, 69–71) for a particularly even-handed discussion of these reforms.

17. See the ILO report from August 20, 2020: “Qatar Adopts a Non-discriminatory Minimum Wage,” International Labour Organization, https://www.ilo.org/beirut/countries/qatar/WCMS_753583/lang--en/index.htm.

18. For example, see “Saudi Arabia Announces Change to Kafala System,” Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/14/saudi-arabias-long-awaited-kafala-reform-goes-into-effect.

19. Albeit often via decisions reached in the complicated social contexts that I have described in this chapter, and also, oftentimes, through a blizzard of misinformation and disinformation that I explicate in detail elsewhere (Gardner 2012b).

20. Appiah (2018, 86) speaks of a man “always betraying his ideals, and forever scrutinizing his own prejudices and preferences like a quizzical ethnographer.”

1. In part, this was inspired by a similar analysis by Matsuo and his coauthors in the introduction to their edited volume (Ishii 2020), and Alloul (2020, 2021) seems dedicated to something along these same lines, but see also Kanna (2011, 30–31) for a typically eloquent explication of the same analytic tactic. Abdoulaye Diop and his coauthors’ findings in their study (2017) also support the utility of an approach that, in the superdiverse context of Qatar, emphasizes class foremost as a categorical demographic frame.

2. Ho and Kathiravelu (2020) move toward a “more than race” analytic frame as well. In recognition of the power invested in the various schema for classifying and organizing human diversity, my emphasis on nationality is merely an entry point for a consideration of the intersections between the many other variables that have long interested anthropologists.

3. He subsequently notes that “When compared to those for other societies and other periods, these figures point to an inequality so huge that it is hardly surprising it should find expression in the spatial structure of the city” (Raymond 2008, 67).

4. Indigeneity is an inherently flawed concept to any anthropologist or scholar who approaches human history via the longue durée, as I have sought to do in this book, but I will leave these arguments dormant at this point.

5. “In Kuwait, we find three overarching categorical dichotomies in terms of which persons were identified and classified: Kuwaiti—non-Kuwaiti, Arab—non-Arab, and Muslim—non-Muslim. These are categories that were officially acknowledged in the public discourse of social life, universally understood, and, in principle, purely descriptive and value-neutral. In reality, given the Kuwaiti context, they were loaded with a wide range of connotations, and the definitely of at least one of them (‘Kuwaiti’) was hotly disputed among the Kuwaitis themselves … Undoubtedly the most outstanding among the three, this dichotomy was based the critical criterion of citizenship” (Longva 1997, 45). Her ideas are of enduring value. This is all the more surprising with the intellectual deforestation typically levied at any and all thinking from the past. In the long wake of the postmodern turn, older ideas and previous thinking are oftentimes only useful as foils for establishing the new and novel.

6. These data are from 2013.

7. Dakkak’s fascinating PhD dissertation explores the Arab migrant experience in great detail through fictional accounts that portray those experiences. Dakkak (2020) sees gargantuan differences between migration experiences from earlier eras and more recent migration experiences, and suggests that those early migrant encounters were vital in setting the tone by which all migration experiences are interpreted to this day.

8. This is also characteristically true of the Indian communities in the various GCC states, all of which stretch from the lowest economic stratum of manual laborers into the cosmopolitan elite described here.

9. The difficulty of accessing data is widely commented on in scholarship; for example, Babar (2017, 11, 26).

10. All of this is strikingly evident in a description of the Qatar-based portion of the team associated with the Msheireb Project, as described by Melhuish and her coauthors (2016, 234–235): “The client team based in Doha comprised a mixed group of mostly American, some British and Australian, and some Egyptian and Lebanese development directors and managers, many of whom had previous experience in Dubai and the region, notably Kuwait and Beirut. However the senior executive level was made up of Qataris from the civil service and ministries, answerable ultimately to the Chairperson of the Qatar Foundation, Sheikha Moza. Also on the development team were a handful of Qataris with training (commonly in Britain or the US) and some experience of working in architecture or urban and interior design, in line with state directives on Qatarization. At a more technical level, particularly IT support, roles were mainly filled by male employees form the Indian subcontinent, while female PAs included a mix of nationalities (e.g. Russian, Indian), front-of-house receptionists were often Filipina women, and tea-boys south Indians.”

11. Or QR 7,000 (US$1923) with free accommodations from an employer.

12. See Hosoda (2020) for a clear articulation of a similar point in relation to the Filipino community in the United Arab Emirates.

13. See also Bruslé (2009/2010) for an insightful analysis of the socioeconomically bottom-heavy Nepalese community in Qatar.

14. For example, in 1992 I moved to New York City and shared a studio on 6th Street on the lower east side—a street entirely dominated by perhaps fifteen different Indian restaurants. The gravity that brings these different entrepreneurs together in urban space is what I am interested in here.

1. Notably, Kathiravelu (2016, 134–180) explores these same parallels in her book.

2. Alsayer (2019a, 2) sees these same constructions as an attempt “to transform society and its built environment.”

3. As Fuccaro (2009, 205) notes, the phase of urban development that commenced in the 1960s was “inspired by Western concepts of urban planning,” and the enclaves constructed by BAPCO in Manama provided a model for new neighborhoods and construction.

4. Alsayer (2019a, 6) describes how “The systematic transformation of Dhahran from portable homes to a U.S. suburb complete with green landscapes was celebrated as the U.S. triumph over the desert.” In its 1960 handbook, for example, Aramco boasts of the “creation, in what was open desert country, of modern communities in which employees and their families can live and work, with houses, streets, shops, office buildings, restaurants, hospitals, schools, recreational facilities, lawns, gardens and trees” (Lebkicher et al. 1960, 5–6).

5. Rule eleven from the document titled “A Code of Conduct for Tourists Visiting Qatar for the World Cup 2022” states that “A tourist is prohibited from consuming alcohol in stadiums or outside the specified areas.” From another angle, this is a form of the “morality zoning” that Fuccaro describes (2009, 231) in her historical analysis of Manama.

6. These parallels are perhaps most clear in some of the examples I have not presented here, such as the Special Economic Zones. See Oxford Business Group (2015).

7. At the same time, for Agamben (2005) these “states of exception” arise foremost during crisis—during purported extraordinary circumstances or their conjuring. In Qatar, the state of exception seems to arise from the quotidian tumult of development and urban growth.

1. Those misgivings include a concern with Foucault’s overwhelming preoccupation with power such that, in the final accounting, that preoccupation seems to eclipse as much as it reveals about human nature. I am also wary of the stasis of the American distillation of “French Theory,” which has changed little since it first coalesced in the 1980s. And one might also lament Foucault’s penchant for concept inflation by which discourse suddenly means something other than discourse, and archaeology suddenly means something other than archaeology. Most scholars today are essentially inured to this last feature of the contemporary ideoscape.

2. See also Msheireb Properties (2021), where the development is trumpeted for providing “an intrinsic mix of hospitality, retail, residential, commercial and civic offerings. Designed to have everything close and convenient enough to walk to, each quarter caters to every need of an urban dweller. The five quarters comprise offices, the city’s key extended government area, luxurious residential units, green spaces, an international academy, community mosques, state-of-the-art retail spaces, treasured cultural offerings, an extensive café culture and world-class dining and hotel options—all within minutes of one another. With an intrinsic mix so diverse, Msheireb Downtown Doha will truly be a place like no other.”

3. Hanieh (2018) further articulates that these surpluses are vital not just to the cities of the Arabian Peninsula but to the whole of the global financial system.

4. Hanieh (2018, 83–84) provides useful and detailed data concerning ownership in his assessment of the ten largest developers in the GCC, three of which are Qatari: the Qatari Diar, as a sovereign wealth fund, is entirely owned by the state; the Qatari Diar also owns 45 percent of Barwa Real Estate, alongside private investors; the United Development Company is listed as a private business, but various state-controlled funds hold an estimated 34 percent of the firm.

5. Kolson (2001, 184) argues that “great urban space begins with a willingness to accommodate, rather than obliterate, the culture detritus of the past … this is the secret of some of the world’s most beautiful and successful cities.” Perhaps this helps explain why the Msheireb Project and the adjacent Souk Waqif—both of which had to accommodate a preexisting urban landscape, remain some of the most popular urban spaces in Doha. See also Elsheshtawy (2019a, 244).

6. As Molotch and Ponzini (2019, 6) claim, those “grand plans are only loosely followed; they get replaced at fairly short intervals.”

7. Kolson (2001, 125–127) traces this feature of urban planning to Haussmann and his service to Napoleon III. See also Melhuish, Degen, and Rose (2016) and Degen, Melhuish, and Rose (2017) for a discussion of the process by which representations of these atmospherics are crafted.

8. Conversely, David Harvey (2008, 60) suggests that postmodernism signified a break with “the modernist idea that planning and development should focus on large-scale, metropolitan-wide, technologically rational and efficient urban plans.”

1. The keystone to this sustained scholarly conversation is Hazem Beblawi (1987). In the postmodern tradition, critiques of his ideas typically treat rentier state theory as a narrative rather than a theory, thereby shifting the terms of the critique from an assessment of the evidence in support of that theory to an indictment of the implications that such a narrative might be imagined to connote.

2. Again, this seems to be the result of the seemingly endless and analytically simplistic Foucauldian preoccupation with power.

3. Although precise and up-to-date figures can be difficult to obtain, Gengler (2021, 242), referring to data from the Global Labour Markets and Migration, notes that in Qatar, “nine out of ten employed citizens work in the public sector.”

4. Paul Dresch (2006, 202) remarked that because citizens are “privileged landholders” in the Gulf, real estate serves as another conduit for the transfer of wealth from the state to the citizen. See also Iskander (2021, 57) for a discussion of the competitive advantages conferred to citizens by law.

5. For Soja (1996), secondspace is the space of the city as it is represented and imagined, the very domain in which CGI images seek to intervene. See also Melhuish, Degen, and Rose (2016) and Degen, Melhuish, and Rose (2017).

6. I first articulated these ideas in Gardner (2008a).

7. In a conference paper (Gardner 2008b), I sought to grapple with the collective aspect of the consumerist ethic manifest in the cities of Arabia—with the “collective consumerism that predominates in the region.”

1. These ideas and this argument were first broached in a conference paper I delivered (Gardner 2011b).

2. See also Gardner (2010a). During my fieldwork in Bahrain in 2002 and 2003, I interviewed numerous Indian business owners who collectively portrayed the Bahraini worker as indolent, spoiled, lazy, and unreliable. One business owner noted to me that “the effort that they [Bahrainis] would normally put in is half as much as an expatriate. When you think about wanting to put a Bahraini in [a job], well, they’re so lazy. They just don’t do as much.” Another suggested that “the basic problem is with their attitude. They’re just not used to working—especially hard work. They’ve taken it very easy all these years, and that has passed on to the younger generation.” Some Bahraini interlocutors concurred. As one young Bahraini man noted, “The things people say about the Bahraini work ethic—well, I agree with it in general. [Bahrainis] feel like they’re entitled to more than what they’re getting, and they feel like they shouldn’t be doing as much as they are for it. A lot of people criticize Bahrainis for not performing as well as Indian workers … You can see it firsthand. Just go into any place. Go to Jasmis [a fast-food restaurant that had begun to employ Bahrainis at the time] or any retail place. See how the Bahraini man or lady behind the counter treats you. They’ll be talking to a coworker or on the mobile, or they’ll yell to the person behind you.” When forced to hire Bahrainis under a state-mandated quota system, many business owners and managers would simply pay these employees and ask them to stay home.

3. Portions of this chapter draw on Gardner (2015a, 2015b).

4. See Gardner (2011a).

5. I encountered similar experiences with a photography exhibit and with various other projects at the American satellite campuses located in the region.

6. In her insightful analysis of experts, consultants, and power holders in the GCC, Calvert Jones (2019, 16) quotes a foreign expert who emphasized that the ruling elites are oftentimes out of touch with local realities and contexts.

7. This term, originally coined by the American aluminum manufacturer Alcoa in the 1940s and popularized by Walt Disney, is also the name of a Japanese entertainment company.

8. What I am suggesting here is that the sociocultural tradition of insularity perceptible in the social traditions of the region is enhanced by the enclaving proclivities common to authoritarian high modernism (Scott 1999).

9. These ideas were first broached in Gardner (2015b).

10. Jane Jacobs (1961) is perhaps the most notable example, but we might also add Gehl (2011) and Klinenberg (2017) to this list.

11. In concluding his book, Sennett (1970, 198) suggests that “in extricating the city from preplanned control, men will become more in control of themselves and more aware of each other. That is the promise, and the justification, of disorder.”

1. The social topography of this parking lot is discussed at more length in Gardner (2023).

2. In addition to Hannerz’s 2005 piece, see also Gardner (2023).

3. Excellent scholars of the urban form in the Gulf disagree with this reading. Al-Nakib (2016, 205), for example, contends that separation and segregation inhibit contact with difference in the city.

4. Although a legion of scholars and academics seem to have built careers on the assumption that this debate is ongoing.

1. For example, in the context of Arabia, women’s activities and their friendship were often out of bounds for me. Only foreign women have the ethnographic privilege in Arabia of working closely with both men and women. As a result, ethnographic assessment of migrant domestic workers, for example, was mostly out of reach for me.

2. The turn from subjectivity to identity is a conceptual shift of recent provenance. Our ongoing conceptual reliance on identity is, I suggest, a measure of the American dominance of the global intellectual conversation and, more directly, over the conceptual toolbox on which that conversation draws. Unlike subjectivity, the concept of identity shears the individual from the social contexts into which she was born, and pays little attention to the coconstruction of our individuality in dialectic with those social forces and social forms. Identity is a concept vastly more amendable to the neoliberal ideology and privileged consumerist ethic that America continues to promote, despite the superficial political dramas of our past decade.

3. Or was Mark Fisher (2009, 2014) correct in his assertion that postmodernism corrupts the very possibility of any future?

4. Although several of the research projects underlying this book were clearly of an applied nature—those projects explicitly sought to enable, foster, or inform change via the policy environment. See, for example, Gardner (2010b); Pessoa, Harkness, and Gardner (2014); and Gardner, Pessoa, and Harkness (2014).

5. Remember, this tenure purportedly offers me some insulation from forces that might influence my analyses and interpretations.

6. Many of my colleagues (and, probably, some of the people evaluating this manuscript as experts, publishers, editors, or gatekeepers of some sort) are often now concerned a priori with a moral assessment of the author, even before their work is digested. A colleague of mine in political science, for example, conveyed to me that I might perhaps not be “on his team.” Similarly, in nascent form, one chapter of this book was rejected by the journal City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action, with the admonition from an anonymous editor that my attempted revisions demonstrated “a lack of commitment to a wider emancipatory project which are part of critical theory and contributions to City” (email December 2, 2020). These sorts of exchanges leave me puzzled. What is the nature of this project, exactly? Is this the same “sacred project” that Smith (2014) described nearly a decade ago? And what are these teams of which my colleague spoke?

7. For readers interested in discerning or assessing the therapeutic terrain of our concerns, I suggest Lasch (1979), Moskowitz (2001), Furedi (2003), Smith (2014), Bloom (2016), and Lukianoff and Haidt (2019).