6 COMPOUNDS, WALLS, AND CULTURAL SOVEREIGNTY
In the previous chapter, my analytic concern was largely directed at the vast legion of transnational migrant labor residents in Doha—at the men and women who, by definition, comprise the lower echelons in the social hierarchy of Doha’s residents. These migrants constitute a transnational proletariat, an underclass imported to Qatar via the migration system with Arabia at its center. As I sought to explicate, this transnational proletariat’s experience in the urban landscape of Doha is, essentially, a segregated experience. These migrants’ mobility is constrained at various junctures and impeded in particular locations and spaces. Furthermore, the forces impelling this spatial segregation are manifold and varied, and discrimination is merely one ingredient in the segregatory forces perceptible in Doha and in neighboring cities. My understanding of these migrants’ experiences was a result, in part, of Friday ethnography and its cadences, conducted foremost during my residence in Doha between 2008 and 2010, and continuing via numerous and periodic returns to Qatar in the subsequent years. As a privileged and professional expatriate, I was able to cross various thresholds and borders in the city to visit migrant residences in the Industrial Area and elsewhere on the peninsula. By night, and oftentimes after a meal with my interlocutor friends, I returned to my residence and sought to digest everything I had heard.
My residence was assigned to me by my employer, Qatar University. Like many migrants of the professional or skilled class—what I have termed the cosmopolitan professional elite—my family and I dwelled in a compound (see figure 10). Our residence was one of several options offered to me upon arrival. Although it has since been renamed, at that time the compound’s moniker was Al Zuhoor, and it was located in the sea of compounds that sprawled out into the formerly empty desert of the city’s suburban periphery. Like other compounds, Al Zuhoor was surrounded by a high wall. Entering the compound required drivers to pass through a gated security checkpoint manned by a guard—yet another foreign worker. My assigned apartment was one of perhaps a hundred different residences behind the high exterior wall. Some of those domiciles were “villas,” the Gulf nomenclature for freestanding houses designated for larger families or important personnel. These villas were located in the outer ring of the compound, and from the second story, residents might peer over the compound’s exterior wall to the suburban landscape sprawling out to the horizon. Other two-story buildings of multiple apartments occupied the inner region of the compound. My family’s second story apartment, located in this inner region, consisted of three bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room, and a kitchen. It was at a desk in the extra bedroom, reconfigured as my home office, that I first began to articulate my frustrations with the segregated experiences of the foreign workers who have long been central to my ethnographic work.
FIGURE 10. A compound in the suburban neighborhood of Al Waab. Photograph by Kristin Giordano 2009.
Here one might also recognize how anthropology’s foundational concern with otherness, and with other groups of humans’ experiences in this world, can sometimes narrow our capacities for reflection and reflexivity. Contemporary American identitarianism and the widespread commitment to the partiality of inquiries framed in terms of social justice seem to have only exacerbated the fettering of the anthropological lens; anthropology’s preoccupation with difference, and now foremost with inequality, can eclipse our capacity to recognize similarities and parallels between the anthropological observer and her or his subjects. This blinds us to the common threads woven into the shared essence of the human experience, and the “psychic unity of mankind” that Edward Burnett Tylor first postulated in founding anthropology. To clarify, consider the quotidian features of my ethnographic work at that time: on Friday evenings, after a long day in the labor camps of the Industrial Area or, sometimes, elsewhere in the city, I would eventually depart for home. In my car, I would make my way from the desolate outer fringes of Doha into the vast suburban belt of the city, a landscape characterized by a seemingly endless sea of high exterior walls enclosing compounds much like mine. Arriving then at my compound’s entrance, I would make eye contact with the South Asian guard, wait for the gate to be opened, and then proceed into the residential space that was invisible from the street. On those Friday nights, after parking outside the entrance to my second story apartment, I would proceed upstairs to my home. After greeting my wife and daughter, I would retire to my home office to review my fieldnotes and to jot down various reflections and passing thoughts before concluding my workday.
It was not until later that the fundamental irony of my situation first dawned on me. Peering out my home office’s window, past the mosque to the compound’s outer wall, the parallels between me and my interlocutors in the labor camps suddenly emerged from the analytic fog: was I not writing about my subjects’ segregation from behind high compound walls, in an enclave assigned by my employer to accommodate me and others of my class and station? Did I not also occupy another sort of segregated space? That is the fundamental conundrum from which this chapter commences.1 Borrowing the anthropologist Paul Dresch’s concept (2006), I suggest that all kinds of foreign matter fall into the spatial logic that I first sighted in pondering the conditions and the experiences of the transnational proletariat. As I will demonstrate, human beings are only one sort of foreign matter that falls into the segregatory spatial logic of the city.
Compound Life
Scholars’ analyses of the housing compounds to which I was assigned by my employer, and those compounds’ historical proliferation on the Arabian Peninsula, draw together several different themes and interpretive threads. In 1936, the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) constructed the first set of homes at Dhahran to accommodate American employees and their families. Construction of a similar gated community in Manama, Bahrain, commenced the next year (Fuccaro 2009, 191). By 1954, Aramco had built and was operating two additional communities in Saudi Arabia, one at Abqaiq and another at Ras Tanura, altogether with more than 22,000 employees and 3,589 family residents (Lebkicher et al. 1960, 156). Aramco heralded “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).2 In many scholars’ work, these enclaved communities were the clear template for urban development and growth in the ensuing decades. Through this lens, compounds are typically framed as a foreign imposition tied to the legacy of American imperialism.
Other scholars, however, see the proliferation of the compound on the Arabian Peninsula as part and parcel of broader global trends. Through this lens, the enclaving of the foreign cosmopolitan professional elite behind compound walls traces its foundations to the neoliberal global moment. These enclaves are emblematic of urban development in the Los Angeles model, where privileged urban denizens retreat to the protection of gated communities, and cities steadily relinquish urban public space to privatized concerns. Yet while most scholars suggest that these new developments were emblematic of American and British employees’ wishes to insulate themselves from local society, there is evidence that points to other reasoning. In his book, Nasser Othman quotes Qatari Ibrahim bin Saleh Bu Matar al-Muhannadi, who noted that “The English were not allowed to go to Doha, there was not a single Englishman in the company house. Nor were the English allowed to visit the market without the express permission of Sheikh Hamad (the Heir Apparent). Englishwomen could not enter Doha under any circumstances, and as far as I can remember, even Mrs Dixon, the manager’s wife, never went into the capital” (Othman 1984, 52–53).
These observations and the complexities they suggest point to perhaps another analytic thread, albeit one poorly articulated in the literature, that frames these enclaves and compounds as a modernist iteration of deeper patterns in the urban landscapes indigenous to the region. We might even hypothesize that these patterns in the urban landscape are the spatial manifestation of the hierarchical multiculturalism sighted in the previous chapter. Regardless, there are definite parallels between the regional proliferation of the compound in the twentieth century and the various traditions and norms already present on the Arabian Peninsula; in the form of urban development indigenous to the region, the traditional fareej already grouped families and tribes together in the urban landscape. In the Kingdom of Bahrain, to the north of Qatar, Fireej Al-Fadhel is the neighborhood in Manama inhabited by the remnant vestiges of the islands’ Jewry. Similarly, the millet system, imposed throughout the Middle East under Ottoman imperialism, “allowed for the coexistence of different religious and ethnic communities” while ensuring the boundaries and distinctions between them were maintained (Eldem 2013, 217; see also Barkey 2005; Barkey and Gavrilis 2016). As this suggests, while Aramco may have built the first modern compounds in Arabia, the form of this habitation and the cultural segregation it manifests at least resonate with regional traditions and customary form. Perhaps it even draws upon them.
To some degree or another, these legacies point to the emergence and the proliferation of the compound in the contemporary urban landscapes of Arabia. Prototypical compounds in Doha resemble the Dhahran model first configured by Aramco, and then BAPCO in Bahrain, with a high external wall concealing recreational facilities like swimming pools, exercise gyms, courts, and playgrounds.3 Streets and, oftentimes, small shops are also frequently found inside these planned communities, and the “lawns, gardens, and trees” therein remind one of the midcentury suburban developments in American cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix, or Las Vegas.4 In the wake of heavy capital investment in the urban core of Doha that commenced in the early twenty-first century, many of the same features discernible in compounds are also perceptible in the high-rise apartment buildings also constructed to accommodate the cosmopolitan professional elite. Although lacking the landscaping and verdant interior grounds found in many suburban compounds, these high-rise accommodations include many of the compound’s other features—swimming pools, recreational facilities, and via verticality rather than compound walls, a private sphere segregated from the public spaces of the city. The homology between compounds and high-rise apartment buildings rests not in any structural parity but rather in the residential enclaving of foreigners of a particular class.
In my experience, life in the compound enclave was memorable, and the social frictions therein point to the tensions inherent in such communal contexts. Canadian and American residents, many of whom traced their ancestry to South Asia or the Middle East, were a small component of the national diversity present there. Perhaps the largest demographic component of my compound’s inhabitants was from elsewhere in the Middle East, although many were also from Africa, and particularly from North Africa. South Asian members of the cosmopolitan professional elite employed by Qatar University were nearly as numerous. Expatriates from other sources—including Europe, East Asia, and elsewhere—were less common. The coherence of residents’ position in the social hierarchy of foreign communities in Qatar did little to assuage some of the intercultural frictions that arose in such a communal setting. Compound residents were conflicted about attempts to instigate a “ladies only” period at the communal swimming pool and at the compound’s exercise facilities, for example. This conflagration, and numerous others like it, were perhaps exacerbated by the national and cultural diversity of the compound’s inhabitants, as Qatar University’s employees were much more diverse than many other institutions of higher education in Qatar at the time.
In Doha, a city replete with foreigners, the sea of compounds sprawls to the horizon in many portions of the city’s suburban landscape. Another fascinating feature of this suburban belt, however, is the coagulation of Qatari citizens in this same landscape. Migrant workers primarily occupy the Industrial Area and other regions of the urban periphery; the cosmopolitan professional elite dwell in the compounds that comprise much of the suburban belt of the city, or perhaps inhabit an apartment in one of the high-rise apartment buildings closer to the city’s central business district. Another vital element of this urban landscape is the domiciles of Qatari citizens. Like the foreign populations they host, citizens reside in particular neighborhoods in the city, and via the state-directed apportionment of land, members of different families, clans, and tribes have configured ways to reside together in the suburban landscape, as best they can, with arrangements akin to the fareej of Qatar’s recent past (Nagy 2004). Unlike the domiciles gathered together in compounds, however, for the citizenry the prototypical residence is the freestanding villa, surrounded by a high wall that both defines the grounds and yields privacy to inhabitants. Like the city’s other inhabitants, Qatari citizens gather in the urban landscape.
In training our attention here on the cosmopolitan professional elite’s experience in suburban compounds or in high-rise apartment buildings, and via a brief excursion into the residential geography of citizenship in the urban landscape of Doha, I seek to reinforce the assertion that the segregatory powers delineated in the previous chapter operate on more than just the lowest echelon of migrant workers. Although economic class is the key variable in one’s place in the urban landscape, the spatial segregation of the city’s many diverse inhabitants transcends the inequalities of class: all of the city’s inhabitants—even Qatari citizens—fall into this spatial logic. In addition to the variable luxuriousness of these residential enclaves, what differentiates one urban inhabitant from another is not their segregation in urban space but rather their mobility across the various thresholds and boundaries of difference in the city.
Foreign Matter
In his seminal 2006 essay Foreign Matter: The Place of Strangers in Gulf Society, the Oxford anthropologist Paul Dresch considers at some length the impact of the long-standing demographic presence of so many strangers on the structure and shape of Gulf society. In concordance with Longva (1997), Dresch (2006) envisions the distinction between citizen and foreigner as the paramount cleavage in these plural societies (see also Nagy 1997). In Europe and elsewhere, Dresch argues, that same distinction is largely a geographical calculation: noncitizens are primarily identifiable as those located across borders and, hence, outside the polity. In Qatar and in the other Gulf states, however, the citizenry lives in an urban landscape suffused with foreigners, with alien others. As a result, the distinction between citizen and noncitizen is drawn by a constellation of other means. The remainder of his essay is an analytic consideration of the social arrangements that, over decades, have evolved to establish and maintain the distinction between citizen and foreigner. Following Dresch, my emphasis thus far has been on people and their place in the city. Although my attention was first drawn to the experiences of the transnational proletariat, I have now sought to reinforce with evidence my assertion that the sorting, enclaving, and segregation of people into particular urban spaces is a process that transcends the inequalities of class. The transnational proletariat, the cosmopolitan professional elite, and even the citizenry itself—all find themselves either placed in or drawn to particular locations in the urban landscape.
From this analytic waypoint, I now want to contend that while humans are the central subject of this segregational logic, there are other sorts of matter subjected to this same spatial logic, and to the sorting, enclaving, and segregation it entails. By paying attention to space, we can discern how incorporeal foreign matter is also compartmentalized in urban space. Three examples will illuminate my point. The first example concerns gender and the education system in Qatar. As is customary in Qatari tradition, public schools on the peninsula are gender segregated: there are classes designated for girls and other classes designated for boys, and this segregation was extended even into the university system. Qatar University, the national university, remains a gender-segregated campus, as do public schools from the primary level on up. This contrasts sharply with the constellation of private, coeducational schools and universities found in Doha. Many of the coeducational primary and secondary schools were first constructed by different foreign communities of the cosmopolitan professional elite: the various Indian schools, the American school, and an array of other diasporic educational institutions ensure that family members accompanying migrant professionals might remain apace with the national education systems in their respective home states. Similarly, in 2003, the Qatar Foundation—the massively endowed state-funded foundation tasked with stewarding Qatar’s development in the realms of education, science, and community development—inaugurated Education City, the twelve-square-kilometer urban campus located at what was once the suburban periphery of the city. Education City contains numerous satellite campuses tethered to world-renowned universities: it is the location of an outpost of Weill Cornell’s Medical School, a satellite campus of Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, a soon-to-close manifestation of the University College of London, and an array of other institutions of similar stature. All these campuses are coeducational. In summary, at all levels of the education system, the establishment and proliferation of gender-mixed institutions and campuses are spatially consigned to various exceptional spaces in the urban landscape, of which Education City is the most prominent example.
Alcohol, as another sort of foreign matter, comprises a second illuminating example. Alcohol is generally prohibited in Qatar, as it is in the neighboring Gulf states. For the millions of foreigners at work on the peninsula, however, there are three different ways of accessing alcohol for consumption. Residents may purchase alcohol for personal use at the Qatar Distribution Center (QDC), provided they are not citizens of the GCC, and provided they earn a minimum salary of QAR 3,000 (US $822) per month. Like private schools, the QDC is configured specifically to serve the cosmopolitan professional elite. Second, individuals may purchase alcoholic beverages at one of the numerous four- and five-star hotels built to cater to the same cosmopolitan class of both residents and visitors. Lastly, as both of these points of access are beyond the reach of the transnational proletariat, there is a substantial black market for brewing and selling alcohol in places like the Industrial Area. Leaving aside the final mode of access (which is illegal and renders foreign workers vulnerable to arrest and deportation), the other two modes of accessing alcohol are emblematic of the spatial logic I seek to chart here. Punctuating the urban landscape are designated exceptional spaces—select hotels or a designated distribution center—in which alcohol may be obtained. As Qatar prepares for the World Cup, the strategic enclaving of this foreign matter has been further extrapolated: officials now intend to allow fans to consume alcohol in a variety of designated spaces, sometimes referred to as “wet fan zones” or, alternatively, as “World Cup fan zones.”5
The third and final case to consider is perhaps the most immaterial of the three examples presented here. As numerous scholars have long noted, the right to own land in Qatar is conferred by citizenship (Dresch 2006, 202; Nagy 2006, 124; Alshehabi 2015). In practice, the legal arrangements prohibiting foreign ownership serve as the keystone in the solidification of the rentier state by ensuring that some Qataris will inevitably profit from the presence of foreigners at work on the peninsula. For example, the owner of the compound in which I was placed received monthly rental payments directly from Qatar University, and hence indirectly from the state. Early in the twenty-first century, however, Qatar began construction of the luxurious residential and commercial development advertised as “The Pearl.” An artificial island “reclaimed from the sea,” the offshore development was built to accommodate forty-five thousand residents. Notably, The Pearl is also a freeholder development—an exceptional space in the urban landscape where the regulations prohibiting foreign ownership of property are suspended. In 2019, Qatar heralded plans to expanding the number of freeholder developments on the peninsula, thereby expanding the number of legally exceptional spaces in the urban landscape of Doha (Gulf Times 2019). In summary, then, the right to own land is another feature, another sort of foreign matter, that is consigned to designated spaces in the urban landscape.
To recapitulate, in the previous chapter I discerned the spatial segregation of the transnational proletariat as a central feature in the experiences of millions of migrants in Qatar and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula. I thought expansively about the forces complicit in that segregation. This chapter commenced with the assertion that the segregational forces I identified in that previous chapter transcend the dynamics of class: while members of the cosmopolitan professional elite—and even Qatari citizens—have greater mobility, the same segregational forces can be discerned in their experiences in the urban landscape. By revisiting Dresch’s notion of foreign matter, and bending his conceptualization to include the incorporeal, I have used three examples to suggest that more than just humans are subjected to these spatial politics. With coeducational campuses, we can see that some social relations are enclaved into specific exceptional spaces in the city. With alcohol, we can see how particular commodities and the social results they conjure are consigned to designated zones. And with freeholder developments, we can see how the law itself has been spatially modified to include zones where the otherwise prohibited is allowed.
Cultural Sovereignty
In her influential and highly regarded analysis of Southeast Asian states, the anthropologist Aihwa Ong describes the “fragmentation of the national space into various noncontiguous zones” (Ong 2006, 77). Although scholars had been previously attentive to the impact of globalization (increasingly thought of in terms of neoliberalism at that time), few were attuned to the urban and spatial manifestation of these forces. Ong convincingly argues that the spatial reconfigurations of power she observes in the Asian Tiger states are best conceived as strategic flexibilities by which those states were adapting to the neoliberal domain.6 Ong coins the term “graduated sovereignty” to describe these new permutations of state power and its evolving footprint in the national space it seeks to govern. Undoubtedly, her ideas map well onto Qatar and the differentiated zones, enclaves, and segregated spaces that I have described in this chapter. And she is correct that the more homogeneous national spaces of the past have given way to new fragmentary topographies of state power. But the empirical foundations of her argument are rooted in the Asian Tiger states, and therefore rooted in those states’ configuration of the forces of production that are themselves ensconced in a demographic landscape dominated by citizens. As a result, Ong’s notion of graduated sovereignty emphasizes the political and economic goals of the state in the evolving nature of governance she observes.
My reading of the permutations to sovereignty in Qatar points in a different direction. Following Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2005), I understand the state of exception in a dialectic relationship with the powers that grant that exception.7 Although the political and economic motivations for the segregatory spatial strategies that Ong sees are present in Doha, those explanations fail to grasp the essentially cultural motivations I see permeating the examples considered here. To consign the consumption of alcohol to a small archipelago of designated spaces is, simultaneously, an assertion about its prohibition in the domain punctuated by these exceptional spaces. To allow land ownership in a handful of specified and exceptional locations in Qatar is, simultaneously, an affirmation of its prohibition everywhere else on the peninsula. To cloister foreigners behind compound walls or in “bachelor cities” at the periphery of the built landscape is to simultaneously convey that those humans are foreign matter—a form of matter that is exceptional in nature, consigned to peripheral and exceptional urban spaces, and therefore out of place elsewhere in the domain those exceptional zones punctuate. In summary, what Ong portrays as graduated sovereignty is, in my estimation, recognizable more as a form of punctuated sovereignty configured to accommodate foreign matter in exceptional spaces, while asserting Qatari cultural sovereignty over the domain punctuated by those spaces.
The city itself is the key mechanism by which this cultural sovereignty is both established and maintained. That tool, and the shape of the city it generates, is the subject to which I turn next.