ARAB GULF PANEL ABSTRACTS AND TITLES
Anthropology in the Arab Gulf: 21st-Century Mobilities, Paradoxes, and Protests
Organizer: Marcia C. Inhorn (Yale University)
Session 1: Mobilities
Chair: Noor Al-Qasimi (U Exeter)
The Anthropologist as Migrant Worker: Encounters of Privilege, Discrimination, and Governmentality in the Gulf
(Ahmed Kanna, U Pacific)
Intimate Mobilities: Migrating Out of the Social Contract in Asia
(Pardis Mahdavi, Pomona College)
Studying Medical Tourism: Lessons from Yemeni Medical Travelers
(Beth Kangas, TAARII)
Cosmopolitan Conceptions? IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai
(Marcia Inhorn, Yale U)
Discussant: Christopher Davidson (Durham U)
Panel Session 2: Paradoxes and Protests
Chair : Christopher Davidson, (Durham U)
Piety, Glamour, and Protest: Performing Social Identities in the Modern UAE
(Sarah Trainer, Arizona State U)
Majlis Musings: Upper Class Qatari Women Debate Power Paradoxes in the Qatari Majlis
(Rehenuma Asmi, Alleghany College)
When Goods Go Bad: Financialization, Crisis and Expatriate Life in Dubai
(Behzad Sarmadi, U Toronto)
Road Building and Development Fatigue in Southern Arabia
(Mandana Limbert, Queens College, CUNY)
Discussant: Noor Al-Qasimi (U Exeter)
Anthropology in the Arab Gulf: 21st-Century Mobilities, Paradoxes, and Protests
Organizer: Marcia C. Inhorn (Yale University)
Anthropology in the Arab Gulf: 21st-Century Mobilities, Paradoxes, and Protests
Panel Abstract
In the 21st century, a new generation of scholars is expanding the theoretical and ethnographic horizons of Middle Eastern anthropology through research on a number of uncharted topics and territories. Of all of the regions in the Middle East, the Arab Gulf has been least studied—until now. This double session represents the new anthropology of the Arab Gulf, based on cutting-edge field research in five Arab Gulf nations. Three important themes emerge from this new Arab Gulf ethnography. The first is mobility. The Arab Gulf is a region in motion, not only internally, but through many forms of human travel, movement, and resettlement, particularly between the Gulf and other parts of Asia. This panel explores contemporary global flows in and out of the Gulf, including of migrant labor, medical travelers, and researchers themselves. These papers highlight what one scholar has called the “intimate mobilities” of workers who are hoping for different lives and new affective relations in the Gulf countries, as well as those who are sick and barren and hope to achieve healing and conception in new Gulf medical tourism destinations. The second theme of these papers is paradox. Hyper-modernization, including the rapid development of infrastructures, urban landscapes, housing projects, medical facilities, and universities, has led to often paradoxical outcomes. Scholars in this panel examine new forms of power and oppression in Gulf women lives, as well as among those who have “bought into,” literally and figuratively, modern urban infrastructures. Some of the paradoxes of modernity include conflicts over work lives and family expectations, individual debt crises and household economic collapse, and overarching “development fatigue” among citizens who are expected to champion nation-building projects. Finally, this panel explores intimate forms of protest in the Arab Gulf. Women are challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about marriage and respectability. Migrants to the Gulf, including anthropological researchers themselves, are questioning rigid “ethnocracies” of power and privilege. Medical travelers reveal their frustrations and disappointments with the quality and limitations on high-tech medical care. And citizens of Gulf states, or those who have made investments in these countries, question the success of new infrastructural projects and forms of financialization. This double session of eight anthropologists, and two well-known Gulf Studies discussants, speaks to both the aspirations and human costs of new regimes of power, value, and morality in the 21st-century Arab Gulf.
Session I: Mobilities
Chair: Noor Al-Qasimi (University of Exeter)
The Anthropologist as Migrant Worker: Encounters of Privilege, Discrimination, and Governmentality in the Gulf
Ahmed Kanna (University of the Pacific)
While there is a significant and voluminous literature on the rigid and hierarchical structure of migration sponsorship in the Gulf (kafala) and how it determines migrant experiences, scholars have paid far less attention to how migrant identities are fluid and contingent upon geographical location, interactions with other Gulf residents, and a range of other factors that make migrants not pre-determined but rather always in a process of becoming. In this paper, I explore the experiences of American and non-white anthropological field researchers in the Gulf as a means to illuminate our roles in the structural and material conditions and meanings of migration in the contemporary Gulf. How do differently situated actors experience the position of temporary residence and contract work in the region, and how does this shift as they move through Gulf cities and interact with various other residents? In what ways does the category of migrant homogenize diverse gendered, national, class, and embodied experiences? Reflecting on the positionalities of anthropologists who are US citizens but who also occupy a diversity of other categories (Arab, Muslim, male, South Asian, non-Muslim, female), we utilize our own experiences of discrimination, privilege, and misrecognition to explore how we were categorized in relation to local Gulf notions of belonging and outsiderness, how we ourselves participated in categorizing others, and—most importantly—how our identities were not fixed but negotiated and interpellated in relation to the spaces we occupied, our insider/outsider belonging in existing diasporic communities, and our privileged positions as American citizens and researchers. How can the position of the foreign anthropologist, especially the anthropologist who traverses various boundaries of identity, be a fruitful site for the critical analysis of the anthropology of migration? We argue that reflexive accounts by Gulf scholars can reveal how scholars themselves play a role in the production of the notion of migration (and of migrants) as an object of knowledge, and that in interrogating the scholar-as-migrant, anthropology of migration in the Gulf could potentially problematize Western categories that still underpin our understandings of contemporary life in the region.
Intimate Mobilities: Migrating Out of the Social Contract in Asia
Pardis Mahdavi, PhD
Drawing on over ten years of fieldwork in the migrant receiving countries of the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, and more recent ethnography in migrant sending countries of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Cambodia, this paper foregrounds the intimate lives of migrants as a major decision making factor in seeking mobility from one part of Asia to another. Contrary to common frameworks of migration that focus on poverty and economic reasons as “push” factors, many of my interlocutors narrate social and intimate reasons for wanting to migrate. Specifically, young women and men describe wanting to migrate not out of poverty, but out of their families and communities. Migrants indicate a desire to migrate away from unwanted or arranged marriages, familial pressures, and social contracts that require them to perform within communal expectations. Some migrate in search of love or adventure abroad, hoping to form new intimate bonds away from the watchful eyes of their social communities. Others feel that they can only express their sexualities when they will not be in a space where they may bring shame on their families. Migrants thus move seeking emotional and social mobility, which may also result in upward class mobility for families back home. This aspect of migration, which I call intimate mobilities, results in the formation of new sexual identities and foregrounds the intimate lives of migrants which have been eclipsed in current literature that focuses exclusively on the circumstances or type of labor of migrants across Asia. In this talk, I explore the multidimensional lives of migrants, chronicling their complex decision making factors as they seek to define and work with and within their mobility and immobility. I draw on ethnographic interviews with migrant men and women moving from South and Southeast Asia to West Asia (or the Middle East), as well as their kin and loved ones who remain ‘home’, but whose intimate lives are intricately touched by the migration of a loved one. In so doing, I explore the liminality of migrants and their families as they employ flexibility in redefining home, the self, belonging, and subjectivity in and through migration.
Studying Medical Tourism: Lessons from Yemeni Medical Travelers
Beth Kangas (TAARII)
International medical travel – patients traveling in order to pursue diagnostic and therapeutic options in other countries – has become a worldwide phenomenon over the past decade. Studies of this phenomenon, commonly referred to as “medical tourism,” have also proliferated. Many of these studies have focused on patients from relatively wealthy countries seeking care and recovery in equal or less wealthy destinations. Few studies have examined the motivations and experiences of patients from low-income countries (beyond the elite) who sacrifice greatly to travel abroad for care that is unavailable in their own countries. This paper revisits over two years of ethnographic data from the 1990s in Yemen and among Yemeni medical travelers in Jordan and India in light of recent scholarship on medical tourism in order to underscore important commonalities and differences within the trend of international medical travel. For example, medical journeys worldwide entail the common logistics of transportation and accommodations, although the specific ways of meeting these needs can vary dramatically. Medical journeys are often motivated by the desire to alleviate suffering; the particular circumstances and procedures involved are worth illuminating, however. Medical journeys are usually undertaken because of the unfulfilled expectations that patients have for their nation-state and its provision of care; the expectations themselves and the reasons behind the lack of care locally need to be uncovered. Except for medical journeys for “natural” therapies, international medical travel often involves procedures that are technological; the specific technologies and their development are worth exploring. Finally, medical journeys occur within a common global arena; however, medical travelers, as well as their nation-states, have differing access to the resources available within this global arena. As this paper demonstrates, ethnographic data on the international medical travel of patients from Yemen highlight necessary complexities within the global phenomenon of what has been called medical tourism.
Cosmopolitan Conceptions? IVF Sojourns in Global Dubai
Marcia C. Inhorn (Yale University)
Dubai is an emerging global city and a new medical tourism hub. In the 21st century, thousands of infertile couples are traveling from parts of Africa, Asia, Euro-America, and the Middle East to Dubai in desperate quests for conception. These reproductive travelers are often fleeing home countries where IVF services are absent, inaccessible, illegal, or harmful. As an emerging global “reprohub,” Dubai sits squarely in the center of a “reproscape”—a world of assisted reproduction in motion—characterized by new “reproflows” of actors, technologies, and body parts. This paper explores the reproductive travel of 125 infertile couples from 50 different nations of origin who are seeking assisted conception in Dubai’s in vitro fertilization (IVF) sector. Conceive, the “medically cosmopolitan” clinic featured in this study, attempts to delivers high-quality, patient-centered IVF across national, ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural boundaries to its many incoming “reprotravelers.” Yet, cosmopolitan clinics such as Conceive are rare within the Emirates and the Middle East at large. Patients often lament the fact that medically and culturally competent care is lacking in the UAE, as well as in countries “back home.” Furthermore, access to a full range of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) is seriously challenged by the UAE’s recent Federal Law No. 11, which can be considered one of the most draconian ART laws in the world. The new law, coupled with preferential treatment for Emiratis in the government’s only publically funded IVF clinic, means that reprotravelers to Dubai face high costs, catastrophic expenditures, and legally imposed religious bans on donor eggs, sperm, embryos, surrogacy, and selective abortion of excess IVF fetuses. These legal bans force some infertile couples to become “reproductive outlaws,” moving betwixt and between the UAE and countries such as India and Lebanon, in order to procure the reproductive services they need. Despite the new law, preimplantation genetic diagnosis to screen IVF embryos for genetic diseases and sex (i.e., male or female) is legally permissible in the UAE, leading to new forms of travel for sex selection, particularly to ensure the birth of sons. These paradoxes and complexities serve as a cautionary tale, challenging the oft-cited term “reproductive tourism” as the most appropriate descriptor for IVF-related travel. Increasing reproductive mobility to places like Dubai bespeaks the need for new forms of 21st-century activism, not only to ensure basic reproductive rights, but to prevent reproductive illegality and discrimination.
Discussant: Christopher Davidson (Durham University)
Session II: Paradoxes and Protests
Chair: Christopher Davidson (Durham University)
Piety, Glamour, and Protest: Performing Social Identities in the Modern UAE
Sarah Trainer (Arizona State University)
In this paper on young Emirati women’s lives, I engage with a number of broad themes. This includes theoretical work exploring the ways in which space and place influence and shape adornment and behavior patterns; historical and current research on the global “Islamic Fashion Industry”; and popular and academic perspectives on the accelerated development trajectories experienced by the Arab Gulf in recent decades, as well as on the increasing importance of international expectations in diverse areas ranging from expected roles for women in a “modern society” to how an ideal female body should look. I then situate these discussions within the specific context of the UAE. I focus on the fashion choices and performances that female Emirati students attending public university in the UAE create across different social and physical spaces, as well as the ways in which these feed into dynamic presentations of self, paying particular attention to the ways in which these self-presentations are constructed in relation to on-campus social interactions, as well as the novelty of many of these interactions and performances. The university campuses allow forms of socializing, performative interactions, and body adornment to develop that often could not be replicated in other physical spaces, off-campus. As a result, women re-craft important sociocultural values, forms of reciprocity, and ways of being in the world that dominate other areas of their lives. I highlight here the ways in which university campuses serve as pivotal sites where young women participate in particular types of social interactions constructed around specific presentations of self. Building from Butler’s work, I focus on young women’s constructions of identity via particular types of performativity and the ongoing processes by which they actively engaged in “self-making” through behaviors, speech, gestures, and fashion. I also propose that UAE universities provide a performative space in which young women are able to “try on” different types of presentation of self and identity that they would not otherwise have been able to experiment with. Universities are thus not only spaces for education but also for social performance, performances moreover that clearly reflect the contradictory forces flowing through women’s lives on- and off-campus.
Majlis Musings: Upper Class Qatari Women Debate Power Paradoxes in the Qatari Majlis
Rehenuma Asmi (Allegheny College)
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As Qatari women attend and graduate from institutions of higher education and some enter the work force, their mobility and visibility increasingly juxtaposes their roles in the family and tribe with their new roles as equal partners in the creation of a new nation. This produces a “power paradox,” a term Hegland (1998) uses to describe the work of Peshawar shi’a women in Pakistan who are needed to recruit and mobilize other women to the religious movement, but whose movement challenges the gender segregation in the community. The power paradox is useful for thinking about Qatari women’s majlis discussions on changing norms related to marriage, gender and sexuality for Qatari women. The women know they have increasing forms of cultural capital in one arena, education, but lack power and status granted through marriage and kinship, where gender segregation, veiling and family name protect women’s social status. I argue that Qatari women combine the different forms of capital available to them, such as family names, veiling and education, in order to adapt to these “power paradoxes” and to find ways out of them. My research is based on eleven months of field work in Doha, the capital city of Qatar, where I attended several women’s majlis gatherings. During these gatherings, upper class Qatari women discussed social and personal issues that ranged from work to family to politics. These discussions reflect a critical moment in the burgeoning Qatari nation, where women are seen as potential allies and supporters in what Najmabadi calls the “heteronormative” state, but they also speak to the women’s creativity and power within the paradoxical contexts they find themselves in. These women are constricted by narrow definitions of gender, but also open to new possibilities of gender performance in the new Qatari nation.
When Goods Go Bad: Financialization, Crisis and Expatriate Life in Dubai Behzad Sarmadi (University of Toronto) Dubai’s superlative urbanism continues to be the subject of much scholarship across a wide variety of disciplines. Yet the conflation of real estate and financial markets underpinning this urbanism has only recently been addressed through the notion of “diversification by urbanization” (Buckley and Hanieh 2014). What is more, the actual practices and shared imaginings of middle class foreign residents who pursued the emergent forms of credit and property derived from this conflation remain understudied. This paper is intended to addresses this lacuna. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted among middle-class Iranians struggling during the heyday of Dubai’s recent economic crisis (2010), I weave together recent interventions in the anthropology of ethics, property, and finance. I examine shared understandings about the ethically productive value of property ownership in so-called ‘New Dubai’, the “anticipatory logic” (Ong 2011) it involved, and the reversal of this value into “radical risk” (Saegert et al. 2009) with the onset of crisis. At a moment when anthropology’s concern with property is increasingly focused on its juridical mutations and the technologies of exchange, I return to the more conventional category of landed property. I do so in order to examine the “kinds of persons” (Hacking 1986) produced when so-called ‘real’ property is entangled with ‘fictitious’ capital. More specifically, I ask: How did the historically unprecedented introduction of “freehold” property ownership in Dubai depart from the long-standing property regime working to differentiate citizens and non-citizens according to a hierarchy of belonging? What kinds of moral value did my Iranian interlocutors associate with freehold property ownership here? How did these ‘goods’ turn to ‘bads’ with onset of the crisis? And to what extent did their pursuit of freehold property coincide with their conscription into an untested regime of financial credit? I suggest that such questions bear urgency given that Dubai’s experiment with “diversification by urbanization” continues to be reproduced throughout the region.
Road Building and Development Fatigue in Southern Arabia Mandana Limbert (Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York) This paper explores changing development and infrastructure projects, as well as the people’s understandings of them, at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries in the Sultanate of Oman. With the 1970 coup d’état that brought Sultan Qaboos bin Said al-Bu Saidi to power, Oman began to witness highly dramatic transformations. Within ten years, roads, hospitals, and schools among many other changes, altered the infrastructural and social landscape of the country. The drive for development has continued, functioning in many ways as what James Ferguson once called an “anti-politics machine.” This paper asks, however: What happens to people’s sense of “change” and “development” after 45 years of intensive infrastructural work that served not only to “modernize” Oman, but to shape a sense of national pride and regime loyalty? How might “development” be changing when it has served for so long as the underlying logic of state legitimacy? This paper attends to the intense focus in Oman on road building as it provides a continuation of the logic of development, while also serving national pride in engineering and a highly visible form of national connectivity. Highways along the coast, highways into the rugged and difficult mountain terrain, and, now, highways across the dessert to Saudi Arabia that will require constant sand removal have become visible and glorified projects. At the same time, this paper also argues, after 45 years of development work, the threat and instances of what can be called “development fatigue” are palpable. The language of progress and infrastructural improvement may also have its political limits, not only because they fail or expectations are not fulfilled, but because they become so taken-for-granted and constant that they lose their aura. In their place, cynicism, disregard, and even boredom may prevail, even if people also recognize that failure in infrastructure or a halt to development would hardly go unnoticed. Discussant: Noor Al-Qasimi (University of Exeter)
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