Introduction
This introductory chapter provides an overview of the exoticizing and exceptionalist discourses about the Arabian Peninsula. This exceptionalism came to the fore in media and academic coverage of the “crisis” in the Gulf region. In general, the Gulf crisis was framed as a “diplomatic spat,” a spectacle marked by tropes of exceptionalism and Orientalism that diminished the importance of the Gulf region, its rulers, and, especially, the people who live there. These exceptionalist representations of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Qatar evacuate society of the social while rendering “culture” as fixed in timeless ideas of bedouins, Islam, indentured labor, and gender repression. This kind of history, politics, and culture writing erases the long and complex histories of class, anticolonial, and nationalist struggles that have marked the region as much as any other postcolonial context, and removes the agency and complex role of both citizens and noncitizens in forming the fabric of Gulf societies. This book then studies Gulf exceptionalism, assessing what it means to conduct ethnography in supposedly exceptional spaces.