Space, Mobility, and Shifting Identities in the Constitution of the “Field”

This chapter reflects on the experiences of the authors during a combined three decades of research in Dubai, Doha, and Riyadh, highlighting their shifting and contingent subject positions as they moved through urban spaces in the Arabian Peninsula and interacted with various interlocutors during their dissertation research. It examines how prevalent ideas about identity in North American and European societies, which have heavily influenced postcolonial and postmodern anthropological attempts to be more inclusive and attentive to subject position, are also forms of baggage that academics bring to the field. The chapter draws on feminist and postcolonial traditions of reflexive ethnography that have deconstructed the figure of the social scientist as a neutral and unmarked observer. It also looks at the production of the Gulf expat as a symbolic field in which imperial histories, concepts of race, neoliberal urban development, and nationalism intersect. By exploring the role of Gulf expats as both migrant laborers and participants in labor exploitation and class hierarchy, the chapter encourages an approach to labor and migration in the Gulf that highlights the region's connection to global networks rather than one that reproduces tropes of its supposed exceptionalism.