Anthropology and the Educational Encounter

This chapter focuses on the author's experiences teaching, researching, and moving between different spaces in Education City, Doha, as it developed and changed during the period of the author's fieldwork. It looks at how Qatar Foundation responded to criticisms, primarily from segments of the citizenry that felt left out of knowledge economy development, through the development of Hamad bin Khalifa University (HBKU). HBKU's formation reconfigured space within the Education City compound and changed the author's everyday mobility within it, as it did her students' and colleagues'. The chapter explores these changes in order to consider how anthropological categories of difference and the university's approach to incorporating oppositional politics migrated along with American institutions, disciplinary formations, and faculty and administrators. While many of these changes, such as moves to segregate formerly coeducational spaces, may have appeared to Western academics as a backlash that fit into their exceptionalizing ideas of Qatari culture and gender norms, or failure of liberalism in illiberal space, oppositional logics were not always pegged to conservative religiosity but rather part of critiques of broader imperial practices within certain, and not all, parts of the country.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter explores the question of what decolonized ethnography and academia can look like. It argues that de-exceptionalizing the Arabian Peninsula as a field site requires deconstructing an idealized vision of Western academia as a presumed site of democracy and liberalism. The projects of anthropology and sociology, as they have been invested in anticolonial and antiracist justice and breaking down binary understandings between East and West, self and other, civilized and savage, are implicated in the continuing use of the exceptional and spectacular as tropes in ethnographic writing, revealing just how much work is yet to be done within their disciplines. Within these disciplines, some have questioned the various hierarchies that are realized through the production of knowledge, not only between the social scientists and their “objects” or “fields,” but also among social scientists themselves, particularly the ways in which power relations in terms of status, racialized identification, class, and gender shape perceptions of their expertise or lack thereof. The chapter then assesses how centering not only the Arabian Peninsula but gender, sexuality, race, household, and other topics that have until now been seen as marginal might provide better information about the societies social scientists study as well as transnational processes, globalization, and the contemporary world.

Class Struggle and De-exceptionalizing the Gulf

This chapter presents a class-struggle perspective to the question of labor exploitation in the Arabian Peninsula, focusing on the figure of the foreign worker. Both liberal and neocolonial Western representations of the working-class migrant have been central to exceptionalizing discourses. In the popular imagination of many in the Global North/West, the Gulf region is almost automatically associated with hyperexploited, abused workers, primarily from South Asia. While these discourses are not entirely a fabrication—massive exploitation based on the racialization and patriarchal gendering of labor in the Gulf is very real—there is at the same time a disavowal in these Orientalist discourses that is either duplicitous or naive. Seen from a feminist and Marxist class-struggle perspective, the racialized exploitation of foreign workers is perhaps the aspect of Gulf societies that is most similar to the neoliberal societies of the North. The Gulf is least exceptional with respect to its regimes of labor exploitation.

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.