Anthropology in the Arab Gulf: 21st-Century Mobilities, Paradoxes, and Protests, Part II
Panel 069, sponsored byAssociation of Middle East Anthropology (AMEA), 2015 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 22 at 2:00 pm
Panel Description
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.
Disciplines
Participants
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Dr. Marcia C. Inhorn
-- Organizer
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Dr. Mandana E. Limbert
-- Presenter
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Dr. Noor Al-Qasimi
-- Discussant
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Mrs. Rehenuma Asmi
-- Presenter
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Dr. Sarah Trainer
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Dr. Sarah Trainer
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.
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Mrs. Rehenuma Asmi
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.
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Dr. Mandana E. Limbert
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 desert 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.
