Citation:
Thesis Type:
PhD dissertationAbstract:
In this dissertation, my primary aims are threefold: to contribute to the anthropological and regional studies' discussion about the Arabian-Persian Gulf region; to investigate the concrete manifestations of what Mike Davis (1992) has called "the sociology of the boom"; and to develop the connection between anthropology's concerns with the concrete and everyday, and (Frankfurt School) critical theory's dialectical analysis of the processes of the "aestheticization" of the everyday.
The Arabian Gulf region has been largely ignored by scholars interested in cultural and social processes. Although there are a few notable exceptions, anthropologists, historians, and sociologists have generally conceded the debate to policy-driven scholars with rather specialized agendas focusing on the development of the "Oil State." The work here is based on approximately fourteen months' fieldwork in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Dubai is a peculiar example of boom urbanization. With a population that has increased nearly twenty-fold since the late 1960s, a majority expatriate population working in the service industries, and a national minority jealously guarding its relative wealth, the semi-independent city-state has been undergoing a rapid and radical, if not fundamental, change in its urban form and morphology. The city fathers, who form a super-elite class in control of powerful holding corporations, have been embarking upon a program of remaking the city from a regional re-export node into a world city whose image jostles the likes of Sydney, Hong Kong, and even New York.
City inhabitants, meanwhile, have not been passively going along with this program. I look, mainly, at three different groups: locals who are proponents of these changes; locals who are critical; and South Asian expatriates, the largest group in Dubai, and also one of its most politically and economically marginalized. My results point toward the important role of idioms of time and space in everyday attempts to grapple with these often traumatizing circumstances: from nostalgic idylls of "a village that is no more," to futuristic idylls of a "brave new city," to South Asians' idioms of transience and uncertainty.