Migrant Dreams

Samuli Schielke

Description

• Based on ten years of ethnographic research


• The book's relevance extends beyond Egypt and the Middle East, for it also makes understandable the tremendous power of the dream of migration across the Global South today, and also how that dream may relate to contemporary American and European anxieties about migration.


• Migration is a hot topic and will continue to be


• Paperback original, perfect for course adoption

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Preface

1. Truman Show

2. The Travel to Doha

3. Guarding the Bank

4. A Narrow Circle

5. Enduring and Resisting

6. Families Only

7. Everything Circles around Money Here

8. Things Money Must Buy

9. Dreaming of the Inevitable

10. To Have Other Dreams

11. A Bigger Prison

12. Until the End of Oil

13. Normality and Excess

14. Estrangement and Faith

15. The Shine of the Metropolis

16: Economy is Not Rational, and Fantasy is not Free

References

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Middle East
• Anthropology
• Social
• Migration
• Culture

Informations

• Publié par: The American University in Cairo Press
• Date de parution: 07 avril 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781617979736
• Langue: English

Extrait

Migrant Dreams
Migrant Dreams
Egyptian Workers in the Gulf States




Samuli Schielke






The American University in Cairo Press Cairo New York
This electronic edition published in 2020 by The American University in Cairo Press 113 Sharia Kasr el Aini, Cairo, Egypt One Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020 www.aucpress.com

Copyright © 2020 by Samuli Schielke

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN 978 977 416 956 4 eISBN 978 161 797 973 6

Version 1
In loving memory of Daniela Swarowsky (1960–2019)
Bull, shake off your blinders and refuse to walk in circle Break the gears of the water wheel . . . Curse and spit The bull: Just one more step . . . and one more step Until I reach the end of the trail, or the well dries up How strange!
— Salah Jahin
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Preface
1. The Truman Show
2. Traveling to Doha
3. Guarding the Bank
4. A Narrow Circle
5. Enduring and Resisting
6. Families Only
7. Everything Circles around Money Here
8. Things Money Must Buy
9. Dreaming of the Inevitable
10. To Have Other Dreams
11. A Bigger Prison
12. Until the End of Oil
13. Normality and Excess
14. Estrangement and Faith
15. The Shine of the Metropolis
Final Chapter: Economy Is Not Rational, and Fantasy Is Not Free

Notes
Bibliography
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T he ideas presented in this book are the outcome of conversations with others. I have tried to credit and acknowledge them whenever possible. My apologies to those I have forgotten. For the sake of privacy, the people about whom this book tells do not appear in it with their real names, and the names of companies and some locations have been changed.
The first version of this book was published in Arabic translation in 2017 with the title Hatta yantahi alnaft (Until the End of Oil) at Sefsafa Publishing House in Cairo, Egypt. As compared to the Arabic translation, which was based on an unpublished manuscript, this edition has been substantially revised and expanded by two chapters. Special thanks are due to Amr Khairy for translating, to Mohamed El-Baaly for publishing the Arabic edition, and to the readers of the Arabic edition, whose feedback has been crucial for the shaping of this English version.
My greatest thanks go to the people of the village that in this book is called Nazlat al-Rayyis, to the workers of the unnamed company in Doha whose book this is, and to my wife, Daniela Swarowsky, whose documentary film series Messages from Paradise provided the starting point for my research for this book, and who encouraged me to write this book in this way.
Thanks are also due to Paola Abenante, Khaled Adham, Muhammad AlAraby, Aymen Amer, Knut Graw, Kevin Eisenstadt, Alice Elliot, Paolo Gaibazzi, Omneya El-Gameel, Pascale Ghazaleh, Bettina Gräf,
Lucile Gruntz, Martin Holbraad, Amr Khairy, Aymon Kreil, Annika Lems, Aïssatou Mbodj-Pouye, Jennifer Peterson, Eman Salah, Ahmed Salem, Sertaç Sehlikoğlu, Mukhtar Saad Shehata, Nayera Abdelrahman Soliman, Manja Stephan-Emmrich, Mohamed Tabishat, Jelena Tošić, Mustafa Wafi, Dina Wahba, and Abdelrehim Youssef. Further thanks go to the participants of the study circle “Anthropological Readings on Our Contemporary World” at Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, 2014– 17, as well as to Michael Baers and Kevin Dean for copyediting, the AUC Press editors Nadia Naquib, Anne Routon, and Nadine El-Hadi for their enthusiasm and engagement toward publishing this book, and Bassem Muhammed Abu Gweili and Samia Jaheen for generously allowing me to reproduce their copyrighted materials in this book.
I have presented parts of this book at various stages of completeness to various audiences, from whose feedback and critique I have greatly profited, as follows: Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in 2009 and 2017, the European Conference of African Studies in Uppsala in 2011, SIEF conference in Lisbon in 2011, Humboldt University of Berlin in 2012, Boston University in 2016, University of Copenhagen in 2016, EASA conference in Milan in 2016, University of Bern in 2016, Nahda Art School in Cairo in 2016, El-Balad Bookstore in Cairo in 2017, Wekalet Behna in Alexandria in 2017, University of Bayreuth in 2017, the conference of the German Anthropological Association in Berlin in 2017, and the workshop “Post-2011 Arab Diasporas and Home-Making in Berlin” in 2019.
Research and writing for this book were made possible by my employments at Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient and Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The final stage of writing and revision was also supported by an ERC Consolidator Grant (ERC-2013-CoG, 617970, CARP) on the anthropology of revolutions and by project funding by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation on the search for a normal life.
PREFACE
W hat does being a migrant worker in the Arab Gulf states do to one’s hopeful dreams? What kind of dreams of a good or better life motivate labor migration, and what kind of dreams do migrants learn to pursue through the experience of migration? What do those dreams—be they realistic and productive, or fantastic and unlikely—do to the social worlds of the people who pursue them?
Much like its English equivalent, the Arabic term hilm refers to both nighttime dreams and hopeful imaginations. While nighttime dreams are unbound by the laws and logic of the waking world, hopeful dreams imply the possibility, the desire, and the need to make them come true— such as in Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The “dream” in this second sense is a vernacular theory of aspiration. It is about having something to strive for, something to pursue. Such hopeful dreams are the stuff from which labor migration is made.
This book follows Egyptian men who migrated as workers to the Gulf, returned, then migrated again. Its focus is on conversations I have had with one man in particular, Tawfiq, 1 about his dreams and experiences over the years, combined with encounters with other people in similar circumstances, and my observations of their lives and struggles in Egypt and work sites abroad. Tawfiq and the other migrants whose knowledge and experience inform my argument have expressed to me their often sharp and critical understanding of their own condition, the dreams they pursue, and the structural constraints and potentials within which they live. With their help, I try to tell the story of a society where migratory movement to metropolitan centers dominates both the socially conservative dream of realizing a stable life lived in material comfort and other dreams that exceed the taken-for-granted social imagination of a good life.
We often think of imagination as a site of freedom, but this book’s key argument is that just as the economy is not rational, the imagination is also not free. Some aspirational dreams are so compelling that it is almost impossible not to pursue them, such as marriage and house-building in Egypt. Contemporary labor migration thrives on and propels two different powers of the hopeful imagination: one that reproduces taken-for-granted values and expectations and another that may exceed them. Understood from the point of view of such aspirational dreams—some of them strange and unlikely, others very ordinary and so compelling that pursuing them becomes practically inevitable—migration emerges as a productive yet open-ended societal dynamic. On the one hand, it guides and limits the scope of migrants’ imagination when wildly unrealistic dreams of quick wealth and a world of freedom and opportunities that originally may have motivated migratory trajectories become directed toward the more realistic goal of saving money for legitimate moral ends. On the other hand, the logic of social reproduction inherent in viable dreaming becomes in itself unsettled when migrant money transforms rural societies, and some migrants develop a horizon of experiences and expectations that exceeds the social imaginary of an ordinary, good life.
My inquiry is shaped by two productive tensions: the permanent condition of cyclical impermanence, with workers moving to and from the Gulf, and, second, the way migration opens up possibilities of social mobility while also creating its own pressures and conflicts. Rather than looking at either the Gulf states or Egypt, I try to think about the interrelation of the two in a world where villages across the Global South are in the process of being transformed into suburbs of the Gulf. Similarly, in analytical terms I am attempting to combine apparent opposites, developing a non-dichotomous approach where money and morals, imagination and materiality are not polar opposites or parallel worlds but exist on the same plane of reality. Working in the Gulf for money is a moral, spiritual condition, and imagination is a scarce resource.
Contrary to conventions of anthropological and other academic writing, the book does not begin with a detailed theoretical engagement with relevant literature. In the final chapter of the book, I elaborate how the proposal I make builds on existing research on migrations in the Gulf and elsewhere, different approaches to imagination, and both existential and political–economic approaches to migration. I have chosen to begin directly with the ethnographic encounter, following the leads it offers step by step. This is also in line wi