Andrew Gardner

• PhD
• University of Puget Sound

Friends and Colleagues, I’m so very happy to announce the publication of my new book The Fragmentary City: Migration, Modernity, and Difference in the Urban Landscape for Doha, Qatar (Cornell 2024). This book is, foremost, a consideration of how sustained transnational labor migration has shaped the city of Doha and, by proxy, the other cities of t...

This brief essay describes programming at the University of Puget Sound that allows undergraduate students to pursue independent ethnographic research projects. This programming undergirds all three of the subsequent student essays included in this issue. The mission of this programming is to encourage "experiential learning"-an objective that is a...

This study analyzes the interaction and friction between tradition and modernity as experienced by Qatari women. We explore the experiences and perspectives of contemporary Qatari women across generations and their continuity and friction with the historical sociocultural past. The general aim was to discern and analyze the sociological reasons tha...

In anthropology's spatial turn, cultural anthropologists directed portions of their attention to the spaces in which human habitation takes shape. is article concerns the large planned spaces configured in the Modernist era of the twentieth century. Utilizing a fieldwork-based methodology that draws on the ethnographic toolkit, analysis compares an...

This essay describes a set of ideas and a related research project. As someone employed on a liberal arts campus west of the Cascade Mountains, I’ve been both astounded and disappointed by the stereotyping that I encounter amongst my colleagues and peers when thinking about rural fellow Americans, and particularly those east of the mountains here i...

A book review of Beyond Exception: New Interpretations of the Arabian Peninsula, by Ahmed Kanna, Amélie Le Renard, and Neha Vora (Cornell University Press).

This is a book review of Yasser Elsheshtawy's book Riyadh: Transforming a Desert City

This set of images seeks to provide viewers with a window into Doha, Qatar, and into the urban heart of the modern Middle East that’s arisen on the Arabian Peninsula. Designed as an exhibit of photography, the images include overlapping themes that explore particular facets or threads of the urban landscape and life therein. In the final accounting...

In this essay, I describe a conflagration stemming from a field-based ethnographic exercise I utilize in one of the courses I’ve designed and regularly teach. In my estimation, the contours of the conflagration I describe illuminate the institutional and ideological parameters of a paradigm that currently dominates contemporary American campuses. I...

Though transnational labour migration in the Gulf States has increasingly been of scholarly interest, that scholarship has to date relied largely on qualitative ethnographic methodologies or small non-representative sampling strategies. This chapter presents the findings of a large representative sample of low-income migrant labourers in Qatar. The...

This paper, grounded in a series of ethnographic projects concerned with transnational labor migration to the Arabian Gulf states, commences with an overview of the Indian Ocean migration system that shuttles tens of millions of temporary workers to and from the wealthy Gulf states. The remainder of the paper comprises two assertions and evidence t...

This study is the first attempt to ethnographically assess the influences of supermalls on cultural change. It takes a first step toward enhancing our understanding of the influences of globalization and consumer culture as drivers of the social and cultural changes to Qatar's traditional society, to similar cultural configurations in the Middle Ea...

In this chapter the authors assess the application of the circular migration framework to the six Gulf Cooperation Council member states of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Oman. By some estimations, the six GCC states comprise the third largest migratory destination in the contemporary world, and for decades these st...

Miriam Cooke . Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. viii + 214 pages, acknowledgements, notes, references, index. Hardcover US$65.00 ISBN 978-0-5202-8009-0. Paper US$29.95 ISBN 978-0-5202-8010-6. E-Book US$29.95 ISBN 978-0-5209-5726-8. - Volume 49 Issue 1 - Andrew Gardner, Eman Al-Mad...

Labor migrants in Qatar and neighboring states are regulated and governed by the kafala, or sponsorship system. By law, all foreign migrants are locked to a particular sponsor-employer for the duration of their stay. While the kafala has been a central feature in analyses of migration throughout the region, little attention has been devoted to the...

This article examines the resurgence of tribalism as a sociological component of contemporary Qatari society. Utilising an ethnographic, mixed-methods design, the article begins with a survey of the substantial scholarship concerning tribes in Arabia. That scholarship provides ideas and understandings that only partially explain the vitality of con...

Though transnational labor migration in the Gulf States has increasingly been of scholarly interest, that scholarship has to date relied largely on qualitative ethnographic methodologies or small non-representative sampling strategies. This paper presents the findings of a large representative sample of low-income migrant laborers in Qatar. The dat...

Allen J.Fromherz, Qatar: A Modern History (Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2012). Pp. 224. $29.95 cloth. - Volume 45 Issue 2 - Andrew Gardner

The petroleum‐rich states of the Arabian Peninsula comprise one of the principal transnational destinations for the global movement of labour. In the Gulf States, much of that labour force comes from South Asia. Legions of unskilled male labourers are typically housed in labor camps, a nomenclature that masks a wide variety of both formal and infor...

Background & Objectives: This presentation reports on the findings of a Qatar National Research Fund-sponsored study that is the first of its kind in the Gulf. Through a survey, the study examines the demographics, cost, migration arrangements, and the living and working conditions of low-income migrant workers in Qatar. Although much has been writ...

For many decades the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council have served as primary migratory destinations for tens of millions of individuals from South Asia, West Asia, and other points in the Indian Ocean world. While both historic and substantial in scale, these migration flows remain some of the most understudied movements in the contemporary w...

{Excerpt} Unpacking and applying the concept of structural violence is one of the principal tasks of this book. To be clear from the outset, however, in lodging the experiences of the men and women I encountered in the larger rubric of structural violence, I do not intend to imply that we should ignore the agency exerted in the scenario I've just d...

This paper provides an ethnographic window into the lives of the middle and upper classes of the substantial Indian diaspora in Bahrain. Like all the Gulf States, Bahrain hosts an extraordinarily large contingent of guest workers. Through a variety of historical conjunctures, Indians have long predominated in the flow of foreigners to the small isl...

The social sciences' interest in transnationalism has grown rapidly over the previous decade. The ethnographic case studies informing this burgeoning transnational literature, however, typically focus upon migration flows with one endpoint in the global North. This dissertation explores the experience of Indian transmigrants in contemporary Bahrain...

From a promontory in the deserts of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, it would not be uncommon to spot two, three, or more herds of sheep roaming in the gentle valleys below. Hardscrabble land, dusty plains, or the smooth lines of sand dunes -all are accustomed to use, and those who use them are undeterred by the seeming lack of vegetation. From that sa...

Corporate mergers in the oil and gas industry in the late 1990s were accompanied by reduced spending for exploration and drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf of the Gulf of Mexico, even though oil prices were skyrocketing. This lack of response to a favorable price environment is an anomaly for product market theories and can better be understoo...

Southern Louisiana has played host to the oil industry for nearly a century. While much of the contemporary activity is offshore, the communities of southern Louisiana provide labor and support to this vast enterprise. Truck-based transportation is one component of this support industry. In the past, the trucking industry meshed with the social and...