Brian Tilley Dissertation-Final
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ETHICS OF ACTIVITY: SOUTH ASIAN SHIA WORKING LIFE IN DUBAI by Brian Tilley A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland October 2016 © 2016 Brian Tilley All Rights Reserved Abstract This dissertation explains how environmental conditions foster ethics of behavior common to various spheres of life-activity: leisure, work, and religious practice, for instance. The research conceives present-day Dubai—the site of research—as a work environment (populated 90% by working expatriates). The city’s particular orientation to labor is an aspect of its immersion in regional and global flows: economic and natural. Dubai has grown a) as a trade entrepôt and a node in global supply chains, and b) by producing manufactured landscapes that overcome harsh environmental conditions. To evaluate the phenomenon of natural-material and environmental forces that foster ethics common to various life activities, the research follows members of Dubai’s Shia Muslim community of Indo-Pakistani heritage, as they move through various sites of daily activity. In doing so, the data note how dispositions of members transcend across experiences. Constrained in Dubai, but globally connected through kinship ties and sectarian identity, members transform the experience of religious practice and downtime activities with qualities particular to worklife. Despite a variety of limitations on activity in Dubai that members characterize as majbūrī (compulsion), particular experiences of work and qualities of the environment magnify ethics of both excess and efficiency germane to Shia practice. The constructed environment also helps manifest a range of aspirations and anxieties that are expressed in leisure-time activities. Urban architectures here are both projections of desire and objects of concealment—obscuring feared realities— ii especially for those employed in construction firms or who provide construction- related services. These are thus forms of imagination attuned to ethics of the often- precarious pursuit of work. Finally, the research sees “constraint” as an ethic of migrant living and space management in Dubai, which fosters a form of “disciplined creativity” in religious expression and poetic performance, in the space of audio recording studios. The dissertation committee members were Anand Pandian (primary advisor), Veena Das, Steven Caton, Erica Schoenberger, and Ryan Calder. iii Note on Transliteration The text of this dissertation includes a variety of Urdu, Arabic, Persian, and Pashto words. I have transliterated them into Roman script using the ALA-LC Romanization system, a popular standardized method. In a few cases, for better readability, I have slightly modified the ALA-LC guide to more closely hue to the system adopted in the Platts Dictionary of Urdū, Classical Hindī, and English (see Platts 1884). iv Acknowledgements The road to any achievement is beset with debts. This dissertation was the culmination of a mix of training and research that I began as an undergraduate student at Hamilton College in New York State in the early 2000s. There, I wrote my senior honors thesis in Asian Studies advised by the political scientist Cheng Li and by Anand Pandian. Drawn to what I took as Anand’s sensibility for philosophical and activist anthropology, I joined the anthropology Ph.D. program at Johns Hopkins University the same year he joined the department’s faculty, and he has been a guiding force in my academic development ever since. He has been an especially dedicated primary advisor and dissertation committee member through my dissertation research and writing phases, dedicating countless hours to responding to my writing as it took form. His high standards, attention to nuance and subtlety of argument, and commitment to pushing the boundaries of traditional anthropological inquiry have made me a better critical and creative thinker, and I owe Anand a debt for his guidance and commitment to me. The Johns Hopkins Anthropology Department, in the time of my most-direct involvement in day-to-day activities from 2007-2011, was as stimulating and nurturing an intellectual environment as I could have hoped. Many faculty were generous guides to me. In particular, my relationship with Veena Das—who served on my dissertation committee—developed first in coursework, and deepened in my dissertation research and writing phases. More than any other anthropologist, I feel the mark of her work—on forms of struggle and everyday life—on my own thinking in this dissertation, and I hope the pages below convey some of that impact, and my v gratitude for the gift of her scholarship and guidance. Niloofar Haeri was also an important advisor and advocate for me during my graduate career, and guide to the anthropology of the Middle East. Naveeda Khan was also an early advisor in my graduate career and guided me through literature in the anthropology of Islam especially. Strands of her work also crucially run through this dissertation, and helped me formulate my arguments. Other department faculty members who were influential at various stages of my development include Jane Guyer, Pamela Reynolds, Juan Obarrio, and Aaron Goodfellow. Many of my fellow graduate students in anthropology were stimulating colleagues and gave me generous feedback, structured and unstructured, through my career at Johns Hopkins, including especially Chitra Venkatarami, Maya Ratnam, Aditi Saraf, Caroline Block, Andrew Bush, Sylvain Perdigon, Bhrigupati Singh, and Bican Polat. And James Williams was a generous friend and sounding board for my ideas in the midst of my field research phase in Dubai. Outside of anthropology, I must thank two other members of my dissertation committee, Erica Schoenberger and Ryan Calder. Their reactions and generous advice will help me as continue to develop this manuscript. Elsewhere at Johns Hopkins, I wish to thank Chris Nealon and Hent de Vries who were guides to me in my coursework phase. At Hamilton College, I wish to thank Douglas Raybeck and Chris Chekuri, who helped spark my interest in anthropology and in the study of South Asia respectively, at an early stage. During my dissertation write-up, I had the good fortune integrate myself into the anthropology department at Harvard University as a visiting fellow, thanks to vi the commitment and generosity of Steve Caton, who served as my advisor there and ultimately as a member of my dissertation committee. Steve’s influential work initially compelled my interest in the anthropological study of poetry, and I was fortunate to have his guidance in my writing phase, especially related to scholarship on the Arabian Gulf region. Harvard Anthropology was very welcoming to me, and I benefitted especially from a dissertation writing group with Esra-Gökçe Sahin and Jared McCormick. I also enjoyed sustained interactions with Namita Dharia, Federico Perez, Peter McMurray, and George Paul Meiu. The economist Ishac Diwan helped expand my thinking on the political economy and development of the Arabian Gulf region. I was grateful for the opportunity to participate in and present a paper with the Political Anthropology Working Group, and to present a paper at a workshop on the Gulf region at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard. In the United Arab Emirates, I thank Jane Bristol-Rhys, a U.A.E.-based anthropologist who helped me get my bearings there early on. I also thank Ravi Sriramachandran and Amin Tejpar, scholars based in the country who offered generous feedback to me at times. Sankar, a family friend, provided very helpful logistical support at times. It is hard to begin to thank all of the people who participated in this research, in roles big and small. In many ways, this dissertation must be dedicated to them and to their forms of struggle, big and small, that I observed. To protect their privacy—and in keeping with ethnographic conventions—I do not name them here or in the dissertation text itself. I trust that they know who they are. My debt to them is in many ways my largest, and I hope that this dissertation stands as a testimonial to their experience in Dubai and the vii space we shared there over fifteen months in 2010-2012. This dissertation is a first step toward repaying my debt to them. I hope that they can see themselves in it. The study of Urdu language was an important entry point for me into the study of South Asia generally—and to the study of Indo-Pakistani migrant work in Dubai. Robert Phillips was a patient initial Urdu instructor, at the University of Wisconsin. As a Pashto language student at Wisconsin years later, Mark Kenoyer took a personal interest in my development at a crucial moment. Most especially, Aftab Ahmad and Wafadar Husain at the American Institute of Indian Studies in Lucknow in 2005-2006 were excellent teachers, who helped guide me through the subtleties of Urdu poetic expression. And in writing Chapter 5 especially, I had the benefit of feedback and assistance from Amy Bard at Harvard, whose work on South Asian Shia poetic performance helped spark my initial interest in these expressive traditions. I was fortunately to receive generous financial support for research and study through my academic career. My initial Urdu training was funded by the University of Wisconsin’s Center for South Asia and by a Berkeley Urdu Language Fellowship administered by the University of California. As a graduate student, my language training in Punjabi was supported by a Critical Language Scholarship from the U.S. Department of State, my training in Persian was generously funded by a language grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, while my study of Arabic, Pashto, and continued study of Hindi were funded by separate Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) grants, administered by the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Wisconsin, and Johns Hopkins University respectively.