1. Introduction

NOTES 1. Introduction 1. Nor are accurate data available concerning the size or nationalities of these transmigrant populations, or even of the national populations (Kapiszewski 2001, 63). Scholars working in the Gulf point to several overlapping factors to explain this dearth of contextual data. Many of the sending countries lack the bureaucratic infrastructure to accurately gather data about the number of people departing for the Gulf (Nair 1999; Demery 1986, 19). Similarly, the coexistence of formal and in- formal migration conduits between South Asia and the Gulf would confound any simple calculations based on migration through formal channels even if such capaci- ties did exist. Conversely, because undocumented migration is rare in most of the Gulf states, one suspects that at least basic demographic data describing the national components of the foreign worker populations must exist. All the foreign workers I encountered in Bahrain, for example, had at one point been “properly” registered with the Population Registration Ministry and received an identity card listing their nationality and other data. Bahrain and most of its neighbors, however, release only aggregate demographic data concerning the foreign populations: we know, for example, that the Bahraini government counted 205,626 Asians in the 2001 census, but we have no idea how many of those Asians are from Bangladesh, India, and so forth. It is often suggested that this obfuscation refl ects the tenuous political and cultural climate of countries where these foreign populations often outnumber the citizenry (Kapiszewski 2001, 27; Leonard 2002, 215; 2003, 133). That only a handful of social scientists have had the opportunity or desire to explore these truly massive migratory conduits is compounded by the fact that the foreign populations in the Gulf states are uncharted territory in the larger ethnography of transnational migration, and the violence levied against these men and women is a reason for—and a product of—the silence concerning the lives of foreigners in the Gulf. 165 2. Anh Longva’s pathbreaking book on relations between citizens and foreign workers in Kuwait grazes this topic, but in calling the relationship a “structure of dominance,” she avoids directly engaging the violence produced in the lives of the men and women working in the Gulf states (Longva 1997). In effect, she focuses more on the inequalities in the distribution of power and less on the lived experiences of those dominated by that power. 3. This connection is perhaps most clearly distilled in Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois’s defi nition of structural violence as “the violence of poverty, hunger, social exclusion and humiliation” (2004, 1). 4. Sadly, he was released from his position three days before my arrival on the island. 5. I build here upon my many conversations with Sharon Nagy. 6. The terms fi nancescapes and mediascapes were coined by Arjun Appadurai (1996) and appear throughout this volume. 7. The Gulf Cooperation Council was formed in early 1981. Its membership com- prises the heads of the six Gulf states: Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and Oman (Zahlan 1989, 135). 8. The Bahrain government published the 2000 census in Arabic, English, and Malayalam. The newspapers expressed much consternation about the last of these: Indians claimed that Hindi is the national language of India, and hence Malayalam was a poor choice on the government’s part. The offi cial Bahraini response stated that the purpose behind the choice was simply to reach as many individuals as possible, and with the large Keralite community on the island, Malayalam was the logical choice. 9. Although most scholars report that citizenship in the Gulf states is not available to transmigrants (Leonard 2003, 139; Falzon 2003, 675), Bahrain and several other states allow foreigners to become citizens. Naturalization of Arab foreigners— and, particularly, Sunni Arab foreigners—is reportedly substantial (Wright 2008). For South Asians, however, naturalization is diffi cult and rare, particularly because a dem- onstration of facility with Arabic remains a key juncture in the application process. 10. These words appear on the Toastmasters Web page. 11. The name Santosh is a pseudonym. I use it because Santosh still lives and works in Bahrain, and I wish to protect him from repercussions for assisting me with this project. 12. “Bahrain Labour Minister Seeks Support for Scrapping Sponsorship System,” Gulf News (Dubai, UAE), May 28, 2009; “Date with History,” Gulf Daily News (Manama, Bahrain), May 14, 2009; “Bahrain to Halt Labour Sponsorship,” Al-Jazeera (Doha, Qatar), May 7, 2009. 2. Pearls, Oil, and the British Empire 1. Vertovec notes that “transnationalism (as long-distance networks) certainly preceded ‘the nation.’ Yet today these systems of ties, interactions, exchanges and 166 Notes to Pages 7–24 mobility function intensively and in real time while being spread throughout the world. New technologies, especially involving telecommunications, serve to connect such networks with increasing speed and effi ciency” (1999, 447). 2. Although this statement is generally true, it needs some qualifi cation. In Bahrain, Oman, and several other GCC states, wealthy and established South Asian transmigrants, albeit in limited numbers, have received GCC passports. Naturalization has occurred more widely, if sporadically, among Arab and Middle Eastern transmigrant populations in the GCC states. In Bahrain, the racial policies of naturalization are explicit rather than implicit: the law mandates a period of fi fteen years for Arab applicants, and twenty-fi ve years for non-Arab applicants. 3. In 2006, Bahrain’s crown prince and the Bahrain Defense Force’s commander in chief declared that a new labor law, under development at the time, would eventually lead to the scrapping of the sponsorship system. The changes being deployed at the time of this writing suggest something less than the wholesale scrapping of the sponsorship system, an issue explored in more depth in the concluding chapter of this book. 4. As Longva notes, “Lack of legal protection, the predominance of women [in the domestic sector], and low educational background combined to make domestic workers the most vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, a situation of which the labor- sending countries were acutely aware” (1997, 70). 5. In Bahrain, that threshold was BD250 ($663) a month at the time this research was conducted. Foreign workers seeking visas for family members must also secure permission from their sponsor. 6. Although there is some uniformity to the transmigrant experience in all the Gulf states, the unique social, cultural, historical, economic, and demographic facets of the individual states connote that neither Bahrain nor any of the other GCC states can serve as an unadulterated proxy for its neighbors. This suggests that the experience of foreigners in each of these respective states, while similar, is not the same. For example, the petroleum wealth in Qatar, Kuwait, and portions of the United Arab Emirates far outpaces that of Bahrain and Oman—a fact that, in these wealthier states, results in more housemaids per house, different attitudes concerning the work appropriate for the citizenry, and an expanded welfare system. The ethnic patterns of both the citizenry and foreign communities also differ: Oman through both its proximity to the African continent and through its historical relations with Zanzibar, Saudi and its long accommodation of Yemeni transmigration, and Bahrain and its long-standing connections to Iran, are all factors in shaping the variable ethnic relations in these respective states. So in spite of the commonalities among the Gulf states—all have a citizenry composed predominately of Arabs, all discourage assimila- tion, all provide roughly the same sort of work for transmigrants, all are engaged in the process of trying to compel or persuade their burgeoning young population to take the sort of jobs now held by foreign workers—there is nonetheless signifi cant varia- tion among them. The experiences of the Indian transmigrants in Bahrain can only serve as a rough proxy for the experience of foreign workers in the Gulf as a whole. Notes to Pages 28–30 167 7. I nonetheless continue to refer to this collection of islands in the singular, not only because this is common usage in Bahrain itself but also because through the contin- ual infi ll in the bays near Manama, the many islands are seemingly merging into one. 8. The Persians controlled the island until 1718, when the Arabs of what is today Oman gained control of the island (Lorimer 1908b, 836–37). By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Hawala Arabs (Arabs from Persia) lived on the island in great numbers and are still represented today (837). In 1753, the Persians again moved on the island. They were driven from the islands by the Ütub in 1783 (839). The Portuguese were ousted from Bahrain in 1602 (Khuri 1980, 17). 9. Writing in 1908, J. G. Lorimer of the Indian Civil Service described the fol- lowing groups: the Baharinah, although not really a tribe, consisted of those Shi’a who, as families, predated the arrival of the Sunni al-Khalifas. The Sunni Hawala, mostly townsmen, were (and are) Arabs from Persia who claim an Arabian tribal genealogy. In addition to the Ütub, two other Sunni tribes—the Dawasir and the Sadah—made their home on the island. As a mercantile hub for the region, the island also accommodated Persians, Basra Arabs, Hindus, and Jews. 10. Wallerstein originally posited the world-system framework in the social sci- ences, but it was Wolf’s revision of this framework that most captured the attention of anthropologists, particularly for his contention that the “history” of the peoples who came into contact with colonial powers, and more importantly, the history of the cultural and mercantile interconnections between those peoples, predated European contact (Wallerstein 1974; Wolf 1982).

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