Market Orientalism: Cultural Economy and the Arab Gulf States
Benjamin Smith
Language: English
Pages: 362
ISBN: 0815635222
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Although the Arab states of the Persian Gulf are leaders in many of the measures of absolute wealth that have traditionally defined success in the global economy, they have had a much harder time becoming accepted in the equally fractured and hierarchal realm of the cultural economy, where practices, signs, and perceptions of propriety matter. Market Orientalism examines how emerging markets are imagined as cultural economic spaces—spaces that are assembled, ranked, desired, and sometimes punished in ways built on earlier forms of dealing with “backward” economies and peoples. Such imaginations not only impact investment and guide policy, but also create stories of economic value that separate “us” from “them.” While market Orientalism functions anywhere that questions of “deserved” wealth come down to cultural/economic differences between places, Smith focuses on the Arab states of the Gulf. By combining field research with extensive analysis of news archives concerning the cultural economies of the Gulf states, Market Orientalism addresses important motivations for economic relations and provides a framework to analyze how prejudice, fashion, taste, and waste are vital to both narrow and widespread forms of economic activity.
good and bad, intriguing or not, comforting or exotic. Not surprisingly, these ideas are strongly influenced by classical cultural axes of difference such as gender, class, race, sexuality, and nation, which are always multidirectional and emotional/ affective in their impacts. Again, the Gulf provides a vivid example of the effect that this creation of hierarchy through structures of feeling can have. If “value” in the global economy is defined purely by something such as GDP per capita, then
purpose has always been a tricky proposition. There seems to be consensus, at least from the outside, that something called the Middle East must exist and that something about it must be coherent—but what exactly? What is often considered the Middle East contains great diversity. Large countries such as Turkey and Iran do not speak Arabic; even Arabic speakers from different areas do not speak the language in the same way. Multiple localized and transnational Islamic belief systems interact with
characteristics, actually existed. It also began to provide characters for the righteous morality play that discussions of Gulf cultural economic production were to become. All these oil strikes also meant that there were political and economic structures to build. 112 ✦ Market Orientalism The Long but Inevitable Road? In his 1946 New York Times article on Saudi Arabia, C. L. Sulzberger wrote: “Little by little, the land is slowly assuming its role in the modern world with foreign
Perhaps the best summary of the attitude the press took toward Gulf building in the 1970s is given in the title of one article: “Designers Freed from Cost Shackles” (Wilson 1977). The phenomenon of anticipatory building—which also dominated early 2000s coverage of the Gulf until the Dubai property crash—was a major fixture of the discourse in the 1970s. One comment was particularly evocative: “The visitor to Abu Dhabi today can almost watch it growing, like one of those exotic plants which open
set the standard for the “typical rich Arab” for decades to come. Khashoggi similarly became the extreme example taken as a type—a very common practice in market Orientalism that has the effect of heightening differences over commonalities. This image of the hypocritical Gulf businessman-playboy had become cemented by the end of the 1970s, as a report on Saudi Arabia following the attacks on the mosque in Mecca attest. “The simultaneous verbal attacks voiced in Mecca and broadcast from Iran drew