Qatari Ethnography

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course will devote considerable attention to Qatari State and Society from the remnants of the archeological records to current debates on its ethnography, politics, and society. The course will employ a variety of resources ranging from primary records (i.e. kinship charts, Qatar Records, Lorimer Persian Gulf Gazetteer to resources in possession of individuals). Current accounts of the State’s political evolution, cultural heritage, and urban life will be explored in depth. To this end, the course will examine a plethora of sociocultural and political factors, which contributed to key debates on culture, archeology, migration, comparative histories, politics, cosmopolitanism, national identities, civil society, and emerging forms of urbanisms. The work of major theorists of culture and politics in general and that of Gulf scholars in particular will provide the framework within which we situate Qatari ethnography in its proper sociopolitical context. This research course will utilize ethnographies that have stood prominently in the field of Qatari scholarship authored by Qatari sociologists, historians and urban experts’ accounts on their own society. These ethnographies have ably addressed the nuances of ethno-history as well as the State’s rising prominence on a global scale. In addition to engaging scholarship on the historiography of the Qatar, ethnographies of its diverse societies through time and space, the course will provide several modules of ethnographic fieldwork. Both historiography and ethnography will provide sufficient understanding of theories of change and social organization as well as comprehension of basic histories and principles of the construction of cultural and political subject positions in Qatar.