‘Traveling habitus’ and the new anthropology of class: proposing a transitive tool for analyzing social mobility in global migration

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the ‘momentous mobility’ that lays enmeshed in transcontinental migration. It documents how re-emplacement across differently structured privilege regimes affects and partly reconfigures the habitus of those on-the-move. It looks at the impact that a notoriously segregated city like Dubai has on a group of skilled Western laborers who constitute a minority in their EU country of origin, namely second-generation European Maghrebis from Belgium and the Netherlands. In documenting their newfound class sensibilities in the UAE, it develops the ‘traveling habitus’, a conceptual tool which helps capture the interplay between kinetic human mobility and implicit class mobility. This transitive analytic shows that class may function as an 'arrival infrastructure' in its own right, capable of remolding migrants’ habitual character traits, bodily stylings, and sense of self-worth by means of its gravitational force and timely logic. This contribution thus foregrounds the oft ignored fact that migrants traverse not only geographical places and ethno-religious boundaries, but equally engage in ‘class journeys’ in between class locations. In the UAE, this class progression was further characterized and complicated by a perceived sense of ‘racial mobility’.

KEYWORDS:

• UAE
• migration
• habitus
• class distinction
• arrival infrastructure
• racial mobility

1. Introduction

This ethnographic paper looks at the impact that a notoriously segregated city like Dubai has on a group of skilled Western laborers who constitute a minority in their EU country of origin, namely second-generation European Maghrebis from Belgium, and the Netherlands. By documenting their newfound class sensibilities overseas, it frames their celebratory narratives about Dubai into a Bourdieusian logic of practice. By discerning what it calls the ‘traveling habitus’ of minorities-turned-expats, it interrogates the extent to which a sense of ‘progress’ in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) derives from upward social mobility. In his (1977) seminal work, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu foregrounds consistently the importance of agents’ social origins as well as their class trajectories over time. In so doing, he conceptualized the notion of ‘habitus’ as ‘a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions and makes possible the achievement of infinitively diversified tasks’ (Ibid. 82–3). This paper, however, explores the ways in which a person’s habitus may ‘travel’ not only throughout the life course – already well attended to by Bourdieu in his national sociology – but also as one moves transnationally, across social formations. In this twist on Bourdieu, my contribution thus investigates the extent to which ‘class journeys’ (Pedersen 2012, 1103) materialize by engaging in cross-border migration, overcoming in some cases specific status impairments and mobility anxieties at home.

It was Farida who first hinted at the profound impact that migration to the Gulf Arab states has on the behavioral apparatus of those who make Dubai their home. Farida was born a Belgian citizen in Belgium to Moroccan immigrant parents and grew up in a working-class milieu in the capital city of Brussels. After managing to graduate from university with a political science degree, she moved to Dubai in the mid-2000s for a three-year period (2006–2009), before moving onward to Australia for additional studies – paid for by the savings she accumulated in the UAE – and then onward again to New Zealand for professional opportunities. I first met her in February 2015, in a quiet Brussels café. During our interview, she reflected on her time in the UAE, and tried to explain to me the effects that a city like Dubai had on some of her Belgian-Maghrebi friends, many of whom had chosen to stay to put in the Gulf after she left:

They would lead their life as superficial people that all have their little car. [Dubai,] It’s half-American, half-Emirati, half … it’s a mix, a strange mix that they try to copy […] and it’s a really good test. […] Most of them, they really change; their personality changes. It’s not only … [pause] it’s something really deep inside them that has changed.

Farida belonged to a sub-cluster of respondents bent on a more permanent exit from Europe. Over the course of their resettlement to the Gulf, this group had stopped viewing Europe as their natural home to which they would one day return, explaining why some decided to venture even further afield after spending time in the UAE. Others, like the ones referred to by Farida, sought to stay put in Dubai as long as possible, seemingly defying the ‘transitory’ and ‘impermanent’ logic regularly associated with Dubai (Vora 2013; Khalaf, Alshehabi, and Hanieh 2014). Yet, despite this overall diversity in terms of migrant itineraries, none of my interlocutors remained unaffected by their time in the Gulf. Indeed, having tasted the distinctive benefits of an ‘expatriate’ lifestyle in Dubai, their accounts were all marked by a profoundly transformative mobility experience. It is precisely this sort of ‘momentous mobility’ (Salazar 2018), deeply enmeshed in transcontinental migration, in which this paper takes primary interest.

Resettlement to Dubai could easily be mistaken for mere kinetic action on the part of free-floating individuals, and consequently, as a move that is easily reversible. In practice, however, and in the particular case of my interlocutors, a lot more had ‘traveled’ than meets the eye. Indeed, due attention for the spatially-induced reconfigurations of behavioral sensibilities, along with their implications for (racial) self-worth, highlight some of the more lasting and deep-running consequences of geographical mobility. This paper examines how re-emplacement across differently structured privilege regimes affects and partly reconfigures what I coin here as the ‘traveling habitus’, discernable by documenting the gradual shifts in behavioral dispositions, mannerisms and tastes, and bodily styling(s) of those on-the-move. As most scholars have focused on low-wage migrants in studying Gulf societies (Lowi 2018, 40), hitherto, little is known about the everyday formations of dynamic (upper) middle-class lives in Gulf cities like Dubai (Akinci 2019, 1).

In what follows, I will briefly describe the geographical context, theoretical framework, and research methodology, before I move on to develop my argument about the significance of habitus transformations during international migration. I conclude by reflecting on the ‘hidden life of class’ (Ortner 1998), and what my findings imply for migration and mobility studies as well as the new anthropology of class.

2. Dubai: immigration with/out inclusion?

One line of thought has cast Dubai as a ‘hyper-capitalist dystopia’ (Hanieh 2015), a ‘gilded cage’ (Ali 2010), and an almost unique societal model of ‘immigration without inclusion’ (Fargues 2011). Others, however, contend that Dubai’s tolerance-inducing scripts, or ‘inclusionary assemblages’, have come to serve as ‘semiotic and material openings’ for genuine non-citizen forms of belonging and inclusion (Vora and Koch 2015, 544, 549). In lamenting what they believe to be a ‘pervasive submissiveness’ emanating from much of the social science literature on migrant laborers in the Gulf Arab states, Vora and Koch take aim at Anh Nga Longva’s (1997) seminal work about exclusion in Gulf ‘ethnocracies’. Longva’s framework, first developed on the basis of a case study about Kuwait, foregrounds the contemporary function of the ‘kafala’ institution, the sponsorship system of (labor) patronage for non-citizens in the Persian Gulf region. In her view, kafala has been repurposed into a biopolitical tool of outsourced state power during the post-colonial state building period in Gulf Arab states, with the purpose of servicing a numerically small, ‘native’ citizenry in its exclusive claims to citizenship, belonging, and economic privilege, relative to other resident populations. The Kafala system – enshrined into labor law in all six of the Arab states that make up for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – Longva argues, is key in maintaining not only authoritarian rule, but also the larger ‘rentier’ model as a whole, which subsidizes a generous cradle-to-grave welfare support system for nationals (in the form of social security benefits, free education, state-allocated land for housing etc.), that is, the comprehensive social contract by which rulers justify a governance model lacking of political participation. Hence, she contends, kafala is not only a matter of law, merely implemented top-down by the state, but equally an entrenched social institution for ‘keeping migrant workers in check’ (Longva 1999, 20). In her refined critique, she demonstrates how the modern ‘task of alien surveillance’ (Longva, 1997, 100) has thus been collectivized as a shared responsibility among Gulf citizens who act as complacent ‘sponsors’ and benefit financially from partaking in this labor scheme.

Yet others have extended Longva’s work in describing how Emirati authorities now lead the way among GCC states in further sophisticating the kafala system, resulting in an ‘ambiguous “tiered system” of economic, political, and social rights among permanent residents’ (Jamal 2015, 602). Trying to offset this literature, however, Vora and Koch (2015, 542) are adamant to document a myriad of ‘everyday inclusions’, urging others to join them in taking stock of what they coin as ‘practices of citizenship on-the-ground’ and ‘non-citizen “belonging despite exclusion”’. In their aim to demonstrate that Gulf Arab states are not uniquely illiberal, they even claim that migrants in the UAE are actively participating ‘in discourses and practices of nationalism in ways that cannot be reduced to nationality, class, race, or religion’ (Ibid. 550). Although my paper remains sympathetic to the former argument that casting the region’s governance model as historically unique in terms of exploitation may be an over-interpretation that is neo-orientalist and highly selective in nature– reference to Europe’s expansive ‘age of capital’ (Hobsbawm 1975) easily debunks such impressionist claims – it does not follow the latter argument, mainly because it obscures for no good reason the foundational role that citizenship, and class play in structuring the ‘differential inclusion’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 159) of migrant labor in the Gulf. Hence, and to be clear, my aim here is not to relativize exclusion conveniently by resorting to a ‘vulgar Foucauldianism’ (Graeber 2014, 80), nor do I seek to ‘normalize’ an otherwise ‘dark’ geography by uncovering alternative ethnographic data. Rather, my study is grounded empirical observations about a specific group of immigrants in the Gulf, which allow me to situate analytically a set of celebratory narratives about a favorable inclusion inclusion in Dubai as immediately contingent upon intersecting class and race positionalities on the ground.

3. Framework: migrant labor, habitus & class-as-infrastructure

This article seeks to contribute to the emerging anthropology of class by investigating a case study that sits at the interface of transnational migration and social mobility. In so doing, it aims to complicate current research on human ‘mobilities’ (Sheller and Urry 2006). Although class analysis has long been an uncomfortable focus in anthropological circles given the discipline’s ongoing, neocolonial fixation on all things ‘primitive’, ‘distant’, and in supposed need of urgent encyclopedic ‘cataloguing’, creative and highly critical work in both anthropology and qualitative social science more broadly has steadily explored the everyday experience and (re)production of social class in  a variety of societies under global capitalism, Western or otherwise (Wacquant 1992; Ortner 2003; Rutz and Balkan 2009; Schielke 2012; Graeber 2001, 2014; Kalb 2015). By examining the displaced ‘class mobilities’ of a specific group of EU citizens in Dubai, this paper will resort to Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977) structuration paradigm. This micro-sociological framework is analytically productive because it synthesizes into one lens elements of Marx’s primordial focus on capital and the materialist baseline in the historical development of societies; Weber’s socio-cultural preoccupation with (competing) status groups (with distinctive lifestyles) and its implications for the organization (political) authority in society (see: Dahrendorf 1967, 49–51); and, to some extent, Foucault’s – or better, Gramsci’s – near totalizing argument about the dominating power of hegemonic ideology-as-internalized discourse (see: Lorick-Wilmot 2018, 115, 117, 119). Following Bourdieu (1987, 6), then, social classes are defined as

sets of agents who, by virtue of the fact that they occupy similar positions in social space (that is, in the distribution of powers), are subject to similar conditions of existence and conditioning factors and, as a result, are endowed with similar dispositions which prompt them to develop similar practices.

Consequently, class mobility is understood as ‘the evolution in time of the volume and composition’ of various forms of capital ‘according to their trajectory in social space’ (Ibid. 4). In my paper, however, particular attention will be attributed to cross-border alterations in people’s ‘habitus’, gradually unfolding over the course of their resettlement process, and arguably indicative of their newfound class location abroad. The notion of transnational ‘class journeys’ is defined in migration literature as an upward or downward move in terms of social class positioning, due to, ‘for example, education or migration’, and this without being ‘a linear movement’ throughout the life course per se (Pedersen 2012, 1103). Hence, global migrations have already been theorized as a mobility strategy for class maintenance (Loacker and Sliwa 2016), or as an unfortunate catalyst for social down classing – as is often the case for colored refugees entering Europe. Yet, literature on the transnational migration of Western laborers rarely focuses on upward instances of class mobility. For instance, Hof’s (2019, 1) research shows how tertiary-educated EU-nationals have started using ‘using mobility to Asia as a practice of middle-class reproduction’ as they fear professional down classing and ‘immobility at home’. Given that my research respondents held a more working-class background in terms of household origins in Europe, their geographical mobility to the Gulf led not to an immediate reinforcement of previously held class inclinations and household aspirations, but rather to a profound reconfiguration of their habitual ‘dispositions’ (Bourdieu 1977, 72, 214). Therefore, their class journeys between Europe and Dubai, and their gradual cultivation of an expatriate ‘distinction’ (Bourdieu 1984) overseas, involved also a lot more ‘hidden self-work’ (Ortner 1998) in terms of class acculturation following their arrival.

In the meantime, migration scholarship has also noted ‘considerable ambiguity around who is considered an expatriate’ (Kunz 2016, 92), calling for the need to unpack this neocolonial status category of practice. However, much of the critical research on racialization processes in ‘expatriate’ migrations still focuses on majoritarian ‘White’ groups, who thus see their ‘racial capital’ (Alloul 2020) favorably reinforced through emigration, in one way or the other (Walsh 2012, 2014; Lundstrom 2014; Le Renard 2019; Hof 2020). To diversify and complicate this perspective in the literature, my research investigates lesser documented ‘non-White experiences and negotiations of the expatriate’ (Kunz 2016, 97). Moreover, notwithstanding mainstream views that equate Western ‘expatriate’ groups in the UAE with ‘highly-skilled’ elites, I argue that the tertiary-educated ‘European’ laborers under discussion here remain part of a wider labor class, which still relies on (indirectly) selling labor for subsistence purposes. In Dubai, this social condition is veiled, however, by the fact that Western labor, as representative of the local ‘professional-managerial class’ (Graeber 2014, 74–5), is favorably allied with a native ‘rentier class’¹ that controls the ‘means of production’ (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013, 20).

Now, given the importance of social class in shaping ‘individuals’ lives, their experiences, and ultimately their identities’ (Lehmann 2009, 633), this labor ‘property of self’ (Ortner 1998, 2–3) – characterized by the imperative of (marketing and) selling one’s (intellectual) labor power in the service of capital (Lorick-Wilmot 2018, 113, 119) – still functions as a restrictive force onto the agentive maneuvering of any worker, ‘nomadic’ (Beaverstock 2005) or otherwise. Yet, in the overall mobilities literature, class, as well as race, have thus far been marginalized. One way of redressing this is by resorting to Bourdieu’s influential work, and, in so doing, valorize it from a particularly intersectional angle. For instance, in her work on second-generation Caribbean migrants in the US, Lorick-Wilmot’s (2018, 128) discusses what she discerns to be a ‘black habitus’, or the specific ways in which ‘race and ethnic identification also carry social class meanings for children of immigrants in ways that influence their own definitions and responses to race ascription’. Inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’ seminal (1899) work on the historically fragile emergence of an African-American middle-class in the US, whose constituent members sought to sustain their fraught attempts towards public 'respectability' (at a high cost), Lorick-Wilmot reworks Bourdieu in positing ‘race, ethnic, and class identities as interrelated and mutually reinforcing’ (128–9). Hence, what is taken in this paper to constitute a ‘traveling habitus’ among European minorities-turned-expats will inevitably come to foreground the inherently racialized ways in which a class-based ‘sense of the world’ is, as Ortner (1998, 14) has pointed out, ‘constantly renewed through practice in that world’.

An effort is thus made here to develop analytically the traveling habitus as a ‘transitive concept’ (Kalir 2020, 350), which may help re-center class and race in the social scientific discussion of human mobilities. By means of documenting the gradual transformation of class dispositions across space and time, we may indeed arrive at a productive analytical tool for mapping the behavioral mobilities that also lay enmeshed in migrant lives. In the absence of a ‘single model or grand theory that can explain the complexity of human mobility’ (Salazar 2018, 157), there is use for meso-level categories of analysis that contribute in more practical terms to theory building. While the ‘mobility turn’ (Urry 2007) has been successful in redirecting scholarship away from the ideological proclivities of our time – celebrating and naturalizing movement, hyper-mobility, and all things mobile in society – we need to develop this critique further. As pointed out by Salazar (2018, 153-4), in studying movement, we need to focus on ‘how the formation, regulation, and distribution of these mobilities are shaped and patterned by existing social, political, and economic structures’. He emphasizes that empirical mobility becomes ‘momentous’ – that is, analytically meaningful – precisely by discerning its social embeddings and power relationalities, however complex they may be.

Following such attempts at refining the mobility gaze, my paper explores the consequential ways in which a ‘traveling habitus’ dynamically reconfigures itself, not only when social actors gradually move upward or downward in the social hierarchy of a (certain field in) national space during the life-cycle, but equally so when they migrate across social formations and move into new class (and race) locations overseas. When approached from a migration lens, social class, along with the forceful ‘sorting’ and ‘selective channeling’ that structure access thereto, becomes remodeled as a ‘platform of arrival’, if not a veritable ‘arrival infrastructure’ (Meeus, Van Heur, and Arnaut 2019, 2, 15). It is precisely this latent operation of an infrastructural politics of class in migrant lives, which co-produces the agentive internalization, negotiation, and re-articulation of entrenched hierarchies of power across space. Class-as-arrival infrastructure, I would then argue, may accommodate, stabilize, or even remold the habitus of mobile subjects that enter its gravitational field force. In short, the perspective on human mobility developed here will demonstrate how ‘subjects in motion’ (Bourdieu in Hage 2011, 84) move in between much more than only geographical places. Indeed, habitus also ‘travels’, as mobile labor morphs in between social formations and class locations.

4. Methodology and data

This qualitative study relies on extensive multi-sited fieldwork for which 80 semi-structured interviews were gathered among 70 respondents, including 10 in-depth follow-up interviews with key respondents at different time intervals. This overall pool of interlocutors consisted of 29 males and 41 females, in their mid 20s to late 30s. Sample inclusion criteria were EU citizenship (from Belgium, France and the Netherlands); that at least one parent² was born in Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia; and that respondents were themselves either working in the UAE when meeting them, had returned (temporarily) after doing so, or were about to depart (again) with this objective in mind. These participants hailed predominantly from working-class milieus in Europe, whose parents were blue-collar workers. All but two of my respondents held advanced tertiary degrees, working in such fields as marketing, engineering, sales, IT, finance, tourism, architecture, real estate, or corporate law. This data was supplemented by participant observation and long-term field immersion among the studied community, including co-housing and deep hanging out in Dubai. In addition, longitudinal data were further generated through complementary online rapport over time, including the occasional exchange of detailed e-questionnaires with key interlocutors. The main fieldwork was conducted in Dubai throughout 2016, while exploratory and follow-up work took place in Europe, respectively in 2015 and 2017–2018.

5. Discerning ‘traveling habitus’

5.1 Displaced class mobilities: distinction and its racial discontinuities

Occupying a ‘European’ status position in Gulf Arab states does not only imply the allotment of higher wages than non-Western co-workers. For my interlocutors, settlement in Dubai also meant finally gaining entry into the (upper fractions of the) ‘middle-class’, and with it, the gradual apprehension of new mannerisms and tastes, specific to Dubai. Take Marwan, for instance, a 33-year-old Belgian-Moroccan, who had lived in Dubai for about five years (2009–2014) before returning to Belgium with his spouse and two children. Meeting him in an Antwerp café in mid-2015, he shared the view that Dubai had been an extremely easy place to settle into, likening his relocation to ‘a matter of plugging in and out’. When asked why he had opted for Dubai instead of Morocco, for instance, he claimed that he ‘would have had to adapt much more when moving to Morocco than when moving to Dubai’, adding that in the latter, his family was at least certain to ‘attain a similar standard of living than in Belgium’. In his narrative, he then alluded to the Dubai-specific mode of living they found themselves adjusting to:

Everyone is super friendly and welcoming. We could go and dine everywhere, and this is different from Belgium. It’s really easy to go out for food, and to be served by an entire Filipino catering team. […] Often, people live more luxurious lives than at home: they live in better-off neighborhoods and drive fancier cars. […] That kind of lifestyle is not accessible over here [in Belgium]. […] When you’d go dine here in the Hilton hotel, they’d look at you in such a manner that you’d want to leave. […] From that perspective, it is somehow less segregated.

Marwan’s remarkable comment about Europe feeling more ‘segregated’ than Dubai was typical for the narratives I encountered among my respondents. When I tried to further establish what the ‘good life’ meant, and what being ‘middle-class’ felt like to them, my data pointed towards a highly racialized form of upward class acculturation in Dubai. Latifa, for instance, a 36-year-old Belgian-Algerian professional, even compared her relocation to a quasi-liberating experience:

[Upon arrival,] I just felt incredibly free. Like everything was suddenly possible and accessible to me. […] It was very important to me just to feel like I have the right to be here [Dubai]. [Today,] I don’t have to justify constantly my origins or religion. Even more so, being Arab is a plus. […] It’s a similar experience [for Europeans with a majority background], but I think it’s even more empowering and liberating for minorities, for beurres.³ For us, a lot more changes than just having a better lifestyle.

Latifa grew up in a working-class household in Brussels, and graduated from the Université Libre de Bruxelles with an MA in Sociology. Spending nearly nine years working in the UAE, she made a career in marketing. Her mention of ‘everything’ being ‘suddenly possible and accessible’ in Dubai – a newfound equation which made her feel ‘incredibly free’ and empowered – is analytically significant. By describing her move to Dubai as a liberating process, she claims that formerly held aspirations started materializing in situ, that is, for things to change, and, in her words, to change more radically ‘than just having a better lifestyle’. Next to a long-anticipated material progression, Latifa signals here that class mobility in Dubai also allowed a change in social status for Euro-Maghrebis like her. When I asked Latifa in a follow-up interview in early-2017 whether she was not planning a return to Europe in the near to medium term after all, she remained adamant:

No, I don’t think I could deal with all the racism and discrimination again. […] The stigma is stronger than ever. […] I used to get followed in shops [when I was a kid], you know—people thinking I would steal things. This happened to me again recently when I visited Belgium, and the thing is that now that I‘ve experienced a different life, I don’t tolerate it anymore, this kind of stupid discriminating behavior. […] You see, it [read: emigration, life in Dubai] offers a lot, but it has a big price too. [You make] certain certain sacrifices along the way, and most importantly the risk of not being able to fit ever again into previous schemes.

Latifa’s claim that she is not inclined to return to Europe because of enduring racism suggests that her successful class mobility overseas did not free her in the medium term from a pervasive racial technology of exclusion in Europe. While she now holds the spending power and class inclination to casually engage in a variety of consumer rites, she claims that she is still not readily recognized as a legitimate customer in Belgium. Instead, her phenotype continues to draw suspicion in the eye of shopkeepers and security personnel, instilling into her the feeling of being mistaken for a potential thief. This difference of fortune in terms of consumer treatment between Dubai and Europe was echoed by Maryam, a 38-year-old Belgian-Moroccan female with an MBA, who had spent six years working in the UAE before returning to Belgium, where I first met her. In Dubai she had earned an exceptionally good living and had thus gotten used to some of the well-documented ‘expat’ privileges of Dubai (see: Ali 2011, 556). Consequently, she had been shocked to return to her native Brussels, where she, wanting to continue catering to the fashionable class ‘tastes of luxury’ which she had cultivated in Dubai (Bourdieu 1984, 174), got blatantly discriminated against by a shopkeeper. She recounted the day she had entered a high-end Louis Vuitton shop to look for a new bag. Upon entry, a sales woman had immediately approached her in a policing manner rather than welcoming her in. According to Maryam, this behavior clearly displayed not only that the shopkeeper in question was not used to seeing veiled women like Maryam enter her shop in Brussels – resulting in a cognitive dissonance and ‘mal-orchestration of habitus’ (Bourdieu 2005, 215) on the part of the shopkeeper – but also that she held deep running racist views. Recounting this story, Maryam was visibly upset. Like Latifa, her account indicates that she genuinely expected to be able to continue nurturing the specific leisure practices that she had inculcated abroad, a ‘practical anticipation’ (Ibid., 214) that seems ‘reasonable’ given the novel consumer propensities now integral to her habitus.

As scholars have argued, consumer habits are no trivial matter, and feed straight into identity formation: ‘in the world of late capitalism which markets consumption, individual identity can be achieved through consumer choices’ (Bell 2015, 262). Indeed, liberated from the highly racialized status anxieties of a ‘black habitus’ (Lorick-Wilmot 2018) in Europe, aesthetic performances of a newfound consumer ‘respectability’ in Dubai point to the ‘hidden’ class work (Ortner 1998) of becoming honorary ‘European expats’ overseas. Indeed, from the vantage point of economically empowered consumers, a ‘taste of luxury’ symbolizes foremost as a ‘taste of freedom’ (Bourdieu 1984, 567), insofar as it is an attempt at distancing oneself from the constraints of bare necessity, as reminiscent, in the case of Latifa and Maryam, of former working-class origins, which remain palpable as an enduring condition given the labor constraints of their liberating, yet still dominated lives as part of the ‘wage-earning’ fractions of the middle-class (Bourdieu 2005, 32–3). More so, drawing on Wolfgang Streeck’s (2012) theory of citizenship, Fischer (2020, 4) draws attention to the ideological properties that lay buried in contemporary spectacles of consumption, and discusses their implications for a future politics of inclusion:

the contestation of citizenship not only concerns the question of who is entitled to belong, but the articulation of citizenship practices as well. Neoliberalism has engendered a ‘market citizenship’, whereby citizenship as the idea of equal access to democratic and social rights is being replaced by the idea of equal access to consumption amidst an increasingly depoliticized public sphere.

The enduring racialization experienced by Latifa and Maryam in Europe approximates what Elijah Anderson calls the ‘iconic black ghetto’ (Anderson 2012, 3). In his work on the ever-growing African-American middle-class in the US, he describes practical instances, which his interlocutors call the ‘nigger-moment’ (Ibid. 253): a social interaction of acute disrespect based on race, be it conscious or subliminal, associating its victims at once with stigmas about ‘the ghetto’, and shattering their claims to ‘respectability’ (Ibid. 2). According to Anderson, these ‘slides of status’ usually come as a moment of shock, not only because they occur when least expected, but also due to the fact that middle-class sensibilities center around a firm belief about public civility, anonymity, and personal security, thus inverting the mobility-esteem hitherto appropriated. In the case of Maryam, it was her headscarf rather than only her phenotype – as was the case for Latifa – that operated as a key information carrier on the basis of which an abrupt status interpellation took place in the Belgian context. Despite their individual efforts at educational upskilling, and their tactical ascension in the labor hierarchy through global migration projects and transnational professional (private sector) fields - trying to make the most of the limited capital available to them – subtle racial barriers in Europe still mattered in the extent to which hard-attained class mobility was permitted to casually unfold. It seems that their ‘immigrant background’ was a form of bodily-coded status capital not easily disguised. Taking a longitudinal perspective on European history, these everyday obstructions steeped in race may very well be indicative of an underlying 'mobility envy' (Gotz 2014, 5, 35, 228-30) and fear of competition for resources from the part of working-class fractions of the majority population.

Having had a taste of a ‘different life’ in Dubai, as Latifa claimed, she no longer accepted a provisional sort of access in Europe. She applies the sign of 'tolerance' in her narrative so as to articulate her newly cultivated defiance (‘any longer’) against the reattribution of a formerly held, degrading racial status (‘it’), re-emerging whenever she visits Europe from the UAE. In fact, by claiming that she is not ‘able to fit ever again into previous schemes’, she cements her will to relegate permanently the racialized sort of class entrapment confronting her efforts at upward social mobility in Belgium. Unwilling to accept the delegated position of racial inferiority that she was born into in Belgium – a position which, according to her, did not improve much over time – Latifa became painstakingly conscious of the fact that, after having undergone a profound ‘class journey’ (Pedersen 2012, 1103), a return was no longer possible for her. Marianne Pedersen’s work on Iraqi refugees in Denmark, who undergo down classing upon arrival, demonstrates that class is both a socio-economic positionality, as well as a deeply internalized social identity that is not easily shed. Given that Pedersen applies a similarly transcontinental scale of investigation – across states rather than within the national social formation – she equally discerns (dis)continuities of lived and ascribed modes of class, and therefore draws attention to the importance of more complex (racial) status formation processes in/during class mobilities across place.

Given that most of Latifa’s family continues to reside in Belgium, her ‘lingering in temporality’ in Dubai is significant. Moreover, she was fully aware of the fact that the UAE does not allocate citizenship or permanent residency to foreigners (Ali 2011, 556). Yet, she continues to defy the odds by staying put as long as possible. Realistic about Europe and Dubai, Latifa framed her displaced class mobility as imbuing considerable status gains (‘it offers a lot’) as well as a painful emotional loss (‘big price’, ‘risk’). It becomes clear that physical movement does not merely imply ‘temporary’ kinetic re-emplacement, but also profound cognitive and behavioral transformations – transformations that can in turn lead to lasting convictions about the nature of certain places and one’s potential positions therein.

5.2 Social gravity at work: cultivating an expatriate habitus in Dubai

In May 2016, I met Malika in Dubai, a 31-year-old Dutch female born and raised in The Hague to immigrant parents from Morocco. She suggested we meet at Reem Al Bawadi in Dubai Downtown, a restaurant lounge located at the foot of the Burj Khalifa tower, the tallest building in the world. It was early evening when I arrived, but the sun was still burning away. In making my way to the venue, I asked the taxi driver to drop me off a few streets before hand so that I could take in some of the features of the Downtown district – still new to me – and I remember being in awe of the sheer size of the iconic landmark for which Dubai gained global fame. When I arrived, Malika was already waiting for me. As we got seated in the indoor and air-conditioned terrace section, a Nepali waiter took our orders. While I resorted to my regular Arabic coffee, Malika ordered a lemon and mint juice, and requested a very specific chocolate cake, which she wanted customized with several toppings, giving the waiter an extremely detailed description of how she demanded her cake. At first, I was a bit perplexed by this lengthy exposition during which Malika ostensibly lectured the somewhat baffled waiter. However, I then quickly realized ‘where’ I was: immersed, after all, into the expatriate leisure sphere of Dubai, the everyday banalities of which I was still grappling with at the time.

Malika moved to the UAE in 2012, and ended up working for a high-end Italian furniture company that delivers the interior leather designs for luxury cars (Ferrari, Bentley), yachts, and commercial airplanes (Etihad). Back in the Netherlands, Malika had graduated with an MBA and insisted that she had held a good job back home, working for a British fashion and design company operating in the Netherlands. Like most of my interlocutors, Malika would put a lot of emphasis on individual responsibilities in working towards a better future. Like many of her Dutch compatriots, and quite different from my francophone Belgian and French interlocutors, her narrative had a staunchly Calvinist echo to it. In a similarly Dutch vein, she was equally blunt in conveying her thoughts to me:

I am no Mohamed or Ahmed with an accent, so clearly, I’m doing well. But it tires me a lot when people treat me differently [in the Netherlands]. It doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does, it takes away my focus. My brother will soon graduate with a BA in Economics and he’ll continue pursuing his studies. It is possible! My cousin works for Ernst and Young. So, it also depends on your own efforts, and how much you want things. […] You have to explain things to people too. […] But that’s precisely it, right? It takes away your time. Here [in Dubai], you’re not bothered by media portrayals about Islam and Muslims. It doesn’t preoccupy you. It’s not as much in your face as in Europe.

Malika speaks to the idea of having exited a tiresome societal context, in which (latent) Islamophobia wears down even the most socially ascendant racial others. Yet, throughout her narrative, she was adamant that Europe remained one of her social anchorages, and she was rather optimistic about her professional opportunities in the Netherlands, in case she would decide to return. Having gone to college, holding well-paid jobs over time, and traveling extensively around the world, her social mobility in the Netherlands was well underway. By distancing herself from ‘Mohamed or Ahmed with an accent’, she thus differentiates her middle-class self from those she sees as (still) audibly ‘immigrant’ and visibly ‘working-class’. Yet, what at first sight appeared to be a smooth mobility process at home was cast in a more provisional light when Malika exclaimed pejoratively during the interview: ‘I’m no refugee, you know!’ In fact, she repeated this imputation at various occasions during our conversation, especially when emphasizing her hard-attained accomplishments. Her audibly nervous insistence on not being a refugee – obvious to me – seemed to rest on a deeper fear, namely that the recently unfolding ‘refugee crisis’⁴ in Europe would negatively affect her hitherto ascending position in the Dutch status order. Having labored intensively to reposition herself in the Netherlands, first by means of tertiary education and then through white-collar labor, she now feared to be ‘mistaken’ for a lower-status ‘refugee’ due to her phenotype and name.

I would encounter this specific status concern, and the binary use of refugee-hood, during other encounters with Dutch respondents, likely because they were the group most inclined to return. Worried about a potential status penalty that would negatively impact her middle-class ‘respectability’, Malika displays what has been described by race studies scholars as an implicitly ‘black habitus’, a deep running awareness of, and fear for, being perceived as ‘unwelcomed pretenders trying to escape their lower racial and social status despite their own best efforts of self-improvement’ (W.E.B. Du Bois in Lorick-Wilmot 2018, 126). Indeed, Malika’s racially coded status anxieties point at her social origins, both in terms of salient societal stigma still confronting her Maghrebi-Muslim community in the Netherlands as well as her own family history. For instance, in tracing her individual mobility ‘success’, she stated:

Look, in the 70s my parents migrated to the Netherlands temporarily to improve their lot […] Doing so, they gave me a real opportunity. I am educated now. I know how to talk! […] I have that choice to choose where in the world I want to live and work. […] I see that as a gift from them to me. It’s an opportunity. It’s up to you to grab it and to emigrate. It’s a freedom I have. My Dutch passport is part of that freedom. Freedom of movement is an absolute privilege. I can go to any country in the world, and start from scratch! I know how to do that too.

In her narrative, Malika connotes her Dutch passport with the symbolism of a ‘gift’, framed as a value form that was transferred across generations, and which is both infused with the bond-enforcing care so typical of traditional kinship relations (Mauss 1990), as well as with the burden of an inherited responsibility, namely the obligation to continue adding mobility capital to the assets already ‘gathered’ by the family unit she was born into, albeit in a different geographical place than where her parents had left off. Indeed, the implied burden of the passport-as-gift is best understood through its ‘structural symbolism’ (Strauss 1978, 6): Malika attributes emotional weight to the materialist dimensions of her passport precisely because of the cross-generational, ‘economizing labor’ (Bourdieu 1977, 171–2; Graeber 2001, 28) buried into its physical properties. Conscious of the privilege of holding Dutch citizenship, she is grateful and proud of her parents’ earlier ability to endure as low-wage, migrant laborers in the Netherlands. The gift she mentions thus appears to us as a self-interested ‘form of capital’ (Bourdieu 1986), collectively owned as a sort of commons by her family unit, and which she can further put into productive practice – almost as a disaggregated ‘means of production’ – by virtue of renewed geographical mobilities and calculated labor strategies.

One could argue that by moving to Dubai, Malika is maximizing the racialized value of her inherited legal status capital. Individualized migrancy and larger household reproduction strategies arguably go hand-in-hand, not only (from the African continent) in the direction of Europe, as premised in the neo-classical view of the ‘new economics of (labor) migration’ (de Haas and Fokkema 2011, 759), but also when it comes to understudied ‘out-of-Europe migrations’ (Arnaut et al. 2020, 1). Many of my interlocutors would, for instance, help their relatives (tertiary-educated siblings) or close friends in joining them in the Gulf once they had managed to set up a stable base. Furthermore, in leaving Europe behind, the legal power of Malika’s Dutch citizenship would help ‘channel’ (Meeus, Van Heur, and Arnaut 2019, 15) favorably her professional deployment in the UAE labor market. Her Dutch passport thus gives additional direction to her migratory endeavors in ways that exceed smooth legalized entry at restricted international border nodes. Rather, and aided by the racialized prestige that is encoded in ‘Western’ labor in Dubai’s private sector (Jamal 2015, 603), her passport further ‘sorts’ her entry into a ‘skilled’ labor echelon after arrival, permitting her to negotiate, on her own, her salary and additional housing allowances with prospective employers. As such, she was granted access to an elevated class position in the Gulf, allowing her to accumulate considerable ‘economic capital’ (Bourdieu 1986, 47) over time. In fact, Malika was well-aware of the considerable status mobility she underwent by leaving Europe:

We live in a bubble here. Everything is catered to you. All arrows are directed towards you. Everything is one button or phone call away. […] I enjoy it very much too. […] We are served here; as expats, we are spoiled. You don’t have that kind of luxury in the Netherlands. If you return, you simply downgrade again; you really downgrade!

More so, Malika was granted access to such class privileges in Dubai not only because her labor was suddenly appreciated locally as scarcer on the basis of market demands, but equally because it was a racialized ‘European’ one:

On the work floor, it’s clear that I’m closer aligned with my German and Italian colleagues than my Arab colleagues, and that’s normal. My stamp here is ‘European’. I get paid as such too. […] If I’m not ready yet to return to the Netherlands, I would first go to Australia, Singapore, or Canada. In Singapore and Canada, I’d also be an expat.

Although Malika is the first to describe the expatriate experience in Dubai as one confined to ‘a bubble’, membership of this social group is no trivial matter. For instance, able to occupy the social position of ‘expat’ in Dubai by virtue of her passport, Malika saw herself compelled to abide by the specific modes of ‘distinction’ marking this group’s ‘noblesse oblige’ (Bourdieu 1984, 16), at least if she were to maintain her newfound status over time. This was most visible in the logic informing her residential behavioral in the UAE, spurred by local norms about spatial segregation, differential citizenship, and the co-constitutive accumulation of personal wealth:

In Dubai, the first questions [you usually get] are ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘Where do you live?’ That’s standard, and often all you need to know: obviously, you’re an expat. […] I chose to live right next to the Burj Khalifa, one of the most expensive pieces of land on planet earth.

To sustain certain ‘expat’ privileges in Dubai, like receiving an above-average wage in the private sector, seems to be conditioned not only by one’s citizenship status, but also by the ‘respectable’ behaviors that co-constitute expatriate socialibities in the city, such as the residential ‘choice’ of neighborhood. Like most other respondents, Malika had first set up life in the Dubai Marina district, and had then moved to Dubai Downtown. During this relocation process, she had not looked for housing in one of the more affordable neighborhoods; either more crowded, like Al Karama or parts of Deira, or located on the outskirts of town, like Dubai Silicon Oasis. In accordance with her emerging (upper) middle-class sensibilities, respectability in the medium term was clearly more important than saving up (and remitting) as much financial resources as possible in the short term. Residential habitus, as the compounded class propensities of a broader ‘mode of life’ (Bourdieu 2005, 33, 38), thus both determines and further reifies ‘expatriate’ distinction in Dubai, and this precisely because it signals (to others) whether someone has the legal and financial means to occupy and maintain this honorary status in everyday practice.

Malika did not merely conform tactically to the informal rules of conduct animating her social group in Dubai. Her newfound life(style) would over time also transform and reconfigure her habitus, rather than only guide it ad hoc. Having spent more than three years living, working, and actively socializing as a single professional in the class milieu of (mainly Western) fellow-expats in Dubai, Malika had internalized certain behavioral patterns and mannerisms, so much so that they felt almost ‘natural’ to her over time:

[Visiting the Netherlands,] You realize suddenly that no one opens the door for you; no one carries your luggage into the car. […] These might be very stupid things, but you get used to them. No one packs my groceries? Very small things, you know. For instance, I never have to wash my car over here! There’s a guy in my building, who does only that. He goes over the cars [in the garage] every other day. They just do it! Also, I do have my own laundry machine, but I never do any laundry! I always send it out; someone picks it up and delivers it. It’s very cheap to do that. They even iron everything; so convenient!

Malika’s narrative aptly demonstrates the workings of what Bourdieu calls ‘social gravity’ (Bourdieu in Hage 2011, 81, 85, 87). Indeed, the constant deployment of her agentive self in Dubai, along the specific confines of her expatriate career and lifestyle, result in her gradual entrenchment in the UAE. By deploying and investing herself actively in Gulf space, it appeared almost natural to her over time that a ‘passive’ army of door attendants and cleaners would cater to her daily comfort. Equally, in supermarkets, readily available (and ‘affordable’) labor would automatically attend to packing her groceries, and upon request even carry them to her car for a small tip. While she agrees that these may be ‘very small things’ to the outside observer, their everyday reoccurrence did result in her cultivating of a new set of class dispositions, constantly feeding, renewing, and cementing her self-identification as a ‘Dutch expat’ in Dubai. Hence the expression ‘class personified’.

Considered ‘European’ in Dubai – different from Europe, so we learn from her ‘class-conscious’ (Bourdieu 1977, 83) status concerns about ‘refugees’, voiced above – Malika was exempted from having to occupy herself with menial labor in the UAE, like doing her own laundry or washing her car. As a result, and like many other respondents, she had much more ‘free’ time left to herself, hitting the gym instead, or ‘spending it’ with friends on the beach, or in one of the many lounges that Dubai has on offer. In so doing, she had ample time to establish her professional and personal networks in Dubai. While engaging in these activities, however, the clothes she wears are washed, ironed, and carefully pre-folded by the invisible hand of an ‘unskilled’ labor force – the face of whom she never gets to acquaint much in person. However banal or profane as it may seem, these expatriate forms of leisure, along with the hidden forms of labor that serve as a platform for their everyday effectuation, together make up for the deeply political, ‘infrastructuring practices’ (Meeus, Van Heur, and Arnaut 2019, 17) of class reification. As a consequence, the Emirati configuration in which Malika is favorably positioned and socially insulated also came to affect her ‘bodily hexis’ (Bourdieu 1977, 87, 93–4), not only in terms of its aesthetic appearance to the eye of beholder – fit from fitness – but also in its dominant comportments towards laboring others, positioned at a lower end of the social hierarchy in Dubai. Even if subtle, the latter trait was immediately noticeable to me when she had lectured the waiter in a passive aggressive tone about the precision of the cake she demanded from him when we got seated in the restaurant at the onset of our interview.

5.3 The hidden lives of class: racial mobility in migration

In light of the ethnographic materials presented above, Vora and Koch’s (2015, 544) argument about the veracity of ‘inclusionary assemblages’ in the Gulf – albeit outside the purview of Emirati citizenship – seemingly gain weight. Clearly, I too have encountered ample forms of ‘non-citizen belonging’ in Dubai, compounding a range of migrant sensibilities that altogether provide for alternative ways of looking at the Gulf, at least going beyond ‘Western geopolitical imaginaries’ (Ibid. 550) that frame the region as inherently unique and somehow disconnected from the larger world. Malika, for instance, was certainly very pleased with her degree of ‘inclusion’ in Dubai. Setting up life in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the world, in Dubai Downtown, she now claims to feel ‘spoiled’ for living a luxurious ‘expat’ life, otherwise not available to her in the Netherlands. Her mode of distinction amplifies a steep social mobility process following emigration. Malika was equally fond of no longer being bothered ‘by media portrayals about Islam and Muslims’, weighing down on everyday life in Europe.

Latifa, the Belgian-Algerian expat, attributed even more affective registers to the UAE. In fact, she remains adamant not to return to Belgium, feeling ‘incredibly free’ ever since her arrival in Dubai, a phenomenological account that may at first sight appear as an oxymoron to those equating the region with an ‘immigration without inclusion’ (Fargues 2011). Yet, she felt genuinely at home in the UAE, the country she managed to build a successful career in. Lingering on in Dubai’s infamous ‘temporality’ (Vora 2013), she has become unwilling to settle once more for the ‘previous schemes’ in Belgium, where she feels readily mistaken for a potential criminal when trying to entertain her newly cultivated consumer habits. While Malika is more open to the idea of a potential return to Europe than Latifa, the question remains whether the former will be able to make do in the Netherlands without the everyday privileges of her elitist lifestyle in Dubai. Indeed, having become so accustomed to it over time, only imagining such a prospect already feels like a real ‘downgrade’ to her.

Vora and Koch’s main argument in their work on ‘inclusionary assemblages’ in Gulf space reads that inclusion may simply operate ‘differently’ in a place like the UAE, suddenly ‘unique’ after all, in its developmental history and mode of organization (2015, 551). Alleged evidence for this convenient assertion is taken from the empirical observation that many migrants in the Gulf take seriously ‘recent actions of the Qatari and Emirati leaderships to improve working conditions for workers of all class backgrounds’ (Ibid. 549). Based on this inspection, Vora and Koch arrive at a post-modern relativism that is overly brisk in its positivism: ‘non-citizens are, as they are everywhere, active participants in Gulf state- and nation-building projects’ (Ibid. 540). This view, however, amplifies what Ortner (1998) describes as the inflation of an ‘identity’ centered literature celebrating ‘diversity’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’, while urging us to relegate the ‘clichéd status of class’; yet without demonstrating analytically how its alleged redundancy actually holds up. A brief return to Farida, mentioned in the introduction, and Latifa, who is a friend of Farida, shows, by contrast, the extent to which social class and its racialized performances remain key to understanding narratives about feeling (more or less) included in Dubai.

When Farida was on a layover in Dubai in late 2016, on a visit to Belgium coming from New Zealand – her new home – she met up with Latifa, one of the friends she left behind in the UAE when she moved onward. They invited me to join them in an outdoor lounge overlooking Dubai’s Jumeirah beachfront and the Dubai Palm (island) developments. My presence that evening seemed to work as the catalyst for a slight argument – apparently long in the making – when Farida directed her thoughts to me about her previous life in Dubai – several years ago – in Latifa’s presence:

I remember that for me, I really felt bad for being on top, all of a sudden; on top of all those Indians and the likes, living so segregated from each other, in such a strong hierarchy. I always felt bad⁵ about it, and I’m happy I left this place! Sure, I made good money in Dubai, and I was able to do many things with it. I’m grateful for all the opportunities I got over here, but … [pause/hesitation]

Annoyed to hear this, Latifa intervened, cutting Farida off in vehement disagreement:

It’s my reality! It’s my home! […] it’s the place I know. […] And how is Belgium different anyways? Tell me! You have things like that in Belgium too! The only difference is that over there, we are the ones who are down.

This observation demonstrates the complex ways in which a former habitus may reconfigure in terms of its class and racial properties, depending on the specific geographical, economic, or social locations that are traversed. This, in turn, alludes to the extent to which shifts in rooted convictions and habitual behaviors may in fact denote an underlying dynamic of co-constitutive mobility in terms of class positionality. It comes to show that agentive movement in between differently structured societies may allow for a repurposing of modes of distinction – in relation to laboring others – and this precisely due to the ‘arrival’ into a different class milieu overseas. It is no surprise then that Latifa’s protracted class journey between Europe and Dubai also came to signify a profound sense of ‘racial mobility’ over time. Clearly, international migration in between social locations can engender a myriad of new dispositions, which may themselves outlast the more kinetic aspects of human mobility, however implicit they may be. Indeed, it is by turning to the complex interplay between class and race, and what these social infrastructures encourage people to feel and think about a particular hierarchization in social space, that we can make theoretical sense of why a ‘momentous context’ (Salazar 2018, 154) like Dubai is celebrated so casually by some for its inclusionary properties.

In researching transnational migration, it remains key to examine the extent to which mobile subjects move in between class locations, rather than only retrace kinetic itineraries between geographical places. Hitherto, migrant groups remain all too often studied for the ways in which they bridge the imagined gap between their own 'ethnic' or religious background and that of the arrival society writ large. The empirical materials presented here argue, however, for the need to explore at more length the less visible movements in terms of class too. In making this analytical suggestion, my contribution has developed the ‘traveling habitus’, a conceptual tool which makes legible the implicit habitus mobility of those engaging in longer-term migration. While there is a tendency to ignore class in the anthropological study of migration and mobility, it nevertheless remains key in identity formation and behavioral development. The transitive notion of the traveling habitus may thus help remedy some of the epistemic silences about class and race in contemporary mobility studies.

6. Conclusion

This paper tries to expand on Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of habitus, which, in its original formulation, mainly concerned the formative acquisition of (enduring) behavioral patterns throughout early life. This is done by mobilizing Bourdieu’s analytical tool in a case study on transnational migration between Europe and the Gulf Arab states. As such, it explores the ways in which some of the (older) agentive dispositions of migrants denaturalize and transform over time as they re-embed themselves in new localities. While anthropologists interested in class have already explored the everyday ways in which habitus transforms throughout the life course – much like the ‘little cracks and openings that constantly appear as a result of the complex and constantly changing dynamics of practice’ (Ortner 1998, 14) – these insights have yet to be developed in the literature on mobility studies. By addressing this gap in the literature, my contribution documents the ways in which habitus may not only be dynamic over time, relative to shifting biographies of class, but also in its reconfiguration across space, relative to migration trajectories in between class locations across differently structured societies. It is precisely by discerning what I coin here as the ‘traveling habitus’, repurposed by European minorities-turned-expats by means of their extended immersion into a different class milieu in Dubai, that this paper arrives at decoding the ‘momentous’ significance (Salazar 2018) that lays enmeshed in this type of human mobility.

This article contributes to the mobilities literature by treating at once human mobility transnationally as well as class mobility in social space. It is precisely by attending to the kinetic aspects of human mobility in direct relation to the more implicit inner motion of migrants’ behavioral dispositions, and vice versa, that we may comprehensively grasp the effects that migration has on complex habitus reconfigurations across space and time. One such an example is the way in which respondents became gradually aware of the global power of their European passports. Hence, in reframing this seemingly casual ‘European’ status as a deeply racialized form of cultural capital in Dubai, its practical value (overseas class mobility) as a cross-generational ‘gift’ (inherited mobility capital) is made more legible. The same goes for newly cultivated consumer and leisure practices in Dubai. Rather than casting them as merely trivial or profane, these conspicuous rites are reconsidered as the distinctive markers of a novel class and race positionality overseas. Indeed, these cultural behaviors are learned and conditioned as part of a group-based class compulsion (Bourdieu 1987, 6, 15), and thus represent the everyday cultivation of more ‘self-confident’ social bodies overseas. At the same time, however, this reconfiguration of habitus in Dubai also incapacitated, for some, a potential return to Europe, with their former home reappearing (during visits) as a place where casual modes of (upper) middle-class consumption – as everyday class effectuations – were disrupted by a relentless racial policing, and this despite their transnational efforts at ‘respectability’ as part of a global professional class.

Acknowledgments

I presented an earlier version of this article in March 2019 at the Mobile Labour symposium organized at the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Science, and co-sponsored by the 'Colour of Labour' research project and EASA’s AnthroMob network. I wish to thank Cristiana Bastos and Mari Lo Bosco, the organizers of this event, as well as the editors of this special issue, Andre Novoa and Noel Salazar. I am also indebted to Karel Arnaut and Houssine Alloul for their critical feedback and unceasing support. My gratitude equally goes to Janine Dahinden, who kindly hosted me as a visiting fellow at the University of Neuchâtel in 2019, under the auspices of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research on Migration and Mobility (NCCR-On the Move). Any errors or inconsistencies in the article remain entirely my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Recent 'Emiratization' (De Bel-Air 2018, 7) policies by the UAE Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratization have sought to bolster citizens’ employment through generous public sector employment and additional financial incentives for ‘native’ employment in the private sector. Hence, Emiratis are not integrally retracted from the labor force. Rather, some sections of the local citizenry have now been remolded into the workforce, albeit into the elevated position of a labor aristocracy.

2. All but one respondent held two parents with North African heritage.

3. A French term used since the 1980s to denote ‘Arabs’ (arabes), connoting here francophone Euro-Maghrebis. When being among themselves, many of my French and Belgian respondents would self-identify as such, most often by applying its verlan inversion of ‘rebeux’.

4. Referring to the numeric spike in refugees entering the EU in 2015, not long before our interview.

5. Farida displays here a ‘habitus clivé’, or cleft habitus, indicating that the sort of rapid social mobility covered by her move to Dubai proved, at least for her, to be emotionally dislocating over time, leading to a conflicted sense of self and resulting in her onward migration to Australia (see: Bourdieu 2005, 214).