Migrant Dreams

Samuli Schielke

An intimate portrait of Egyptian migrants' lives and hopes, and their return home A vivid ethnography of Egyptian migrants to the Arab Gulf states, Migrant Dreams is about the imagination which migration thrives on, and the hopes and ambitions generated by the repeated experience of leaving and returning home. What kind of dreams for a good or better life drives labor migrants? What does being a migrant worker do to one's hopes and ambitions? How does the experience of migration to the Gulf, with its attendant economic and legal precarities, shape migrants' particular dreams of a better life? What do those dreams-be they realistic and productive, or fantastic and unlikely-do to the social worlds of the people who pursue them, and to their families and communities back home upon their return?Based on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork and conversations with Egyptian men from mostly low-income rural backgrounds who migrated as workers to the Gulf, returned home, and migrated again over a period of about a decade, this fine-grained study explores and engages with these questions and more, as the men reflect on their strivings and the dreams they hope to fulfill. Throughout the book, Samuli Schielke highlights the story of one man, Tawfiq, who is particularly gifted at analyzing his own situation and struggles, resulting in a richly nuanced account that will appeal not only to Middle East scholars, but to anyone interested in the lived lives of labor migrants and what their experiences ultimately mean to them.

List of FiguresAcknowledgementsPreface1. Truman Show2. The Travel to Doha3. Guarding the Bank4. A Narrow Circle5. Enduring and Resisting6. Families Only7. Everything Circles around Money Here8. Things Money Must Buy9. Dreaming of the Inevitable10. To Have Other Dreams11. A Bigger Prison12. Until the End of Oil13. Normality and Excess14. Estrangement and Faith15. The Shine of the Metropolis16: Economy is Not Rational, and Fantasy is not FreeReferences