‘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’.