Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt in Saudi Arabia. By Pascal Menoret. Cambridge University Press; 250 pages; $85 and £55. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.ukGOOD anthropologists aim to enter into the minds of their subjects, sharing their lifestyle, acquiring their language, studying their moods and responses but always maintaining an objective self-awareness. Pascal Menoret is better than good. Halfway through two years of research in the sprawling, aesthetically bleak, politically and socially stifling capital of Saudi Arabia, the French academic, currently at NYU Abu Dhabi, found himself feeling profoundly tufshan.In Saudi dialect, explains Mr Menoret, the word describes the “subtle and incapacitating torpor” that results from a dawning sense of worthlessness and social inadequacy. Common among the young and working class in Riyadh, a city he calls “a selective El Dorado where only a handful became rich”, this state of dejection generates not merely ennui but a detached indifference which itself can be intoxicating and even revolutionary.Mr Menoret is made to feel ...
from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1lU8LDD
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