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Paper short abstract

Stability is a conservative dream that partially transforms the world through attempts to generate continuity. It invites us to understand how people at the exploited end of capitalist processes seek to join those processes, and how contradictions shape human lives while remaining unresolved.

Paper long abstract

Based on a long-term ethnography with men and women who move from the Nile Delta region of Egypt to the Gulf states in search of the means of a moral and material good life, I address stability as a productive and paradoxical dream in a time of high capitalist acceleration. The people I have met commonly search for the means to build conservative good life where things and people are in their proper places, and moral hierarchies are intact yet materially better. Through their search, they become entangled in three complications: first: stability in a capitalist economy requires growth, which is an unstable state; second: to build a good life at home, it is often necessary to move away; and third: spiritual, moral and economic values and strivings are part of the same reality but often cannot be reconciled. Those complications, by virtue of being unresolved, shape their lives and the world we live in. Stability, I propose, is a conservative dream of the kind that partially transforms the world through attempts to generate continuity. It invites us to understand how people at the exploited end of capitalist processes seek to join and contribute to those processes, and how contradictions of between what is, what ought to, and what is emerging shape human lives while remaining unresolved.