Nourishing Nostalgia: Modern Ex-Soviet Expatriates and their Foodways in the UAE

Abstract

On a busy street in one of Dubai’s colorful neighborhoods, a vibrant Uzbek restaurant opens its doors to international customers interested in trying a new cuisine or who have longed for their childhood memories. Often, these customers, known in the UAE as expatriates, appear to be of Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) origin and engagingly speak Russian among themselves. On the other side of the road, a modest CIS food store has taken a permanent location, bringing CIS foods to often the same customers of the Uzbek place. Why do CIS expatriates keep coming back to CIS restaurants and supermarkets in Dubai, and what do they look for there? What does it mean for them to maintain ties with “home”? How does Dubai’s internationality as a host affect this meaning? And how strong is intergenerational cultural knowledge transmission in the state of expatriation? As a CIS expatriate myself, I have long asked these questions. Now, it is time to find out what brings us back again and again and how we understand ourselves through our ethnic roots and cultural foods while being abroad. This exploratory qualitative project draws on phenomenological and ethnographic methods to study the day-to-day lives of CIS expatriates in Dubai through conducting unstructured interviews, supportive modes of field observations, and online ethnography of food blogs. The results of this research help fill the gap in understanding former Soviet people abroad and their constructed ethnic identity through food in the unique environment of the UAE, an exceptional country with nearly zero assimilation. In addition, through the insights gathered from expatriates and while juxtaposing those with an online ethnography of food stores’ social media accounts, utilizing linguistic anthropology of images, supplementary insights were produced as implications and suggestions for these supermarkets. Overall, I expect this endeavor to support future studies on migrants’ ethnic construction and migrant cultures. I build on previous studies of ex-Soviet migrants in other European countries, the US, Israel, and Japan, and from broader studies on migration vs expatriation, ethnicity, nationalism, food, and social identity theory, which provides the necessary frame of sociocultural exposure with own attitudes towards other expatriates with shared ethnicity. Here, I try to understand how expatriate communities make sense of their ongoing and changing experiences as “expatriates” and uncover meanings expatriates assign to their experiences through “home” food abroad.