Although financed almost entirely by the artists who draw/write for it, it has been apparently been thriving in–and because of–the ongoing revolution. And lately its picked up some international press. There was a video segment about it on Al-Arabiya news, mention of it and interview with one of the artists in a recent article on the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation’s web site, and an account of one of the features  was the subject of a short feature released by Common Ground News Service.

It’s revolutionary in that it’s not a kids magazine, as are most collections of comics in Egypt; it’s a collection of illustrated stories, some gritty, some funny, some quite dark. Tok Tok is described on the cover as a medicine “to be kept out of the reach of children”.

This is a significant departure from the cartoons I describe in the children’s magazines in Connected in Cairo.

In an interview with Swiss Broadacasting , TokTok”s originator, Mohamed Shennawy explained why it was named after the motorized tricycle that negotiates Cairo’s jammed streets by weaving in and out around bigger cars but which in doing so adds adds to the traffic problems. The little vehicles are gritty and streetwise and urban, which is a tone the magazine wants to capture. Moreover:

“Our magazine is like this tricycle: efficient but annoying thanks to its ironic tone,” he said. “Laughing and satire are characteristic traits of the Egyptian spirit – they let us get across what we’re trying to say.”

“Thriving” is a relative term, of course. TokTok sells 1500 copies per issue, at five pounds per. This means it’s probably in the black, but nobody’s making a living out of it. But its fans are loyal enough to show up at special venues to buy the latest editions and get them signed by the artists.

A story in the Egypt Independent when Toktok was launched described the new magazine in this way:

Tok Tok’s focus on the everyday embraces what comics do best and what gives the medium its subversive political power: mixing the high and the lowbrow without sentimentality or propaganda, and carrying a huge potential for ambiguity.

It also makes the magazine undeniably Egyptian, whether in its dealings with sex, traffic or great works of literature. Among the narratives is a spread of funny satirical advertisements and altered logos, and a “Made in Egypt” series inside the back cover, which will select one stereotypical Egyptian character each issue for a drawing and witty biography.

A story also appeared in mashareeb.com. The author wrote:

The artwork of the magazine is fascinating and the Egyptian spirit can be felt in all the stories and the drawing styles. The whole thing is not just graphic novels and comic strips, it also contains a short story, a poem and a section dedicated for talking about the history of Egyptian comic artists and their work (wich is a GREAT idea!).

A recent issue featured a comic about a superhero named “super-Makh” who fights against the sexual harassment that has always been part of Urban Egyptian life but has become particularly aggressive and noxious since the revolution. The superhero was the subject of a short feature released by Common Ground News Service.

The story is penned by Sophie Anmuth, who writes:

Dressed in floral print clothing, he needs cinnamon chewing-gum to fight against his foes and a long rest after his encounters – It’s Super Makh! Reappearing this year in the Egyptian comic publication Tok-Tok, Super Makh is the Egyptian version of Superman in a popular cartoon where his main mission is to the help women and girls stop their harassers

The comic is by Ahmed Makhlouf, who just signs himself Makhlouf. The Common Ground story notwithstanding, this is not the work Makhlouf himself features on his web site, and the title of the comic seems to me to be ironic, reflecting what he wished he would/could do when he witnesses women being harassed.

Other artists include Andil, Hicham Rahmah and Tawfik. You can check out the magazine at its web site, of course: www.toktokmag.com.

A toktok, for those who don’t know, is an autorickshaw, a three-wheeled car originating in South Asia (where I took this picture) but spreading throughout the global south, including Cairo, where they are now a common urban sight.

Binary oppositions serve as part of the cultural repertoire through which revolutionary struggles are performed, says Jeffrey Alexander..

What allowed the Egyptian revolution to succeed? Why didn’t the Egyptian army fire on the protestors and end the whole thing in the first three days?

In Performative Revolution in Egypt (2011), Jeffrey Alexander analyzes the fall of President Hosni Mubarak using a “performance” approach, arguing that successful social performances allowed the anti-Mubarak movement to enact—and so become–the country’s collective representation.

Symbolic Versus Materialist

Most political scientists offer the usual sets of material factors as explanations for the revolution. Egypt had

• high unemployment, especially among young, prime-age working men
• rising literacy rates
• increased Internet usage, supposedly enabling the wider spread of democratic ideals
• lower cost coordination among those committed to democratic ideals

All in all, they say (in retrospect), a perfect storm for the revolution.

Alexander challenges the idea that revolutions depend primarily on such things as

• the economic conditions of the people,
• demographic changes, and
• the capacity of opposition groups to mobilize support for their revolution.

Instead, he argues, economic conditions have to be interpreted and made meaningful.

“Without being mediated by cultural representations material causes would not have effect” (Alexander 2011: ix).

In a political struggle, the agents who can frame the material conditions in charged symbolic terms within civil discourse will be the likely victors, he claims.

This will come as no surprise to most anthropologists, who understand that the symbolic and material are always deeply entangled in mutually influential ways, but Alexander seems to be writing for an audience he expects to have to persuade of the truth of his claims. Apparently, many political scientists take performance for granted in the struggle for power, and reduce rhetoric, symbolic patterns and grand narratives itself to epiphenomena, rather than recognizing that it is in the play of symbols that people articulate their identities, order their social relations and even decide what kinds of things are worth fighting for.

Alexander’s method is far from anthropological—he essentially reads moment-to-moment political reportage by Western media pundits through a critical language of stages, and scripts and performances. It’s not very theoretically sophisticated compared to Abeles (2007), Handelman (1990) or Kertzer (1996); it reads like  a little like early Goffman (1959, 1969).

On the other hand, a political scientist colleague of mine (a well-regarded Middle Easternist)  recently told me, “All the anthropology I’ve read is either too theoretical to be useful or so personal and subjective it’s useless.” A favorite word in praising theoretically sophisticated ethnographies these days is “nuanced”; maybe we can be too nuanced for our political science colleagues?

Maybe a guy like Alexander is who they need to read to be able to take the power of symbols for real.

Symbolic Performances

Alexander emphasizes the power of the public and communal in political culture over the agency of political entrepreneurs engaged in strategic, short-term appeals to shifting group interests and identities. He does not treat culture as static, however. The metaphor of performance emphasizes the activity of symbolic action, of putting symbols to use.

For Alexander, there are pre-existing cultural configurations (often expressed as Levi-Straussian binary oppositions) that form the boundaries of the cultural fields within political actors perform social dramas in order to convince audiences that they embody the society’s most cherished representations of political good.

In this view, national politics is a not a social and cultural outcome of underlying economic and social tensions; rather, national politics is comprised of performances by competing sets of actors who must try to bring those tensions into their performances and make them part of a meaningful (and hence persuasive) show.

“For participants and observers alike, revolutionary conflicts are experienced as a life and death struggle between not just social groups but social representations, one representing the sacred, the other profane” (2011: 14).

Performing Revolution in Egypt

In The Performative Revolution in Egypt Alexander describes both Hosni Mubarak and the protestors seeking to depose him as performers crafting texts from a binary moral classification of security versus chaos, modern versus primitive. (A Levi-Straussian style chart of Alexander’s notion of Egypt’s binary code is printed above)

Alexander is not a structuralist, however, because he recognizes the fact that these codes are only made meaningful in performance:

 Binary moral classification may seem static, but it is not. Its social anchoring is restless and undecided, its interpretation dynamic and potentially explosive. Binary structures pollute those who think of themselves as sacred, and purify those who[m] others passionately judge to be profane (p.23).

As performers, they seek to persuade audiences that their actions are legitimate by linking themselves to the sacred side of the national political paradigm. One of the key audiences each seeks to persuade is the military–each demands deference from the military by virtue of their classification as legitimately expressing the political-social-moral good.

Alexander’s example of the symbolic significance of Khaled Said offers a good articulation of his method. He describes the way Said’s ugly death led to public protests and inspired Google marketing manager, Wael Ghonim, to create Kullina Khaled Said (“We are all Khaled Said”), turning the man’s murder by the state into a collective representation. Khaled Said came to stand for the moral collapse of the state, and the struggle over the true spirit of Egypt.

In Alexander’s account, Nobel laureate Mohammed ElBaradei came to Egypt to organize against the regime because of the significance  taken on by the Khaled Said murder. Alexander then shifts his attention to the rhetoric of ElBaradei, according to which

1. Said’s death provides the wake-up call for a nation that has “lost its place”
2. “Egypt, the land of the Library of Alexandria, of a culture that contributed groundbreaking advances in mathematics, medicine, and science, has fallen far behind.”
3.  Only a people “taught not to think or act” would tolerate such blatant injustice.
4. Apathy would have to rule for the opposition to fail.

While both sides struggle to present themselves as embodying the values on the side of the sacred, Mubarak is unsuccessful. Alexander argues that the president had analyzes Mubarak’s 1981 inaugural address as an example of a successful performance, in which he looked forward to the great work that he and his people had embarked on, “building and not destroying, protecting and not threatening, preserving and not squandering” (2011b: 14).

Thirty years later, efforts to reclaim such rhetoric ring hollow against the fresh performances of the protesters, because the ability to claim the values of building, protecting, and preserving are not inherent in the president’s structural position as ruler; they must be continually renewed in credible performances that make Egyptian audiences recognize him as a collective symbol.

Performance shape experience by giving meaning to it. Egyptians experienced a transformation in moral classification during the uprisings. Positioning themselves as “the Egyptian people” they undermined the most fundamental claim of the regime–its ability to provide security against chaos–by framing the regime as an oppressive force.  Now it is “the people” who must counter the “dogs [and] thugs” (p. 18) of the regime. It is “freedom” (hurriya) that is now the opposite of the regime’s “stability,” not chaos.

And freedom is both an indigenous, Islamic ideal, and one that resonates as “modern” with international audiences.

Critique and Analysis

While there is a lot to like in this book, there are also a lot of weaknesses.

• It is contextually thin. Alexander doesn’t appear to have much, if any, direct field experience in/of Egypt, or to know Arabic, or to have worked closely and dialogically with Egyptian interlocutors. The religious, ethnic, class, gendered and nationailstic contexts that performers draw on in creating political meaning–and which affect how audiences respond–are very poorly attended to.
• It is semiotically thin. Lacking the kind of thick contextualization discussed above, it fails to do justice to the complexities of representations. Calling Mubarak “Pharoah” links him simultaneously to paganism and backwardness and oppression, yes, but ancient Egyptian symbolism has also been employed by Egyptians as signs of secular nationalism apart from the regime. The speeches Alexander quotes (in English) are filled with references and indexes to Egyptian contexts that remain unpacked and uninterpreted.
• It fails to attend to media ecologies. There needs to be more description of the “stages” on which performances are enacted, and the ways various  serve as  distribution channels through which performances are circulated to various audiences. Different media offer different kinds of stages for different kinds of audiences. I desperately wanted a more nuanced description of which media various political actors are performing for, and through, and the extent to which these various performances are accordingly mediated, as well as how the various media affect circulation of representations of these performances.
• It undertheorizes failure. Not all regime performances failed with all audiences, and not all performances succeeded with all audiences. In addition to describing how the protesters repositioned themselves as sacred and Mubarak as polluted, it would be useful to attend to ways the performers themselves contributed to failed performances, to their own positioning as polluted.
• It treats journalism as data. This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Alexander’s method. Journalism is a mode of writing. Western media representations are themselves constructed in semiotically complex ways that make it difficult to use them as transparent sources of data of this kind. Even assuming journalists have complete access,  and no agendas of their own (a fraught assumption), Western journalists approach events in the Middle East through a fairly limited range of narrative tropes, all of which carry ideological baggage.

References:

Abeles, Marc. 2007.  Le Spectacle du Pouvoir. Paris: l’Herne.

Alexander, J.C. 2011 Performative Revolution in Egypt: An Essay in Cultural Power, New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor.

—–. 1969. Strategic Interaction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Handelman, Don. 1990. Models and Mirrors: Toward an Anthropology of Public Events.

Kertzer, David. 1996. Politics and Symbols. New Haven: Yale University Press.

The review is by Anouk de Koning of the University of Amsterdam, author of Global Dreams: Class, Gender, and Public Space in Cosmopolitan Cairo (American University in Cairo Press, 2009).

She summarizes the book thus:

Peterson explores how mostly elite children, students, and entrepreneurs socially position themselves by drawing on consumption patterns, styles and discourses that signify a familiarity and connection with the West. These different protagonists walk a tightrope of social positioning in a landscape in which class, culture and forms of connectedness to the outside, particularly the West, are intimately related.  In this context, cosmopolitanism can signify elite status but also inauthenticity, while the local can be read as both as lack of sophistication and as authentic. Peterson admirably combines these explorations with accessible theoretical discussions of media and globalization.

…which is a pretty good brief summary. She has, however several criticisms.

1. The ethnography is too thin. I fail to go beyond suggestive illustrations to show the social lives of the people I am describing in greater detail.
2. The book pays insufficient attention to the political-economic and ideological climate of Egypt (at the time). The linkages between the Mubarak regime’s undemocratic neoliberal project and the languages, styles and consumption practices of those I’m describing are not drawn sufficiently.
3. I pay insufficient attention to the “long history of linkages between class, culture, and connectedness.”

I can point to places in Connected In Cairo where I address all of these things, but the key word here is probably “insufficiently.” It’s like when I’m watching international studies capstone students presenting projects on a Middle Eastern topic and I wince at all the stuff they are missing; it hard to please someone like Anouk de Koning because she knows so much about the very issues I am writing about that she immediately sees what else I could have said.

But her conclusion is very positive and gets at what I was trying to do:

Connected in Cairo provides an accessible and instructive reading of the everyday construction and negotiation of what is oftentimes glossed as globalization, and will be of value to students and academics interested in the importance of social imagination in the making of local worlds in global times.

CAUTION: Do not read this unless you read it in full, to the last paragraph. Trust me on this.

To be Muslim in England means to perceive from when you are little that you are different, when you leave the class for the hour of religion, with your small classmates looking at you curious and bewildered, and you go to another classroom with a handful of Muslim pupils like you. From that moment you will prefer to stay with the other Muslim pupils and you will seek refuge in their company because nobody makes fun of your faith or treats you badly.

To be Muslim in England means that many people do not love your religion and do not practise it. It’s enough for you to say your name to give away your religion, to arouse often negative reactions that alternate between coldness and open hatred.

To be Muslim in England means that you are an accessory element, marginal, superfluous looked upon with suspicion: people seldom take any interest in your rights and your dignity. It means that you will be forced to study and work during your religious holidays as the state, to throw smoke in your eyes, just recognises you one feast day a year as an official holiday. For the state all the others are normal days, to which no particular importance is given. Do you remember how many times on the feast day you went to an important conference or a business meeting. How many times your children saw the joy of the feast day being ruined by an exam fixed on that day!

To be Muslim in England means to try your utmost in your studies even in the knowledge that you will not get the highest mark, even though it should go to you. On reading your Muslim name during the oral exams at university, the lecturer will go dark in the face and give you a lower mark than your classmates’. And even if you have the highest marks, the university administration will invent something to stop you from being assistant, because you are Muslim. Those who will deprive you of your right to be assistant are moreover church-goers who follow the precepts of their religion; they simply consider you an unbeliever who cannot enjoy the same rights as them.

To be Muslim in England means to get ready to emigrate at any time. You have to choose your children’s names and their course of study in such a way that it is in keeping with the country where you might be forced to emigrate to, should there be attacks by extremists.

To be Muslim in England means that you will never occupy the highest positions in the state. However capable you may be, you will never be President of the Republic or Prime Minister or the Chief of Staff or Head of the Secret Services. Why? Because you are a Muslim and some men of the majority faith consider that God has banned your appointment to the highest positions and also because the state in England, to be quite frank, does not completely trust you. It considers you as a potential traitor who could get in touch with the enemy at any time, as the enemy is of the same religion as you.

To be Muslim in England means struggling well before being able to build a mosque in which to practise your religion. The state and the extremists will take care of stopping you from building mosques. The state by making oppressive laws that make the construction of mosques extremely difficult and hinder the renewal or restoration of any part of them (even the toilets), without first having received numerous permits from the authorities. Add to this the fact that the extremists in England consider all mosque construction as an open attack on their religion and their dignity. As soon as you start building the mosque, hundreds of extremists will rush to attack it, they will burn the building and target you, your family and children, cursing them as infidels. All this will happen because you want to build a place where you can worship God. The police will let them do what they want, then will arrive late, to make out a statement when the people behind the crime have already run away.

To be Muslim in England means that at any moment you risk being expelled from the neighbourhood in which you live. It just needs the extremists to send you a death threat giving you one or two days to leave. Then you will have to take your family and children and leave your home to move somewhere else. And if you go asking the police for help, they will tell you that they advise you to leave your home for a while. ‘Honestly, we are not able to protect you’.

To be Muslim in England means that you are always at risk of massacres. While you are protesting for your rights coming out of the mosque together with your fellow worshippers, you’ll be shocked at the sight of army tanks. Then the extremists will swoop down on you and kill you. Or a shopkeeper will be having words with a customer in the area in which you live and as one of them is Muslim, the question will immediately change into religious war from being an argument about prices. Then the extremists will attack the houses of the Muslims and burn them and will perhaps kill you. As always the police will arrive late and arrest some of the assailants, but however many Muslim dead there may be, the murderers will get mild sentences or will be acquitted. If you are a Muslim in England and your angry star finds you living in a village or a slum, it’s enough for a neighbour to stop under your window and start shouting: ‘This infidel offends our religion on Facebook’. This will be the signal for your extremist neighbours to surround the house and attack you and your family chanting religious slogans. All this will happen despite the fact that you have not attacked their religion on Facebook; furthermore many of those who attack you haven’t the faintest idea of what Facebook is. After every fresh massacre the representatives of the state will come and cover the blood of innocent victims with nice words and loving kisses. They will say that the investigations will go ahead and that the criminals will not escape justice. Then they will declare that this painful incident will never manage to mar national unity and that the Muslims live in England in complete safety and harmony.

To be Muslim in England means to be used to hearing abuse hurled at one’s religion everywhere, on TV, in the streets, in the underground. You will see men of the majority religion declare that your Muslim faith is an error and godlessness and warn their followers not to have anything to do with you, not to mix with your family or to wish the divine mercy on your dead: Mercy is not licit on you Muslims because you are inexorably destined to Hell, ‘as your sad fate’. Moreover, they will prohibit their followers from expressing their wishes for your religious holidays because these wishes would be an implicit recognition by them of your religion, which instead is evident godlessness.

To be Muslim in England means seeing an extremist who destroys your Sacred Book in front of the TV cameras and who exhorts his nephews to urinate on them. You must accept these public offences. The extremist in fact will be released after a formality-trial. His supporters will gather outside the court to pour even more mockery and insults on your religion. In England anyone has the right to attack your religion, because you are Muslim. But if you criticise the majority religion, you will be immediately arrested and thrown into prison for many years with the charge of offence to religions. At that moment you will discover that in England by offence to religions is meant only the offence made against the majority religion. Offence against the minority religion on the other hand is completely allowed: anyone can denigrate it or make mockery of it or tear up its Sacred Book with no problem.

To be Muslim in England means having to ask a girl’s religion before falling in love with her, so as to avoid your love story ending up tragically. If you love a girl who is not of your religion, thousands of extremists will consider your love as a physical attack on their honour, which only blood can wash off. These extremists will attack your house and the homes of the Muslims in your neighbourhood and will burn them, will beat you up and perhaps kill you. All this because you dared to love a girl of their religion, even if they do not know the girl, even if they don’t care anything about her and even if in normal conditions, meeting her in the street, they could subject her to sexual harassment. But you are a godless Muslim and you will never be allowed to profane a girl of their religion.

To be Muslim in England will stop you from expressing your religious convictions in public places. On the underground you will find many passengers reading their Sacred Book very loudly. But if you try to do the same thing, you will find that the passengers will rise up against you and will beat you. You will find that the others swear in the name of the sacred things of their religion, but if you try to swear in the name of your god, those listening will get annoyed and will stop you from swearing. One word will be sufficient, ‘follow my advice’. You will find that the others put their religious symbols everywhere, in cars, terraces, hallways, lifts, but if you put your religious symbols where they do, you will be surrounded by looks of hatred and disapproval.

To be Muslim in England means seeing a sector of citizens ask for the application of their religious law to you; if you oppose by trying to make them understand that you have another religion and that therefore it is not reasonable that they apply the Law of a religion to you in which you do not believe, they will reply: ‘England is our country and we will apply our Law. If you don’t like it, go to another country’.

If you are a Muslim in England, you must accept that freedom of religion is one way. If a Muslim citizen converts to the majority religion, the state congratulates him on this, rejoices at this and smoothes out the way for him. But if the opposite takes place and a citizen converts to the minority religion, he must flee abroad as quickly as possible because if he were to stay in England he could be killed by the extremists in the application of what they consider a religious duty.

Lastly, If you are a Muslim in England, I pray you, do not let yourself be overwhelmed by grief for all these injustices, do not hate your country and do not leave it. Remember how lovely and tolerant our country used to be, England, before being invaded by extremist ideas supported by petrodollars. Remember that we in England have always lived together, and together we have eaten and drunk; we have spent times of happiness and difficult moments and we have defended our fatherland with our lives and blood. Remember that for every extremist there are ten tolerant people who have grown up in the respect of the faiths of others; they too suffer from the attacks of the extremists, just like you.

Do not leave England that loves you. Stay and defend it. Remain where you are and put your hand in ours to free our civilised country from the extremist barbaric tribalism that is trying to take over.

PS: dear reader, in the article that you have just read there is a deliberate mistake. Please replace the word ‘England’ with the word ‘Egypt’ and instead of ‘Muslim’ read ‘Coptic’. Replace the word ‘mosque’ with ‘church’. Then read the article again from the beginning in order to understand what it means to be a Copt in today’s Egypt. Last of all I hope that you will phone all the Copts that you know to wish them Happy Christmas.

Photo by Emily Crane. Used by permission.

How does one write ethnography of an unfolding revolution?

“For decades,” writes Julia Elyachar, “Cairo has been the default location for anthropologists as well as journalists and development workers: it was unquestionably stable, open to Americans and Europeans, and home to the best Arabic language program in the world.”

Now this has changed, Elyachar continues in an introductory essay entitled “The Politics of Writing in Revolutionary Times: Dilemmas of Ethnographic Writing about the January 25th revolution in Egypt and its Aftermath.” In it, she lays out a litany of the ways Egypt has changed as a field area for anthropologists:

Some of the challenges of writing from Egypt this past year are obvious. Too many voices–of friends, relatives, acquaintances—were silenced forever, shot dead by Mubarak thugs, or run over by SCAF (the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces) tanks.  Some of the voices we longed to hear from were in jail, could possibly be back in jail, or might end up there soon. Some were locked inside at home, depressed by the course of events, unable to go outside other than to Tahrir and back again each day. Others were busy with the piled-up tasks of junior faculty anywhere: classes to be taught, grades to be filed, tenure files to be assembled, bills to be paid, children to be raised, and parents’ health crises to be attended to—all this fit into days otherwise occupied with organizing strikes at the University, volunteering at clinics for victims of SCAF violence in Tahrir, and testifying at hearings.

and

In the new Egypt, anthropologists who felt impelled to document the revolution rather than write a planned book faced new risks. Research permits violated were more likely to be revoked; residence permits once taken for granted were not being renewed.

Elyachar is the author of a brilliant book called Markets of Dispossession (Duke, 2005) which I’ve reviewed elsewhere.

Being There

“Being there” is critical for ethnography. Some anthropologists were there, and brilliant writing may proceed from their work (I’m looking forward to seeing great things from Jessica Winegar, Walter Armbrust, Sherine Hamzy and many others in the near future…).

Some social scientists, however, went to Egypt because of the revolution. Some came to check on their networks of hosts and colleagues and friends, and just to be part of something those friends were experiencing.

Others, however, went to Cairo to re-establish their bona fides to be teaching and writing about the Middle East. My former AUC colleague Mona Abaza wrote a widely circulated, scathing critique of such social scientists, the equivalent of parachute journalists, who call on their colleagues and friends to arrange meetings for them with revolutionaries, then return to the U.S. to write as “experts.”

This said, it is no coincidence that many belonging to our [local] scientific community have recently felt somehow “misused” through being overwhelmed by Western tourist-revolutionary academics in search of “authentic” Tahrir revolutionaries, needing “service providers” for research assistants, for translating, and newspaper summaries, for first hand testimonies, and time and again as providers of experts and young representatives for forthcoming abounding conferences on the Arab Spring in the West. “Cherchez”, the authentic revolutionary in each corner of the city, is the fashionable mood of these times. In theory, there is nothing wrong with providing services, had the relationship been equal, which was unfortunately never the case.

Although obviously (to me) aimed primarily at academics from prestigious US and European universities who lack their own local contacts, the missive has stirred up a good deal of hurt feelings among other academics. I’ve spoken to three young scholars who have lived in Egypt for extended periods of time, speak Egyptian Arabic, and have their own local communities of friends and hosts, but who nonetheless felt tarnished by Abaza’s statements. This is especially true of those Egyptian and international students who parleyed their AUC MA degrees into PhDs at just such high prestige  institutions as the scholars Abaza is criticizing are coming from.

But I think these students miss the central point: if they have their own extensive networks, hosts and friends, they are not parasitic on the AUC establishment, so Abaza’s criticisms do not apply to them.

I’m reminded of my experiences as a journalist and the hierarchies of prestige and expertise we experienced, which Mark Pedelty has captured well in his ethnographic study of war correspondents War Stories. Like ethnographers, journalists root their knowledge in the experiences of “being there”–yet local journalists find themselves serving the needs of superficial but high-profile correspondents who fly in when the local become international news, and who leave after a few days of reporting from the field.

It is interesting to reflect on this in the light of Abaza’s own work on consumption in Egypt. Her book Changing Consumer Cultures of Modern Egypt: Cairo’s Urban Reshaping (2006, Brill) is a postmodern pastiches of images and vignettes and statistics and anecdotes producing a sweeping effect. This kind of writing is often associated with just the kinds of scholarly flaneurs that Abaza is criticizing–but in her case, the ability to write of changing tastes is a reflection of the depth of her experience in Egypt, not only the numbers and kinds of interviews she has conducted, but her memories of consumption practices in the middle-class home of her girlhood, and the physical landscapes she has watched transform from working class shops and dwellings to shopping malls and five-start hotels. Without the depth of long-term “being there,” Abaza could never have pulled it off.

The Ends of Ethnography

“Being there” also entails modes of belonging. What does it mean to do participant observation of a revolution? What kind of participation is this? Does “observation”–the writing up of field notes, the gathering of interviews, the synopsizing of facts into lists and charts and relationships–distance oneself from the genuineness of the revolutionary spirit?

These questions are raised by a very brief, pointed essay by Reem Saad entitled “Reflections on the Egyptian Revolution.”  She writes:

Since the first days in Tahrir, I would retire late at night thinking I should record what happened, at least write down the date and main events. Sheer exhaustion made it impossible. As days went by, exhaustion was relatively under control, and so much was lying there waiting to be anthropologised, but I did not touch it. It seems, somehow, I felt or decided that if I “use” this as ethnographic material it would detract from taking it all in, from all of this becoming part of me, of who I will become. Was I making a sacrifice? Was it a convoluted tribute to the martyrs and their blood- that none of this should make it to, say, a “publication” or a tenure application file? That I should not pollute the pure by feeding the sublime event to the cold and brutal machine that rules our existence as academics?

But it is not really so much the practice of ethnography that bothers Reem as the ends toward which the ethnography is aimed. As a discipline, anthropology is always parasitic on its hosts. The anthropologist,individually, always benefits–personally and professionally–to a greater degree than our hosts. Reem is concerned that she not profit from activities for whom others have made great sacrifices.

Yasmine Moll, NYU grad student and author of an interesting recent article on Egyptian televangelists writes about the positionality of doing ethnography of the revolution from within the revolution. On the one hand, as an Egyptian Yasmine is excited, engaged and filled with revolutionary spirit. On the other hand, she sometimes fears to participate in arguments and debates about the revolution for fear of not being sufficiently

She writes:

I felt I had to hide, or at least not explicitly articulate, my disagreement with this informant’s views because I didn’t want to jeopardize my fieldwork relationship with her. I went so far as to limit her access to my Facebook profile, as I was regularly posting updates and pictures of Tahrir on it. As an anthropologist, I strove to understand her reasoning and to contextualize it within the broader narrative of her life and work. As an Egyptian citizen and a Muslim, however, I found her position absolutely unacceptable.

Yasmine also found that the footage she was taking during the revolution–not unlike many other revolutionaries bringing their cameras to Tahrir Square–could be turned into a video that makes an important point about gender that anthropologists may take for granted but which many others do not hold. Posting the video to Vimeo produced exciting results:

I didn’t at all anticipate the very positive response it would get: over 7,000 hits on Vimeo and Youtube, requests from both college and high-school teachers in the US to show it in their classrooms and have me Skype-in to talk about it, and emails from viewers who told me the video made them rethink their assumptions about the types of actions “possible” for veiled Muslim women, and so on.

A similar sentiment was expressed by Samuli Schielke, who had been conducting ethnography in Egypt and recording the frustrations of Egyptians for many years. He went to Cairo just days after Jan. 28th and left just a few days before Mubarak stepped down. He took many pictures and blogged about the experiences at http://samuliegypt.blogspot.com/ When queried about when his research would be published, Schielke wrote

I didn’t know how to answer because I then realized that the blog had become the research output. An academic article might never be able to convey what I think the blog did.

Schielke sought to write as an anthropologist but also as a revolutionary, or at least as a fellow traveler.

it was always clear to me that I was writing not just about the revolution but for the revolution. The same writing was intended both as anthropological analysis as well as revolutionary propaganda (directed mainly at a Western readership that oscillated between enthusiasm and scepticism about the events). This is a tricky thing. Scientific research is obliged to an ethos of truth, while revolutionary action requires a tactical relationship with truth. At the same time, I also believe that a revolutionary uprising is one of those situations where one cannot speak truthfully about the events without choosing sides. When people are shot dead, there is no neutral ground for disengaged analysis. My account of the Egyptian revolution is an extremely partisan one, and I would consider it a failure if it were otherwise

Interestingly, many of his Egyptian revolutionary friends said what they liked best about the blog was its neutral and objective tone. It was they who translated the blog into Arabic and published it as a book entitled Hatit’akhkhar ‘ala al-thawra: Daftar yawmiyat ‘alim anthropolojia shahid al-thawra (You’ll be late for the revolution: The diary of an anthropologist who witnessed the revolution).

New Media, New Data

One of the perplexities of new media is that even while it is used as a tool of revolution, it creates complex networks of interlinked texts which bear, within themselves, indexical indicators of the time and place in which they were generated (to the second, no less). This means that they offer an extraordinary new source of historical and processual data.

What kind of data do the texts created by new media provide for us? What kind of semiotic unit is a tweet? Tweets from Tahrir, an edited collection of tweets by organizers and winesses of the Jan. 25 revolution offers one kind of account, the use of tweets as an historical archive of materials on how the revolution unfolded minute-by-minute..

But another crucial question involves the interplay between social media texts, with their capacity to be distributed virally through reader/appropriator interest, and other forms of text, both mainstream media and non-electronic media. Oral poetry, music, signs and grafitti all played a part in the Tahrir uprising and its aftermath, and all reached far beyond the immediacy of Tahrir through digital photography, postings to Facebook, tweets, web site postings, and even collections in photographic books.

One of the most successful of these books, Karima Khalil’s Messages from Tahrir collects photographic images of signage used by protesters in Tahrir during the Jan 25th-Feb. 11 protests. In an interview, Khalil describes the project thus:

I went through about seven thousand photographs, focusing on signs people were holding in Tahrir Square between 25 January and 11 February 2011, the day Mubarak stepped down. Starting with my own photographs, I looked carefully at what the signs said and how powerful the message was. I wanted the images collectively to represent the range of emotions I saw in Tahrir: mourning, rage, determination, pride, sarcasm, steadfastness, good humor, satire, and ultimately celebration, as well as caution. The book shows them in that order. It tells a story.

Ethnographers have always contextualized their material with additional data. Social media provides vast quantities of new possibilities for thick contextualization that we are only now getting glimmers of how to handle.

Ways and Means

Moll’s digital videos and Schielke’s blog point to the ways that efforts to write for as well as of the revolution has changed the means through which their scholarship is disseminated. New media have not only opened up opportunities for revolutionary practice but have become central tools for scholarly reflections on the revolution.

Perhaps the most significant of these efforts is the web site Jadaliyya, an extraordinary scholarly resource. Interviewed by Julia Elyachar, one of the web site’s founders Bassam Hadad describes it thus:

Our politics are mirrored by the design content in our website. … We mix everything together–long analytical documented pieces, together with what are usually called “opinion pieces,” together with poetry, literature, and art. We do not separate these into different “sections” on the main page. We publish in different languages on the same page; we have articles in French, and lots in Arabic. We are not producing our work with an eye to the market, nor to two different markets: one “western” and the other “Arab.” We have one version that goes everywhere…

What such web-produced scholarship allows, of course, is the possibility of radical transformations of scholarly output; publications that are more immediate, more intimate and more dialogical than the usual scholarly formats. And this was, as Hadad states, one of the reasons for creating Jadaliyya:

By 2010, my colleagues and I had gotten really irritated by the fact that, although the news cycle had narrowed and narrowed, there was no medium to capture the middle ground between daily blogs and peer-reviewed scholarly journals. At one end, were  daily blogs. Often very creative, scholarly, and energetic, but they were also one-person efforts. On the other end were peer reviewed articles in journals that can take six months at best to get out information and analysis. There was a huge unoccupied vacuum between the two. We created Jadaliyya to fill that vacuum.

The complete  interview is available as Jadaliyya: A New  Form of Producing and Presenting Knowledge in/of the Middle East (interview with Julia Elyachar). Haddad is the co-editor of a new book on the uprisings from Pluto Press, The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings.

The essays quoted here are drawn from among several great pieces collected and edited by Julia Elyachar and Jessica Winegar and published as a “Hot Spot” (a collection of essays by anthropologists around a common topical theme of current interest) by the journal Cultural Anthropology. I urge you to read the entire article here.

References:

Abaza, Mona. 2012. Academic Tourists Sight-Seeing the Arab Spring. Cultural AnthropologyHotspots: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt a Year after January 25^th, Julia Elyachar and Jessica Winegar, eds. http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/488

Elyachar, Julia. 2012. Writing the Revolution: Dilemmas of Ethnographic Writing after the January 25th revolution in Egypt. Cultural Anthropology Hotspots: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt a Year after January 25^th, Julia Elyachar and Jessica Winegar, eds.http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/492

Haddad, Bassam and Julia Elyachar. 2012. Jadaliyya: A New Form of Producing and Presenting Knowledge in/of the Middle East. Cultural Anthropology Hotspots: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt a Year after January 25^th, Julia Elyachar and Jessica Winegar, eds.http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/486

Haddad, Bassam, Rosie Basher and Ziad Abu-Rish, eds. 2012. The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? Pluto Press.

Khalil, Karima. 2012. New Texts Out Now: Karima Khalil, Messages from Tahrir. Cultural Anthropology Hotspots: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt a Year after January 25^th, Julia Elyachar and Jessica Winegar, eds. http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/494

Moll, Yasmin. 2012. Conversation on the Egyptian Revolution. Cultural Anthropology Hotspots: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt a Year after January 25^th, Julia Elyachar and Jessica Winegar, eds. http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/495

Saad, Reem. 2012. Reflections on the Egyptian Revolution. Cultural Anthropology Hotspots: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Egypt a Year after January 25^th, Julia Elyachar and Jessica Winegar, eds. http://www.culanth.org/?q=node/496

Schielke, Samuli. 2011. Hatit’akhkhar ‘ala al-thawra: Daftar yawmiyat ‘alim anthropolojia shahid al-thawra (You’ll be late for the revolution: The diary of an anthropologist who witnessed the revolution, in Arabic), transl. Amr Khairy, Cairo: al-Nafisa li-l-‘ulum wa-l-adab.

I am even more thrilled because the review, by Dan Gilman (University of Mississippi) is so positive. In four pages, Gilman carefully describes the argument of my book, chapter by chapter, in elegantly parsimonious language.

I wish I could reprint the whole thing here because he summarizes the book far better than I ever could. Instead I’ll just quote his last paragraph:

Although he does not dwell on it as a major topic of discussion, Peterson acknowledges in perceptive detail that the discourse of elite cosmopolitanism in Cairo is ultimately linked to a relatively rigid and implicitly violent class structure in which the elites use a suite of tools and justifications to reserve their privileges for themselves, and shut out the vast majority of Egyptians from even attempting to gain entry to more privilege or opportunity. This book is thus a valuable contribution for scholars in a variety of social sciences who have taken the wave of revolutions in the Arab world as their subject matter, and for those who will be paying close attention to how these elites in Cairo and elsewhere respond to existential threats to their structural privileges.

Gilman is himself a scholar of contemporary popular music in Egypt, the author of one of my favorite essays on the pop culture aspect of the revolution.

Happily, the critical discussion does appear in issue 15(1), so I have updated the references in the blog post and inserted the references into my bibliography of the Egyptian uprisings.

I learned of this piece from Ted Swedenburg, who writes:

[M]ahragan artists are also more than willing to aim their barbs at figures of authority, including Egypt’s post-revolution, popularly elected president, Muhammed Mursi. “Morsico Systems” from mahragan artist Ahmad Samih sets a presidential speech to a sha‘bi beat, and splices Mursi’s sonorous message together with autotuned, impertinent commentary. To Mursi’s claim that “there is support for that,” meaning for his regime’s “organization,” the singer replies, “There is an elephant.” The recording goes on to repeat and counterpose the words of Mursi and the singer, “support” and “elephant,” several times, reducing the president’s intonations to nonsense.

Updates include writing from the International Review of Information Ethics, Middle East Report, and many others

Although Western journalists love to remake the Arab world in a Euro-American image, in Cairo, the rising music of the underclass is mahragan (“festival”) music, not rap, writes Ted Swedenburg.

Egypt’s popular music remains filled with calls for both national unity and social justice, writes Ted Swedenburg in an article titled “Egypt’s Music of Protest: From Sayyid Darwish to DJ Haha” in a recent edition of Middle East Report, but its role in the revolution is not quite the way Western media has tended to portray it. The article is available free on-line.