This new study provides us with a unique and detailed ethnographic portrait of life within two large textile factories in Alexandria, Egypt. Working for nearly a year as a winding machine operator provided Shehata with unprecedented access to workers at the point of production and the activities of the work hall. He argues that the social organization of production in the factories—including company rules and procedures, hierarchy, and relations of authority—and shop floor culture profoundly shape what it means to be a ‘worker’ and how this identity is understood. Shehata reveals how economic relations inside the factory are simultaneously relations of significance and meaning, and how the production of wool and cotton textiles is, at the same time, the production of categories of identity, patterns of human interaction, and understandings of the self and others.
Shop Floor Culture and Politics in Egypt
Samer Shehata
304 pp.
21 b/w photographs, 1 table
15X23cm
ISBN 9789774163777
For sale only in the Middle East
19.95
Related products
Anthropology in Egypt, 1900–67: Culture, Function, and Reform
Cairo Papers Vol. 33, No. 2
Nicholas S. HopkinsAnthropology as a discipline came to Egypt around 1900, as foreign anthropologists reported home on the culture they found. Gradually the intellectual approach was influenced by the functionalist school, stressing that a society consists of interlocking parts. As Egyptians took the lead in anthropology, in the 1930s, the discipline entered into the debate about the need to reform Egyptian society and culture especially in the rural areas, against a general background of functionalism. This approach dominated through the 1960s, when there was a break in Egypt because of the Six-Day War and in world anthropology because of the emergence of new intellectual models. This study traces the evolution of anthropology in Egypt through the stories of its practitioners such as Blackman, Galal, Evans-Pritchard, Hocart, Abbas Ammar, Hamid Ammar, Berque, Abou Zeid, el Hamamsy, Uways, and their contemporaries, showing their challenges and accomplishments.
...read more
Paperback
180 pp.14.2X21.6cm
14.95
Connected in Cairo
Growing Up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East
Mark Allen PetersonFor members of Cairo’s upper classes, cosmopolitanism is a form of social capital, deployed whenever they acquire or consume transnational commodities, or goods that are linked in the popular imagination to other, more ‘modern’ places. In a series of carefully contextualized case studies—of Arabic children’s magazines, Pokémon, private schools and popular films, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants—Mark Allen Peterson describes the social practices that create class identities. He traces these processes from childhood into adulthood, examining how taste and style intersect with a changing educational system and economic liberalization. Peterson reveals how uneasy many cosmopolitan Cairenes are with their new global identities, and describes their efforts to root themselves in the local through religious, nationalist, or linguistic practices.
...read more
Paperback
288 pp.7 b/w illus.
15X23cm
16.95
Crossing Borders, Shifting Boundaries
Cairo Papers Vol. 29, No. 1
Edited bySari HanafiThis monograph centers on the effort to understand the issue of return migration to Palestine from a sociological point of view. Six papers examine various human situations among Palestinians, ranging from villages that have been divided by borders such as the Green Line to populations of Palestinian origin that have been cut off from their roots in Palestine and are now seeking to establish their lives elsewhere. The common theme is the role of borders and boundaries—those that people seek to cross and those that the wider political processes establish around existing populations. Cairo Papers Vol. 29, No. 1.
...read more
Paperback
112 pp.14X19cm
19.95
Cairo Cosmopolitan
Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East
Edited by Diane SingermanPaul Amar
In the cities of the Arab world, while the media focus overwhelmingly on questions of religiosity and war, the future of urban modernity and political globalism is taking shape. As the Egyptian state reaches out to capture the apparent promises of neoliberalism, Cairenes struggle over and redefine their place, identity, and material welfare. Bringing together a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores what happens when new forms of privatization meet collectivist pasts, public space is sold off to satisfy investor needs and tourist gazes, and the state plans for Egypt’s future in desert cities while stigmatizing and neglecting Cairo’s popular neighborhoods. These dynamics produce surprising contradictions and juxtapositions that are coming to define today’s Middle East. Luxury malls owned by the military or foreign investors compete with flourishing but criminalized open-air markets; Nubian, Upper Egyptian and labor-migrant identities confront a renaissance of Arab nationalism; and new chic coffee houses, crumbling movie palaces, and resurgent working-class cultures offer radically clashing versions of public and gender sociability. This volume launches the Cairo School of Urban Studies, committed to fusing political-economy and ethnographic methods and sensitive to ambivalence and contingency, to reveal the new contours and patterns of modern power emerging in the urban frame. Cairo shows us that divergent cosmopolitanisms—both elite and working-class—are emerging across a broad spectrum of the polity, making new claims for political space, recognition, and representation. Contributors: Mona Abaza, Nezar AlSayyad, Paul Amar, Walter Armbrust, Vincent Battesti, Fanny Colonna, Eric Denis, Dalila ElKerdany, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Farha Ghannam, Galila El Kadi, Anouk de Koning, Petra Kuppinger, Anna Madoeuf, Catherine Miller, Nicolas Puig, Said Sadek, Omnia El Shakry, Diane Singerman, Elizabeth A. Smith, Leïla Vignal, Caroline Williams.
...read more
Hardbound
564 pp.80 b/w illus., 21 tables, 2 maps
15X23cm
24.95