Anthropology 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.

In the 1960s the construction of the Aswan High Dam occasioned the forced displacement of a large part of the Nubian population. Beginning in 1960, anthropologists at the American University in Cairo’s Social Research Center undertook a survey of the Nubians to be moved and those already outside their historic homeland. The goal was to record and analyze Nubian culture and social organization, to create a record for the future, and to preserve a body of information on which scholars and officials could draw. This book chronicles the research carried out by an international team with the cooperation of many Nubians. Gathered into one volume for the first time are reprinted articles that provide a valuable resource of research data on the Nubian project, as well as photographs taken during the field study that document ways of life that have long since disappeared. Contributors: Kawthar Abd el-Rasoul, Mohamed Fikri Abdel Wahab, Charles Callender, Abdelfattah Eid, Hussein Fahim, Robert A. Fernea, Peter Geiser, Fadwa el Guindi, Anna Hohenwart-Gerlachstein, John G. Kennedy, Mohamed Riad, Alia Rouchdy, Thayer Scudder, and Abdel Hamid El-Zein.

Egypt is a country of its people. What has been the effect on its inhabitants of the 2011 revolution and subsequent developments? In 2013, a conference held under the auspices of Cairo Papers in Social Science examined this issue from the points of view of anthropologists, historians, political scientists, psychologists, and urban planners. The papers collected here reveal the strategies that various actors employed in this situation. Contributors: Ellis Goldberg, David Sims, Yasmine Ahmed, Deena Abdelmonem, Dina Makram-Ebeid, Clement Henry, Sandrine Gamblin, Hans Christian Korsholm Nielsen, Zeinab Abul-Magd