The Farthest Place Reviews

The global economy is increasingly dominated by the production of knowledge goods and by struggles for control over information. This book provides an overview of the challenges and opportunities facing efforts to promote access to knowledge in Egypt. The essays, written by leaders in the field, favor a deeper understanding of how the production of information, innovation, culture, and knowledge affects the core of human development and human rights. Combining both theoretical and empirical approaches, the work will be of interest to scholars and practitioners dealing with intellectual property and innovation the world over. Contributors: Ahmed Abdel Latif, Hossam Bahgat, Jack Balkin, Sherif El-Kassas, Sherif Kamel, Nagla Rizk, Lea Shaver, Rebecca Wright.

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.