Title: When capitalists collide: business conflict and the end of empire in Egypt 
Author: Vitalis, Robert 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Politics | Ancient History | Middle Eastern Studies | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Robert Vitalis's empirically rich study challenges the left-nationalist paradigm through which twentieth-century Egyptian history and politics has generally been interpreted. He argues with those who explain Egyptian economic development primarily in terms of class and of power struggles between British and Egyptian entrepreneurs and politicians.Vitalis offers a rare, detailed view of the objectives and political strategies of both international firms and Egypt's own big business rivals. He highlights the career of Muhammad Ahmad 'Abbud, modern Egypt's most successful businessman. Vitalis's argument can be effectively applied to many other Third World countries and his book makes a major contribution to ongoing debates regarding class, underdevelopment, and nationalism.   [brief]
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Title: A different shade of colonialism: Egypt, Great Britain, and the mastery of the Sudan
Author: Powell, Eve Troutt
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern Studies | Postcolonial Studies | European History
Publisher's Description: This incisive study adds a new dimension to discussions of Egypt's nationalist response to the phenomenon of colonialism as well as to discussions of colonialism and nationalism in general. Eve M. Troutt Powell challenges many accepted tenets of the binary relationship between European empires and non-European colonies by examining the triangle of colonialism marked by Great Britain, Egypt, and the Sudan. She demonstrates how central the issue of the Sudan was to Egyptian nationalism and highlights the deep ambivalence in Egyptian attitudes toward empire and the resulting ambiguities and paradoxes that were an essential component of the nationalist movement. A Different Shade of Colonialism enriches our understanding of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egyptian attitudes toward slavery and race and expands our perspective of the "colonized colonizer."   [brief]
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Title: Lives at risk: public health in nineteenth-century Egypt 
Author: Kuhnke, LaVerne
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Lives at Risk describes the introduction of Western medicine into Egypt. The two major innovations undertaken by Muhammad Ali in the mid-nineteenth century were a Western-style school of medicine and an international Quarantine Board. The ways in which these institutions succeeded and failed will greatly interest historians of medicine and of modern Egypt. And because the author relates her narrative to twentieth-century health issues in developing countries, Lives at Risk will also interest medical and social anthropologists.The presence of the quarantine establishment and the medical school in Egypt resulted in a rudimentary public health service. Paramedical personnel were trained to provide primary health care for the peasant population. A vaccination program effectively freed the nation from smallpox. But the disease-oriented, individual-care practice of medicine derived from the urban hospital model of industrializing Europe was totally incompatible with the health care requirements of a largely rural, agrarian population.   [brief]
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Title: Colonising Egypt 
Author: Mitchell, Timothy 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Politics | Middle Eastern Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern History | Intellectual History | Postcolonial Studies
Publisher's Description: Extending deconstructive theory to historical and political analysis, Timothy Mitchell examines the peculiarity of Western conceptions of order and truth through a re-reading of Europe's colonial encounter with nineteenth-century Egypt.
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Title: Possessors and possessed: museums, archaeology, and the visualization of history in the late Ottoman Empire
Author: Shaw, Wendy M. K 1970-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern Studies | Art | Middle Eastern History
Publisher's Description: Possessors and Possessed analyzes how and why museums - characteristically Western institutions - emerged in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire. Shaw argues that, rather than directly emulating post-Enlightenment museums of Western Europe, Ottoman elites produced categories of collection and modes of display appropriate to framing a new identity for the empire in the modern era. In contrast to late-nineteenth-century Euro-American museums, which utilized organizational schema based on positivist notions of progress to organize exhibits of fine arts, Ottoman museums featured military spoils and antiquities long before they turned to the "Islamic" collections with which they might have been more readily associated. The development of these various modes of collection reflected shifting moments in Ottoman identity production. Shaw shows how Ottoman museums were able to use collection and exhibition as devices with which to weave counter-colonial narratives of identity for the Ottoman Empire. Impressive for both the scope and the depth of its research, Possessors and Possessed lays the groundwork for future inquiries into the development of museums outside of the Euro-American milieu.   [brief]
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Title: Thinking from things: essays in the philosophy of archaeology
Author: Wylie, Alison
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Philosophy | Archaeology | History of Science
Publisher's Description: In this long-awaited compendium of new and newly revised essays, Alison Wylie explores how archaeologists know what they know. Examining the history and methodology of Anglo-American archaeology, Wylie puts the tumultuous debates of the last thirty years in historical and philosophical perspective.
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Title: The dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: culture, politics, and the formation of a modern diaspora 
Author: Beinin, Joel 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Religion | Judaism | Middle Eastern Studies | Jewish Studies
Publisher's Description: In this provocative and wide-ranging history, Joel Beinin examines fundamental questions of ethnic identity by focusing on the Egyptian Jewish community since 1948. A complex and heterogeneous people, Egyptian Jews have become even more diverse as their diaspora continues to the present day. Central to Beinin's study is the question of how people handle multiple identities and loyalties that are dislocated and reformed by turbulent political and cultural processes. It is a question he grapples with himself, and his reflections on his experiences as an American Jew in Israel and Egypt offer a candid, personal perspective on the hazards of marginal identities.   [brief]
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Title: An archaeology of Greece: the present state and future scope of a discipline 
Author: Snodgrass, Anthony M
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Classics | Archaeology | European History
Publisher's Description: Classical archaeology probably enjoys a wider appeal than any other branch of classical or archaeological studies. As an intellectual and academic discipline, however, its esteem has not matched its popularity. Here, Anthony Snodgrass argues that classical archaeology has a rare potential in the who . . . [more]
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Title: Masking the blow: the scene of representation in late prehistoric Egyptian art 
Author: Davis, Whitney
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Art | Art History
Publisher's Description: The meaning of late prehistoric Egyptian images has until now been tantalizingly mysterious, as little understood as the circumstances of their production. As a result, analyses of these images have been general and often incorrectly illustrated. Whitney Davis now provides a welcome remedy in this detailed reinterpretation of the images carved on ivory knife handles and schist cosmetic palettes. These images are among the most important documents of early Egyptian history and include the Narmer Palette, often considered the very inception of ancient Egyptian image making.Davis deciphers the intriguing pictorial narratives and complex metaphors of images that are concerned with "masking the blow" of the ruler. "Masking the blow" refers to the ways that the images - from hunted animals to human antagonists - represent, elide, or suppress the depiction of a ruler's violent act of conquering an enemy.Examining late prehistoric Egyptian images in light of contemporary visual theory and illustrating his analyses with excellent reproductions, Davis goes beyond the usual concern for stylistic development and iconographic meanings that characterize prior studies. His work will greatly interest art historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and students of the visual arts.   [brief]
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Title: Seeing double: intercultural poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria
Author: Stephens, Susan A
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | Classical Literature and Language | Poetry | Classical Politics
Publisher's Description: When, in the third century B.C.E., the Ptolemies became rulers in Egypt, they found themselves not only kings of a Greek population but also pharaohs for the Egyptian people. Offering a new and expanded understanding of Alexandrian poetry, Susan Stephens argues that poets such as Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius proved instrumental in bridging the distance between the two distinct and at times diametrically opposed cultures under Ptolemaic rule. Her work successfully positions Alexandrian poetry as part of the dynamic in which Greek and Egyptian worlds were bound to interact socially, politically, and imaginatively. The Alexandrian poets were image-makers for the Ptolemaic court, Seeing Double suggests; their poems were political in the broadest sense, serving neither to support nor to subvert the status quo, but to open up a space in which social and political values could be imaginatively re-created, examined, and critiqued. Seeing Double depicts Alexandrian poetry in its proper context - within the writing of foundation stories and within the imaginative redefinition of Egypt as "Two Lands" - no longer the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt, but of a shared Greek and Egyptian culture.   [brief]
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Title: The poetics of military occupation: Mzeina allegories of Bedouin identity under Israeli and Egyptian rule
Author: Lavie, Smadar
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Military History | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: The romantic, nineteenth-century image of the Bedouin as fierce, independent nomads on camelback racing across an endless desert persists in the West. Yet since the era of Ottoman rule, the Mzeina Bedouin of the South Sinai desert have lived under foreign occupation. For the last forty years Bedouin . . . [more]
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Title: Merovingian mortuary archaeology and the making of the early Middle Ages
Author: Effros, Bonnie 1965-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | European Studies | Archaeology | Ancient History | Medieval History | Archaeology
Publisher's Description: Clothing, jewelry, animal remains, ceramics, coins, and weaponry are among the artifacts that have been discovered in graves in Gaul dating from the fifth to eighth century. Those who have unearthed them, from the middle ages to the present, have speculated widely on their meaning. This authoritative book makes a major contribution to the study of death and burial in late antique and early medieval society with its long overdue systematic discussion of this mortuary evidence. Tracing the history of Merovingian archaeology within its cultural and intellectual context for the first time, Effros exposes biases and prejudices that have colored previous interpretations of these burial sites and assesses what contemporary archaeology can tell us about the Frankish kingdoms. Working at the intersection of history and archaeology, and drawing from anthropology and art history, Effros emphasizes in particular the effects of historical events and intellectual movements on French and German antiquarian and archaeological studies of these grave goods. Her discussion traces the evolution of concepts of nationhood, race, and culture and shows how these concepts helped shape an understanding of the past. Effros then turns to contemporary multidisciplinary methodologies and finds that we are still limited by the types of information that can be readily gleaned from physical and written sources of Merovingian graves. For example, since material evidence found in the graves of elite families and particularly elite men is more plentiful and noteworthy, mortuary goods do not speak as directly to the conditions in which women and the poor lived. The clarity and sophistication with which Effros discusses the methods and results of European archaeology is a compelling demonstration of the impact of nationalist ideologies on a single discipline and of the struggle toward the more pluralistic vision that has developed in the post-war years.   [brief]
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Title: Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity
Author: Mitchell, Timothy 1955-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Politics | Middle Eastern Studies | Cultural Anthropology | Postcolonial Studies | Economics and Business | Middle Eastern History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Can one explain the power of global capitalism without attributing to capital a logic and coherence it does not have? Can one account for the powers of techno-science in terms that do not merely reproduce its own understanding of the world? Rule of Experts examines these questions through a series of interrelated essays focused on Egypt in the twentieth century. These explore the way malaria, sugar cane, war, and nationalism interacted to produce the techno-politics of the modern Egyptian state; the forms of debt, discipline, and violence that founded the institution of private property; the methods of measurement, circulation, and exchange that produced the novel idea of a national "economy," yet made its accurate representation impossible; the stereotypes and plagiarisms that created the scholarly image of the Egyptian peasant; and the interaction of social logics, horticultural imperatives, powers of desire, and political forces that turned programs of economic reform in unanticipated directions. Mitchell is a widely known political theorist and one of the most innovative writers on the Middle East. He provides a rich examination of the forms of reason, power, and expertise that characterize contemporary politics. Together, these intellectually provocative essays will challenge a broad spectrum of readers to think harder, more critically, and more politically about history, power, and theory.   [brief]
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Title: May her likes be multiplied: biography and gender politics in Egypt 
Author: Booth, Marilyn
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern History | Women's Studies | Literature | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: Marilyn Booth's elegantly conceived study reveals the Arabic tradition of life-writing in an entirely new light. Though biography had long been male-authored, in the late nineteenth century short sketches by and about women began to appear in biographical dictionaries and women's journals. By 1940, hundreds of such biographies had been published, featuring Arabs, Turks, Indians, Europeans, North Americans, and ancient Greeks and Persians. Booth uses over five hundred "famous women" biographies - which include subjects as diverse as Joan of Arc, Jane Austen, Aisha bt. Abi Bakr, Sarojini Naidu, and Lucy Stone - to demonstrate how these narratives prescribed complex role models for middle-class girls, in a context where nationalist programs and emerging feminisms made defining the ideal female citizen an urgent matter.Booth begins by asking how cultural traditions shaped women's biography, and to whom the Egyptian biographies were directed. The biographies were published at a time of great cultural awakening in Egypt, when social and political institutions were in upheaval. The stories suggested that Islam could be flexible on social practice and gender, holding out the possibility for women to make their own lives. Yet ultimately they indicate that women would find it extremely difficult to escape the nationalist ideal: the nuclear family with "woman" at its center. This conflict remains central to Egyptian politics today, and in her final chapter Booth examines Islamic biographies of women's lives that have been published in more recent years.   [brief]
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Title: Putting Islam to work: education, politics, and religious transformation in Egypt 
Author: Starrett, Gregory 1961-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Middle Eastern Studies | Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Education | Religion | Islam | Politics
Publisher's Description: The development of mass education and the mass media have transformed the Islamic tradition in contemporary Egypt and the wider Muslim world. In Putting Islam to Work , Gregory Starrett focuses on the historical interplay of power and public culture, showing how these new forms of communication and a growing state interest in religious instruction have changed the way the Islamic tradition is reproduced.During the twentieth century new styles of religious education, based not on the recitation of sacred texts but on moral indoctrination, have been harnessed for use in economic, political, and social development programs. More recently they have become part of the Egyptian government's strategy for combating Islamist political opposition. But in the course of this struggle, the western-style educational techniques that were adopted to generate political stability have instead resulted in a rapid Islamization of public space, the undermining of traditional religious authority structures, and a crisis of political legitimacy. Using historical, textual, and ethnographic evidence, Gregory Starrett demonstrates that today's Islamic resurgence is rooted in new ways of thinking about Islam that are based in the market, the media, and the school.   [brief]
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Title: The Prophet's pulpit: Islamic preaching in contemporary Egypt
Author: Gaffney, Patrick D 1947-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies | Islam
Publisher's Description: Muslim preaching has been central in forming public opinion, building grassroots organizations, and developing leadership cadres for the wider Islamist agenda. Based on in-depth field research in Egypt, Patrick Gaffney focuses on the preacher and the sermon as the single most important medium for propounding the message of Islam. He draws on social history, political commentary, and theological sources to reveal the subtle connections between religious rhetoric and political dissent.Many of the sermons discussed were given during the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, and Gaffney attempts to describe this militant movement and to compare it with official Islam. Finally, Gaffney presents examples of the sermons, so readers can better understand the full range of contemporary Islamic expression.   [brief]
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Title: Dioscorus of Aphrodito: his work and his world 
Author: MacCoull, Leslie B
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Classics
Publisher's Description: From the hand of Dioscorus of Aphrodito, sixth-century Coptic lawyer and poet, we have the only autograph poems to come down to us on papyrus from the late ancient world. Both the poetry he wrote for special occasions and the documents he produced in his legal career, in Greek and Coptic, reflect the major preoccupations of Dioscorus' society and his age: the nature of Byzantine imperial government, the patronage of the powerful elite, and the spirituality of the Egyptian Christian church. Thanks to residence in Egypt and many years of work with the original papyri, Leslie S. B. MacCoull is able to present a comprehensive picture of Dioscorus and his times. Through detailed analyses of the documents and poems, some previously unknown, she leads us to a fresh perception of the Coptic culture of Byzantine Egypt. She reveals the man and his world as inheritors of and contributors to the Egyptian-Classical-Christian fusion of society and intellectual life that gave birth to Gnosticism and the Desert Fathers. Dioscorus of Aphrodito epitomizes the little-known cultural flowering of late antique Egypt, which is now seen not as a place of sterility and decadence, but as the home of a strikingly original and creative culture whose subsequent eclipse still remains unexplained.   [brief]
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Title: Destination culture: tourism, museums, and heritage
Author: Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Art | Art Theory | Popular Culture | Cultural Anthropology | Travel
Publisher's Description: Destination Culture takes the reader on an eye-opening journey from ethnological artifacts to kitsch. Posing the question, "What does it mean to show?" Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explores the agency of display in a variety of settings: museums, festivals, world's fairs, historical re-creations, memorials, and tourist attractions. She talks about how objects - and people - are made to "perform" their meaning for us by the very fact of being collected and exhibited, and about how specific techniques of display, not just the things shown, convey powerful messages. Her engaging analysis shows how museums compete with tourism in the production of "heritage." To make themselves profitable, museums are marketing themselves as tourist attractions. To make locations into destinations, tourism is staging the world as a museum of itself. Both promise to deliver heritage. Although heritage is marketed as something old, she argues that heritage is actually a new mode of cultural production that gives a second life to dying ways of life, economies, and places. The book concludes with a lively commentary on the "good taste/bad taste" debate in the ephemeral "museum of the life world," where everyone is a curator of sorts and the process of converting life into heritage begins.   [brief]
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Title: Possessing nature: museums, collecting, and scientific culture in early modern Italy
Author: Findlen, Paula
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | History and Philosophy of Science | European History | Renaissance History
Publisher's Description: In 1500 few Europeans regarded nature as a subject worthy of inquiry. Yet fifty years later the first museums of natural history had appeared in Italy, dedicated to the marvels of nature. Italian patricians, their curiosity fueled by new voyages of exploration and the humanist rediscovery of nature, created vast collections as a means of knowing the world and used this knowledge to their greater glory.Drawing on extensive archives of visitors' books, letters, travel journals, memoirs, and pleas for patronage, Paula Findlen reconstructs the lost social world of Renaissance and Baroque museums. She follows the new study of natural history as it moved out of the universities and into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific societies, religious orders, and princely courts. Findlen argues convincingly that natural history as a discipline blurred the border between the ancients and the moderns, between collecting in order to recover ancient wisdom and the development of new textual and experimental scholarship. Her vivid account reveals how the scientific revolution grew from the constant mediation between the old forms of knowledge and the new.   [brief]
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Title: Remaking the modern: space, relocation, and the politics of identity in a global Cairo 
Author: Ghannam, Farha 1963-
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | Cultural Anthropology | Middle Eastern Studies
Publisher's Description: In an effort to restyle Cairo into a global capital that would meet the demands of tourists and investors and to achieve President Anwar Sadat's goal to modernize the housing conditions of the urban poor, the Egyptian government relocated residents from what was deemed valuable real estate in downtown Cairo to public housing on the outskirts of the city. Based on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork among five thousand working-class families in the neighborhood of al-Zawyia al-Hamra, this study explores how these displaced residents have dealt with the stigma of public housing, the loss of their established community networks, and the diversity of the population in the new location. Until now, few anthropologists have delivered detailed case studies on this recent phenomenon. Ghannam fills this gap in scholarship with an illuminating analysis of urban engineering of populations in Cairo. Drawing on theories of practice, the study traces the various tactics and strategies employed by members of the relocated group to appropriate and transform the state's understanding of "modernity" and hegemonic construction of space. Informed by recent theories of globalization, Ghannam also shows how the growing importance of religious identity is but one of many contradictory ways that global trajectories mold the identities of the relocated residents. Remaking the Modern is a revealing ethnography of a working class community's struggle to appropriate modern facilities and confront the alienation and the dislocation brought on by national policies and the quest to globalize Cairo.   [brief]
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