STUDYING THE CITY

Fieldwork cannot appear primarily as a cumulative process of gathering “experience” or of cultural “learning” by an autonomous subject. It must rather be seen as a historically contingent, unruly dialogical encounter involving to some degree both con X ict and collaboration in the production of texts.

James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture

I arrived in Cairo in early 1993 with promises from Egyptian friends to introduce me to some families in al-Zawiya al-Hamra. The first families that I met were not part of the relocated population and did not live in el-masaakin. Over a short time, I found myself part of a wide network of relationships with people living in el-ahali. Although I toured the housing project (where the group was relocated), I did not want to just walk into one of the apartments and introduce myself as a Palestinian-Jordanian graduate student at an American university who was doing research, especially after the recent Gulf War and the increasing suspicion of outsider involvement in armed attacks in different parts of Egypt. What struck me early on was the resistance and hesitation of my new acquaintances to introduce me to “such people.” This resistance was based on a genuine concern for my safety. Informants residing in el-ahali strongly believed that the resettled group consisted of drug dealers, criminals, and troublemakers. One informant suggested that I only go with her son, a

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policeman, something that I, of course, rejected. It was not until I went to a wedding with a friend in el-ahali that I met two sisters from the relocated group. I realized how lucky I was, since weddings attended by residents of both el-ahali and el-masaakin are rare. In this particular case, the two young women had worked with the bride in the same sewing workshop for more than two years, first outside and later inside al-Zawiya. Through these two sisters, I managed to establish a separate network with the relocated group. This was facilitated by the physical separation between el-ahali and el-masaakin, which allowed me to visit one part of the area without being monitored by members from the other. This invisibility was important so that I could maintain relationships with both parties and avoid pressures, mainly by informants from el-ahali, to control my mobility. Although my relationship with the two groups was based on a continuous negotiation of various selves rather than a fixed identity, I believe that my interaction with people in al-Zawiya al-Hamra was shaped primarily by my gender and marital status on the one hand and by my religious identity on the other.