Tag Archives: Egypt

Carl Rommel on his book, Egypt’s Football Revolution

Posted on by

0

Interview by Jessica Winegar

https://utpress.utexas.edu/books/rommel-egypts-football-revolution

Jessica Winegar: The study of sports has been somewhat marginal in the field of anthropology. Why do you think that is, and in what ways does your book show its importance to understanding major social events such as revolutions?

Carl Rommel: This is an intriguing question, because in many ways, sports is really a total social fact. Huge spectator sports, such as football (soccer), bring together a range of sociocultural spheres, including economy, ritual, performance, religion, emotion, gender, global media, mega events, and politics. Still, with the exception of a small number of recent works (such as, Guinness & Besnier 2016, Kovač 2022, Carter 2008), sports has indeed been marginal in the field of anthropology.

Now, I am not exactly sure about the reasons for this marginalization, but I have a few ideas. First, I think that spectator sports for a long time came across as too modern to a discipline primarily interested in the primitive and exotic. Hence, while Clifford Geertz went to thickly describe the local practice of cock fighting on Java (1973), it was left to sociologists to analyze spectator sports as an exceptional realm of excitement in bureaucratically organized western societies (Dunning & Elias 1986). More recently, as ostensibly modern social phenomena such as mass media, science, and development have been made central foci of anthropological exploration, sports might instead have looked too ordinary: a popular pastime for the masses without any true epistemological or aesthetic depth. I would also not rule out a measure of latent snobbism. At least in some contexts that I know, academics self-identify as ‘people who don’t like sports.’ Anthropologists with such opinions might not only opt to research more supposedly worthy topics. They also do not possess the background knowledge necessary to penetrate the world that a huge spectator sport assembles. To be able to properly discuss the game with one’s interlocutors, one needs to master information about a large corpus of players, coaches, clubs, matches, and tournaments. While that is no easy task for any anthropologist taking on a whole new sports universe (as I did in Egypt), it is likely even more daunting for a scholar who is not a sports person in the first place.

As for the second part of your question, I think that my book shows that sports can provide unique anthropological angles on a revolution’s who, when, where, and what. First, my story about Egypt’s Football Revolution introduces a completely new cast of revolutionary characters: television pundits, players and coaches, club officials, representatives of the football association, and more or less organized supporters. Second, my study of football gives the revolution an alternative timeline. It shows how supposedly non-political football events (matches, tournaments, television talk shows) constituted key moments in a revolutionary transition that began to take shape already before January 25, 2011. Third, my story recasts the revolution’s spatiality: the football revolution that I chronicle took place at stadiums, in television studios, and in coffee shops just as much as in Tahrir Square, the Egyptian Parliament, or the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood. This shift of focus, finally, provides an alternative account for what the revolutionary struggle was all about. I analyze the revolution first and foremost as a contest over how Egyptian football men – and Egyptian men more generally – should feel, act, and behave. My ethnography of the world of football recasts the revolution as a revolt that set out to transform emotions, masculinities, and ultimately the Egyptian nation.

Jessica Winegar: Taking football seriously has indeed given us a better understanding of the depth and breadth of the revolutionary process in Egypt, and the important ways that this process was gendered through notions of masculinity as related to politics and nation. I would love to hear you riff on how these insights from football in Egypt could be useful to those studying protests and revolutions of the past 15 years – which have seen an intensification of such political action worldwide.

Carl Rommel: I’d like to answer this question by returning to the revolution’s who, when, where, and what. The way my book suggests alterative answers to these questions could arguably be useful in other settings ripe with protests and revolt too. Because, a truly revolutionary situation is never merely a moment when activists raise demands limited to representational politics and try to push them through the vested institutions of the nation-state. When studied carefully, a revolution always reverberates in spaces that might look somewhat marginal, and through events that both precede and succeed canonized timelines. You might also find actors who may not come across as political at first glance, but who are actually key players. And you might identify a revolutionary battle over whom the taken-for-granted and normal we are or should be. In my Egyptian case, this contested normal we was a national and gendered we. Football provided a central stage for carving out normal Egyptian masculinities before, during, and after the 2011 Revolution. In other situations, the established we that the revolt has to take on could just as well be a classed or racialized we. For instance, who is the normal and white middle-class woman?

What my research illustrates – and what could be useful to consider elsewhere – is that processes that define who are normal and who are not are complex and a long time coming. Normalized subjectivities surface at the intersection of media, popular culture, spectacle, investments, legislation, and more. For a revolt to be truly revolutionary, it has to provide alternatives to such entrenched scripts. My ethnography illustrates both how and why this is possible and why it is difficult to pull off. Because processes of subjectivation are long-term and multidimensional, they take on an inertia that is difficult to fully obliterate. The counterrevolution is always likely to gain momentum from never fully eradicated ideals for how to be, feel, and behave normally. In Egypt, as elsewhere, revolutions are fragile projects, and they most often fail. One reason is that they are up against potent powers vested in distributed assemblages of institutions, discourses, ethics, pop culture, and media technologies.

Jessica Winegar: Do you think that fun can be a revolutionary practice? What would your soccer fans have said at the time, and what would they say now?

Carl Rommel: Oh yes, absolutely, this is one of the central arguments that I make in the chapters that deal with Egypt’s so called Ultras supporters. The Ultras were a new type of football fans who started to appear at Egyptian stadiums in 2007. Inspired by Ultras groups in North Africa and southern Europe, they introduced a new style of fandom that grew influential in the years leading up to January 2011. As the ethnographic research that I conducted with the Ultras shows, the new fan groups’ success was to a large extend a result of the fun and freedom that they generated in the stands. Through bold chants, flags, choreographed displays, graffiti, and firework, their novel way of supporting their teams attracted tens of thousands of young men. Almost immediately, this subculture was spotlighted as a security threat by the Egyptian police. Consequently, the Ultras found themselves forced to confront the security forces and defend their right to do their thing – that is, having fun in their own way – inside and outside the stadium. In 2011 and 2012, this experience of taking on the security state through organized violence proved vital for the revolutionary struggle. The Ultras’ subculture of fun and freedom became a central force in clashes and street fights.

But the Ultras new way of having fun was also subversive for another reason. As I discuss in the book’s first two chapters, Egyptian football had constituted a realm of fun also before the Ultras entered the scene. To make a long story short, Egyptian football experienced an unprecedented boom in the late 2000s. Fueled by victories, media, and popular culture, the nation was swept away by a football craze that was mobilized successfully by the Mubarak government in a pretty classic bread-and-circuses manner. Rather than a fight for or against fun, therefore, the revolution inside Egypt’s national game was at the heart a conflict between two different ways of having fun: one older, media-driven and closely related to the political and economic establishment; one younger, more international, and vehemently opposed to the media. As such, while my book demonstrates that fun can be a revolutionary force, it also shows that fun is not revolutionary by default. Football’s unmatched ability to generate fun could just as well be reactionary. It all depends on the context, and how the fun is mobilized and by whom.

As for what Ultras would say about this today, it is difficult to know as the supporter groups are currently in disarray. In the years since the 2013 Military Coup, the Ultras (like most revolutionary groups in Egypt) have been crushed by the counterrevolution. Many leaders are or have been in prison. Others live abroad. While Egypt’s biggest group, Ultras Ahlawy, was formally dissolved in 2018, other groups still exist, but their activities are scattered. When talking to (former) Ultras today, they tend to look back at the revolutionary years with a great deal of nostalgia. They tell me about a period when they had an incredible amount of fun at the stadium. And they tell stories about demonstrations, clashes and sit-ins that all but revolutionized Egypt. Whether Ultras connect these stories about fun and revolution, I am not sure. Possibly such an analysis is more exciting for an anthropologist than for the people who live the (counter-) revolution’s twists and turns. Still, everyone knows that one reason for why their revolution was crushed is that the regime has banned fans at most Egyptian football games over the last ten years. As a result, it has been impossible to keep generating fun at the stadium. And without fun, there has been no way to recruit new members, and hence no way to keep the revolutionary momentum going.

Jessica Winegar: And it is hard to keep revolutionary momentum going within the straitjacket of proper nationalism that requires a kind of seemingly apolitical stance. I think readers would be especially interested in your argument about that bind in the book, in part because I see it playing out in other contexts. Can you briefly recap that central theoretical point?

Carl Rommel: So, the notion of siyasa (politics in Arabic) pops up in several chapters in the book. Overall, I show that while siyasa comes with many different connotations for my interlocutors, it almost always elicits a sense of unease. One reason is a long-standing tension between siyasa and idealized notions of Egyptian nationalism. To put it brief and simple, we might say that whereas a true nationalist works for the common interests of the whole people, being political (siyasi) by definition means serving partial group interests at the expense of some other citizens. Since the foundation of the Egyptian nationalist movement in the late 19th century, therefore, nationalism and siyasa have been understood as inherently antithetical. One telling example is the way nationalist leaders, such as President Gamal Abdel Nasser, have strived to appear non-political (Roussillon 1996).

Being Egypt’s indisputably national game, football is a realm where this tension is particularly recognizable. In my book’s chronology, it surfaces for the first time in the wake of two World Cup qualifiers between Egypt and Algeria in November 2009. I portray these matches as the culmination of the football hysteria permeating late-Mubarak Egypt. This was both the moment when the regime used football most actively to shore up support and the time when things began to crack. After Egypt lost the second game and missed the 2010 World Cup, criticism against the sport’s ‘politicization’ proliferated. Instead of bringing people together, commentators argued that the national game was breeding fanaticism and politics. After January 2011, such ideas became even more commonplace. Football now looked like the cause of a range of problems grouped together under the rubric of siyasa. In the final chapters, I examine ethnographically how these debates impacted on supporter attachments. As the national game became mixed up with politics, many Egyptian men found it increasingly difficult to care about it.

Tensions between siyasa and nationalism play a key role in my story of the Ultras too. Journalists, club officials and people in the football association recurrently blamed the new fans for being political, that is, for serving their own interests rather than those of the whole people. The Ultras were well aware of these labels. In 2011 and 2012, the fans were keen to prove that they were properly nationalist, for example, by not taking parts in supposedly overtly political demonstrations and street fights. Indeed, I argue that the Ultras’ football revolution was most powerful precisely when it came across as respectable, nationalist, and non-political among the general public. Paradoxically, their political success was a consequence of their ability to stay outside the realm of putative politics. In the long run, however, it was not possible to push for revolutionary demands while at the same time maintaining an apolitical profile. From early 2013 onwards, the Ultras were caught up in events that made them look increasingly political, and which saw them lose a great deal of popular support.

The book’s conclusion suggests that this double bind faced by the Ultras was an impasse plaguing many revolutionary factions in Egypt. To understand this point we must first realize that the Egyptian revolution was a nationalist revolt first and foremost. Nationalism constituted a taken-for-granted meta-framework; liberals, Islamists, socialist, and the Army all claimed that they were fighting for the true interests of the whole people. While this was no doubt a reason behind the revolution’s initial success – appeals to nationalism could be recognized and supported by millions of Egyptians – it also imposed limitations. As the Ultras exemplify, it can be difficult to combine being a proper nationalist with fighting for the interests of particular subsections of the national collective, for example, a particular class or gender. I am convinced that this is a factor to consider when we try to understand why the Egyptian revolution was stifled. It is not at all easy to stay strictly non-political in a revolutionary situation that by its very essence requires bold action, violent resistance, and demands calling for radical transformation.

Jessica Winegar: This working with and through local conceptions of politics (siyasa) is fascinating. What advice would you give junior anthropologists working on politics in other contexts, then?

I guess my suggestion would be to be a bit less concerned with how anthropology defines politics and a bit more interested in what the people we work with understand to be political and not. In my analysis of siyasa I take cues from an article that Matei Candea wrote in 2011. Candea notes that while anthropologists since the 1960s have been very good at discerning politics in all thinkable sociocultural fields (the politics of gender, the politics of the body, clothing, taste, language, knowledge and so on), politics itself has rarely been examined. Candea proposes that anthropologists should study the political as an ethnographic category. His ethnographical material from schools and educational administrators on Corsica analyses in detail how politics is understood locally, how the political and non-political are divided up, and how such boundaries become an important part of reality.

My book demonstrates the potential of studying politics as an ethnographic category in revolutionary situations. Conducting my research in a period when siyasa seemed to be everywhere in Egypt, I documented how football people understood and delineated the political, as well as how it generated a visceral sense of unease. This empirical focus facilitated an analysis of the variegated work that the political does. It allowed me to pinpoint how too much politics forecloses previously strong emotions. As one interlocutor expressed it, ‘everything has become politics; there is no fun left.’ It also made me show how the political functions as a derogatory label: how it could discredit and marginalize actors from the national we; and how it could render a whole sport suspicious and problematic. I would imagine that similar analyses would be of interest in many contexts around the world. Which phenomena or individuals are political or not can never be known in advance. It is a fluid field ripe with contestations that must be studied ethnographically. Such ethnographic attention to emic notions of politics does not only provide valuable insights about what the political is, how it is debated, and how it feels. As I hope that my book demonstrates, it could also provide a fresh entry point for analyzing conflicts over resources, power, and hegemony, a ‘politics of politics,’ as I call it at one point in the conclusion.

Chihab El Khachab on his book, Making Film in Egypt

Posted on by

0

Interview by Meg Morley

https://aucpress.com/product/making-film-in-egypt/https://aucpress.com/product/making-film-in-egypt/

Meg Morley: How do/would you explain the central arguments of your book to the film industry personnel with whom you worked?

Chihab El Khachab: There are some arguments about which I already talked with film personnel during and after fieldwork because they were well aware of their dynamics. In particular, we talked a lot about interpersonal relations and labour hierarchies, and how both could negatively affect one’s trajectory within the industry. I’ve had this conversation with directors as well as lighting technicians, clappers, video-assist workers, and so on. I don’t recall discussing the arguments about technology or the distinction between uncertainty and imponderability. What I would tell my interlocutors, however, is that I’m not just interested in documenting the objective constraints on their work – how much money they make, how many hours they work, what kind of tasks they execute – but also in analysing how they take charge of a process as taxing and unpredictable as filmmaking despite these constraints.

What I noticed during fieldwork is that, while filmmakers were always worried about what would happen to their film next, and whether they had the right people and tools to deal with it, they ultimately managed to get through the muddle by using certain working conventions, certain hierarchies, and certain digital technologies in a way which is rarely articulated verbally. This is important because, if this core argument were to become explicit, it would highlight the extent to which the film cannot just be made by a few workers recognized in the first few credits on screen, but in a real sense, it is the outcome of collective labour to overcome everyday failures and uncertainties in the course of production.

Meg Morley: As with any ethnography, there are a number of apparent theoretical roads not taken; to me the most apparent were the neoliberal labor practices of the film industry (for example, workers are expected to always be available and sometimes own/use their own equipment) and the classism of labor hierarchies, imagined audiences, etc. Why did you decide to focus on process, technology, and future rather than other potential options?

Chihab El Khachab: On privileging process and technology, I would say two things. First, it is a matter of narrative structure: I think that the story of the book is better told as a series of anticipations which mirror, in a way, the daily anticipations of filmmakers themselves. The overarching process of the book echoes the process of filmmaking as I have experienced it. Second, the theoretical neglect of everyday technologies and everyday orientations to the future is, I think, an important reason to centre them in the book, precisely because they are so vital to the lived experience of filmmaking. Film production cannot exist without these technological uses and future-orientations, and yet, many ethnographies of film production neglect these dimensions. To put it crudely, I wasn’t interested in writing an ethnography of neoliberalism or class disguised as an ethnography of film production, but rather, I wanted to centre the actual workers that I’ve met and the experiences that I’ve had within the book’s architecture.

Now, why avoid talking about neoliberalism and class? As you rightly point out, the book has a whole subtext precisely about capitalist exploitation – in a sense, the whole analysis of the distinction between artistic and executive workers is about how value creation ultimately relies on the exploitation of manual labour to the benefit of some labelled as artists and a handful of oligopolistic producers/distributors. However, what is happening in today’s industry is not peculiar to the neoliberal period in my view, because similar precarious working arrangements existed in the early 20th-century Egyptian film industry. What I am describing today could be read through the lens of neoliberalism, of course, but this reading would occult the longer historical pattern through which precarity, value-extraction, and exploitation go hand in hand with Egyptian capitalism.

About class, I discuss the issue very briefly in chapter 2, but the basic reason I didn’t centre it is because I don’t have a good analytical language to discuss class in an everyday working context in Egypt – neither does, in my view, the anthropological literature on Egypt. The basic problem is that the existing analytical language – whether it is broadly Marxist, Weberian, Bourdieuian – is historically unattuned to emic class distinctions in Egypt. So what is called “popular” (sha‘bi) or “middle-class” (taba’a wusta) in Cairo cannot be squared easily with a Marxist distinction between people who own the means of production and people who sell their labour-power, or even a Bourdieuian distinction between people with different degrees of economic and symbolic capital. The film industry is interesting precisely because it is a cross-class space in an emic sense, where people hailing from aristocratic or upper middle-class families coexist with people from working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds. I explain in the book that these class positions correlate with – but do not directly correspond to – rank within the industry’s labour hierarchies. In limited cases, in fact, the industry can serve as a vector of social ascension in emic terms. This is a significant observation because it could lead to a more accurate accounting, in common with reflections on other sectors, of the historical process through which class mobility happens in Egypt. This is an important project to undertake beyond the bounds of the film industry proper.

Meg Morley: Can you talk a little bit more about technology and commodity-objects as reserves? In what other ways would you like to see people apply this concept?

Chihab El Khachab: There are two basic ideas I wanted to get across in the chapter on reserves. First, I wanted to say that the actual devices used by filmmakers in their daily activity go well beyond film technologies such as state-of-the-art cameras and editing suites, because smartphones, laptops, and even paper are just as widely and effectively used by filmmakers in practice. These everyday commodities are important filmmaking technologies in their own right. Second, these commodities are not just matter for consumption in the sense in which they are understood in material culture studies, but they are active elements in a production process. This is an important nuance because approaches like object biography or consumption studies tend to detail the commodity’s past and present, whereas their use in film production implies a different orientation to a somewhat expected yet unpredictable future.

The concept of reserve, as I understand it, is an attempt to explain what happens to the everyday technologies used by filmmakers when they are not just inert objects or consumption goods, but active agents in the filmmaking process. I argue that these technologies oscillate between this passive and active role at different moments in the filmmakers’ lives, which I have tried to render by the terms commodity-object and reserve. The reserve is a moment in the life of a technological device in which it is summoned to anticipate what will happen next in film production while summoning their human user to think through the future. This technological-cum-human anticipation could well apply to many socio-technical processes – architecture, art, craftsmanship, manufacture – and I would like to see scholars apply it in contexts where everyday technologies have a strong future-orientation. It’s not enough to say that people use or consume technologies in a certain way, because these technologies are often central in shaping the projects that these people have – and I believe that the idea of technology as a reserve is one step in taking this into account.

Meg Morley: Your fieldwork was on two films conceived of by the producers as art house/film festival films. How do you think your book might have been different if one or both films you worked on were of the popular “Sobky” type?

Chihab El Khachab: The surprising answer to this question is: not very much. Before doing fieldwork, I would’ve guessed – like most people who watch films without knowing how the industry works – that the production patterns in art-house cinema would be a bit different than in commercial cinema. While there are some differences, of course, especially when it comes to how the creative crew think about the film and what marketing strategy the production company uses, the core issues in which I’ve been interested – interpersonal relations, labour hierarchies, technological use, imponderability – apply just as well and look very similar in both cases. In other words, the end product might look very different, but the process itself is quite similar.

I did spend most of my time on productions which were labelled “festival films” by their companies, but I’ve also followed some productions which were much closer to the commercial mainstream. This is because the same company that was making Décor – New Century Film Production – was also making Al-Nabatshi, Qot w-Far (Cat and Mouse), and Qodrat Gheir ‘Adeyya (Out of the Ordinary). I attended some preparations and shooting in all these films, but I didn’t write about them to avoid interrupting the book’s narrative flow. The production crew with which I worked in Décor had a long history of working with Good News, a mega-budget company from the 2000s, and all the technicians in Décor also worked on commercial films to make a living. The main difference, really, was the marketing team and the creative crew – the director, the cinematographer, the art director – who would want the film to look and be branded in a certain way. Everyone else, it seems to me, worked according to very similar patterns, which is a significant observation on its own.

Meg Morley: As someone doing research on Egyptian cultural production (in my case, raqs sharqi/belly dance), I can imagine how you moved from studying the process of filmmaking in Egypt to doing a historical ethnography of the Ministry of Culture. But for those less familiar with the arts and entertainment in Egypt, can you explain how your book project led to your current project?

Chihab El Khachab: I would say that there are two main connections. The first connection is very practical: many of the filmmakers with whom I worked have one link or another with the Ministry of Culture. Many went to the High Cinema Institute (which is part of the Academy of Arts at the Ministry of Culture), some received funding from the National Film Institute, some would go watch the regular screenings at the Opera House (where the Cairo International Film Festival is usually held). In addition to the writers and artists connected with the Ministry of Culture that I knew already, I made a sizeable network within and around the Ministry through fieldwork.

The second connection is a historical one. While the film industry was only regulated by a censorship bureau at the Ministry of Interior until 1952, President Nasser was keen on promoting the film industry as an organ of national development after independence. From 1957 onwards, especially, there were several national bodies and institutions dedicated to promoting film production, distribution, and exhibition. These bodies became nearly omnipotent after extensive nationalization policies in the 1960s, but they lost much of their power once the industry was re-privatised in the 1970s. Yet, these institutions continue to play a vital role in today’s industry – including the High Cinema Institute and the National Film Institute – which means that it is important to understand the intersections of filmmaking with the cultural state apparatus and its historical development in order to understand Egyptian film production. This is why there is a kindred spirit between my first and second projects.

Meg Morley: How did you decide on AUC Press for your book?

Chihab El Khachab: This was serendipitous in a way. Prior to finishing the manuscript, I had sent my book proposal to many university presses and, ultimately, committed the manuscript with a US-based publisher. While the book was under review, Anne Routon (who had just become the new acquisitions editor at AUC press in New York) contacted me about publishing the book and told me about AUC’s ambition to expand its research monographs list – which they since did. I told her that I was already committed to another press, but when things didn’t work out there, I decided to move back to AUC press because (a) I knew that the editor was genuinely interested in my book’s topic (which, in hindsight, seemed to have been an issue with the first publisher) and (b) the AUC press has been, with few exceptions, the major English-language publisher on anything Egyptian cinema. My book found a natural home in this list, and I’ve been very happy with the whole publishing experience at AUC press.

Angie Heo on her new book, The Political Lives of Saints

Posted on by

0

 

https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520297982/the-political-lives-of-saints

Interview by Alice Yeh

 Alice Yeh: Talk of persecution and extinction often accompanies media coverage of Christians in the Middle East.  What intervention does your book contribute to this conversation and what assumptions are you arguing against?

Angie Heo: Without doubt, Christians in the Middle East confront horrific incidents of violence – bombings, torchings, abductions, murders – that hit the headlines on a numbingly regular basis.  These tragedies understandably lead to anxieties and fears that Christians and Christianity are on the decline in the Arab Muslim world.  The irony is that social imaginaries of persecution and extinction are also the very stuff of Christianity in current contexts.  Persecution politics rely on aesthetic tropes of martyrdom and suffering.  Rhetorics of extinction compel the collective memory of founding origins.  During my fieldwork among Egypt’s Copts, I became convinced that marginalization and violence did not so much extinguish minority traditions as they activated and reactivated them toward various political ends.

My book shows how Coptic Orthodoxy serves as a central medium for governing Christian-Muslim relations in Egypt.  I found that saints – the Virgin, martyrs, miracle-workers, mystics – invite a form-sensitive analysis of communication between Christians and Muslims.  Saints and their imagined representations touch on classic anthropological themes such as personhood and materiality, and they also build on recent debates around religion and/as media. Perhaps most of all, I saw that tracing the semiotic intricacies of divine communication afforded more empirical purchase on the linkages between religious and political mediations.  I believe this is especially important when working on saints and shrines – a topic that often appeals to romanticized pasts and other-worlds that circumvent structures of modernity.  I hope my book does justice to the ways that cultural expressions of holiness flourish and transform in relation to complex politics of authoritarianism, inequality, revolution, and bloodshed.

 Alice Yeh: I want to ask a question about the structure of the book, and its organization into three parts (relics, apparitions, icons). One effect is that, as a narrative, the book describes the increasingly sophisticated semiotic technologies by which saints are made accessible to others. Why did you organize the book this way? Do these techniques build one upon the other or do they develop in tension?

 Angie Heo: Thanks for this most thoughtful observation. I am happy to hear it because crafting my book’s organization was a source of weird obsession and pleasure; your recognition that there is a narrative structure in it is so gratifying.  When I was planning my book’s flow, I decided to focus on the religious terms of belonging to the Christian community and to the Christian-Muslim nation.  My ethnography begins with holy origins (in other words, “life-in-death”): the Coptic Church’s origins in martyrdom, through St. Mark of Alexandria and during New Year’s Eve of the 2011 uprisings.  I chose to open with the relics and how they mediate loci of divine passion, sacrifice and resurrection, ultimately, the ritual exchange of violence for justice.  My ethnography closes with holy departure (that is, “life-after-death”): the canonization of saints, through holy fools and mystics, and the creation of eternal memory.  Here, the icon is my medium of choice, and I trace how icons mediate holy personhood and the temporal dynamics of disappearance.

On the point of the book’s cumulative arc, yes, I do understand that the semiotic technologies that I describe build on each other — relics, apparitions, icons.  I am not sure that I would say that they are increasingly sophisticated, but I definitely see them as interconnected modes of reproduction and circulation.  Essentially, I wanted to move away from the idea that relics, apparitions and icons are particular types of “things” or image-objects, toward considering them more as distinctive styles of material imagination that are subject to historical transformation. These three genres of imagination involve different sensory ratios (combining the visual, tactile, auditory) with different effects on making the space and time of saints.  For all their differences, relics, apparitions and icons are also inter-related media of representing and disseminating presence that work in intimate tandem and blend into one another.  I think where you can best see this blending effect is in the transitions between my book’s three parts: between chapters 2 and 3, it is Saint Mark’s relics that operate with the Virgin’s apparitions in a political economy of territorial returns; between chapters 4 and 5, it is a dream-apparition of a Virgin that translates into a miracle icon’s power to reconfigure the public.

Your proposal that relics, apparitions, and icons develop in tension to one another is quite stimulating.  While I have devoted my energy to thinking about the continuities between these semiotic technologies, I have done much less work on considering the tensions between them. If I could write a second version of this book, with all the same fieldwork materials but another entire analysis, I would take this question up.  It would be a really interesting exercise to see how the relic-form poses a challenge to the icon-form, for example.  The arbitrary quality of what analytic direction an author chooses to pursue and not pursue is what makes scholarship feel so infinite and full of possibilities!

Alice Yeh: Can you elaborate on the paradox of “mystical publicity”? Are there non-Christian or non-religious contexts in which it manifests?

It just so happens that I am teaching a bunch of texts this quarter that trace the mystical and ascetic strands of moral personhood in other traditions.  There are Sufi mystics hiding away in Hyderabad and Delhi, “Gandhian publicity” with its ascetic management of bodily energy, and of course, the Jewish Kabbalah which appeals to an occult cosmology of knowledge and power. Reading Eastern Orthodox theological writings on the holy icon, I was completely floored by how much ink, century after century, has been spilled on the divine status of images and the fatal risks of idolatry.  When I did my fieldwork, I was also taken by the way that monks and nuns looked away from cameras when we were taking group photos, which got me reading up on holy fools and the desert anchorites – on social imaginaries of withdrawal, self-effacement, and death.  If you check out my footnotes, you may notice that I also try to link up the Orthodox tradition to ancient Greek ethics of cynicism via Sloterdijk.  My last body chapter’s epigraph is also a quote from Goffman’s “On Facework”, a classic piece whose first footnote is a fascinating orientalist reference to Chinese concepts of face and saving face.  Not incidentally, it is also an essay that motivated MacIntyre’s charge that foundational nihilism lay behind Goffman’s sociological method.

In the broadest sense, I suppose I am making a claim here about the nature of the religious / non-religious distinction within the work of concepts.  One could argue that mystical thought and practice has been a crucial resource for deconstruction and poststructuralism; I am thinking of Derrida’s disavowal of metaphysics and de Certeau’s ontological commitment to traces here.  Continental philosophy and American sociology also inherited, at least in part, a canon of core terms that have defined the status of the human, and the divine/ human limit, in religious traditions.  Secular humanism may be presumed in mass industries of celebrity and in the consumption of imagined persons.  However, the moral perils of mass popularity, such as “losing one’s self” or “turning corrupt”, also deeply resonate with the millennia-old mystical impulse to retreat and just disappear from the crowds.

Alice Yeh: One especially interesting observation is that institutionalized Christian-Muslim sectarianism is more the consequence of a shared rather than oppositional religious imaginary.  For example, you write about how Muslim eyewitnesses are crucial to authenticating a Marian apparition. How are these eyewitnesses located in the construct of “the simple people”? How do “the simple people”shape cross-confessional practices of witnessing?

Angie Heo: One of my book’s main arguments is that sectarian division is intrinsic to imaginings of Christian-Muslim nationhood.  My claim here is really directed to long-championed formulas of “nation above religion” that are based on an ideological opposition between national unity and sectarian difference.  To break past the opposition, I begin with questions of communication, or “commonness”, to expose the formal continuities between national and sectarian imaginaries. This is where I see semiotic approaches and resources in linguistic anthropology to be very helpful. In each of my chapters, I explore the question of communicative form, or what is presumed to be shared and not shared between Christians and Muslims.  When I analyzed relics and apparitions, I focused on the communicative terms of a sacred territory, whether it is imagined as a divinely blessed Holy Egypt (national) or as a church in competition with a mosque (sectarian).  When I analyzed apparitions and icons, I examined the communicative terms of a moral public, and the ways in which a collective subject comprised of both Christians and Muslims (national) create structures of communal identity and secrecy (sectarian).

Anybody who has spent significant time with Copts will have likely heard the adjective “simple” (basīṭ, basīṭa) or the phrase “the simple people” (al-busaṭāʾ).  In Egypt, “simple” can be a subtle geographic reference to Upper Egypt, and in the Arab world at large, “simple” can also connote  the urban working classes (here, I must credit Abdellah Hammoudi for pointing this out to me).  During my fieldwork in both rural villages and industrial neighborhoods, I discovered that the term “the simple people” also expressed some kind of moral credibility among Copts: “Those villagers are too simple, they wouldn’t even know how to torch a church!” (chapter 6); “The Muslims who reported seeing the Virgin are simple people, unlike those who denied her who are motivated by their self-interest.” (chapter 3).

Judgments like these are curiously ambivalent.  They revealed how the quality of simpleness signified both the power to transcend sectarian identity and the guilelessness to ward off allegations of violence.  I became utterly fascinated by invocations of “the simple people”, especially since saints are also frequently praised for being simple.  If simplicity is a virtue, then I had to study the image of “the simple people” – the trustworthy public and its credible opinion – as a key protagonist in the story of making saints.

 Alice Yeh: What specific challenges or conveniences did the turn to identifying relics, apparitions, and icons as genres of mediation pose for your fieldwork?  What advice would you offer to students with related interests?

Angie Heo: I have a zillion answers running through my head, and I think it’s because I am imagining many different audiences reading this.  To students interested in materiality studies, I am committing to one brief piece of advice, for what it’s worth.  Resist taking the object for granted.  This seems like an elementary point, but I am always surprised by how often some “thing” is presumed to be a relic merely because it is a body-part of a holy figure or because it is a fragment of a lost past.  I approach relics, apparitions, and icons as genres of mediation, and not as already-given types of objects, because I see my most interesting work emerging from a curiosity in how persons and things are recognized as such in the first instance.  Like it did with numerous thinkers from Marx to Munn, this somewhat dissatisfied curiosity drove my constant doubt in my inclinations to naturalize images into “things.” And I am grateful for what the curiosity and doubt together allowed me to question and see anew.

Coleman Nye and Sherine Hamdy on their new graphic novel, Lissa

Posted on by

0

Lissa

https://utorontopress.com/us/lissa-2

Interview by Perry Sherouse

Perry Sherouse: In your article in George Marcus and Dominic Boyer’s volume on collaborations, you write that “comics – far from “dumbing down” or “simplifying” concepts, could be used to layer on more complexity – through comics, we could play with scale, time, and place.” What complexities of language and place were both of you able to convey in this format that would have been flattened or omitted in a standard, text-only account?

Coleman Nye and Sherine Hamdy: One of the great things we were able to do through comics was attending to fine-grained ethnographic detail without weighing down the pace of the story. We could be very specific about, for example, what people in Egypt eat, how they dress, what their daily concerns are, what traffic is like in Cairo, but show it contextually through the images in a way that enhances and layers the dialogue and action rather than detracting from it in the heavy prose of conventional “thick description.” With images, we could also zoom in and out of different scales — from the microscopic DNA mutations, to Anna as a person, to a wider environment in which toxins impact and predispose us to different cancers — all on the same page, weaving through the connections of cellular processes, personal life histories, and social-political structures that shape how we live. We could also juxtapose times and places, as for example, we see two characters in the US and Egypt on the same page, side-by-side prepping for surgery in very different settings. This invites readers to infer the differences, and also to think through the connections between these political and medical contexts. A great thing about comics is that you don’t need exposition — the reader does a lot of the work of making connections, filling in details, and otherwise populating the spaces between the panels (gutters) for us. Anna’s use of photography let us visually depict the layering of cancer’s timelines — from her mother’s family’s cancer genealogy to her present concerns about her cancer futures — and how through the clicking of her camera, Anna struggled with the temporalities of cancer and genetics. We could also point to characters’ shifts in perspective visually through things like Facebook Feeds — how a list of Anna’s posts shows us the different concerns she’s been grappling with across time and space– concerns about the political violence putting her friends at risk, but also about her own potential of succumbing to the cancer that killed her mother. Through Anna and Layla’s friendship, we could connect broader themes, like the difficulty of making life-and-death ethical decisions, the reduction of women’s health to their reproductive viability — across the U.S. and Egyptian contexts that we depicted, rather than reifying the old divide between the “West” and “the Rest.”

Perry Sherouse: When considering how to include citations to revolutionaries in this visual format, you were careful to think about the politics of representation. How does graphic ethnofiction change the way we think about the aesthetics and politics of citation?

Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye: We were drawn to the potential of the graphic novel form to reach a much wider audience — and in so doing, to re-conceptualize what counts as knowledge. It was important for us to cite the work and insights of the revolutionaries which were being produced in ways not generally accepted as “scholarship” — like social political commentary on graffiti throughout the public walls of Cairo and especially in Tahrir Square. We heavily visually cite Egyptian graffiti artists and even had a full-page mural designed by Ganzeer as a way to acknowledge our indebtedness to them in our own approaches and understandings of the revolution, and to signal a wider range of what counts as intellectual contribution. The revolutionaries who were present, in the Square and the streets of Cairo fighting off tear-gas, protecting protesters from military or police violence — they too were contributing to our theories of what counts as political action. Similarly, the doctor-volunteers who set up make-shift “field hospitals” in a city not technically at war — they reconceptualized the idea of “medical neutrality” and impartiality. By having Layla work with Tahrir Doctors in the story and by interviewing real people like Drs. Amr Shebaita and Dina Shokry, getting their feedback on the story, and incorporating them in the book as characters who play themselves, we wanted to acknowledge their political action as a key intellectual contribution to the Revolution, as well as to our book. The comic form allowed us to do that in a novel and exciting way.

Perry Sherouse: What influences are most powerful for you, but are undetectable in your work? [that is, intellectually, who or what brought you to this point?]

Coleman Nye and Sherine Hamdy:  Art Spiegelman’s Maus is an obvious inspiration for its novel use of the comic form to deal with the very serious events of the Holocaust and its aftermath. Persepolis too was wonderful in that it opened a window onto the Iranian revolution through the eyes of a young girl. These influences are probably not “undetectable”! But since neither of us had grown up on comic books as kids, these works opened up the possibilities of what comics could portray and depict. We wanted to extend that work by making it really obvious how it connects to traditional academic scholarship, which is why we mapped out the connections in the appendices. It’s definitely unconventional for comic book producers to provide “teaching material” to accompany their stories, and may even be off-putting for some, in a way that it calls attention to what is ordinarily buried within the story, but we wanted Lissa to break through to academics and provide something of a bridge between the comics and academic world.

Perry Sherouse: Where and how do you write (for example, in a houseboat with a pencil, in bed with an iPad, underground cave with charcoal)? What is essential to your creative process separately, and collaboratively?

Sherine Hamdy and Coleman Nye: This was a funny project because so much of the collaborative writing took place long-distance. Sherine was on the East Coast and Coleman was on the West Coast for all of the early script-writing, which took place in chat and via Skype on a shared google doc. And toward the end, we had one artist on Mountain time and our visual editor Marc Parenteau working from Mongolia, so the coordination was nutty to say the least. But there were wonderful moments of collaborative writing and drawing: in Egypt, we talked through the plot and character design in a range of places, from street markets to meetings with medical students; in Providence, Coleman and Sarula sat in a coffee shop trying to talk/sketch the gene patenting page; and our favorite – Sherine hosted Caroline at her house for a week, while feeding her Egyptian food and modeling different facial expressions for her during the final push of art production.

 

El Khachab’s Technology, Labor, and Mediation in the Egyptian Film Industry

Posted on by

0

My thesis is not about the link between cinema and car mechanics in Egypt, but this is what I discuss on page 99. There is still a sense in which this link touches on a core intellectual contribution that I hoped to make. The thesis examines how workers in the Egyptian film industry cope with the unforeseeable future of film production. I argue that this future is not entirely unforeseeable, as it is made to seem by interlocutors and scholars alike, but that it is managed through a hierarchical division of labor, an attention to the socio-technical process of film production, and a constant use of technological devices. In other words, when filmmakers confront such an unforeseeable problem as imagining “the film” while writing it, their responses never come out of nothing: they rely on existing hierarchies, techniques, and technologies to manage the issue.

This has little to do with car mechanics, or so it seems. Cinema carries strong expectations regarding what there is to study about it, and one imagines a cinema anthropologist to hang out with stars and directors to study their works, worldviews, and creative impulses. What I have done instead is to document the contributions of “unknown soldiers” in the film industry: set builders and production assistants, cameramen and sound engineers, grips and gaffers; workers who have more in common with craftsmen than the creative types we imagine peopling the industry. The vital insight is that each worker has a different stake in the film’s future: what it means to imagine the film is very different to a director as opposed to a gripping technician. By giving equal consideration to the director’s and the technician’s projects, however, I have tried to complicate expectations about what there is to study in “cinema”.

What remains to be studied is the historical link between cinema and other industrial crafts, for example, car repairs. The history of Egyptian cinema – and arguably, the history of cinema tout court – is predominantly written as though cinema was a series of “artworks”, without recognizing how cinema workers exist in a wider socio-technical world. It would be astonishing if the strong similarities between Egyptian craftsmen in the film industry and in the car repairs industry were a mere historical accident. Yet this comparison is seldom raised, because both activities are seldom put in the same sentence together. The comparison matters nevertheless because it breaks the stereotypical bounds between “creative” and “technical” activities, and it lets us think about what Egyptian cinema can say about Egyptian society more broadly.

Chihab El Khachab. “Technology, Labor, and Mediation in the Egyptian Film Industry.” DPhil dissertation, University of Oxford, 2017.

Chihab El Khachab is a Junior Research Fellow in Anthropology at Christ Church, University of Oxford. His doctoral research examined the everyday production practices of Egyptian cinema. He is currently working on a history of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. He can be reached by email at chihab.elkhachab@chch.ox.ac.uk.