Tag Archives: revolution

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.

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.

 

Shane Greene on his new book, Punk and Revolution

Posted on by

0

https://www.dukeupress.edu/punk-and-revolutionhttps://www.dukeupress.edu/punk-and-revolution

Interview by Orin Starn

Can you tell us about Punk and Revolution: 7 More Interpretations of Peruvian Reality and what you set out to accomplish with the book?

 I hope the book goes down as a few things:  a novel take not just on Peru’s war with the Shining Path but, somewhat by extrapolation, the narratives that dominate understandings about “Cold War Latin America.” I’m invested in inserting some wacky anarchists into that otherwise standard tale of the “hard left” (that is, Marxist) and “hard right” alternatives that dominated the region from the 60s to the 90. I also want some sort of disruption into punk’s too comfortable location in the Anglo North Atlantic rock nexus, and all the debates about provocation, selling out, and being reborn that that typical story about punk has generated. And I guess it is something like a modest assault on academia to make it slightly less boring.  There’s also the distinct possibility I was just trying to live “rock subterráneo” vicariously and reopen old wounds about the politics of feeling out of place, something that started when I was about 13.

 

Punk is genre-busting music.  And this is a genre-busting ethnography.  Can you tell us about your ethnographic style here, including all that good nasty language?  Do you see your book as having lessons for other anthropologists in thinking about experimenting with our writing?

Not everyone thinks my nasty language is all that good, and some were in a position to question or kill it when they thought it too nasty, or, maybe just too “masculine” (oh, how they have overrated my masculinity). It was never really a project about challenging “political correctness” (a phrase that emerged on the radical left but has long been appropriated by the far right) and more about wondering what we can or can’t say with academic voices or how we are or are not allowed to juxtapose academic voices with other, um, less staid, voices.  The criticisms sometimes made me really rethink the nastiness (Interpretation #4) and, other times, I just snuck it back in elsewhere (because I’m sneaky). That said, even my kid knows I have a dirty mouth so probably a certain percentage of it is just how I talk anyway. But, really, the main thing was just that I wanted each of the 7 Interpretations to sound/read/look totally different. Eventually, that meant not even writing essays, which explains the Situationist-style art project (Interpretation #6) and the short story (Interpretation #7).  For that matter, there’s technically more than 7 Interpretations given all the supplemental side projects that the book is linked to on the companion website (www.punkandrevolution.com), the zine-stuff, a music video my band did, a tee shirt I made, and so on. The idiosyncratic aspect of “just interpreting shit” (like the punk Geertz or something) makes me not really know if there’s a teachable lesson.  But in general I’m all for encouraging people to go beyond or even explicitly against the standard and dry academese we love to subject ourselves to.

 

Anthropologists have long had Peru as a favorite stomping ground.   But much of that scholarship has been about the rural Andes.  Your focus is on the megalopolis of Lima.  How do you see your contribution to understanding urban experience in Peru and Latin America?   And to how we understand Peru and Latin America more broadly?

There’s definitely a thing with Peru and the Andes fetish. It goes deep and straight to the heart of nationalism.  It’s hard to even think of a handful of interesting books about Lima – on any topic – much less about other Peruvian cities (Arequipa? Piura? Trujillo?) written by anthropologist (oh, but Daniella Gandolfo’s book about Lima is amaaaaaazing).  I think this was honestly more of a side effect than my real intent, that is, I ended up creating a peculiar look into one segment of Lima, basically the middle-class and up (since rock as a genre is mostly middle-class and up).  There’s some good work on hip-hop out there in countries like Cuba, Brazil, and so on.  And there’s some STS types doing interesting stuff that at least crosses into urban spaces but isn’t necessarily about “the city” or necessarily “anthropology” (thinking of Anita Chan’s book Networking Peripheries). Either way, we are overdue for some anthropologists thinking more about the multiplicity and depth of urban subcultures throughout Latin America, as well as their global inspiration in, and creative divergence from, subcultures that emerged elsewhere.  Even when anthropologists finally come out of the countryside and go to the city they seem to end up focusing on the same subaltern populations or themes, like rural-to-urban migration or historically racialized groups, and so on.  But welcome to the history of anthropology, I guess.

 

What do you see as your contribution to understanding the global history of punk?  And to how we think about sound and the politics of sound?

The book doesn’t talk about sound per se but I got very interested in the geopolitics of music formats, hence all the stuff about production and circulation (and piracy) of demo cassettes in Interpretation #1.  Of course, format studies are now an offshoot of sound studies. There’s something mystically beautiful and marvelously awful about the sound of Peruvian punk from the 80s.  The conditions for production (or instruments available for recording for that matter) were so bad, it is just truly wonderful.  Some contemporary Peruvian punks and hardcore types wax nostalgic about the cassette format for that reason and so they buck the global digitalization trend by recording new albums on cassette now when it seems utterly anachronistic.  The global north has its own history with cassettes but it isn’t quite the same thing.  First off, it more often connotes some sort of social intimacy or friend networks (such as: the friend who recorded album X for me; or the girlfriend who gave me the mix tape Y).  In Lima, because of the dramatically unstable political context there was a curiously ambiguous dialogue taking place between the “underground rock” economy (cassettes, fliers, art pieces, and so on) and the other “underground political” sector of Shining Path organizers and militants who were also producing art, propaganda, newspapers and other genres for the “revolution.”  Both were happening outside, and against, mainstream media circuits (and, for that matter, the state).  So, it became really dangerous for Peruvian punks at the time and many of them found that out the hard way (hence Interpretation #6).  There was a deep political risk (of death, disappearance, imprisonment, exile) built into being a Peruvian punk and producing things that were punk-like in the Peru of the time.  That, as far as I can tell, is quite unique within punk experiences writ large.

 

What’s your next project?

I’ve been throwing around this term “misanthropology” for the last few years and threatening to write a book about how we, the human species, are all gonna die.  And probably should. Given November 2016, seems like maybe it’s a good time to get started on that.