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As the Manshiet Nasser Zabbaleen built permanent homes, they erected them directly on top of the plots they originally occupied, creating a layer-cake style of vertical separation between different sorts of spaces. It is not unusual in Manshiet Nasser to see waste sorting on the ground floor, a human living space on the first floor, and goats, sheep, chickens and other animals on the subsequent floors up to the roof, which is often used as a storage space for recyclables Figure 6. The Ezbet el Nakhl Zabbaleen, in contrast, built homes in the fields around the animal enclosures where they themselves used to live, slowly separating themselves from garbage and animals in a hori- zontal manner Figure 7.
People now live in the surrounding buildings, having separated their living spaces horizontally from waste sorting areas. These are essentially indistinguishable from the non-Zabbaleen residents' homes, except for small signs such as the vehicle parked in front. The religious demographics of the two sites, as mentioned, are also very different. Development-oriented intervention began with the French Mother Theresa figure, Sr.
After she put the Zabbaleen on the map in the s, a deluge of NGOs, for-profit consulting firms, engineers and urban planners, development-oriented foundations e. Ford Foundation , international institutions e. World Bank , religious charities, and others, carried out projects targeting the Zabbaleen. Looking back on it all in the mid-to-late s, the consulting firm Environmental Quality International EQI , which implemented many Zabbaleen development projects through the s, reminisced understatedly that 'financial resources were forthcoming since the project was quite popular among funding agencies' EQI a: Devel- opment projects with the Zabbaleen had been so much the in-thing that one critique of the process was simply that there were '[t]oo many projects and too much outside funding' Assaad and Garas Microcredit, income generation for female-headed house- holds, composting, small industry, child health and hygiene, advisory support for grassroots institu- tions, and veterinary vaccination programmes is but a partial list.
It has been said that 'most known development principles were present' Assaad and Garas Today, the Manshiet Nasser Zabbaleen neighbourhood is a showcase of sorts, and its two main NGOs have in important respects become tourist destinations. On any given day it is possible to meet one or more groups of foreigners taking a tour of the Association for the Protection of the Environment's recycling and needlework projects, or Spirit of Youth's Montessori 'recycling school. It would be a mistake to assume that the state has been any less interested in some- thing it would call 'development,' however.
As pointed out above, it would be un-anthropological to take the meaning of development as a given. Rather, its meanings—the plural is critical—in their various historically and socially situated and contingent forms, are what the anthropologist seeks to investigate.
The question is not who practiced development and who did not, but what different ac- tors understood by that notion. In the context of the bureaucracy's 'explicit goal to modernize, beautify, and brand its city' Singerman Although constitu- tive of the 'contemporary' if not exactly the 'modern' city, they nevertheless do not fit the idea of such a city.
As someone once put it to me, in the minds of many Egyptians, the solution to Cairo's long- standing garbage collection problem is to 'get rid of the garbage collectors. The profession is also often cast as one in which people are lured by money into giving up dig- nity and the norms of civilized life becoming, literally, filthy rich.
Historically, as soon as Cairo expanded to encompass them within itself, the Zabbaleen neigh- bourhoods were bulldozed and moved to the outer fringe. Since the city never stops expanding, the pattern would repeat itself, locking the Zabbaleen into a kind of dialectic of perpetual displacement. As part of this same strategy of invisibilization, the Zabbaleen have been forced to collect waste al- most entirely at night.
The bulldozers are used more sparingly today than in the past,7 but the Egyp- tian state has not ceased to be interested in the Zabbaleen: Thus, in the early s, the Egyptian state contracted several foreign firms to manage Cairo's waste. The key concern seems to have been that the companies operate as in the West, in the full symbolic and technical sense: Perhaps above all, the Zabbaleen system and all that it represented—against which the public authorities had been inveighing for decades—was to be, at last, eliminated. The Zabbaleen persisted, however, and in , during the world-wide H1N1 influenza 'swine flu' pan- demic, the Egyptian state formulated another intervention on the Zabbaleen, which consisted of slaughtering the entirety of the pigs that they raised on organic waste.
During the time of the pan- demic, the Egyptian public and in particular the news media were ablaze with discussion of the insa- lubrious Zabbaleen neighbourhoods in which they raised the taboo animal, and the role the bodies of 7 Not because of increased sympathy on the part of the authorities. First, there has been a certain abandonment of the strategy of keeping undesirable elements out of the core of the city. Many of the rich have instead moved them- selves to the margins: Second, the Zabbaleen today have an increased capacity to resist compared to thirty years ago.
Destroying the Zabbaleen neigh- bourhood in Manshiet Nasser, for example, would be a monumental task, almost impossible. But in the cases where the Zabbaleen have not succeeded in auguring in and making themselves virtually un-evictable, the danger persists. The proximate cause was to allow a French archaeological excavation of the site, which is how I learned about it, since the director of the dig had kept 'before and after' photos, which he showed me with passing remorse.
First is the critical literature from the discipline of development studies. This literature's primary contribution is in framing the object of study and determining how it is ap- proached from an 'anthropology of development' and not a 'postdevelopment' perspective.
This body of literature provides theoretical tools and orientations: However, since the object of this study is not the Zabbaleen but interventions on the Zabbaleen, it should be clear why, for all its merits and inter- est, this literature does not constitute a point of departure for the analysis and arguments put forward here and therefore will not be referred to. I nevertheless tried to keep firm to a commitment to the 'method of particularities' Dresch Accordingly, each chapter has ana- lytic sub-parts tailored to the specificities of the events, people and facts discussed.
In certain chap- ters a summary of literature on Egyptian cinema or evolving notions of Christian mission will be necessary, to 'render obscure matters intelligible by providing them with an informing context,' as Geertz once said is the role of the ethnographer Since those bodies of literature are bridges necessary to make certain crossings along the way but do not give the dissertation its overall analytic thread, they are referred to as the need arises rather than in this introduction.
Critical Development Studies The critical development studies literature includes ethnographic and historic studies of specific de- velopment projects or locales e. Ferguson ; Mosse ; Elyachar ; Murray Li , wider-ranging empirical works, historical or anthropological in varying degrees e. Escobar ; Mitchell ; Rist , and works of a theoretical or programmatic character, which may for ex- ample outline positions on how development should be researched e.
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Fassin ; Ghandour ; Gabiam ; Feldman The topics explored in this literature remain relatively understudied by Middle Easternists, de- spite some notable exceptions for example in the work of Dawn Chatty e. Vice versa, the Middle East as a region is under-represented in development studies. The object of study was defined with that in mind, through reference to predecessor works in the development studies literature, particularly anthropology of development, in a manner that will now be explained. In other words, the object of study is things like 'programs that set out to improve the condition of the population in a deliberate manner' Murray Li For instance, describing the object of study in his book The Anti-politics Machine, Ferguson is careful to specify that [u]nlike many anthropological works on "development," this one takes as its primary object not the people to be "developed," but the apparatus that is to do the "developing.
The distinc- tion invoked by Ferguson can be described as that between anthropology of development the aim of this dissertation and development anthropology anthropologists who work for development agencies. Development is not a thing or an agent, but a process, a series of ideas or objectives, etc. It is not necessary to take a position on that debate for the distinction to serve the purpose for which it is used here. Thus, in a similar vein to Ferguson, Mosse introduces his ethnography of aid policy and practice, Cultivating Development, by explaining that his book's objective is 'not to produce a project overview, a commentary on appropriate approaches or "best practices", not to make an evaluation, or pass judgement; it does not ask whether, but rather how development works' Murray Li explains that her purpose in The Will to Improve is 'not to condemn.
Rather, I seek to understand the rationale of improvement schemes' Thus, she neither dismisses the efforts of proponents of 'schemes for improvement,' nor does she 'offer a recipe for how improvement can be improved' id.: This doctoral project's research design and approach to development studies were elaborated along similar lines. In practice, by drawing lines of continuity with sharply condemned practices and periods e.
That is in any case how they are received by practitioners of development: Mosse and Murray Li both refer to the upset their works caused to the people whom they studied. The anthropology of development approach fol- lowed in this dissertation must nevertheless be distinguished from the more programmatic and radi- cally critical postdevelopment literature.
That distinction is all the more important in light of the dis- sertation's contention that there was a decline in developmentalism qua paradigm for framing the Zabbaleen 'problem' and supplying repertoires of techniques for solving it over the period studied. While that may appear to be a 'postdevelopment' -type thesis, in fact it is not. For example, in terms of its function, Ferguson argues that development has a depoliticizing effect and that while it often fails at reducing poverty, it does achieve other unin- tended ends, like reinforcing and extending bureaucratic state power. The aim of postdevelopment scholars, who are devoted to 'preparing the ground for "post-development"' Rist This lead Escobar to say, in the new Preface to the edition of Encountering Development, that '[i]n its most succinct formulation, postdevelopment was meant to convey the sense of an era in which development would no longer be a central organizing principle of social life.
This did not mean that postdevelopment was seen as a new historical period to which its proponents believed we had arrived' Escobar Thus, postdevelopment scholars do not detachedly observe that 'Age of Development' is, as a matter of fact, over, but quite the opposite: Since they believe they can attack 'Development' by demonstrating its numerous deleterious effects, or supposed such, postdevelopment scholars at times seem to make development responsible for everything bad to have happened since the end of the colonial period.
This puts them in the paradoxical position of lending greater power and weight to development than even its most fervent proponents, generating a misnomer that would be corrected if postdevelop- ment were called 'antidevelopment. Postdevelopment scholars, he says, were not interested 'getting it right' because their agenda was 'constructing an object of cri- tique for debate and action' id.: The present study does not aim to praise interventions for having left the Zabbaleen better off though many undoubtedly did , nor does it comb through them in an evaluative light in order to suggest how they might be done better in future—essentially, approaches belonging to development anthropology.
It limits itself to examining what outsiders saw when they saw the Zabbaleen, what reasons they gave for then intervening in the latter's lives, and what form that intervention took. The questions posed were of this sort: Who were the various actors who intervened on the Zabbaleen over the period studied? For what motives did they act? What aspects of the lives of the Zabbaleen did they seek to change? In the name of what? How did their beliefs shape their stances toward the Zabbaleen, generating differing types of interventions?
What kind of a city was thus being imagined, and created? There is one important difference between the way this dissertation's object is framed and the way the object is typically defined in anthropology of development. I have preferred to speak of 'in- tervention' in general and not limit this to 'development interventions' or interventions carried out by what is normally thought of as 'development apparatuses. This makes it possible to address a question that anthropologists of development may have trouble speaking to: Murray Li ac- knowledges this problem when she notes that 'development schemes are only one of many social forces transforming the world.
I believe that ethnographers should attend to them but not necessarily give them center stage' But that is difficult to achieve when the study's object is defined as 'development' from the outset, since that ipso facto places development centre stage. In addition, speaking of 'development interventions' at the outset risks using an unproblematized, normative no- tion of what development means. This can be avoided through the kind of conceptual shift that oc- curred when scholars began speaking of multiple modernities Appadurai , locating 'modernity' in this case, 'development' in the idiom of the actors, not that of the observers Ginzburg Speaking of interventions simpliciter avoids foreclosure of the meanings of 'development.
Anthropological and historical literature on waste The theoretical apparatuses elaborated and deployed in development studies by authors such as Fer- guson , Mitchell or Murray Li , concerning depoliticization, 'rendering technical,' and the power of expert knowledge have great relevance in understanding one episode of Zabbaleen development, involving the World Bank, in the late s and early s.
Beyond that, however, they did not appear in the present case to be the invariable and inevitable characteristics of all 'develop- ment,' and they provide little leverage in understanding many of the other actors and periods studied here. The primary analytic inspiration for this dissertation comes instead from another body of litera- ture, which concerns waste, in the broad sense. Douglas' classic, Purity and Danger, is an important point of de- parture in this literature. Douglas examined many different kinds of pollution beliefs, although she focussed a great deal on substances that enter and leave the body food, bodily fluids, excrement, urine, etc.
A somewhat different way of doing this kind of an- thropology, one which is particularly promising in a contemporary urban setting, is through the sub- stance of waste itself, particularly household waste. She demonstrates how ideas about pollution, purity and con- tamination are rendered visible through people's relationship to household waste, and how, recipro- cally, that relationships is shaped by such ideas see e. What the discipline seems to have primarily retained from Douglas is her argument on the rela- tivity of cleanliness. When Malkki argues in her book Purity and Exile actually, takes as a given, within the context of her discipline that 'as an empirical question, of course, "cleanliness" is of little inter- est' In her view, only 'considered as a form of social commentary on the relations of opposition in which people found their lives embedded, [does] it be- comes more significant' Coming at it from a different angle, history also provides the means for relativizing notions of cleanliness.
Vigarello's Le propre et le sale , for example, examines some of the different ways bodily cleanliness was imagined through time in France. What Vigarello tries to show is that there is no absolute scale of cleanliness on which civilizations, epochs, or individuals can be measured, only a multiplicity of ways of imagining what it means to be clean. For example, in Europe, bathing was for a long time not considered a technique of bodily hygiene, but rather a rank form of luxuriance that inclined those who partook in it toward lustful, lewd behaviour. In short, baths were a source of dirtiness rather than a means for cleaning.
Consequently, people who bathed once a year, or never at all, were perfectly capable of seeing themselves as clean, and indeed in some cases thought their ab- stinence from baths was what preserved them. This is not to say that they lacked means for achieving external cleanliness: Such relativizations are an important point, particularly as the basis for elaborating critiques of the instrumentalization of hygiene discourses more on this in a moment. This dissertation accepts and further develops this insight.
But it also seeks ways to push our reflection in new and different directions, beyond the mere idea that dirtiness is in the eye of the beholder. One way to do this is by emphasizing objects, practices and change, as some contemporary ethnographers of waste workers do in the effort to take the discipline in new directions e. This is a more dy- namic, actor- and action-oriented approach that tends to distinguish itself from Douglas by suggest- ing that her approach was a static and changeless 'symbolic anthropology. In fact, Douglas's own discussion of purity and pollution did not belong merely to 'symbolic anthropology'; she was also quite interested in what notions of pollution did.
She pursued that question through a structural-functionalist apparatus, asking how notions of purity and pollution shaped society. How ideas about the physical body give shape to the 'body politic,' or at least how can they be analogized. This is discussed further in Chap- ter 3, where I suggest a fuller re-reading of Douglas in different and I hope more sophisticated terms than she is normally understood today. The analytic approach in this dissertation has also been heavily irrigated by historical studies of the relationship of human beings to waste e.
Barles , Strasser , Zimring and the in- strumentalization of hygiene, especially in colonial and post-colonial contexts. Concerning the latter, there is a significant body of historical work connecting notions and practices of hygiene to forms of domination and normative cultural imperialism.
From South Asia Chakrabarty ; Kaviraj ; Oldenburg ; Prashad , to Southeast Asia Anderson , Russia Peeling , or East- ern Europe Weindling , a variety of historians have sought to show—actors' claims about hy- giene's neutrality notwithstanding—how the lines between scientific and social ills were frequently blurred, and not only germs were cleansed. Hygiene and cleanliness became vehicles for expressing disdain, and served as covers for all sorts of more or less harmful forms of social reconfiguration and subjugation of other people. For example, although the British had foresworn social regulation and reform in colonial India after the mutiny, they continued interfering with many cultural and relig- ious customs through the seemingly innocuous medium of bylaws adopted under the watchword 'cleanliness.
The power thus exercised was so thoroughgoing that even 'even customary ways of defecating, drinking, burying their dead, or building houses were not left un- touched' id.: Mitchell makes hygiene and important facet of his study of how a Western blueprint for 'modernity' penetrated Egyptian society under colonialism. The Canal Zone cities were so clean that they became Sanitary Model Towns that the French aspired to emulate in the other colonies, from 'Morocco to Indochina' id.: Such fastidiousness was necessary in part to attract European workers, among whom there was a widespread perception that Egypt and Egyptians were unclean—'they throw the body of a dead animal out just in front of the stable or the barn where it decomposes in the open road; it is the fellah, the Egyptian peasant, who periodically revives the plague through such misconduct' id.: Above all, hygiene required imposing Western social norms on Egyptians 'for their own good' id.: In deciding how much inspiration to draw from such studies, it is important to bear in mind that the Victorians gave unusual importance and breadth to the notion of hygiene.
A 'shorthand for a va- riety of related concerns: This should serve as a caution not to conclude too quickly that current cases can be analyzed in the same way. At the turn of the 20th century, the American co- lonial administration in the Philippines constructed the Filipino as a 'promiscuous defecator' lacking control of his orifices and needing reformation because of the way he polluted the environment and spread illness. In her article on 'Egypt's hygienist utopia,' Chiffoleau describes how during Egypt's 'lib- eral' period, from the First World War to the revolution, a modernizing, Francophile bourgeoisie set out to transform what they thought was the country's deplorable image, to reconstitute it according to the norms of 'civilisation,' which they had absorbed through their contact with the West.
Chif- foleau's article emphasizes how the 'narrative of progress radiating from Europe,' that consigns '"non-Europe" to static backwardness,' Cooper Or as Chakrabarty says in Provincializing Europe, the equation of 'Europe with "modernity" is not the work of Europeans alone' []: Whereas Europe was, for the people Chiffoleau examines, the very definition of progress, modernity and civilization, hence constituting at once a point of aper- spectival objectivity and a yardstick by which to measure the rest of the world, Egyptian elites tended to describe their country as suffering from almost pathological backwardness.
As in the colonial mind, poverty, ignorance and disease converged in or emanated out of a caricatured fellah, the peas- ant farmer whose traditional habits—particularly those relating to water use, eating, defecation—re- main unchanged since Pharaonic times see also Mitchell Not only must his house- hold space be demolished and rebuilt in order to establish proper divisions between man and animal, between clean and dirty activities—above all, he must be disciplined and reformed. King Fouad's Hy- giene Museum no doubt one of the edifying experiences most dreaded by Egyptian children was inaugurated in the same square as his Royal Palace.
The UN reminded us of the topic's ongoing relevance by declaring 'International Year of Sanitation' http: Beall thus suggests that the great Victorian sanitation movement lives on today in the discourse of development [ While the language of science has replaced the tones of moral panic and high dudgeon, urban development policy is still infused with a similar logic.
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What does it mean to say that 'the great Victo- rian sanitation movement lives on today in the discourse of development,' and to what extent can that be concretely demonstrated and supported? These cross-cutting themes, central to a variety of disciplines and theoretical approaches,11 acquire their importance in the present context due to the fact that carriers of 'dirtiness' matter, people, ani- mals can rarely be eliminated. Most clean s ing therefore consists of moving things around, isolating them, containing them. This obviously results in a close nexus between spatial forms and ideas about hygiene, which was picked up on right away in anthropological writing on space.
For example, in The Hidden Dimension: Man's Use of Space in Public and Private, Hall emphasized that the 11 Themes of enclosure and exclusion, rigorous maintenance of the division between inside and outside, obsession with impenetrable boundaries and separation, as well as corporeal individuation and integrity have been central to certain theorists' attempts at conceptualizing Western 'modernity' e. They are said to be the basis of the material culture of containment that embodies Western concepts of health, morality, and property Warnier On the level of personal identity, the principles of bodily individuation, integrity, closure and distanciation are central to the shaping of a 'modern' individual subjectivity Ferguson And they are the theoretical underpinnings of the emergent sub- discipline of 'border studies' e.
Not only are there special rooms for special functions—food preparation, eating, entertaining and socializing, rest, recuperation, and pro- creation—but for sanitation as well. For example, relocation to the outskirts of the city and distant desert locations has been a long- standing cornerstone of the official approach to the Zabbaleen, and was briefly the preferred solution during the swine flu epidemic before opting for the pig slaughter.
Distance and spatial separation promised to resolve a twofold problem of 'mixing,' on the one hand of pigs and humans in the Zab- baleen neighbourhoods, and on the other of Zabbaleen with normal Cairo residents, both of which threatened the city with contagion. Interpreted more abstractly than in their relation solely to the built environment and physical space, the themes of barriers, separations, and distance which are also ones of cleanliness, hygiene, and contagion , have important implications for development and humanitarian action in general.
But can that distance from the other, our separation from them, ever really be overcome? The observer must actively hold the suffering at a distance, for his own 12Distant suffering is the suffering we witness others experiencing, as distinguished from our own suffering and the suffering of others in cases where we can immediately go to their aid. Since pity was pre-rational and pre-reflexive, it existed in the state of nature, imbuing it with a sort of justice and morality without which it would degenerate into a war of all against all as Hobbes had suggested.
Yet, as we will see in the first substantive chapter, Sr. Emmanuelle made collapsing distance, overcoming separation and breaking down barriers central movements in the relationship she sought to forge with the Zab- baleen. This was an expression of the Christian position with respect to purity and pollution. Reflexivity places several quite different requirements on us as researchers. It requires that we self- consciously and critically examine, on the one hand, our fieldwork practices and relations e.
Ra- binow []; Crapanzano ] and, on the other, the manner in which we translate the field- work experience into 'authoritative' ethnographic representation after the fact see e. Clifford and Marcus ; Clifford These issues are sufficiently important and thoroughgoing that neither can be 'gotten out of the way' in the space of a few paragraphs. Thus, this methods chapter is not the only place a reflexive effort is made in this dissertation. Reflexive considerations concerning the chal- lenges of representation and the authority of ethnographic texts have been worked into the architec- ture of the dissertation as a whole.
Similarly, reflexive considerations pertaining to fieldwork practices and relations will be raised at multiple junctures. To give an example, Chapter 3 introduces one of my fieldwork assistants in some detail, describing our relations as well as the impact of his presence on other informants when we conducted interviews. This requires reference to prior work in the field of study, both to frame the questions, and to see what methods have previously been used to answer them.
One of the main ob- jectives of the summary of critical development studies literature in the introduction was to show how the present dissertation's object was framed by analogy to predecessor works in anthropology of development. This section examines the consequences of that definition of object on research de- sign. Just as an anthropologist of scientific processes and knowledge must study particle physicists and not particle physics, the anthropologist of development processes as such must focus developers rather than the developed.
Given that the research questions posed in this doctoral project concern processes of intervention i. In taking that route, the present study follows what, according to Deeb and Winegar in their forthcoming Annual Review of Anthropology article, has been the trend in Middle East Anthropology over the past twenty years: Studying up is not a process of, in the manner of, say, Ginzburg [] or the subaltern studies group, of turning upper-class narratives upside down, of 'reading across the grain' to recover silenced views from below, or of employing 'the analytic tactics of inversion and recuperation' Stoler These approaches have immense value, but studying up means being genuinely interested in understanding the lifeworlds and epistemologies of the people who acted upon the Zabbaleen.
This approach is far from deaf to the Zabbaleen, however. As Deeb and Winegar add, after ob- serving the trend toward the study of the middle classes and elites, 'our subsequent more complex understanding of elite power formation has illuminated how the poor and working classes are dis- placed, silenced, or created as a category for elite intervention' Understanding how the Zabbaleen have been constituted as an object of in- tervention, as I have put it, or 'created as a category,' as Deeb and Winegar put it, is central to a sym- pathetic understanding of their situation.
This is indeed one of the key objectives of studying up. Nader's belief in the importance of looking at colonizers as well as colonized, the powerful as well as the powerless, affluence as well as poverty Nader thus regarded studying up as the opposite of abdicating responsibility toward 'the underdog;' for her it was a form of engaged and at times indignant anthropology that weds social concern with a desire for scientific completeness. This includes where fieldwork was conducted, what types of materials were collected, the duration of time spent in the field, language proficiency, and reliance on research assistants.
This discussion aims to cover the main overarching points. Several subsequent chapters further the reflexive discussion of research as- sistants Chap. The studying 'up' I practiced radiated outward from the Zabbaleen neighbourhoods qua field sites, where I lived. My research began when, in the summer of , I walked into Manshiet Nasser and sat down for a cup of tea not knowing a soul in the neighbourhood. Later, I would rent an apartment there, as well as in Ezbet el Nakhl for a time. But far from circumscribing herself to such a site, Elyachar instead considered it a starting point: These included banks, consulting firms, office buildings, NGOs, and other loca- tions that were implicated in the locality she had chosen Elyachar Without letting go of a grounding in a specific physical locale in contemporary Cairo, Elyachar ultimately defined her eth- nographic 'field' in terms of an 'analytic problem' rather than a bounded physical space: I also radiated outward temporally, so to speak, going back to what seemed like the beginning of developmental interest in the Zabbaleen.
So, although it remained anchored in place by the existence of Zabbaleen neighbourhoods, this re- search did not concern culture or practices localizable in a bounded field-site, be it one in the old mould, like the Trobriand Islands Malinowski , or one of a newer kind, like the head office of an international NGO Hopgood The chapters cover different time periods rather than focuss- ing on different facets of a single ethnographic present.
Yet, the dissertation is not about the segment of time it covers as such, i. The temporal thickness of the study is not diachronic the study of something that happens over time but heterochronic the study of some- thing in multiple, discrete temporalities. Its boundaries are the limits of the phenomenon of repre- sentation under study. This notion of the anthropological 'field' is further elaborated and defended in a subsequent section of the chapter. The remainder of this sec- tion focuses on describing the field methods in concrete terms.
I met with and interviewed individuals involved in Zabbaleen development. Many of these meetings were recorded for later review or transcription. Some of the material accumulated through interview would best be described as constituting an 'oral history' archive; others were with people who continued to be involved in Zabbaleen development work at the time we met.
I visited the offices and various centres of NGOs regularly, to cultivate relationships with their staff, take tours of their facilities and conduct interviews. Where they existed, I did my best to access the old documents of these organizations. I also col- lected newspaper articles, other published materials and pretty much anything I could get my hands on that concerned the Zabbaleen.
This included films of which there are quite a few, it turns out , recorded television interviews and music. Most of the individuals and documents to which I sought access were subject to no obligation of disclosure, making access at times challenging. Chapter 5 de- scribes in more detail the state of one consulting firm's 'archives' and the challenges faced in tracking down its key reports. Many busy professionals have little time to spare, particularly when there is the risk that they or their organization may be exposed to criticism as a result.
What was perhaps, there- fore, most surprising were not the challenges access, numerous though they were, but the opposite: I also accompanied a number of Zabbaleen on waste collec- tion rounds, particularly in the north of the city.
I also visited a number of neighbourhoods where the foreign firm AAEC operated to ob- serve waste collection activities, toured its waste transfer stations, and its Qatamiya dumpsite. The latter activities, with the company, took place in the context of and were facilitated by my collabora- tion as co-director of a documentary on waste in Cairo.
Despite this compromise and the ethical challenges the collaboration posed along the way discussed below , involvement in the documentary was worthwhile as a research experience because the film crew's 'prestige' and budget provided access that would otherwise have been unachievable. This meant doing things like observ- ing work activities and occasionally taking part, such as sorting plastics, a task reserved for men , on the one hand, and participating in non-work activities such as attending weddings and church serv- ices, or hanging around smoking sheesha, on the other.
This had great methodological importance despite the fact that what follows is not an ethnography of the Zabbaleen per se. The last two substan- tive chapters of the dissertation, concerning events that were unfolding while I was in Cairo, are de- pendent on direct observations, the opportunities for which were enriched by living in the same places as the garbage collectors. But the methodological gain goes beyond that in two important ways.
First, it grounded my research, including especially? This was true for research at both the top and the bottom ends of the spectrum, so to speak. Our shared interest in the Zabbaleen in some cases they had not been involved in Zabbaleen development for some time, and were anxious to be filled in about goings on in the neighbourhoods provided an entry into discussing their own work.
Fieldwork was spread over four visits to Cairo between and , including one continu- ous period of twelve months. I had also previously spent time in Cairo studying Arabic, in My knowledge of Egyptian colloquial Arabic is adequate to allow me to comfortably carry on conversa- tions and interviews, but many interviews took place in English and French, since they were with for- eigners or Egyptians whose mastery of those languages far surpasses mine of theirs.
French turned out to be an important research language, particularly because of the role of Sr. I was fortunate in that respect to have been educated in French through school and university in Canada, prior to coming to Oxford. He and I also went over important recorded Arabic-language interviews together, to fine-tune my translations.
The transcriptions from the film in Chapter 4, how- ever, were made without the benefit of his assistance since I worked on the film after leaving Egypt. He became a companion and friend through much of the work in the field, as well as an important source of information in his own right. I will introduce him more completely in Chapter 3. They saw the research evolve and shared their views on my attempts to make sense of what I was learning as we went along. This section evokes some of these problems and describes the efforts made to overcome them in an ethi- cally satisfactory way.
It focuses on three key issues: Like all graduate students at the University of Oxford whose research involves human subjects, before going into the field I was obligated to submit a research design to the Central University Re- search Ethics Committee CUREC , and to be generally familiar with their guidelines and rules. Meet- ing the University's formal requirement, however, was not the end but the beginning of the complex, delicate, and at times irresolvable process of negotiating ethical challenges, both in the field and while writing up.
It is impossible to address all the issues, large and small, that arose. I have chosen to focus here on what, in this particular case, seem to have been the three critical ones: For reasons related to the context of research in Egypt and the undue formality of signed consent forms, I did not wish to use written consent forms, the usual CUREC standard. My approach to ob- taining informed consent was instead to be open about my purposes at all times and describe myself as an Oxford University researcher to all those with whom I interacted. There are instances where I conducted observations in public places, such as in the street, at meetings, or in churches.
This is a research technique that is not normally thought of as requiring explicit efforts to obtain in- formed consent since these locations where one must reasonably expect the possibility of being ob- served i. I now turn to power differentials in fieldwork relations. Can payment, considered compensation in the context of many studies, become coercion in contexts of poverty and vastly unequal power relations?
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On the other hand, to say that people vulnerable to financial exploitation should not be paid for research collaboration is perverse since it amounts to financially compensating wealthy in- formants because they don't 'need' the money, while not compensating poor informants because it might override their autonomy.
On the other hand, I made an effort to fairly compensate my research assistants, who repeatedly and system- atically took time to help with my research. In cases of middle-class to wealthy individuals, which is to say much of the research, issues of power did not arise in an ethically problematic manner. These individuals were mostly very helpful, often quite busy, occasionally wary of my purposes, but in any case remained in control of their schedules and the information that they provided.
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There was of course no exchange of money in this branch of fieldwork. However, things were not so simple in other branches of the fieldwork, particu- larly with respect to research assistants and the choice to reside in Zabbaleen neighbourhoods. I paid modest salaries to my assistants, believing that it was a job, and wanting them to approach it in that way. My relationship with Ahmad was monetized from the start since we met through Ara- bic tutorials that I paid him to give me.
This represented a certain vulnerability, but I think the worst I did to exploit it was to occasionally schedule four-hour translation sessions in the late-afternoon during Ramadan. As I have explained, he was clear about his own unwillingness to do 'dirtier' fieldwork and I was completely respectful of this: With Ishaq I was the one who brought up the idea of paying him once it transpired that we were spending a significant amount of time to- gether.
In the next chapter, a little more is explained about this. It would have posed an ethical prob- lem not to fairly compensate someone taking that much time to help me. Vincent Crapanzano paid all informants who 'took time off from work' to help him during his fieldwork in Morocco, noting that 'this was expected' I did not go that far and systemati- cally pay 'informants' for their collaboration, for reasons that will be explained in a moment.
How- ever, I begin by noting that an expectation of payment did not exist on the part of the Zabbaleen I knew. While I could understand this during the shorter period of M. Phil fieldwork, I ex- pected longed, really, since being a guest reminded me that I did not belong for my status to shift during more extended D. However, with a few rare and cherished breakthroughs, it did not.
This raised the ethical problem of becoming a financial burden on my hosts. It was completely impossible to pay in a 'public,' demonstrable way that could be observed by others or took place in sight of my putative 'host,' i. With practice I became more successful in using little tricks like pretending to go to the toilet but actually paying. They did not consult on this, it was just a rule, or as I sometimes felt, a conspiracy.
Most times people's generosity was good natured, but aspects of honour and power did come into play, often in ways that reminded me the ethnographer is not systematically the 'powerful' term in the equation. For instance, the owner of the apartment I rented would always 'beep' me with a missed call so that I would then call him back. The caller pays, on Egyptian mobiles. On one occasion I jokingly gave him a hard time about this, and used the word 'cheap. He took this so badly that he forced his wife to prepare beef, chicken and stuffed pigeon normally any one of these would honour a guest and demonstrate a host's wealth and generosity—having all three at once is unheard of then sat down in front of me, staring at me as I ate and repeatedly interspersing the imperative 'kul!
My own reasons for keeping the use of money to a minimum were partly ethical, partly epistemological I feared it could corrupt the sort of information I was gathering by creating an in- centive to 'please' me , and partly practical I could not afford it. The film crew, on the other hand, had several short weeks on site to complete the project and were keen to use all possible expediencies. Our Egyptian fixer literally had a fanny-pack containing nothing but wadded bills that she used to grease the wheels every step of the way. Since I doubt 'bribes' was itemized in the budget given to the Paris-based production company but probably rather came out of some rubric like 'logistics,' and since the film crew did not understand Arabic and were unaware of the fixer's conversations with the driver, government 'minder' omnipresent , and other people we met along the way, the process was quite discreet, almost invisible in fact.
I repeatedly pointed out to the director how extraordinarily little trouble we were having with access compared to my research experience. But this came at an ethical cost: What will my son's friends say when they see his mother on television sorting waste and realize that he is the son of a zabbal.
This was not so much because he had been paid: In the Egyptian scenario, the people most in need of a tip are often the least likely to get it since they are not likely to have the power that would make 'bribing'3 them necessary. Rather, he probably in- sisted that his wife sort the waste because he was employed by the foreign company AAEC. Since we had arrived with company officials he must have believed that he was risking his livelihood if he failed to please the foreign filmmakers.
The wife continued to stubbornly refuse, and he was finally forced to sort the waste himself with several male relatives, a task which men almost never do. One of the surprises of this doctoral project has been discovering that the ethical pitfalls of research, far from ending when one leaves the field, are often multiplied during the process of writing up. I will focus on the anonymization of sources4 since mishandling it is one of the more damaging things a writer can do. Where garbage collecting practices are involved, for example, no individuals are identified and anonymity is preserved.
However, many of the actors involved in Zabbaleen development are named and identified. When she speaks with farmers, she simply quotes 'a farmer. First, the practical grounds. Emmanuelle, Mounir Neamatalla, etc. And that is the test: So where individuals are named it is gener- ally because false names, initials, labels like 'a nun,' 'a consultant' and other such tricks would be com- pletely contrived and fool none of the people who need to be fooled if anonymization is to have the desired effect. On a more principled level, the defence of this approach splits into two parts.
First, I maintain that the obligation of confidentiality varies in degree according to the duty of care that the researcher owes to the people studied. The extent of this duty of care varies, I would argue, with the extent to which the relationship of researcher to researched is one of unequal power, and the extent to which the researched is, in absolute terms, powerless. Moreover, as the ESRC guidelines remind us, ethical obligations vary in proportion to the potential risk.
World Bank managers, senior consultants, and other high level figures are not in my view exposed to the same risks as other less powerful fig- ures when their identity is revealed. In addition, by virtue of their positions they expose themselves to, and must reasonably expect, a certain amount of critical scrutiny. Finally, weighed against the re- searcher's, their power, for instance to respond to what is written about them , is considerable. The second principled ground concerns the type of knowledge that the present study seeks to produce.
These individuals are unique, not merely placeholders in a structure. It is therefore inadequate for the intellectual ambition of the project to speak of 'a consultant' or 'a nun. This research stresses the importance of change, specificity, and cases—not structures, patterns, or universals. Individuals must feature since they are more than simply dots for the researcher to connect.
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This has conse- quences with respect to one's positionality as a researcher. A concern with reflexivity requires both acknowledging this fact and exploring its consequences, in particular the ways in which it may shape research results. In my case the ascribed religious identity was Christian, which I believe was, on the whole, bene- ficial for research. While being positioned as a Christian undoubtedly shaped the demographic I en- countered among the Zabbaleen, it by no means precluded interactions with Muslims.
What it did do, on the other hand, was facilitate access and generate rapport with some Christians, who are the ma- jority among the Zabbaleen. Many did not hesitate to try and capitalize on the fellow-feeling this shared identity was supposed to engender. Treating me as some sort of long-lost kin, after a few sto- ries about how hard it was for us Christians in a Muslim-majority country and a few slaps on the back, they might mention that they would sure appreciate a bottle of scotch from the Duty Free shop at the airport.
I wish to explain the process of this ascription and the manner in which I reacted to it during the course of fieldwork. Like many foreigners in Egypt, for whom religion is not the opening gambit with strangers but an intimate and complex topic one builds up to slowly, I was taken aback by the ease and frequency with which I was asked my religion. This question almost never took the open-ended form 'what is your religion?
When on one occasion I objected to the question by pointing out that Egyptians never ask one another what their religion is, I was told 'But we don't need to ask Egyptians, because we can tell without asking. I had thought these were just rituals of greet- ing and small talk, i. I knew some Christians, mainly from higher social classes, who were difficult to position in this manner indeed, their parents sometimes deliberately chose their names with this in mind, in order to facilitate their children's navigation of personal and professional life.
But as a sociology of first names would be sure to reveal, the lower down the social ladder in the Christian community, the more identifiably 'Christian' the first names get. Among the Christian Zab- baleen, for example, most children are named after popular Saints and martyrs, and all of the most popular names are glaringly, almost provocatively Christian. Likewise, the rule seems to be that the number of tattooed crosses is inversely proportional to social class. For instance, many Christian Zabbaleen, in addition to multiple, large tattoos of crosses on their hands and wrists also get in the case of men images of martyrs and saints on their shoulders and pectorals.
Many men are especially proud of the cross on the webbing between the thumb and forefinger of the right hand, because this makes it impossible to shake hands—and therefore to transact business or forge a social bond— without laying their cards on the table. They consider it a cowardly betrayal to 'play down' their Chris- tianity in order to grease the wheels of social life, and conversely, their openness about their Christi- anity is part of their self-conception as Upper Egyptian men: It was the combined illegibility according to this system of signs, on the one hand, and the strong desire to nevertheless position me within the matrix, on the other, that led to the taboo on the 'are you Christian or Muslim' question being broken.
That being said, many of the Christians I knew, particularly those from relatively low socio-economic brackets, thought it impossible that I might be anything but Christian, so went straight to asking what my denomination was. I did little to dissipate the ascribed identity by trying to explain my actual religious convictions, which would have been at best difficult to get across, and likely upsetting and inadmissible in many circumstances.
For instance, during the course of my fieldwork a foreign NGO employee who worked in Manshiet Nasser insisted on telling people that he was Baha'i. As my religious identity is a subject about which I felt less strongly than that individual, I took the path of least resistance. The reason for this was that of the three choices open to me, Evangelism was closest to the truth and sounded like a better bet because it is more widespread among the Zabbaleen than Ca- tholicism and its adherents are reputed to have very intense faith, which is a positive attribute.
It would have been impossible to plausibly claim that I was Orthodox since I had no familiarity with the Eastern rites and would have quickly been made a liar when I attended church for social and research purposes. As it was, I had to answer suspicious questions about why I did not have any tattoos of crosses on my body, which many people I met did not realize are uncommon among Western Christians. This process of ascription slowly produced a ferment of consciousness of a religious identity in the cultural and historical sense.
I certainly did not leave Egypt a believer, but I did become aware that I possessed a number of attitudes, habits and positions that are invisible at home not because they do not exist, but because they go unnoticed against a social and cultural backdrop into which they are thoroughly suffused. This project is neither one of archival history nor a classic ethnographic monograph set exclu- sively during the period of fieldwork and based entirely upon firsthand participant observation.
It is the fruit of intensive, fine-grained analysis of fieldwork-derived materials that were studied in situ. For the most part these materials were either circulating in the mass media while I was in Cairo, or come from the personal archives of individuals I met with and interviewed. Even the most 'historical' chapters i. In the Middle East, a so-called 'complex' and literate society, these sorts of artefacts are often central even in 'traditional' rural settings see e.
Messick a for written texts, Peters for ra- dio, Abu-Lughod for television , to say nothing of Cairo, where my research was set. I am rarely surprised by the surreal coincidences life offers, but during our stroll I noticed a bloke working on the pavement, installing a new star. The bloke making the star smiled at me.
And as we snaked through the area we spotted a residence with a Union Jack flag flapping in the wind. Thanks to Google, we soon discovered it was the L. Larry said he had, and that he was currently sightseeing with the three of us. Excitedly, we scribbled down the Hollywood address, checked that we were all carrying proper identification to get us through the studio security gate, and then Larry hit the accelerator.
Mike Connelly joined us presently, and we headed off to their writing studio, which resembled my image of a proper L. The debut of such TV dramas as True Detective , The Killing , American Horror Story , and Breaking Bad convinced him that the small-screen, episodic format would better accommodate his style of storytelling. We met an ex-LAPD officer who acted as technical consultant, and he indicated that at times he felt as if he were right back at work.
Here are a couple of exclusive clips to illustrate the filming process: At that moment, from the corner of my eye, I saw Titus Welliver appear on the set. I must have looked a little worried.
Connelly explained that the new Bosch series combines elements from his novel, The Concrete Blonde , but the spine of those 10 episodes please pardon the pun is based on City of Bones. Connelly introduced us all: We talked some more about films, and he was very amused by my anecdote concerning the use of a Hoskins impersonation to escape personal injury, which comes from an encounter Roger Ellory and I had during Bouchercon in Baltimore back in Over wine and desert I quizzed the author about the task he faced in casting Harry Bosch for the small screen. Connelly explained that finding the right actor to portray Bosch had been difficult, as they needed someone who could command the stage in minimalist fashion i.
But either way, I very was saddened to hear of his passing [in ].
After dinner, we thanked Michael Connelly for a most excellent afternoon, and drove back to our Bouchercon hotel in Long Beach. Even my wife, who is rarely excited by my adventures in crime and thriller fiction, was checking Facebook to see what I was up to in California. Posted by Ali Karim at Bosch , Michael Connelly , Videos. Newer Post Older Post Home. The Rap Sheet is always on the lookout for information about new and soon-forthcoming books, special author projects, and distinctive crime-fiction-related Web sites. Shoot us an e-mail note here.
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