TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF CONNECTIONS

We're connected in Cairo.

Economically dependent on foreign aid, tourism, and foreign investment, Cairenes look abroad for models of development and study foreign languages in pursuit of social mobility. Meanwhile, foreign goods flood the markets. Cheap plastic toys made in China are hawked on street corners in the central urban neighborhoods of Tahrir and Dokki, electronics made in Japan are sold in high-end shops in Mohandiseen, and you can buy a Jaguar in Heliopolis if you've got the cash. Shopping centers like Giza's elegant First Mall have become spectacles of luxury and modernity, places to see and be seen. They join other translocal spaces, like McDonald's and Dreampark, where consumers can experience the global in settings whose identicality with other such settings around the world seems to put them neither in Cairo nor anywhere else in particular. A small number of upper-class elites, joined by an equally small rising middle class, some rich from their own roles in this transnational trade, others flush with petrodollars earned in the Gulf, purchase these goods, enter these hyperspaces, and send their children to expensive "American" private schools (oft en owned and run by Egyptians or other Arabs) to acquire modern languages and educations.

Cairo's mediascape is awash with technologically mediated interconnections. BlackBerries and iPhones have become the badges of the upper middle class. The Egyptian cinema, in spite of being the premier movie industry of the Arab world, cannot keep the local theaters filled. American films fill this gap in the high-end theaters, while Bollywood filmis and Hong Kong action flicks inhabit the low-end market niche. Cybercafés cluster in areas inhabited by students, expatriates, tourists, and Egyptian emigrants visiting from abroad. Satellite broadcasting has transformed viewing patterns by making an increasing amount of uncensored news and entertainment programs available to the urban middle classes. Broadcast television has followed suit, changing decades-old programming patterns to meet new desires. Specialized "Arab" and "Egyptian" web portals, which promise to create "interfaces" between the "traditional" local and the (Westernized) global, are emerging. Egyptians explore websites that offer accounts of Islamic practice by engineers and others who, by virtue of their particular educations, would not be authorized to speak on these subjects in more traditional venues.

And yet not everyone in Cairo is equally connected, and not everyone is connected in the same ways. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Egypt's mean gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was only $4,000 according to official figures, and some economists estimat