Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Omnia El Shakry is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Davis.

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THE GREAT SOCIAL LABORATORY

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................ixNote on Transliteration and Translation....................................................................................xiiiIntroduction: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Knowledge Production...........................................................11 The Ethnographic Moment..................................................................................................232 Anthropology's Indigenous Interlocutors: Race and Egyptian Nationalism...................................................553 The Painting of Rural Life...............................................................................................894 Rural Reconstruction: The "Road to a New Sanitary Life"..................................................................1135 Barren Land and Fecund Bodies: The Emergence of Population Discourse in Interwar Egypt...................................1456 Body Politics: Gender, Reproduction, and Modernity.......................................................................1657 Etatism: Theorizing Egypt's 1952 Revolution..............................................................................197Conclusion.................................................................................................................219Notes......................................................................................................................223Bibliography...............................................................................................................291Index......................................................................................................................319

Chapter One

In an 1869 letter to Khedive Isma'il (r. 1863–79), renowned for his desire to recreate Cairo as a "Paris of the East," archaeologist, savant, and medical doctor Gaillardot Bey put forward a proposition: the creation of a scientific institution for geographical explorations, along with an attendant framework of museums, libraries, and educational programs. The importance of this project, stressed Gaillardot, was in its reformist and civilizing spirit, a continuation of the reforms initiated by the modernizing Ottoman viceroy Mehmed 'Ali himself. Gaillardot pointed out that the establishment of such an institution would be the first of its kind in the Orient (and would rectify the relative absence of scholarly societies in Egypt), thereby placing Isma'il at the head of scientific innovations as well as moral and intellectual progress. Nor did he hesitate to remind Isma'il of the excitement created by his personal appearance at and Egypt's participation in the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris, which inspired the admiration not only of savants, but of the "ignorant" public as well. Attached to Gaillardot's letter was a report detailing the process of establishing the proposed scientific institution and emphasizing the need to conduct studies that would expound the country's natural resources, in view of profit, as well as its moral order, in the view of progress.

A mere six years later, in 1875, the Royal Geographic Society of Egypt was founded, part of a larger cultural revival sponsored by the Egyptian court. As Gaillardot Bey's letter intimated, Khedive Isma'il was actively involved in the representation of Egypt to the Western world, or what Timothy Mitchell has referred to as the "exhibitionary order" of nineteenth-century Europe. It was not only Europeans, therefore, who desired to represent Egypt on a Western stage to a Western audience. For example, Egypt's pavilions at the 1867 Exposition Universelle were designed by French Egyptologist August Mariette; Isma'il's extravagant celebration of the opening of the Suez Canal in November of 1869 replicated key elements of the world's fairs; and Isma'il himself commissioned Verdi's masterpiece Orientalist opera, Aïda. This complicity of colonial forms of knowledge production (world's fairs and Orientalist art) and Egyptian state institutions complicates our understanding of the production of knowledge in colonial contexts. Individuals who were involved in state-sponsored knowledge production—for example, those working in the Royal Geographic Society of Egypt—participated in a wider shared culture of scientific expeditions (often with their own imperial aspirations in sub-Saharan Africa), museums, and ethnographies, all of which contributed to the formulation of a colonial modernity in late nineteenth century Egypt. As Mauricio Tenorio Trillo has observed with respect to Mexico, "Mexico joined the world's fair circuit in order to learn, imitate, and publicize its own possession of the universal truths of progress, science, and industry." Yet, these universal truths were invariably inflected with the specificity of locale, "Mexican sciences, Mexican art, Mexican nationhood." Or as Zeynep Çelik has noted in comparing the Egyptian khedive Isma'il with the Ottoman sultan Abdülaziz, who also attended the 1867 Paris Exposition amid much fanfare, "[w]orld's fairs were idealized platforms where cultures could be encapsulated visually—through artifacts and arts but also, more prominently, through architecture."

The Royal Geographic Society in Egypt (which exemplified the porous boundaries between anthropology and geography) provides an excellent case study of this culture shared by Europeans and non-Europeans who engaged anthropological and geographical ideas, practices, and debates surrounding the modern Egyptians. The foundation of the society was a crucial moment in the authorization, and transformation, of European social-scientific knowledge in Egypt. Scholars have begun to explore the ways in which authoritative disciplinized knowledge, such as nineteenth-century European geography, was formed through the "effacement of alternative subject-positions and the appropriation of other ways of knowing," for example the knowledge of central Africans. By paying attention to "the historical processes that condemned certain knowledges, meanings and subjects to a place outside the field of what was considered, intelligible, rational, and disciplined scientific discourse," these studies contribute much to our understanding of the constitution of scientific knowledge in its colonial manifestation. Nevertheless, although indigenous actors (in their role as "informants") appear in these accounts as coauthors of geographical knowledge, these studies do not directly address the scientific production of local geographical or anthropological knowledge by indigenous authors themselves. Curiously, very few histories of non-European attempts to produce and disseminate geographical and anthropological knowledge exist.

We can address this gap by foregrounding the site of knowledge production in Egypt, and its co-production by Europeans and non-Europeans. This is not to be understood in the postmodern sense of a critique of ethnographic authority—such critiques emerge from within the disciplinary boundaries and epistemological commitments of anthropology itself. Thus, rather than emphasizing the importance of these anthropological ideas for European anthropology (the formation of British social...