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"Ethnographically rich and analytically powerful, "Markets of Dispossession" fundamentally reshapes the debate over the informal economy, microenterprise, and economic development and points to the complex and many-layered world-conjuring work of that which we have come to call neoliberalism. Based on evocative accounts of craftsmen's workshops in Cairo, Julia Elyachar shows how the market expansion promoted by the World Bank, NGOs, and others poses critical challenges to both everyday lives and contemporary social analysis."--Bill Maurer, author of "Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason"

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MARKETS of Dispossession

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS..............................................................................ixA NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION....................................................................xv1 Introduction: The Power of Invisible Hands................................................12 A Home for Markets: Two Neighborhoods in Plan and Practice, 1905-1996.....................373 Mappings of Power: Informal Economy and Hybrid States.....................................664 Mastery, Power, and Model Workshop Markets................................................965 Value, the Evil Eye, and Economic Subjectivities..........................................1376 NGOs, Business, and Social Capital........................................................1677 Empowering Debt...........................................................................191Conclusion: The Free Market and the Invisible Spectator......................................213NOTES........................................................................................221BIBLIOGRAPHY.................................................................................245INDEX........................................................................................269

Chapter One

Let me describe my path of movement on that evening around that small span of Cairo: Into an empty apartment built for a craftsman's family where a state employee, an "entrepreneur" in his o-time, sits with two telephones at hand, pondering the reopening of his "microenterprise marketing office." Into the unfurnished, unpainted apartment of a woman whose sharp mind peers out from behind her body's folds of resignation, and off to the workshop where her husband works away late into the night. Down streets lit by small lamps hung on car hoods, illuminating the backs of five boys and three teens-workers all-hunched over a car engine that waits to be revived. To the doors of a coffeehouse flung open at night after the fast, where the budding flowers of child laborers' faces glow in the warmth of dancing girls and great actors whose laughs and shouts from television screens mark the return of Ramadan, its annual nightly television series followed closely around the country and the Arab world.

Men and women make Ramadan their own in a few spots of warmth. Lanterns and paper chains, such as those found throughout Cairo during this holy month, play quietly in the dark outside apartments gleaming with laughter. A few workshops resound with the sounds of eating and drinking far into the night. Some kilometers away, in the workers' dormitory town of Madinet el-Salam, still within the bounds of the mega-city, the streets are emptier still. Men and women sit quietly at home together with a child, maybe two, around the nuclear family's television screen. Cousins and grandparents and aunts of these families, who were also evicted from apartments downtown after the earthquake of 1993, watch the same programs in other neighborhoods on other outskirts of town.

A car passes by, stops, and backs up: Be sure to come tonight! Come and see us! Come and see Mahmoud el-Sherif (former governor of Cairo)! So Essam Fawzi, my partner in the conduct of most of this fieldwork, and I get into the first microbus that passes through el-Hirafiyeen to complete its fare before heading downtown. Seats are filled with big women veiled, sleepy children on laps, and thin, tired men heading back to visit family and friends in downtown neighborhoods from which natural disaster and the state evicted them in 1993. The microbus moves fast but then, as we move into what used to be the heart of the city, where the joyous mood of Ramadan becomes most intense, traffic slows down.

From far away comes the roar of the celebration in Hussein, the neighborhood known to foreigners as Khan el-Khalili. We walk up the street toward the Eastern Cemeteries, toward exhibition halls owned by the governorate. This Ramadan, the halls have been given over to the "Exhibition of the Products of the Youth Micro Industries funded by the Social Fund" (itself an organization funded by the World Bank). Loud-speaker voices boom into the street, in the scratchy sound of the Friday call to prayer. But this time it's a call to build the future through the market and debt. Words call out in steady rhythm: "the banks," "our youth," "social needs," "production." A few steps further, and boom! The lights are blaring, television cameras are running, and men stand gathered under the dyed red colors of tents that imitate the great hand-embroidered craft still practiced by a few old men near Bab Zuwaylah, built by the Fatimids in A.D. 1092, not far from here.

Gathered around this impromptu stage were some of my informants from el-Hirafiyeen, including past and present officials of two nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) in town established to support small productive enterprises. Small enterprises are central to Egypt's economy-one estimate put them at 99 percent of private sector economy units in Cairo (World Bank 1994, 3). From the outside those enterprises all look the same. They are small spaces facing the street in which a few men (rarely women) and children work. They are sometimes called microenterprises because they are so small. But few Egyptians would call a workshop (warsha) a microenterprise (mashru' saghir). A microenterprise denotes a place established with loans from development agencies to reduce unemployment, empower the poor, and support the free market. Those funded microenterprises represent a minuscule proportion of Cairo's small enterprises. Most of these places of work are, rather, workshops. A workshop denotes a place run by a man who learned his trade in childhood. A workshop master learned by doing, not from books or in school. Unlike the microenterprise owner, he is not a mere student (telmidh). His knowledge resides, as one master put it, in his body and his brain. Workshop masters are by and large deeply integrated into what is known as Egyptian popular culture.

The first of the two NGOS in el-Hirafiyeen had been established by craftsmen moved from other neighborhoods of Cairo. The second NGO had been established for youth graduates (al-shabab al-kharigiyeen) who had received loans from the Social Fund for Development to open microenterprises. The president of the youth graduates was the first invited to speak: "We were the children of socialism. We were brought up to go to school and then wait for an appointment from the State. And then structural adjustment hit...