Issue 9

Anthropologies of the Middle East

December 2011

Photo: Kalet Auom Elmaa, Qatar. By Colleen Morgan, 2011. Copyright: Creative
Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike.

~ Contents ~

Introduction: Anthropologies of the Middle East
Ryan Anderson

My Field Site is Soaked With Blood
Diane E. King

Toward an Ethnography of Contingency in the Egyptian Uprisings
Mark Allen Peterson

Nationalism in the Built Environment: Imagining the Turkish Nation at the Mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
Lydia Roll

Problems with Prawer: Recent Developments in Negev Land Conflict
Emily McKee

Studying ‘race’ and blackness among Ethiopian Jews in Israel: A commentary
Gabriella Djerrahian

Politics and Art: Graffiti Art in Cairo, Egypt
Christine Smith

A Tale of Tell Halif
Tim Frank

Strangeness, Marvel, and Representation
Nomi Stone

Problems with Prawer: Recent Developments in Negev Land Conflict

A stand-off is escalating in the Negev region of southern Israel. Though less publicized than Palestinian-Israeli conflict over state borders, this struggle between Jewish and Bedouin Arab citizens and the Israeli government has profound implications for civil rights, ethno-religious divisions, and democratic representation in the region. The conflict, which is commonly and prejudicially dubbed the “Bedouin problem,” involves disputed lands over which Bedouin Arab residents and the government both claim rights.

This September, Prime Minister Netanyahu’s cabinet approved the Prawer plan, which would forcibly relocate 30,000 Bedouin Arab residents from their villages to governmentally planned towns.

Bedouin-Jewish inequality is a real problem in Israel, but its causes, consequences, and solutions are hotly debated. In recent years, warnings of a “Bedouin Intifada” due to Bedouin citizens’ mounting frustration over structural violence and second-class citizenship status have increasingly flown through Israel’s media. Governmental representatives acknowledge that “the Bedouin community” has lower standards of health care, employment, and education than the rest of Israel’s citizens and claim that relocation will improve their access to government services. As Netanyahu spokesman Mark Regev stated last month in The Guardian, “We are investing 1.2 billion shekels [$325m] to move them into the mainstream, to reduce that gap.”

However, following announcement of the Prawer plan, thousands gathered in Beersheba, the Negev’s largest city, to protest the proposed relocations. Since then, national and international advocacy networks already calling for Bedouin Arabs’ land ownership and civil rights have focused their energies on preventing implementation of the Prawer plan. They point to the national government’s simultaneous push to remove Bedouin residents from large areas of land and plans to create new rural settlements for Jewish residents as evidence that land-use discrimination, rather than raising standards of living, is at issue in the threatened evictions.

The Prawer plan and subsequent mass protests mark a new development in a decades-old struggle over access to land for farming and homes and the status of “unrecognized” Bedouin villages. Historical and ethnographic background information is necessary to clarify this current escalation, and I contend that this background clearly warns against proceeding with the planned relocations.

A Growing Conflict
After the 1948 war that ended in Israel’s founding, Palestinians who remained within the territory of the new state became citizens. However, they were also placed under military rule, and Palestinian Arabs in the Negev—also identified as Bedouins—were moved to the siyag, a restricted area of residence comprising 10% of their former lands. In 1966, military rule ended, but it was quickly replaced by the policy of Iyur HaBedowim, or “Urbanizing the Bedouin,” which aimed to relocate Bedouin Arabs from rural communities into government-planned townships. These townships received less funding than their Jewish counterparts, and most Bedouin Arabs who moved there became disillusioned and now see them as places of crime, neglect, and economic stagnation.

Today, approximately half of the 180,000 Bedouin Arabs of the Negev live in these townships. The rest live in villages and family clusters that the government deems illegal. Residents of unrecognized villages claim rights to village lands based on their families’ historical occupancy and sometimes even documented agricultural use. But government officials contend that these residents illegally occupy state-owned lands. In a political and legal culture that prioritizes the territorial integrity of a Jewish state and enlists a strict interpretation of property rights, Bedouin Arab residents’ claims in terms of morality, family lineage, and affiliation hold little weight. Through home and crop demolitions, legal suits, and withholding municipal services government officials attempt to move residents out. Residents respond by rebuilding or protesting, and some move to the planned townships.

Throughout this history, Bedouin Arab residents have been treated as a problem to be minimized, rather than citizens possessing both rights and responsibilities shared by a wider Israeli public.

State officials say they must concentrate the Arab population to provide services like schools, electricity, and medical care. But the Regional Council of Unrecognized Villages (a representative body that is not acknowledged by the Israeli government) and planners from an NGO called Bimkom have presented alternative plans to the government. Developed in collaboration with residents, these plans would consolidate and “rationalize” spatial planning within existing villages. While enabling municipal services, these plans would move as few residents as possible and encourage both industrial and agricultural livelihoods.

While ignoring such proposals to recognize existing Bedouin settlements, the government continues to plan and support small towns and agricultural villages designed for Jewish residents.

As a result, widespread mistrust among Bedouin Arab residents greets any government proposals involving relocation. Many Bedouin Arabs resent a history of removal from purportedly state lands because they feel excluded from the national priorities that guide the use of those lands. They see relocation as attempts to free lands of Bedouin Arabs and make room for Jews.

Problems with Prawer
As a peripheral region within the country, the Negev faces considerable economic, environmental, and social difficulties. Unfortunately, most governmental efforts to resolve the issue of disputed lands have had the opposite effect, enlarging and entangling land disputes with these other difficulties. Rather than including Bedouin Arab residents in efforts to solve these problems, past governmental policies have pushed them to the margins. They have consistently excluded Bedouin Arabs from the national “we.” 

In 2008, the Goldberg Commission hinted at a shift from previous government policy. The Commission was formed according to former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s directive, and though the panel’s final report did not go far enough for most advocates of Bedouin land rights, it did advocate collaboration in resolving the Negev’s disputes. The report acknowledged Bedouin Arabs’ “historic connection” to the Negev and recommended recognizing most of the unrecognized villages. “We need to listen to their [Bedouin Arabs’] claims,” urged the report, “and to take their needs into consideration, and they must be involved in determining their own future.”

The recent Prawer proposal rejects that promising shift and would continue the exclusion and imposition of past governmental approaches to “the Bedouin problem.” It drastically cuts the amount of land to be recognized for Bedouin Arab residences and has not included these residents in decision-making.

With September’s protests against the Prawer plan, Bedouin Arabs exercised their rights as citizens. They were attempting to participate in land-use decision-making as members of Israeli society. To succeed in moving past the current status quo of conflict, governmental officials should embrace this participation. Proposed solutions must face the difficult history of Bedouin-government relations and include Bedouin Arabs in nation-building.

“Our state is leaping toward the future and you need to be part of this future,” Prime Minister Netanyahu told a group of Bedouin mayors this month in a meeting regarding implementation of the Prawer plan, according to Reuters. “We want to help you reach economic independence. This plan is designed to bring about development and prosperity.”

If the Netanyahu administration’s true goal is an improvement in living standards, then Bedouin Arab residents themselves must be included within processes of problem-solving and decision-making. Bedouin Arab residents’ efforts to maintain possession of rural landscapes are not simply a matter of traditionalism or a nostalgic clinging to land. They are not a rejection of modernization or change. Rather, they constitute a reaction in kind to the pressures applied by state planners that push Bedouin Arab residents to relinquish familiar lifestyles without real inclusion in the governmental decisions that will shape future lifestyles. A “move into the mainstream” or “development and prosperity” cannot be done to any minority group. It must be done with them.

Emily McKee has conducted ethnographic research in the Negev Region of Israel to examine land relations, social conflict, governance and activism among Jewish and Bedouin Arab residents. Having written a dissertation on the subject, she completed her Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Michigan in 2011.  She is currently a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University.

My Field Site is Soaked with Blood

My field site is soaked with blood.

I am a cultural anthropologist. The area where I generally do most of my fieldwork is called, “the Dohuk Governorate."  It is the northernmost governorate of "Iraq," and of "Iraqi Kurdistan." Some people call Dohuk "Nohadra." It has other names too.

It used to be part of the “Ottoman Mosul Liwa.” For awhile parts of it were a part of the “Pashalik of Diyarbakir.”  I love my field site, and more importantly the people there.


But my field site is soaked with blood.

The victims have been Armenian, Kurdish, Nestorian, Arab, Chaldean, Turkoman.


Shabak.


Yezidi.

Jewish.

(I would like to put quotes around these labels too, just like I put them around the places. But this is a piece about blood, and the victims died as their categories, just as the killers killed them in their categories. I think quotes would detract from that point.)

My field site is soaked with blood.

My field site used to be called, “The Bahdinan region.” A prince from the Bahdinan family ruled from Amadiya (an incredible natural fortress that you really should see sometime).

But then another prince, ruling from another fortress (that you also should really see sometime) decided to take out his fellow neighboring princes.

It was the 1830s. The Bahdinan princes had ruled since the 1370s.
 My field site is soaked with blood. Which is not to say that it’s not one of the greatest places in the world. Because it is. Did I mention that I love it, and especially the people there? I also love the mountains, the humor, the flowers, the tea, the dancing.

In 1933 a Kurdish general in the Iraqi army led his men on a killing spree of Assyrians in Simel, a town situated in the middle of Bahdinan. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish lawyer who developed the term “genocide,” first used his neologism to refer to what occurred in Simel. My field site is the site of the first mass killing to be called “genocide!”

In 1988 the Iraqi army, on orders from Saddam Hussein, killed thousands of people, disappeared thousands more, and razed several thousand villages. The killers were mostly Arabs. The victims were mostly Kurds. A Dutch court later called it “genocide.”  
Did I mention my field site is soaked with blood? Turks kill.

Kurds kill. Assyrians kill. Arabs kill.

Now everyone from my field site who reads this will be mad at me, for saying that members of their group kill. How can I say this, when their hospitality has been boundless, truly boundless?  It’s true, I say to my imaginary critic from my field site, people of all types kill. People kill! Killing doesn’t just take place in my field site. But I notice the killing there, because it’s my field site.  Someone will ask me why I didn’t mention Americans killing in my field site. Especially since I am an American, they will ask me that.

Americans haven’t killed in Bahdinan/Dohuk that I know of. In the Mosul area, yes, but that’s half an hour away, and I’m trying to stick to my field site here.

But now an American academic is my imaginary critic, who will say that I should include the American killing zones in Occupied Iraq. I have only spent one day there, in Mosul, and while I was there I saw what was probably intentionally inflicted violence – I saw a structure go rapidly up in flames. (I stop short of calling it an “explosion.” It was not a normal engulfment because it was too fast for that, but then again it was a split second slower than a regular explosion.)

But anyway that wasn’t technically my field site. I suppose I could mention Henry Kissinger selling the Kurdish resistance up the river in 1975. That was pretty bloody even though it was actually someone else doing the killing. Ok, so add Americans to the list.

My field site is soaked with blood.

Soaked with blood, I’m telling you!

So now that I have made everyone angry by saying that people with different labels kill, what should I do? Should I have left them anonymous? I did not ask the Institutional Review Board if it was ok to make everyone in my field site angry.

But I think the killers want their labels known. They’re proud of their categories. What to do? Who to accommodate?  Should I emphasize victimization instead? That seems better.

Let me talk about my friend who was blown up. He was blown up by Islamists on 1 February 2004. That bomb killed more than 100 others, some of whom I also knew. The victims were Kurds. Kurdish leaders, mostly.  My friend used to beat his wife, at least that’s what she told me, complaining to me about him six years before he died. (To think he probably beat her for six more years! I haven’t seen her since to ask her, and this is not exactly something I wish to email her about.)

Is this a digression, since beating is not quite killing, and my point was that my field site is soaked with blood?  Who cries for the victims? Their families. Their friends. The people who went to school with them and worked with them. Their neighbors.


Me.

Some of the people who cry have killed, or will kill. Humans kill.

Humans in my wonderful field site that feels like a second home, kill. Where people are so friendly. Even men with guns at checkpoints are friendly, and I am not exaggerating (go there and see for yourself).

My field site is soaked with blood. It is the blood of certain categories. Are categories worth this blood?

Some people in my field site are asking this, and working toward a better way. Leaders are working toward a better way. Regular people are working toward a better way. Their achievements are already noticeable.

There is hope!

Diane E. King

University of Kentucky

deking@uky.edu

Note: Peter van Arsdale, chair of the SfAA Human Rights and Social Justice committee, on which I serve, has articulated three “A’s” on which the committee focuses: awareness, action, and advocacy. In this column I combine two of the three “A’s” by “advocating” for “awareness” about the violence that has plagued Bahdinan. It is a great thrill to report that Bahdinan has largely been peaceful and stable since 1997, the end of the internecine conflict
between the two main Kurdish parties in Iraq. (Border areas with Turkey have continued to be dangerous, as they are the site of conflict between the PKK [Kurdistan Workers Party] and the Turkish military, but this conflict does not affect the daily life of most people in Bahdinan. Attacks by Islamists remain a threat, although they happen very infrequently.) The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has brought about many improvements in civil society since
taking over from the Iraqi Ba’th regime in 1991, and since the Ba’th regime’s ouster by the United States in 2003, the KRG has been recognized by and works in cooperation with the Iraqi government. The recent period has been the most conflict-free that the region has seen since the 1830s. I salute the efforts of all who have worked to reverse the violence of the past two centuries that caused incalculable human suffering, and I hope for increased awareness,
 advocacy, and action to militate against further bloodshed.

*This essay was originally published in the January 2009 Newsletter of the Society for Applied Anthropology (Volume 20:1, Pp 32-34).  It has been re-published with the approval of the SfAA.

A Tale of Tell Halif

Anthropology is the holistic study of humans from a variety of angles. One aspect that is common to many anthropological approaches, and which was particularly instrumental in its early phases, was the study of the “other”, people who seem foreign to us. They may live on islands far away or just down the road. How can we get to know them? How can we understand them? Yes, today there are also indigenous ethnographies and we may seek to explain the known people in anthropological terms. Many anthropologists have abandoned a fascination with the “other” for a rationalistic explanation of human phenomena. For some, archaeology may seem somewhat more certain and not directly involve the uncertainties of dealing with humans. After all, we’re mainly concerned with artifacts. And yet, we can also approach archaeology as an involvement with the “other”, trying to understand people not only separated from us culturally, but also removed from us through time.

In archaeology, it is never enough to describe how societies may have worked. It is not enough to posit possible subsistence strategies, political organization, social stratification and even ideology. For in archaeology we are invariably confronted with the flow of time and have to explain how things came to be and how they changed. That is, we have to write history. Not that archaeology is history; but it contributes to it, and at times may be the main source for historical reconstruction. It does so from a standpoint that is particularly its own—the study of cultural remains.

History explains the past and the flow of events through narrative, through relating events and happenings in a framework that makes sense to contemporary listeners of its own culture. As such it is not necessarily universal, and not final. Historical narrative will require revision in new circumstances.

As a discipline related to anthropology, archaeology not only has the evidence drawn from material remains to offer, but also an approach that is sensitive toward the “other.” Not that we can achieve much through the dogmatic “scientificism” that has pervaded so much of anthropology; not that restrictive theories and exact calorie measurements can tell us about the past. But if we allow ourselves to be immersed in another culture, allow ourselves the view into a differently-viewed world even through tiny windows, then we can begin to understand what life might have been like at times and places different from our own. We may even give voice to people who have no voice, at least not in our world. Our staid views of the past and the present may become unsettled; we may be forced not only to re-imagine the past, but also the present. For if we go to another place, we will never be the same when we return to the familiar.

Many of us who have participated in archaeological excavations would have come across stories jokingly imagining what could have happened long ago to leave the things we now find. Many of these are fanciful, never to be taken seriously. But in all this there is a curiosity, an urge to know about the lives of people who left their mark on the earth. Sometimes, to enter their world, we have to tell stories to make sense of their lives, to try to understand the artifacts within their wider setting. Indeed, without those stories, the artifacts become sterile, just curious objects, not remains that tell us about the past. Without the stories, the fascination and romance of archaeology quickly wears off, and we quickly fall into a routine or a race for recognition. It is the stories that drive us to search for further clues that frame the mysteries we’re keen to investigate. And hopefully they lead us to careful investigation, to the consideration of alternatives, and the openness to revise the stories themselves.

I have worked several seasons at Tell Halif, Israel, as part of Phase IV of the Lahav Research Project. Situated at the intersection of the Coastal Plain, the Negev Desert, the Judean Hills, and the rolling hills of the Shephelah, the tell was occupied from Chalcolithic times and used intermittently right up to modern times. Now a kibbutz sits on its flanks.

At the end of the 2009 season, I was reflecting on what we had found during the weeks of excavation in the area I was supervising. I wanted to make sense of what it meant, for the people back home and for me. I wanted to relate the finds to events in history. That’s when a narrative formed.

But before I get onto that, I briefly want to mention what we uncovered. The top layers of the area contained many potsherds, as is normal on tells in the Middle East. Notable was the significant amount of Roman-Byzantine pottery. We also found a nice iron tool not far from the surface. Soon we came upon a well-laid wall. A semi-circular installation was built against the wall. The installation was laid on top of a cobble surface. Once we removed that floor we soon hit another surface level, this time a beaten earth floor. It also seemed to have been in use with the wall. Through an examination of pottery found in the wall and under the two floors, we concluded that they were all constructed, and were probably in use, during Roman times. Mixed among the debris, and also occurring under the floor levels we found several figurine fragments, usually associated with Persian times. Very little evidence of occupation during Hellenistic times was uncovered. The most significant finds relate to the Iron Age. We found a floor covered with dozens of vessels. We found a bread oven, flanked by stones. All this appears to have been covered by a sudden destruction, as houses collapsed on rooms and fire ravaged the town.

I wonder who last used that bread oven we've excavated. She would have had no problems lighting a fire in the oven. I can see her now on that last morning, bending over the bread oven and slapping the flat loaves she just formed against the walls in one swift movement. Outside, the enemy was waiting. Nobody knew how long the city could hold out. But life had to go on. People needed bread. And so she had risen early as she did every morning, had ground the wheat, mixed in the sour dough, formed the loaves. She had taken the dry dung from the outside and started the fire. The little ones were still sleeping, her husband on duty at the city wall. Maybe they shared a last meal in the morning. The bread oven was getting cold as she prepared for her other tasks. And then it happened: the attack of the Assyrians. That morning they were successful, breached the wall, plundered the city and drove out its inhabitants. They set it to the torch. Houses collapsed covering the living spaces with a layer of ash and burnt mudbrick. That's what happened to the bread oven, too.

And the woman? Maybe she was deported to the furthest reaches of the Assyrian empire. She might have never seen her husband again after that fateful morning. Her children went with her into exile, but not all of them survived the hard journey. Their descendants may still live in a small Iranian town, celebrating anti-Israel day each year, ignorant of the twists and turns of history that have cast them to that land.

The bread oven was covered, but life returned to the tell. Making use of the old walls, people built on the rubble, maybe a foot above the old floor. They did not live here for many years before the city was again abandoned. We do not know why, but caught in the rivalry of empires, the kingdom of Judah had to change. And then came the end for this little nation. Just over a century after the Assyrian invasion, the new Babylonian empire devastated the land and razed its capital to the ground. All hope seemed to be lost, the land a waste, only jackals and owls now inhabiting the ruins.

But it was not the end: Babylon was overrun by warriors from the East. The Persians destroyed the rapacious empire. And they sent the exiles back to their home country. So life returned once more to the tell. The settlement was not as big as before, people did not fortify the city again. While the prophets would have rejoiced to again hear the shouts and laughter, the quiet word and reverent prayer, the sounds of life, they would have been incensed at the idolatry, the little gods and goddesses that now flaunted themselves on this tell. For now people came to this place to make their offerings before statues, to bless the rider of the clouds and the mother goddess.

At a time when Jewish nationalism fought with the dominant Hellenistic culture, the city of Rimmon was moved to another hill, maybe two miles to the south of the tell. As the Romans took control of the land, that new city started to flourish. But the site of the old city was not forgotten. A few families moved here again, now calling it Tilla—the tell. We don't know why, but they built one of their houses above the kitchen, still covered by the destroyed remains of earlier centuries. They even dug a trench to place the foundations of their sturdy wall. Nobody even looked at the crude pottery that came up. The floor of compacted clay and earth sealed the traces of a former time. The years passed and season followed season. There was peace at last and no war destroyed the walls.

As the father of the house returned from a visit at a villa in the plains, he looked at his house, the drab mud floor, the sparse furniture. And he decided that night that things would change. It may have taken him a month, but later that year the house had a cobbled floor and an ample platform to work on. Now he only needed the new furniture. The ceiling was a bit closer of course, for fill had been placed upon the mud floor and the cobbles laid on top of it. But it did look a lot more dignified. It would have been at this time that news of a healer and preacher would have come from Galilee. Of course, a new prophet arose every other year at that time, but he was different. His stories showed their God and their writings in a new light. Even though he died a criminal's death in Jerusalem, his message continued, the community he formed grew.

There was no city on the tell when Christianity became the state religion, when churches sprang up in the towns and cities. That was the time in which the settlement to the south, Abu Hof, flourished. People still came to the tell. They took the stones from old walls to use in their houses and started to farm on the hill. The wall of the Roman house suffered, too, and many of its stones were removed. The hole was filled with rubble.

Centuries passed. People still came to the tell. They farmed its flat surface; they lived in the caves around its perimeter; they built defenses to survey the plains and gullies. And though people may still have wondered about former times, its history was forgotten—until archaeologists began to excavate and to find traces of lives lived long ago, until they began to relate these traces to the shreds of information about the history of this land.

Tim Frank

Lahav Research Project (staff member)

Mississippi State University (MA student)

Studying ‘Race’ and Blackness among Ethiopian Jews in Israel: A commentary

In its various popular understandings, the idea of race is conflated with essentialized concepts linked to biology, ancestry, physicality and ethnicity. In the heated landscape of the Israeli-Arab conflict, race and racism provide the prism through which international commentaries on Zionism and Israel’s military actions are often framed. Locally however, within the realm of Jewish Israeli society, racial and ethnic dynamics have evolved mostly away from the gaze of the foreign press, at least until the highly mediatized airlift operations that brought Ethiopian Jews to Israel in the early 1980s.

The existence of the pejoratively termed “Falasha” or Beta Israels as Ethiopian Jews called themselves while living in northern Ethiopia, has fascinated Jewish and non-Jewish observers alike for years prior to their aliyah (immigration of Jews to Israel, meaning ascent). From the time that key contacts in the late 1800s and early 1900s between European Jewish and non-Jewish travelers to Ethiopia and the Beta Israel occurred, and their en-masse arrival to Israel some 80 years later, colossal transformations have taken root in Beta Israel religion and culture. Today, the heart of the Ethiopian Jewish community lives in Israel where they are officially accepted, albeit not without tension and conflict in some areas, as Jews by the government of Israel and the rabbinate. There are approximately 120, 000 Ethiopian Jews in Israel, comprised of various sub-groups based on: religious background (those who consider themselves “original” Ethiopian Jews or the Falash Mura, ie converts to Christianity who reconverted to Judaism); family lineage (former slaves who served Ethiopian Jewish families, pejoratively called barya, and their previous owners called chewa); ethno-cultural and linguistic origin and area of provenance (Amharic speakers from the Amhara region and Tigrinya speakers from the Tigray area); rural or urban provenance and level of education upon arrival; migration cohort and age group. While these divisions should compel researchers to account for the lack of coherence in regards to the (singular) “Ethiopian Jewish community”, intra-group fractions are not generally accounted for in studies on the group.

Thirty years have now passed since their arrival to Israel. By and large, young Ethiopian Jews socialized in Israel have mainstreamed into contemporary Jewish practices and integrated into secular Israeli society [1]. Ethiopian Jews represent a homogenous population block for outside observers, Israeli society, its various government bodies and policy makers.

Racial and ethnic tensions among Jewish populations in Israel preceded the arrival of Ethiopian Jews. Marginalized Jewish immigrants from the Maghreb and the Middle East known as Mizrachim (or Easterners, Orientals in Hebrew) were racialized as dark and ‘black’ upon their arrival in the 1950s. In the 1970s, a popular uprising gathered momentum among their children in protest of the discriminatory treatment by the dominant Ashkenazi elite. A young group of disenfranchised Mizrachim living in the slums of Jerusalem reared this racial epithet on its head, appropriating it as a tool of political empowerment and naming their group the Black Panthers following the African American movement of the same name. Some of the short-lived movement’s activists turned to mainstream political channels to fight for social equality, founding or joining emerging parties and social organizations and the Israeli Black Panthers eventually fizzled out. By the time Ethiopians reached Israel, subsequent generations of Mizrahim socialized in Israel had become acculturated and israelised. Segments of the Mizrahi population experienced upward mobility, making their way into previously inaccessible spheres of power once dominated by Ashkenazis.

Racialized variables and phenotypic differences that mark Ethiopians as internal ‘outsiders’ contradistinguish them from other Jewish Israelis and serve to reinforce in-group membership and create homogeneity. In the Israeli public’s imagination as well as in symbolic and discursive self-representations put forth by Ethiopian Jews themselves, they are, for all intents and purposes, ha shchorim - the Blacks. (They are also called ha Ethiopim, the Ethiopians, as well as the derogatory ‘kushi’, translated in its current and most popular form to ‘nigger’, as the Mizrahim were also called). It would be unwise however, to correlate this color-based label as an interpretation of their social status to the scheme of American race relations and politics.

In regards to my research, this has conceptual implications since I aim to decipher the place occupied by race in the lives of the latest “black” Jews in Israel and to understand how identity claims and grievances made under the banner of blackness shape social interactions on a day to day basis. Thus, it is important to look at what is at stake and for whom when looking at discrimination, exclusion and marginalization in Jewish Israeli society. Some Ethiopian Israeli teenagers are invested in cultivating an imagined (American) ‘black’ identity. In this process they are ‘whitening’ a phenotypically and culturally diverse Jewish population composed of European, Russian, and Middle Eastern Jews under the umbrella of the racial epithet ‘The Whites’ (ha levanim). To some Ethiopian Israeli kids I spoke with, the racial discourse articulated a clear separation between ‘us’ Blacks, as in, ‘us’ Ethiopian Jews, and the rest of Israel’s Jewish population composed of the ‘Whites’ (ha levanim). Thus the blackness and orientalness of the Mizrahim became somewhat normalized and seem to denote Jewishness and an unmarked reference to normative Israeliness encompassed by the skin color ‘white’. If becoming black in Israel is indeed part of a larger process deserving of academic attention, then whiteness and the racializing of former ‘kushis’ into ‘whites’ emerges as a salient research foci as well.

The fluidity, rather than the fixity of black and white as operative categories as described in the Israeli case, is an invitation to explore the social life of race. While concepts of race among Jews in Israel are indeed informed by globalized understandings of blackness emanating in part from the United States, undoing the mass that separates the rooting of global currents of black American culture from the local experiences of discrimination and grievances broadcast in the rhetoric of blackness highlights the importance of resisting the temptation to simply export the American model when looking at race in Israel. It also requires that the integration of Ethiopian Israeli be scrutinized not only in light of the Mizrachi experience, but also as an evolving process that has taken on another direction embedded within the continuum of local Israeli ethno-religious and racial dynamics that have changed considerably since the arrival of the ‘darkest’ Jewish immigrants (olim).

Gabriella Djerrahian

PhD Candidate

Anthropology Department

McGill University

Montreal, Canada

[1] The encounter of the older generation with Israeli society is not accounted for here since their integration to Israel has produced outcomes directly linked to factors that do not apply to those who came as children or who were born in Israel.

Suggested Readings

Anteby-Yemini, Lisa. 2004. “Promised Land, Imagined Homelands: Ethiopian Jews’ Migration to Israel.” Pp. 146-164. In Homecomings: Unsettling Paths of Return, edited by F. Markowitz and A.H. Stefansson. United States: Lexington Books.

Banton, Michael. 1978. The idea of race. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.

Brodkin, Karen. 1998. How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Kaplan, Steven. 2002. “Black and white, blue and white and beyond the pale: Ethiopian Jews and the discourse of colour in Israel.” Jewish Culture and History 5:51-68.

Salamon, Hagar. 2003. “Blackness in transition: Decoding racial constructs through stories of Ethiopian Jews.” Journal of Folklore Research 40(1):3-32.

Shohat, Ella. 2001. “Rupture and Return: A Mizrahi Perspective on the Zionist Discourse.” The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies 1(May):14.

Tessman, Lisa. 2001. “Jewish Racializations: Revealing the Contingency of Whiteness.” Pp. 131-145. In Jewish locations: traversing racialized landscapres, edited by L. Tessman and B.-A. Bar On. Lanham, MD; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield.

Strangeness, Marvel, and Representation

On an island off the coast of Tunisia, on the periphery of the Jewish village of the Hara Kebira, three Jewish teenage girls in bathrobes and slippers pass through a gauzy curtain to visit Nisreen, a, the Muslim hairdresser. The girls treat the space almost like their homes, chatting casually, leaving to check the chicken on the stove, coming back and peering in to see if anyone interesting has stopped in.

The exchanges between Nisreen and the girls seem intimate. She asks how each of the girls’ six to eight siblings is doing, by name. When asked about the Jewish holidays, she lists the names of some of the festive occasions in which the girls visit to get their hair coiffed and their eyebrows plucked. Just before Purim, which commemorates the escape of the Jewish people from a massacre in ancient Persia, Nisreen whispers to me: “Oh I know this one! This is the holiday where they play in the streets and eat sweets with those awful firecrackers!” The Jewish girls, when asked how they feel about Nisreen, initially reply enthusiastically: “She’s been around here forever; she straightens hair better than anyone I know.” When I ask if they consider her a friend, they respond: “Of course not, she’s goyim [non-Jewish].” One girl responds: “I like her well enough, but I get the sense she’s two-faced. She pretends to like us, but actually doesn’t at all. None of them do deep down.”

“Will you stay here in the Hara Kebira? Do you plan to emigrate to Israel?” I ask. One replies: “No, my family doesn’t have any plan to leave. Here, we will always be foreign and strange [ghareeb]. Even though we have been here for thousands of years, this will never change. People don’t think we belong here. We don’t see ourselves as belonging here.” The approximately 1,000 Jews of the island of Djerba trace their origins back to the fall of the Babylonian Temple in 586 B.C., locating themselves as descendants from exiles of the “Promised Land.” In the community’s founding story, a stone from the fallen Temple’s door was brought over the sea to the island and placed in the foundation of a new synagogue. Although mourning the Temple has been woven into the fabric of Judaism itself, its manifestations are acute in Djerba’s community. A wheat porridge (Basisa, a symbol of the Temple’s foundation) is stirred with its lost key once a year, acting out a longing to recreate the edifice. Older men wear black stripes on their trousers on ritual occasions to mourn the temple. A bride places a candle for mourning for Jerusalem at her bedside. Moreover, the Zohar, the mystical book with its prescription for the end of exile and the arrival of the Messiah occupies a central and unique place in Djerban Jewish rituals and festivals. By their own assertion, Djerban Jews have resided in North Africa for two millennia; however, the community simultaneously asserts its strangeness in the region.

I lived in the Hara Kebira during 2003-2004, returning for field visits in 2005 and 2006. In what form, I wondered, should I write about the blend of nostalgia, intimate strangeness, and alienation the community described and enacted in ritual? Indeed, how to write about “strangeness,” when the trilateral root in Arabic implies not only dislocation but also the marvel and the uncanny? I wanted to find registers to represent the theological and mystical, the mythical parables, and the texture of so many voices: the curiosity and opprobrium of the teenage girls; the gentle teacher with his measured judgments; the anxious and lonely wife; the Muslim hairdresser; the fabled girl the Djerban Jews call The Stranger who arrived on the island on a raft of birch, first spurned and then sainted by the community. The result was a book of poems, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press, 2008). It has come to pass that these two ways of thinking and writing demand everything from each other: my academic anthropological work gives my poems intellectual rigor, while my poems give my academic work conceptual clarity. A few of the poems, below.

Jerusalem

The stones are tunnels
of light. The city touches
your funny bone with
a mallet of light, the feeling
of emerging from
a tunnel into a bright room.

They call this city
the navel of
the world. Once the cord
was snipped,
it bucked out of God's arms.


The Girls

They drop a mandarin and a banana in your bag
waiting for you at the door of the schoolhouse.
The girls are sixteen and not yet married. They giggle
their questions. “Whose daughter
are you?” “Why aren’t you married yet?” They
know some words in your language; now and then
they say them. When you say words in theirs,
they peer at you and laugh and let you fumble until
you extract the right one, shining like
a bone they left for you many centuries ago in the sand.


From Her Notes

An upright thimble
in each girl’s heart. Careful now,
or lose your best friend.

The schoolteacher of
history cuts his orange.

Neat surgery.

Your neighbor asks you
what it is you want to learn.
What is it you lack?

She says only our
people own the truest
truth.

Holy days start just
When you first see the moon’s
stab. It’s the seeing.


Why I Came

Under amber, the nearly lost
city: I dream myself
here, to enter how I imagine
we had once lived, until our cities
were paved over, stones
from our graves laid
in the new city's walls.

I came because, here,
amber flooded and
cooled over the homes, over
hands blessing candles inside.
And breath from the lost
cities kept moving in living
throats.

The Sabbath

During the Sabbath, you are in other time. You carry nothing
but your continuing

breath. Enter here, where
time is not

time, inside an alignment of the heavenly
and earthly worlds. The same happens when two bodies

join: the worlds rowing under each
skin climb into a zygote. Birth. And then no-time again

when the ram’s horn
possesses your walled village. The men

blow the horn on each day of rest—

when you hear it, you stop
your breath and wish.

Listen. Your breath
held.

And those stars
behind the stars you recognize,

they stay.


A Map [From “Portraits of Women Who Left, the Negev, Israel]

At the end of the 19th beginning of the 20th century on the island, a rabbi sage was consulted and said: If a Jew hears a Muslim utter a blessing upon smelling fragrant herbs, he should second the blessing by uttering “Amen!” Because they both believe and both want to praise.

In another theological quandary, the sage advised that when a Jew blessed kosher meat, he could add, without contradiction or interruption of his blessing, “Allahu Akbar” to make the meat equally fit for Muslim consumption,

Yaffit and I sit on the balcony. Green. Thorns.
Roosters pecking under clotheslines.
We open her wedding trousseau so she can try on her heavy anklets, the red silken brocade.
She has not opened it for twenty years, so I must try them on too.
We sit together, the dress rustling between.

We are a five-minute cab ride from the land which is being returned.
Do not speak
your politics, because they trust you for the first time. They grieve
the loss
Of the land, because without the land, the Messiah will stumble,
His map will blow away.
Wind will carry it. They will not be good enough.

Nomi Stone is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Columbia University with a Masters in Middle East Studies from Oxford. She is currently researching combat simulations/ training exercises in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America, focusing on both the military imaginations of these spaces and the lifeworlds of the Iraqi role-players who work within them. Her first book of poetry, Stranger’s Notebook (Northwestern University Press, TriQuarterly Books) was published in 2008. A Chicago Public Radio interview on the book can be accessed here. More of her poems can be found here.

Nationalism in the Built Environment: Imagining the Turkish Nation at the Mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Though anthropology is an academic discipline concerned with studying people, sometimes it must contend with the built environment, and structures that have (or seem to have) a personality of their own. For indeed, as Houston (2008) points out, “built environments become social ‘actors’ in themselves” (139). Some structures seem to be bestowed with certain human characteristics by the communities of which they are a part, becoming concrete, physical manifestations of the nationalist spirit of a people. This spirit is sometimes imagined to have been embodied by a particular, previously living, founder or patriarch, and now memorialized by a constructed monument to that patriarch and the perpetuation of what Anderson (1991) calls the imagined national community. “Imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (6-7). I first experienced this phenomenon of built structures embodying the nationalist spirit while teaching English in China, where I was introduced to the cult of Mao, which is most palpable when watching the slowly snaking line outside his mausoleum waiting to be paraded past his remains. I have been confronted with it again since moving to Turkey three months ago. In Turkey, the concept of the Turkish nation is synonymous with one man, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founding father of the Turkish Republic. What he represents for Turkey, and more specifically for the Turkish nationalist project, is embodied in the structure of his mausoleum, Anıtkabir.

Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923, and ruled as its first president until his death on 10 November 1938 (Mango 2004). On 10 November 1953, the fifteenth anniversary of his death, Atatürk’s body was moved to Anıtkabir. According to Wilson (2009) the structure was intentionally built as a symbolic representation of Atatürk and the Turkish nation: “Anıtkabir communicated—and continues to communicate—the constructed identity of the Turkish Republic, educating future generations about their past. Anıtkabir, like most monuments, represents and politicizes the past, shaping the memory of Turks and the identity of the Turkish nation” (249). The structure itself does overwhelm one. Imagine, if you will, what it might be like if the symbolism of all the monuments and memorials in Washington, DC could be distilled into one monumental complex, and you will have some idea of the awe-inspiring feeling of Turkish nationalism one is struck by while walking up the lion road (a wide walkway flanked by lion statues in the style of ancient Anatolia) and across the central square of the complex toward the mausoleum. After ascending a set of stairs and walking through an entry flanked by the text of two of Atatürk’s speeches, the symbolic marble tomb of Atatürk can be seen at the end of an empty hall. His actual tomb is one floor below, in a sealed room accessible to the public only via a closed-circuit television in the museum portion of the complex. This actual tomb is fraught with symbolism, as it is encircled by brass vases containing soil from each of the 81 provinces of Turkey (as well as Northern Cyprus and Azerbaijan). “Atatürk is thus literally enveloped by the territory of the nation” (Wilson: 249). Yet, beyond the physical structure and Atatürk’s tomb, Anıtkabir also contributes to the perpetuation of Turkish nationalism through the history told in the museum that is also housed in the complex.

In the hall that houses a collection of artwork, a series of monumental paintings depicting the Turkish struggle for independence illustrates this focus on the perpetuation of Turkish nationalism. There are eight paintings in the series, none of which appear to be signed, thereby indicating that the identity of the artist is not significant in comparison to the nationalist story of struggle in wartime and Atatürk’s contributions to that struggle. Included is a depiction of people giving supplies to the war effort, showing, according to the placard next to the painting, the “full participation of the people in the war”. Of course, this begs the question, full participation of which people? It is implied that all residents of Turkey eagerly and happily gave all they had to support the fight for an independent Turkish Republic. Another painting is given the English title, “Selfless Contributions made by Turkish Women in the National Struggle.” A particularly graphic representation of the struggle for independence is “The Massacres Perpetuated in Anatolia During the Invasion Years,” which shows a violent depiction of the Greek invasion of İzmir on 15 May 1919. The final painting in the series is “Turkish Army Entering İzmir After the Great Victory,” depicting Atatürk leading a victorious procession of Turkish soldiers though the city of İzmir. It is situated facing the painting of the invasion of İzmir, heightening the emotional impact of both paintings. Adjacent to the room with these monumental paintings, are two areas that depict major battles in the War of Independence—the Çanakkale Battle, the Sakarya Pitch Battle, and the Great Attack. In these areas, music evocative of an epic war movie is playing, creating a nationalistic “aural space,” as described by Houston (2005), in which even the sounds heard are controlled in such a way as to promote the nationalist project.

A large portion of the museum is devoted to the “Vault Galleries.” According the “Hand Guide of Anıtkabir,” which is handed to visitors as they pass though the entrance, there are 18 vault galleries in niches originally designed to house the remains of deceased presidents of the Turkish Republic. Instead, these vault galleries now depict the story of the early years of the Turkish Republic. There is patriotic music playing throughout, to maintain the aural space and help you keep your mind focused on nationalistic awe of early Republican history. At the back of several niches are bronze reliefs, some literally thrusting historical events into your face as you enter.

In the niche labeled “Reforms in Education, Language, and History” is included the following note on history reform: “History is one of the fundamental ties that creates a nation. Common history consolidates national unity and cooperation.” This, perhaps perfectly, sums up the nation-building project. The imagining and creation of a homogeneous shared history is central to the promotion of a nationalistic ideal. One also learns in this niche that the Turkish History Research Society was established on 12 April 1931 (renamed the Turkish History Society in 1935), and that Atatürk claimed on 23 August 1931 that, “Writing history is as important as making history. If the writer is not faithful to the maker, the unchangeable truth would have a misleading nature for the mankind [sic].” This, of course, begs the question, what would alternative voices to the dominant Turkish nationalist version of history have to say regarding the rendering of Turkish history presented at Anıtkabir?

In the same niche, regarding language reform, we learn that “Language is one of the fundamental ties that constitutes a nation. In a country lacking language unity, the national unity is in jeopardy.” And so, we learn that language reform and making Turkish the sole national language of Turkey were steps to ensuring national unity and strength. However, the Ottoman Empire, the remnants of which were re-imagined into the Turkish Republic, was far from homogeneous, serving as the home to a diverse group of ethnicities, religions, and languages. What of this diversity? It was subordinated in the name of establishing a new Turkish nationalism in the early Republic. A key part of “fostering a new national identity” (Houston 2005:104) was insisting on a single national (Turkish) language.

What is conspicuously missing from the narrative presented at Anıtkabir is the presence of alternative voices or perspectives on Turkish history and the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. This is, of course, not surprising, given the nature of the nation-building project undertaken in the early years of the Turkish Republic, a project that is continued for contemporary generations in the displays at Anıtkabir. Through a series of sweeping reforms in such areas as education, language, dress, and history, Atatürk strove to create a new Turkish national community and to unify, and in many ways homogenize, the Turkish nation. It is the story of this imagined homogenous Turkish nation that is told at Anıtkabir.

Lydia Shanklin Roll

References

Anderson, Bendict. 1991[1983]. Imagined Communities. Rev. edition. New York: Verso.

Command of Anıtkabir. (n.d.). Hand Guide of Anıtkabir.

Houston, Christopher. 2005. Provocations of the Built Environment: Animating Cities in Turkey as Kemalist. Political Geography 24:101-119.

Houston, Christopher. 2008. Kurdistan: Crafting of National Selves. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Mango, Andrew. 2004. Atatürk. London, UK: John Murray (Publishers).

Wilson, Christopher S. 2009. Representing National Identity and Memory in the Mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 68(2):224-253.

Toward an Ethnography of Contingency in the Egyptian Uprisings

On Nov. 27th and 28th, 2011, tens of millions of Egyptians went to the polls to vote for a new parliament. For many, of all eligible ages, it was the first time they had voted—in spite of the fact that Egypt's constitution makes voting mandatory for all adult citizens. They went riddled with doubts about the electoral process—whether it would actually be fair, which candidates stood for which principles, whether the ritual of voting in the face of uncertainty would actually create a better future than had voting for certainties during the last thirty years.

For the first time in decades, pervasive uncertainty at every level of civil society is the norm for Egyptians. The economy is in a shambles, public security is unreliable, and the fate of those who protest against the ruling military council is as uncertain as it ever was during the Mubarak regime.

And yet in Egypt, the alternative to contingency—“stability"—has long been a euphemism for crony capitalism, widening gulfs between rich and poor, suppression of political opposition and violent oppression of dissent.

This essay is a programmatic call for anthropological and ethnographic consideration of Egypt's new ontology of the political-as-contingent. It follows Asad's (1993) injunction that we pay more attention to how people confront the unpredictable, aleatory quality of experience. Egypt's current situation cries out for such an approach as multiple players struggle to put forward different political projects, the outcomes of each impinged on by the outcomes of the others. Nonetheless, it is difficult to write about contingency—about politics in action—given that the act of representation itself, or at least those genres associated with political writing (journalism, commentary, policy analysis, ethnography) introduce structure.

One of the common structures constructed by narratives about the uprisings frame them as a conflict between anti-Mubarak protesters, a rainbow coalition of all walks of Egyptian life bravely defying the tyrant, and pro-Mubarak security police and hired thugs. But the truth on the ground was always more complex. While there were members of every part of Egyptian society among the throngs in Tahrir, the protesters did not represent the whole of Egyptian society, their commitments to the project varied, and their sense of acceptable outcomes were not uniform. Even during 18 days of protest in Tahrir that culminated in Mubarak's resignation, at every stage there have been many voices who insisted that the uprising must stop here, that further protests are unnecessary and do more harm than good.

For example, when the uprising started Aline, a wealthy Egyptian student studying abroad, posted to her Facebook page “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” The next day, as the protests swelled, she posted “Yalla Misr!” (Go, Egypt!). But just a few days later she had shared a statement by an Egyptian friend, a fellow former student at Egypt’s most expensive private school saying that because Mubarak had agreed to step down at the end of his term, and had appointed a vice-president, it was time to stop protesting. “I know everyone of you loves his country EGYPT, but you are not helping the situation by spreading hate and more protests” the statement said.

Such positions might be dismissed as cold feet on the part of wealthy cosmopolitans who, while attracted to democracy, benefited economically from the former regime. Perhaps the same can be said of the middle class shopkeepers who were angry because their shops continued to be closed due to the collapse of security that accompanied the protests.

Yet many of the working poor also rejected the protests. Thus some of my young Facebook friends from rural communities like Siwa, in the Western desert, were posting pro-Mubarak photos by Jan. 26, and there was a story reported on Al-Jazeera about the working man who came down to Tahrir to protest for Mubarak, prompted by what he saw on state television, but switched sides after he got there and began talking with people decided to join the protest. On NPR, the blogger “Arabist” described an argument with his garbage collector over his continued commitment to the protests after the first week, and Egyptian friends have shared stories of neighbors who went door-to-door urging people not to attend any more protests

And some of those educated, social media-savvy young people usually seen as the core of the uprising varied in their commitments at various stages in the uprising.

One young Egyptian woman described how she and a friend joined the Friday, Jan. 28 protest, shouted anti-government slogans, were tear-gassed by Central Security police and spent hours hiding in buildings as they tried to make their way home.

But after Mubarak’s second address to the nation on Feb. 2, her friend decided to join what Al-Jazeera, CNN and others called “pro-Mubarak” protesters in Mohandiseen. Yet her friend had not become pro-Mubarak, she insisted; he simple felt that the protesters had made significant political gains and should stop demonstrating.

She also described a call from another friend who had spent three days camping out in Tahrir, but now urged my consultant not to return. The time for protesting was over; the time had come for consolidating, planning, and writing, she said.

Thus all through the uprising, from its earliest days, to the most current protests and counterprotests, we find contingent moments and advocacies as the many stakeholders in this effort of remaking Egypt, continue to play out their great experiments in urban and virtual spaces. Months after the Mubarak regime fell, Egypt remains pregnant with possibilities, and which are good and which are bad depends on where you stand.

Studying contingency makes us aware of the reality as well as the social significance of the present, of the unpredictable quality of life. “Although there is past and future, time is neither a flow nor a cycle. It is a resource through which to negotiate and maximize the socialities out of which the continuing meaning of past, present and future will derive” (Heil and Macdonald 2008).

It is well accepted by now in social theory that chance interactions create higher order predictable patterns. Practice theories, in particular, have emphasized the fact that structures are an emergent property of the behavior of millions of social actors pursuing their own strategies, all behaving indeterministically. An ethnographic account of history unfolding must necessarily include description of the outcomes of an aggregate of multitudes of causes, none of which are necessarily uniform with its others.

But ethnographic explanations of social change must also grapple with “the native’s point of view,” and that point of view is itself changing, becoming increasingly aware of the extent to which the future is unpredictable. As Egyptians look to a future, it is with a growing recognition that the future is contingent. Even while they plan future events, small or large scale, they do not succumb to the illusion of predictability. The possibility of constructing a new and better Egypt remains amid the tensions and ambiguities that come with uncertainty.

Mark Allen Peterson

Miami University

References

Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and reasons of power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Heil, Daniela and Gaynor Macdonald. 2008. “Tomorrow comes when tomorrow comes”: Managing aboriginal health within an ontology of life-as-contingent. Oceania 78: 299 – 319

PHOTO: Malak Rouchdy. Used by permission.

Politics and Art: Graffiti Art in Cairo, Egypt

In the upscale neighborhood of Zamalek in Cairo, Egypt, a military tank faces off with a man, on a bicycle, carrying bread. This scene is a five-minute taxi ride from Tahrir Square, the primary spot within the city and the country where thousands of protesters are currently fighting against the rule of the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF). In the months since the January 25th uprisings that saw the disposal of Hosni Mubarak, protesters have repeatedly returned to Tahrir and squares around the country to have a say in the making of a future Egypt. Activists have also been trying to root out the lingering political ideologies of the old regime. Despite the euphoria of February 11th when Mubarak stepped down, there is now a widespread sense that the SCAF is simply continuing the policies of the Mubarak era while carving out a larger political role for itself—threatening the political future that Egyptians are fighting for.

Artist: Unknown.  Location: Downtown Cairo, Egypt

Thankfully however, the scene in Zamalek is not real. It is a piece of graffiti art by the Egyptian artist Ganzeer (the name means ‘bike chain’ in Arabic). Paralleling the political struggles happening in the country, graffiti art has spread rapidly throughout Cairo since January 25, transforming many of the streets around the city. Ganzeer’s piece evokes the ethos of the political battles currently being waged. The bread deliverer, humble and ingenious, is acting metonymically as a representation of Egyptians while the military tank, representing the SCAF, is a direct affront to his well-being.

Graffiti as a global phenomenon was largely absent from the Streets of Cairo prior to January 25. Since that time it has flourished dramatically. The art form is broadly understood as any piece of unsolicited art that is usually placed in visible public locations. The history of Graffiti is long and varied (Sheon 1976), but in Egypt, many of the manifestations of graffiti visible within the city can be linked to the styles of Banksy or traced further back to graffiti’s history within American urban experience, particularly within the emergence of Hip-Hop. In Egypt, pieces are large and detailed, many incorporating stencils. They are placed on property walls, public buildings and on transportation infrastructure. Professional and amateur artists have all made their mark on the walls of the city. Works seen around Cairo touch on a number of different political topics or operate as forms of commemoration for the uprising and the martyrs who died. Other pieces are meant to illicit laughter. The anthropologist Julie Peteet, in her work on the Palestinian Intifada, has argued that graffiti allows for a range of voices to come together, in turn building relationships and providing an arena for political contestation and the exercise of power (Peteet 1996). Similarly, the walls of Cairo have become important terrain through which to express political power. For example, on my last night in Cairo as I tried to take photos of graffiti in Tahrir Square, I was abruptly stopped by a soldier. It turns out that they had been actively painting over work in the area.

During an interview I conducted with Ganzeer, he discussed the power of graffiti art as a means of creating an intervention in public space, capturing a part of the city to signify public ownership. This is particularly important in a city such as Cairo where there are limited public spaces. In many instances, space within the city (even the park) is only accessible by paying for entrance or by asking permission. In one example, Ganzeer describes the method of Kushk Kiving,

Heliopolis is known for kushk kiving which is like— you have all these kiosks and they sell soda and chips and whatever-- normal stuff and there’s a lot of them and dudes would go and hive around these, you know what I’m saying?... it couldn’t just be anywhere it would have to be around these places because you obviously needed to hang out around these spaces while you were having a soda or something like that. There were certain places that were deemed acceptable [to hang out] but then some places if you go and hangout some people might be weirded out by your hanging there. I think people have never realized that the city belongs to the people—it doesn’t really belong to the authority…it belongs to the people and the people just had never really used it in that context of it being theirs and ‘I’m owning it.’

Graffiti art, in contrast to kuskh kiving, does not ask permission but freely claims spaces on the walls of the city. The explosion of graffiti art in the city can also be understood as part of a general feeling unleashed during the protests against Mubarak. It represents ownership over the political future as well as over the places of the city. In creating markers of political events there is a determination not to give away these newfound powers. Indeed, graffiti spread on public spaces within Cairo performs as a tool to claim space in addition to being visual reminders of the political shift within the country.

Artist: Ganzeer Location: Zamalek, Cairo, Egypt (note the doleful panda standing by. He was added later by graffiti artist ‘Sad Panda’. Pandas like this one are on walls all around the city. His posture is usually the same and his gaze works as a kind of ironic commentary.)

Additionally, beyond thinking of graffiti as a tool of ownership, Ganzeer indicates that graffiti plays another equally important role within the built environment by acting as a representation of the realities of Egyptian life:

If you want to look at a piece of architecture, Islamic architecture…[and] if you were to look at a book from that same era you would see the connection, between the architecture and the look and feel of the books. And you would see the connection between say a carpet of the same era or the clothes they wore of the same era. However, the way cities are built today anywhere in the world is completely detached from the rest of our culture…but with street art I think street art kinda forces an interaction or forces the existence of our culture in the environment that we live in and it’s necessary for that.

The built environment of Cairo is marked by the country’s colonial history and by the country’s current political and economic orientations toward the United States and Europe. Buildings within downtown Cairo represent French architecture; malls and several restaurants echo Western leisure ideals, and the city is marked by advertisements and billboards for expensive consumer items. Juxtaposed against this, Informal housing units and the architecture from Cairo’s Ottoman, Fatimid and Pharonic past is patch-worked through the city. Within this mix, graffiti allows Cairenes currently living in the city the opportunity to see themselves reflected in the landscape and presents an opportunity for them to be connected and invested in the built environment in a new way.

Despite the uncertainty of the political future, it is clear that there has been a shift in how Egyptians understand their relationship to politics and the landscape of the city. Efforts to paint over and ignore these changes only encourage protesters more in their resolve for a new Egypt.

Christine Smith is a Ph.D student in the University of Kentucky Geography Department. Her current research focuses on state violence and memory in Egypt. Contact her at Cesmit5@uky.edu.

References

Peteet, J. 1996. The Writing on the Walls: The Graffiti of the Intifada. Cultural Anthropology 11(2): 139-159.

Sheon, A. 1976. The Discovery of Graffiti. Art Journal 36 (1): 16-22

Introduction: Anthropologies of the Middle East

There are many reasons why anthropological perspectives on the Middle East matter.  One of those reasons is simply the fact that people like the late Samuel Huntington have managed to influence quite a lot of people, who buy into the whole idea that the problems that exist between "the west" and some countries in the Middle East stem from some sort of deep, ingrained cultural difference between the respective people who inhabit these massive regions (and never mind the fact that many people from both places cross these boundaries all the time).  The whole clash of cultures idea is based upon so many assumptions and stereotypes it's almost mind-numbing.  What's even more amazing is how many politicians (and their respective followers) accept--and eagerly promote--broad stereotypes about people in the Middle East, often for political reasons.  This was all too apparent in the United States after 9/11, and the trend continues.  

Far too many people think about the Middle East as this massive block of people who all act and think alike.  This was one of the reasons why I wanted to have an issue dedicated to the Middle East.  Anthropology can challenge some of the dominant narratives about places like the Middle East, and help to contribute to a deeper understanding of current events in the region.  Anthropologists can also help to provide some perspectives that differ from the 20 second clip news depictions of the Middle East that tend to dominate many networks.  There is, after all, much more to the Middle East than the latest (limited) news about the ongoing war in Afghanistan.  

Of course, anthropologists aren't the end all be all when it comes to the Middle East.  All of this is more about encouraging more investigation and conversation--and any good conversation will have it's share of disagreements.  When it comes to the Middle East, there is certainly disagreement among anthropologists...but that's part of what makes things interesting.  In some cases, anthropologists end up combating the ideas that came from their own ranks (see this link for a good example).  In others, they are deeply divided about their role in contemporary politics (check this link for starters).  Overall, though, I think that anthropologists have a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience to bring to the table when it comes to trying to understand the contemporary Middle East.  This latest issue of anthropologies is one small selection.

This issue features articles from Diane King, Mark Allen Peterson, Lydia Roll, Emily McKee, Gabriella Djerrahian, Christine Smith, Tim Frank, and Nomi Stone.  Thanks to everyone for taking part in this project, and in helping to put this issue together.  An extra thanks goes out to Veronica Miranda and Sarah Williams, whose help has been invaluable in keeping this whole online project rolling along!  Especially this month!