Connected in Cairo: Growing up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East (Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa) - Softcover

Peterson, Mark Allen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253223113 ISBN 13: 9780253223111

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2011

Synopsis

For members of Cairo's upper classes, cosmopolitanism is a form of social capital, deployed whenever they acquire or consume transnational commodities, or goods that are linked in the popular imagination to other, more "modern" places. In a series of thickly described and carefully contextualized case studies―of Arabic children's magazines, Pokémon, private schools and popular films, coffee shops and fast-food restaurants―Mark Allen Peterson describes the social practices that create class identities. He traces these processes from childhood into adulthood, examining how taste and style intersect with a changing educational system and economic liberalization. Peterson reveals how uneasy many cosmopolitan Cairenes are with their new global identities, and describes their efforts to root themselves in the local through religious, nationalist, or linguistic practices.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Allen Peterson is Associate Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Miami University. He is author of Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium and co-author of International Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Issues.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Connected in Cairo

Growing up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East

By Mark Allen Peterson

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2011 Mark Allen Peterson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-253-22311-1

Contents

PREFACE, ix, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, xiii, 
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION, xvii, 
1 Toward an Anthropology of Connections, 1, 
2 Making Kids Modern AGENCY AND IDENTITY IN ARABIC CHILDREN'S MAGAZINES, 28, 
3 Pokémon Panics CLASS PLAY IN THE PRIVATE SCHOOLS, 64, 
4 Talk Like an Egyptian NEGOTIATING IDENTITY AT THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN CAIRO, 96, 
5 Coffee Shops and Gender in Translocal Spaces, 138, 
6 The Global and the Multilocal DEVELOPMENT, ENTERPRISE, AND CULTURE BROKERS, 170, 
Epilogue, 215, 
DRAMATIS PERSONAE, 219, 
NOTES, 225, 
REFERENCES, 237, 
INDEX, 253, 

CHAPTER 1

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253223113
• ISBN 13: 9780253223111
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288