On the Semicivilized: Coloniality, Finance, and Embodied Sovereignty in Cairo - Softcover

Elyachar, Julia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478031905 ISBN 13: 9781478031901

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2025

Synopsis

On the Semicivilized by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of coloniality that shaped—and blocked—sovereign futures for those dubbed barbarian and semicivilized in the former Ottoman Empire. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized. Originally used to describe the Ottoman Empire, whose perceived “civilizational differences” rendered it incompatible with western dominated global order, semicivilized came to denote lands where unitary territorial sovereignty was stymied at the end of WWI. Elyachar’s theorizing offers a new analytic vocabulary for thinking beyond territoriality, postcolonialism, and the “civilized/primitive” divide. Looking at the world from the perspective of the semicivilized, Elyachar argues, allows us to shift attention to embodied infrastructures, collective lives, and practices of moving and acting in common that bypass lingering assumptions of territorialism and unitary sovereign rule.

About this title

About the Author

Julia Elyachar is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and author of Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo, also published by Duke University Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478031905
• ISBN 13: 9781478031901
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240