Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium

9. Notable Families and Capitalist Parasites in Egypt’s Former Free Zone: Law, Trade, and Uncertainty

165 9. notable faMilies and caPitalist Parasites in egyPt’s forMer free Zone: law, trade, and uncertainty Christine Hegel-Cantarella Al-Sawy stationery store on Gumhurriya Street in Port Said is notable for its tall ceilings and dark wooden shelves stacked neatly with a vast assortment of office supplies.1 The proprietor is a small man in his seventies dressed neatly in a suit, standing behind the glass display case, who thoughtfully regards each request before retrieving it for the customer and placing it alongside the register. Unlike most of the other stationary shops in town, this one caters to professionals and carries expensive leather desk sets, briefcases, and fine pens. Yet Al-Sawy also stocks the typical array of inexpensive pencil sharpeners, colorful notepads, two-hole punches and other office supplies, as well as a full range of booklets of commercial documents. These include booklets of shīkāt shīkāt (non-bank issued checks), kambiyālāt (bills of exchange or drafts), and iys .ālāt amāna (trust receipts). These single-copy (non-carbon) forms produced by small Egyptian printing companies are used to inscribe and secure various types of delayed transactions. Among retailers in contemporary Port Said, from appliance shops in the central Arab quarter to variety stores that serve residents of government subsidized housing on the outskirts of the city, trust receipts are the principal technology by which many merchants guarantee retail credit. Likewise, wholesalers 166 Subjectivities routinely employ trust receipts to guarantee the goods that retailers buy on credit. The medium in which transactional pledges are represented is not inconsequential .As Catherine Alexander notes,the efficacy of written agreements may derive from the binding properties of ritual and perceptions of efficacy more than from the potential legal consequences of breaking a bond (2001, 468). As such, my examination of trust receipts as a particular medium of pledge-making and guarantee is premised on the argument that their use in everyday transactions —together with discourses about it—is a barometer by which to examine socioeconomic shifts in Egypt since the 1970s. The deployment and avoidance of trust receipts point to contemporary anxieties surrounding business ethics and the uncertainty of informal and semiformal credit. Locals often point out that only people who cannot trust one another use trust receipts and that their ubiquity is an indication that Port Said is not the community it once was: the power of the “original” and notable families of Port Said has been usurped by the nouveau riche. In this way, the medium of pledge-making is a marker of how networked, trusting, and trustworthy are the transacting parties. Although a commercial document recognized by law, the trust receipt as inscribed and deployed guarantees pledges in a more fluid socio-legal realm. Trust receipts likely came into common use in Egypt during the era of the Mixed Courts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, yet they are broadly classified among Egyptians as“customary documents”(muh .arrarāt 'urfī), in reference both to their paralegal status in the law and to the fact that it is common or typical ('ādī) to use them for transacting.2 The latter sense of “customary” tacitly points to an array of practical knowledges about trust receipts, among them that they are inexpensive, provide a measure of guarantee for transactions large and small, and make a verbal agreement tangible without the complications of drawing up a contract.Although trust receipts are similar to contractual technologies because they document a private transaction and remain outside the purview of the law unless a legal claim is filed, they are typically inscribed as legal fictions, which has at least two contrary implications. First, the legal fiction creates additional space for verbal agreements through which trust is given, relationships intercede, and mercy may be granted in lieu of litigation. Second, the legal fiction introduces new risks because failure to deliver can result in a criminal misdemeanor rather than simply a civil suit. Despite the fact that the use of trust receipts carves out a potentially larger role for the state in private transactions than was common in the early twentieth century, literal and figurative spaces in documentation practices enable social logics to prevail. This duality is examined in order to consider how discourses about past and present Notable Families and Capitalist Parasites in Egypt 167 pledge-making can be more broadly construed as re-valuing...