The Great Social Laboratory: Subjects of Knowledge in Colonial and Postcolonial Egypt (review)

Through elaborately refashioned social scientific epistemologies, Egyptian nationalist social reformers and transnational scientific researchers created a new kind of model peasant, cultivated new kinds of children, and modernized motherhood in the early to mid-twentieth century, argues Omnia El Shakry in an important new book. The Great Social Laboratory contributes to a number of fields, including the history of anthropology, cultural geography, colonial and postcolonial studies, and Foucauldian cultural studies. It adds a significant case study to the growing body of work on the history of the human sciences.

Many among those who study the picture of modernity sketched by Michel Foucault seek such case studies ostensibly because they fill in its missing colonial and postcolonial elements. El Shakry’s argument reminds us, however, that it would be inaccurate to represent this historical labor as simply the filling in of an incomplete picture; rather, it forces us to question received assumptions of the sui generis nature of European modernity itself, about its naturalized narratives of nationalism, the primitive, and indigenous science, and about the separated categories of European and non-Western histories and identities. El Shakry shows that nationalist social and human sciences neither simply reflected nor inverted European sciences; they transformed both their own epistemologies and transnationally circulated ones by questioning premises, subverting agendas, and rendering contingent their alleged scientific inevitabilities.

The “subjects” of knowledge El Shakry discusses are, at one level, the sciences of demography, anthropology, and geography. But more importantly (in keeping with the Foucauldian mode and its extensions by Timothy Mitchell, Talal Asad, and others), El Shakry is also calling attention to the co-constitution of human subjects and social scientific knowledge-formations. This double meaning in the modern history of subjects guides the book’s trajectory.

Organized chronologically from the beginning of the twentieth century to the mid-1950s, covering the construction of the peasantry under colonial ethnographic and postcolonial nationalist regimes of knowledge, the book offers compelling analyses of the construction of national bodies and identities. Among El Shakry’s important historical contributions are a re-reading of the 1919 revolution as an incitement to a particular kind of discourse of peasantry and modernity, and an insightful re-theorization of Nasser’s 1952 revolution. El Shakry’s writing is fluid and complex, and her method incorporates a supple interdisciplinarity, weaving together empirically rich archival sources in historical detail with a Foucauldian analysis of gender, race, and nation as epistemic formations. At the same time, there is a strong thread of political economy, and a consistent attention to class politics.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 lays out “the discursive field mapped out by colonial and nationalist discourses on the racial identity of the modern Egyptians” (19), a terrain somewhat familiar to readers from the rich body of existing literature on colonial discourse analysis. El Shakry is, however, attentive to historical particularity, and begins in this section a thread that continues consistently throughout the book, a commentary on the mismatches between Egyptian history and the framework laid out by the subaltern school of South Asian history, which has, she implies, somewhat over-hastily been adopted as a template for all colonial historiography. Part 2 excavates nationalist discourses of the peasantry, with a useful focus on discourses of class. Part 3 analyzes discourses of population, and includes a significant discussion of gendered national dynamics of reforming the family and home.

El Shakry is most persuasive in her detailed archival and textual analysis of nationalist writing, and in the weaving together of separate spheres, including literature, ethnology, and geography. She gives us sparkling vignettes of Egyptian thinkers, including geographer and anthropologist ‘Abbas Mustafa ‘Ammar, student of Raymond Firth, extender of the medieval philosophical legacy of Ibn Khaldun, and author of the 1953 memorandum, “The Population Situation in Egypt”; and anthropologist Salama Musa, who formulated the notion of national personalities or essences. She...