Connected in Cairo: Growing up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East

Notes

225 Notes 1. Toward an Anthropology of Connections 1. If my students are right, perhaps Zaynab’s decision to refuse her children food she has not prepared is motivated in part by a sense of what may be lost to her and her children when food becomes a commodity. Based on fieldwork in Florence, Italy, Carole Counihan has argued that many professional modern women have less input into their children’s socialization than their mothers had because they no longer control what they eat, which is equated with the ingestion of the mother’s cultural values. “Women are losing the manipulative power of food, and perhaps the world is losing it as well” (Counihan 1999: 60). People of my students’ class grow up largely fed by maids, yet I noted that, in most families, mothers cooked at least one meal a week, often some regionally significant dish like mulukhiyah (a thick vegetable soup). 2. By “managerial class,” I mean the educated upper-middle-class families from which are drawn the people who run the nation’s institutions: upper-level bureaucrats, school administrators, and corporate management. One study showed that 54.4 percent of fathers and 17.8 percent of mothers of AUC students worked in managerial and administrative positions (Russell 1994). 3. Class is an older and more established concept than globalization, but no less problematic. That people live in hierarchically stratified systems is obvious, not only to anthropologists but to Egyptians. What is problematic is the nature of the boundaries between the classes. Classes are forged in everyday performances. I will follow Bourdieu in acknowledging that class is thus mutable, but in patterned ways. 4. Writing of the rise of Westernized elites under colonial regimes, Keith David Watenpaugh emphasizes that class was “defined not just by the wealth, professions, possessions, or levels of education of its members, but also by the way they asserted their modernity” (Watenpaugh 2006: 8; emphasis mine). On the history of consumption and assertions of cosmopolitan modernity in Egypt, see Ryzova 2005; Shechter 2006. 5. Bi’a is a slang term of uncertain origin. Abaza (2001b) suggests that it derives from a euphemism for “smelly” and is associated with the culture of the ‘ashwa’iyyat (slums). And as both Abaza and Ghannam (2002) point out, the characterization of an area as a “slum” is itself an important ideological construction crucial to the production of modern counterspaces in Cairo. 2. Making Kids Modern 1. Founded in 1945, just as Unity had passed its heyday, the school has occupied its present ten-acre site since 1963. 226 N ote s to p a g e s 3 0 – 4 8 2. In 2004, a branch of the trendy Cairo coffee-house chain Cilantro opened a small café in its basement (see chapters 5 and 6). 3. Indeed, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Egypt had only 17 daily and 30 weekly newspapers—a sharp decline from the turn of the twentieth century, when it had 114 newspapers (Essoulami 2000). 4. For example, according to the office of the U.S. trade representative, Egypt’s imports from the United States (its largest trading partner) totaled $3.3 billion in 2000, while Egypt’s exports to the United States totaled only $888 million. 5. There are also small Korean and Japanese schools, but they do not seek Egyptian students nor do Egyptians seem to desire to attend. At least as far as education is concerned, cosmopolitanism in Egypt is largely about knowing “the West.” In 2008, a Chinese school for Egyptians opened to much fanfare, but it is not yet clear how it will fit into the local cultural system. 6. Majid is less expensive in Cairo than in the oil-rich states. “Since the Egyptian prices do not cover costs, they are effectively subsidized by profits from the richer petroleum states” (Douglas and Malti-Douglas 1994: 150). 7. Created in the 1930s by Ernie Bushmiller and Carl Anderson, respectively, Nancy and Sluggo and Henry have been in continual syndication ever since. Part of their popularity for foreign publishers seems to be that both are extremely visual comic strips that often use only a minimum of dialogue. 8. In 2002, less than a year after my research period ended, Alaa Eldin’s founding editor, Ezzat El-Saadan, retired. The new editor told me she has made it a point to privilege hand-drawn art over computer-generated texts. 9. Flash is a significant player in the domain...