A civilized revolution: Aesthetics and political action in Egypt

Abstract

A B S T R A C TActs of aesthetic ordering dominated Egyptian protest and civic activity in 2011, around the time of former president Hosni Mubarak's downfall. They played a central role in motivating collective political action, giving form to a nationalist utopian vision and legitimizing ordinary Egyptians as active agents and upright citizens. Yet they also reproduced exclusionary middle-class aspirations tied up with state projects and related forms of citizenship that center on surveillance, individualism, and consumption. Examining such acts of aesthetic ordering

What type of problem is waste in Egypt?

“…Finally, as Starrett's analysis of textbooks above leads us to expect, one of the most common registers for addressing an anti‐littering message to citizens in Egypt is to invoke the ‘cleanliness proceeds from faith’ trope, which Starrett himself notes that he often observed in Egypt (Starrett : 9; see also Winegar : 615). I encountered a very elaborate set of slogans along these lines at a fee‐paying school in Ezbet al Nakhl, largely attended by the children of Zabbaleen.…”

“…The literature on waste in anthropology is growing fast (see Reno ), but the question ‘what type of problem is waste?’ suggests quite a specific project for which there are relatively few emulable examples. For instance, two recent articles about waste in the Negev desert of Israel (McKee ) and Cairo (Winegar ) in my view treat waste and the discourses surrounding it in a different way, as having ‘practical value in a system of agency’ (Warnier : 187), to borrow a phrase from material culture. These articles thus show what characterising others as litterers or theatrically picking up trash while wearing surgical gloves can do , politically: justify various forms of social control and dispossession in the first case, or assert class yearning or disdain and reassert ‘aesthetic order’ in a manner that doubles‐back on the inversion of authority produced when the city's public spaces temporarily became places of contestation, in the latter.…”

“…Douglas does however continue to be considered seminal within anthropological studies of waste, although there is a tension in her work's reception over whether it stands for a universalist or a particularist definition of waste. For some authors, Douglas appears to stand for the category's relativity (Argyrou : 162; McKee : 733; Winegar : 609, 620). However, when Fredericks argues that ‘the meaning and thus political import of waste is not a transhistorical, cultural, or geographical given, but, rather, matters differently in specific conjunctures and their attendant sociotechnical complexes’, she considers this a point of disagreement with Douglas (Fredericks : 533).…”

“…A topic of growing interest in a variety of disciplines (e.g. Crang and Gregson ), waste is being worked on by anthropologists in many settings (Reno ), including Arab‐majority societies (outstanding work of the previous generation includes Jolé (, ); more recent examples, McKee () and Winegar ()), where several recent events underscore its particular significance: the 2016 ban on the production and distribution of plastic shopping bags in Morocco; the ‘trash crisis’ in Beirut, with its iconic images of rivers of waste broadcast on international media; the importance of trash clean up as a process of ‘aesthetic ordering’ after the Egyptian revolution (Winegar , ); or the public accumulations of waste that have proliferated in Tunisia, indexing post‐revolutionary political upheaval (dissolution of local councils previously responsible for waste management; falling budgets; public sector employment reform). Events such as these gather publics, telescoping seemingly local problems into vast movements of political contestation by instantiating state neglect (Fredericks ), bear witness to infrastructural collapse and transformation toward what geographers have termed ‘people as infrastructure’ (Simone ) and anthropologists ‘vital infrastructures of trash’ (Fredericks ), and underpin economies (Alexander and Reno ) as waste becomes a focus for coping tactics and labour in the context of financial crisis, leading to a rise in scavenging and informal recycling activities as well as innovative cultures of repair and reuse, as people seek to rekindle the value in discarded things and prolong objects’ usefulness beyond their usual lifespans.…”

Waste is not the end. For an anthropology of care, maintenance and repair

“…In other words, how does one begin to talk about waste? Defining the contours of waste has been taken for decades as an anthropological problematic, being likened to rubble (Gordillo 2014), debris (Stoler 2013;Ssorin-Chaikov 2016), marginalia (Gandy 2013), ugliness (Novoa forthcoming), ruination and pollution (Olsen and Pétursdóttir 2014), the subaltern (Buchli and Lucas 2001), the unbecoming (Gregson and Crang 2010), the unwanted (Sosna and Brunclíková 2017), the opposite to civilisation (Winegar 2016), what has to be concealed and hidden (Åkesson 2006), negligence and human failure (Lynch 1990), the exercise of power (Ferguson 1994), a tool for urban speculation (Martínez 2017a), as well as 'alluring trashcapes', 'everything plus time' and 'things that have been emptied of desire' (Thill 2015).…”