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MARKETS of Dispossession
NGOS, ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, AND THE STATE IN CAIRO
By Julia Elyachar DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2005 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3583-2
Chapter One
Introduction: The Power of Invisible Hands The Generation of Structural Adjustment It's a Ramadan evening, February 1995, in the streets of a neighborhood in Cairo called "Madinet el-Hirafiyeen," literally Craftsmen's Town. An hour after the break of the fast observed by Muslims during the holy month of Ramadan, most of the workshop doors are still closed. Families are inside, workshop masters are still drinking their tea. For those who commute across long distances of the megacity, home to seventeen million or more, Ramadan also means a shift in the rhythms of the working day. Customers come at different times; buses and micro-buses tear through the streets at a different hour. Food is served, if discreetly, to these migrant workers in their own land.
Let me describe my path of movement on that evening around that small span of Cairo: Into an empty apartment built for a craftsman's family where a state employee, an "entrepreneur" in his o-time, sits with two telephones at hand, pondering the reopening of his "microenterprise marketing office." Into the unfurnished, unpainted apartment of a woman whose sharp mind peers out frombehind her body's folds of resignation, and off to the workshop where her husband works away late into the night. Down streets lit by small lamps hung on car hoods, illuminating the backs of five boys and three teens-workers all-hunched over a car engine that waits to be revived. To the doors of a coffeehouse flung open at night after the fast, where the budding flowers of child laborers' faces glow in the warmth of dancing girls and great actors whose laughs and shouts from television screens mark the return of Ramadan, its annual nightly television series followed closely around the country and the Arab world.
Men and women make Ramadan their own in a few spots of warmth. Lanterns and paper chains, such as those found throughout Cairo during this holy month, play quietly in the dark outside apartments gleaming with laughter. A few workshops resound with the sounds of eating and drinking far into the night. Some kilometers away, in the workers' dormitory town of Madinet el-Salam, still within the bounds of the mega-city, the streets are emptier still. Men and women sit quietly at home together with a child, maybe two, around the nuclear family's television screen. Cousins and grandparents and aunts of these families, who were also evicted from apartments downtown after the earthquake of 1993, watch the same programs in other neighborhoods on other outskirts of town.
A car passes by, stops, and backs up: Be sure to come tonight! Come and see us! Come and see Mahmoud el-Sherif (former governor of Cairo)! So Essam Fawzi, my partner in the conduct of most of this fieldwork, and I get into the first microbus that passes through el-Hirafiyeen to complete its fare before heading downtown. Seats are filled with big women veiled, sleepy children on laps, and thin, tired men heading back to visit family and friends in downtown neighborhoods from which natural disaster and the state evicted them in 1993. The microbus moves fast but then, as we move into what used to be the heart of the city, where the joyous mood of Ramadan becomes most intense, traffic slows down.
From far away comes the roar of the celebration in Hussein, the neighborhood known to foreigners as Khan el-Khalili. We walk up the street toward the Eastern Cemeteries, toward exhibition halls owned by the governorate. This Ramadan, the halls have been given over to the "Exhibition of the Products of the Youth Micro Industries funded by the Social Fund" (itself an organization funded by the World Bank). Loud-speaker voices boom into the street, in the scratchy sound of the Friday call to prayer. But this time it's a call to build the future through the market and debt. Words call out in steady rhythm: "the banks," "our youth," "social needs," "production." A few steps further, and boom! The lights are blaring, television cameras are running, and men stand gathered under the dyed red colors of tents that imitate the great hand-embroidered craft still practiced by a few old men near Bab Zuwaylah, built by the Fatimids in A.D. 1092, not far from here.
Gathered around this impromptu stage were some of my informants from el-Hirafiyeen, including past and present officials of two nongovernmental organizations (NGOS) in town established to support small productive enterprises. Small enterprises are central to Egypt's economy-one estimate put them at 99 percent of private sector economy units in Cairo (World Bank 1994, 3). From the outside those enterprises all look the same. They are small spaces facing the street in which a few men (rarely women) and children work. They are sometimes called microenterprises because they are so small. But few Egyptians would call a workshop (warsha) a microenterprise (mashru' saghir). A microenterprise denotes a place established with loans from development agencies to reduce unemployment, empower the poor, and support the free market. Those funded microenterprises represent a minuscule proportion of Cairo's small enterprises. Most of these places of work are, rather, workshops. A workshop denotes a place run by a man who learned his trade in childhood. A workshop master learned by doing, not from books or in school. Unlike the microenterprise owner, he is not a mere student (telmidh). His knowledge resides, as one master put it, in his body and his brain. Workshop masters are by and large deeply integrated into what is known as Egyptian popular culture.
The first of the two NGOS in el-Hirafiyeen had been established by craftsmen moved from other neighborhoods of Cairo. The second NGO had been established for youth graduates (al-shabab al-kharigiyeen) who had received loans from the Social Fund for Development to open microenterprises. The president of the youth graduates was the first invited to speak: "We were the children of socialism. We were brought up to go to school and then wait for an appointment from the State. And then structural adjustment hit us. We didn't know what to do at first. We had to learn to depend on ourselves, that we couldn't sit and wait for the State to take care of us, that we had to do something. And that's what we've done. Now, we make things happen for ourselves, we don't wait for someone to come to us. Now, we are the generation of Structural Adjustment." The president of the craftsmen's NGO was next. His speech was filled with flowery reminders of the importance of small craft workshops in the history of Egypt. His talk elicited yawns and sneers. It was not workshops and the popular culture of which they were part that were being celebrated, but rather the values associated with microenterprises-market culture, individualism, and self-discipline. Craftsmen, the ones who had made the goods that marked out the cultural practices of Cairo since its Fatimid rulers built their great gates, had no real place here. The sense that something was o increased when the former governor of Cairo, now a cabinet minister, the very one whom they called the father of el-Hirafiyeen, took his turn to speak. He evoked the vision of the "children of structural adjustment." The previous speaker from the Social Fund had just announced the release of an additional 15 million LE (about $5 million US) given by the World Bank, the EEC, and others for microenterprise projects in Hirafiyeen and elsewhere in Cairo. He too wanted to talk about the young entrepreneurs, whom he compared to the "craftsmen" and for whom he was said to have built that model town. "You young entrepreneurs are not just craftsmen who make a piece of something and that's it. You are small businessmen: You have to learn administration, marketing, how to run a business. And you have to be ready for GATT, when the trade barriers of Egypt will come down."
These "microentrepreneurs" had come into existence as a social group when the World Bank designated a new funding category, and set into motion new hybrid forms of organizational power that stretched the bounds of the state, international organizations, and the NGO. These young microentrepreneurs were to embody the new, vigorous market economy that would take Egypt forward in the era of neoliberalism and the ITO. They were not, the speaker wanted to make clear, the old-style craftsmen of Egypt who "make a piece of something and that's it." Although they had been born to rely on the state, they had reemerged from a chrysalis of debt and training to become entrepreneurs. They would embody the free market.
Rethinking the Market
This book challenges prevailing notions of the market. That task is urgent in an age when the market is so triumphant. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, there was no place devoid of the market. The question of whether the market was a good thing had become politically moot. The market was all there was. Planned socialist economies were, with isolated exceptions, a thing of the past. In these circumstances to challenge the idea of the market became not only urgent but also difficult.
It is always hard to challenge prevailing realities and ideas. But it is especially hard to challenge the idea of the market because it is complicated and contested. That it is contested is important to remember in the face of the apparent unanimity of thinking about the market. I have no intention of covering the entire spectrum of ideas about the market in this book. I do not even intend to cover the spectrum of the best-marketed ideas about the market, or the contests and struggles involved in advocating and implementing those ideas. Instead I will focus on one idea about how to rejuvenate the market and extend its scope. That idea is to reconstitute the social networks and cultural practices of the poor as part of the free market. Networks and practices that used to be seen as lying outside the market (or perhaps as a necessary environment for the market) became a key ingredient of market success.
To my mind, this process of free-market expansion is one of the more important transformations under way in the world today. It is at the center of myriad processes discussed under the rubric of globalization, development, forms of power, and new agencies or subjectivities emerging with the decline of the state-centered political order of the last century. It is at the center of new policies implemented by global powers and organizations such as the World Bank, as well as at the center of anti-globalization movements. In this book, based on my ethnographic research in Cairo, I study the ways in which networks and social practices of the poor have been incorporated into the market. I believe that what I observed there in the mid-1990s was typical of, or at least intimately related to, processes under way in other parts of the world. A comparative project analyzing processes of incorporation in different parts of the world would be of great interest. But already in light of my research in Cairo, I maintain, prevailing ideas of the market can be judged inadequate.
Ideas of the market do not reside in the realm of pure theory. They are practical as well. I will thus show how ideas about extending and rejuvenating the market by incorporating the social networks and cultural practices of the poor have evolved in the context of ongoing social experiments. Those experiments have entailed the implementation of quite practical measures and social technologies. In what follows, it will often be hard to distinguish between what lies on the level of "ideas of the market" and what lies on the level of "market practices." In my view, drawing clear distinctions of that sort is unwise and often unworkable. Ideas about the market are inextricable from the implementation of new social technologies, and the spread of new social practices. In the period covered in this book, market practices of the poor were studied, analyzed, and recreated as raw materials for implementing social experiments. Those experiments then became the subject of social science research. In what follows, I will deal with new ideas about the market on all of the levels that I have discussed. That includes the unintended consequences of a multifaceted endeavor to turn community resources of the poor into a source of profit.
That ideas about the market do not exist in the realm of pure theory is very clear in the Middle East. There the idea of the free market (and of free trade, as in nineteenth-century debates) has long been used to justify the overt use of violence. As one of the oldest and greatest cities of the world, Cairo has witnessed many interventions in the name of the market (Mitchell 2002). The assumption that the Middle East must be opened up to the free market has most recently been used to justify the war on and occupation of Iraq. The Middle East is not unique in this regard. Violence has often lain in the background of efforts to create and maintain free markets around the world. In this book, for example, I will discuss how what Marx referred to as "primitive accumulation," which involves the explicit use of force, is integral to the functioning of the free market. At the same time, the particular way that the free market has been imposed on Iraq is not typical of neoliberalism. The invisible hand of the market is usually imposed not through violence but rather through more subtle processes. In this book I will focus largely on those processes, through which the working poor in Cairo, Harlem, or Lima come to accept one version of the market as the only possible market.
I have said that with regard to the market the question of "whether" had become moot by the end of the twentieth century. At the same time, the question of "which market" had taken on new urgency. The United States and international organizations such as the World Bank and the IMF went to great lengths to impose a specific, neoliberal vision of the free market on other countries. Struggles to resist that vision of the market became more common. In many parts of the world people began to ask: What kind of market do we want? What does the market produce, and for what ends? All this brings to mind the old anthropological literature about markets, which pointed to the existence of many different kinds of markets, with different modes of social integration. Increasingly, such differences among forms of the market took on political import as well.
The Anthropology of Value
I will approach the political import of different kinds of markets by means of the anthropology of value. My approach to value is in the spirit of Chris Hann's call (1998, 32) for an anthropology of value that is not an end in itself but rather is tied into broader debates about power in society. At the same time, I think that Hann was wrong to think that a focus on symbol and meaning is contradictory to an analysis of power or property. There need be no contradiction between the two. The anthropology of value, which has a strong focus on symbolic meaning, can have politics at its center as well (Graeber 2001, 88; Turner 1978; Turner 1979; Myers and Brenneis 1991, 4-5). In my approach to an anthropology of value in Cairo, I draw on the work of Nancy Munn to discuss how the popular classes of Egypt in general, and workshop masters in particular, seek "to create the value [they] regard as essential to [their] community viability" (Munn 1986, 3). Again inspired by Munn, I view that value creation in tandem with "antithetical transformations that, in the perception of the community, specify what undermines this value or define how it cannot be realized" (3). I call this value produced in workshop exchanges "relational value," since it expresses the positive value attached to the creation, reproduction, and extension of relationships in communities of Cairo. I argue that workshop masters seek to intensify the production of this value through ongoing exchanges in a spatio-temporal template of their neighborhood, in Cairo, in Egypt, and in some cases throughout the region as a result of cycles of circular migration to the Gulf states. The production of value in workshops is naturalized in metaphors of kinship and a cosmology of the workshop order with deep historical roots. I look at the production of this positive value in tandem with the creation of negative value in workshop life, as embodied in the notion of the evil eye.
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Excerpted from MARKETS of Dispossession by Julia Elyachar Copyright © 2005 by Duke University Press . Excerpted by permission.
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