A01=Julia Elyachar
Anthropology
Author_Julia Elyachar
Cairo
Category=JHMC
Category=JP
Category=NHTQ
commoners
communicative channels
counter-insurgency
Egyptian Mixed Courts
embodiment
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
finance
global commerce
infrastructure
Ottoman Empire
phatic labor
social infrastructures
sovereignty
Suez Canal
Product details
- ISBN 9781478031901
- Weight: 340g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 23 May 2025
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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On the Semicivilized by Julia Elyachar is a sweeping analysis of the coloniality that shaped-and blocked-sovereign futures for those dubbed barbarian and semicivilized in the former Ottoman Empire. Drawing on thirty years of ethnographic research in Cairo, family archives from Palestine and Egypt, and research on Ottoman debt and finance to rethink catastrophe and potentiality in Cairo and the world today, Elyachar theorizes a global condition of the “semicivilized” marked by nonsovereign futures, crippling debts, and the constant specter of violence exercised by those who call themselves civilized. Originally used to describe the Ottoman Empire, whose perceived “civilizational differences” rendered it incompatible with a Western-dominated global order, semicivilized came to denote lands where unitary territorial sovereignty was stymied at the end of WWI. Elyachar’s theorizing offers a new analytic vocabulary for thinking beyond territoriality, postcolonialism, and the “civilized"/"primitive” divide. Looking at the world from the perspective of the semicivilized, Elyachar argues, allows us to shift attention to embodied infrastructures, collective lives, and practices of moving and acting in common that bypass lingering assumptions of territorialism and unitary sovereign rule.
Julia Elyachar is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and author of Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo, also published by Duke University Press.
