Remaking the Modern
Regular price
€38.99
A01=Farha Ghannam
academic
africa
Author_Farha Ghannam
cairo
capital city
Category=JBS
Category=JHM
Category=JHMC
class structure
cultural anthropology
cultural history
cultural studies
culture
egypt
egyptian culture
egyptian history
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnographic
ethnography
fieldwork
globalization
housing
housing issues
investors
modern world
north africa
oppression
poor people
real estate
religious identity
relocation
scholarly
social history
social studies
tourism
tourists
travel
urban
urban engineering
urban poor
Product details
- ISBN 9780520230460
- Weight: 318g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 19 Sep 2002
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In an effort to restyle Cairo into a global capital that would meet the demands of tourists and investors and to achieve President Anwar Sadat's goal to modernize the housing conditions of the urban poor, the Egyptian government relocated residents from what was deemed valuable real estate in downtown Cairo to public housing on the outskirts of the city. Based on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork among five thousand working-class families in the neighborhood of al-Zawyia al-Hamra, this study explores how these displaced residents have dealt with the stigma of public housing, the loss of their established community networks, and the diversity of the population in the new location. Until now, few anthropologists have delivered detailed case studies on this recent phenomenon. Ghannam fills this gap in scholarship with an illuminating analysis of urban engineering of populations in Cairo. Drawing on theories of practice, the study traces the various tactics and strategies employed by members of the relocated group to appropriate and transform the state's understanding of 'modernity' and hegemonic construction of space.
Informed by recent theories of globalization, Ghannam also shows how the growing importance of religious identity is but one of many contradictory ways that global trajectories mold the identities of the relocated residents. "Remaking the Modern" is a revealing ethnography of a working class community's struggle to appropriate modern facilities and confront the alienation and the dislocation brought on by national policies and the quest to globalize Cairo.
Farha Ghannam is Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
